zoobab writes: The US Senate to set to revive Software Patents with the PERA Bill, with a vote on Thursday, November 14, 2024. A crucial Senate Committee is on the cusp of voting on two bills that would resurrect some of the most egregious software patents and embolden patent trolls. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would dismantle vital safeguards that prohibit software patents on overly broad concepts. If passed, courts would be compelled to approve software patents on mundane activities like mobile food ordering or basic online financial transactions. This would unleash a torrent of vague and overbroad software patents, which would be wielded by patent trolls to extort small businesses and individuals. The EFF is inviting members of the public to contact their Senators.

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Apple was notified by the European Union that its geo-blocking practices are potentially in breach of consumer protection rules, adding to the iPhone maker's regulatory issues in the bloc. From a report: Apple's App Store, iTunes Store and other media services unlawfully discriminate against European customers based on their place of residence, according to a European Commission statement on Tuesday. The notification comes as Apple is facing the first-ever fine under the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, for failing to allow app developers to steer users to cheaper deals, Bloomberg News reported last week. That penalty is set to come months after the Cupertino, California-based company was hit with a $1.9 billion fine for similar abuses under the bloc's traditional competition rules. The geo-locating investigation was conducted together with a network of national consumer authorities and found Apple media services only allow users to use payment cards issued in the countries they registered their Apple accounts, according to the statement. The App Store also blocks users from downloading apps offered in other countries, the investigation found.

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Major retailers are considering embedding radio-emitting threads into clothing as a novel anti-theft measure amid soaring retail crime rates, according to Bloomberg, citing industry sources. The technology, developed by Spanish firm Myruns, uses conductive ink derived from cellulose to create threads five times thinner than human hair that can trigger security alarms. Zara owner Inditex has discussed implementing the system, though the company says it has no plans for in-store testing. Retail theft caused an estimated $73 billion in lost sales in the U.S. in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation, while UK losses doubled to $4.2 billion in 2023. The crisis has prompted retailers to increase security personnel and surveillance systems. The threadlike technology could provide an alternative to traditional metal-based security tags, potentially offering biodegradable and recyclable anti-theft protection.

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Pakistan's Punjab province banned most outdoor activities and ordered shops, markets and malls in some areas to close early from Monday to curb illnesses caused by intense air pollution. From a report: The province has closed educational institutions and public spaces like parks and zoos until Nov. 17 in places including Lahore, the world's most polluted city in terms of air quality, according to Swiss group IQAir's live ratings. The districts of Lahore, Multan, Faisalabad and Gujranwala have seen an unprecedented rise in patients with respiratory diseases, eye and throat irritation, and pink eye disease, the Punjab government said in an order issued late on Sunday. The new restrictions will also remain in force until Nov. 17. "The spread of conjunctivitis/ pink eye disease due to bacterial or viral infection, smoke, dust or chemical exposure is posing a serious and imminent threat to public health," the Punjab government said. While outdoor activities including sports events, exhibitions and festivals, and dining at restaurants have been prohibited, "unavoidable religious rites" are exempt from this direction, the order said. Outlets like pharmacies, oil depots, dairy shops and fruit and vegetable shops have similarly been exempted from the directions to close by 8 p.m. local time. Lahore's air quality remained hazardous on Monday, with an index score of more than 600, according to IQAir, but this was significantly lower than the 1,900 that it touched in places earlier this month. A score of 0-50 is considered good.

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Qwant, France's privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index. TechCrunch: The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines -- including and especially around generative AI -- as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing's search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google's search results. Rising API costs are one clear motivator for the move to shrink this Big Tech dependency, with Microsoft massively hiking prices for Bing's search APIs last year. Neither Ecosia nor Qwant will stop using Bing or Google altogether. However, they aim to diversify the core tech supporting their services with their own index. It will lower their operational costs, and serve as a technical base to fuel their own product development as GenAI technologies take up a more central role in many consumer-facing digital services. Both search engines have already dabbled in integrating GenAI features. Expect more on this front, although they aren't planning to develop AI model development themselves. They say they will continue to rely on API access to major platforms' large language models (LLMs) to power these additions. The pair is also open to other European firms joining in with their push for more tech stack sovereignty -- at least as fellow customers for the search index, as they plan to license access via an API. Other forms of partnership could be considered too, they told TechCrunch.

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China's air force showcased a suite of new armaments this week, including a new stealth fighter and an attack drone, demonstrating its advancing ability to challenge the U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific. From a report: The public debut of the J-35A stealth fighter and other weapons systems at China's premier airshow, which started Tuesday, represent the centerpiece in the Chinese air force's celebrations of its 75th anniversary -- a milestone in Chinese leader Xi Jinping's sweeping campaign to modernize the People's Liberation Army. A single J-35A soared over crowds of spectators in a brief flypast on the opening day of Airshow China in the southern city of Zhuhai, making a steep climb with afterburners before rolling away and streaking out of view, state television footage showed. Other new weapons -- including the "Jiu Tian" reconnaissance and attack drone and the HQ-19 anti-ballistic-missile system -- were also prominent in ground displays at the biennial airshow, as examples of the PLA's growing prowess in aerial warfare and air defense. Much remains unclear about these systems and their capabilities. Even so, Chinese officials and state media say the new armaments reflect the significant advances that Beijing has made in developing its air power and enhancing its ability to defend China's strategic interests.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: LG Display, one of the global leaders in display technologies, unveiled a new stretchable display prototype that can expand by up to 50%. This makes it the most stretchable display in the industry, more than doubling the previous record of 20% elongation. [...] The prototype being flexed in [this image] is a 12-inch screen with a 100-pixel-per-inch resolution and full RGB color that expands to 18-inches when pulled. LG Display said that it based the stretchable display on a "special silicon material substrate used in contact lenses" and then improved its properties for better "stretchability and flexibility." It also used a new wiring design structure and a micro-LED light source, allowing users to repeatedly stretch the screen over 10,000 times with no effect on image quality.

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SpaceX plans an ambitious in-orbit refueling test between two Starships in March 2025. "The orbital demonstration is a major step for Starship, and a crucial part of SpaceX's capability of delivering NASA's Artemis mission to the Moon," reports Gizmodo. The plans were unveiled during Spaceflight Now's recent interview (source: YouTube) with Kent Chojnacki, the deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX is under a $53.2 million contract with NASA, signed in 2020, to use Starship tankers for in-orbit propellant transfer. During its third test flight, SpaceX transferred around 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen from Starship's header tank to its main tank while it was in space. The upcoming demonstration, however, requires a lot more of the launch vehicle. Two Starships will launch to low Earth orbit around three to four weeks apart, the spacecraft will meet and dock in orbit, and one will transfer propellant to another. After the demonstration, the two Starships will undock from one another and deorbit. "Once you've done that, you've really cracked open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth's sphere," Chojnacki said during the interview. The in-flight propellant transfer tests are set to conclude in the summer. With in-flight refueling, NASA is aiming to develop technologies to "enable long-term cryogenic fluid management, which is essential for establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon and enabling crewed missions to Mars," the space agency stated when the contract was signed. SpaceX is developing a version of Starship to land humans on the Moon in September 2026 as part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission. To prepare for the Moon mission, SpaceX is expected to launch between eight and 16 propellant tanker Starships into low Earth orbit in rapid succession. Each of the tankers will carry around 100 to 150 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane and will dock with a larger fuel depot. The orbiting depot will then connect with the Human Landing System Starship, filling its massive 1,200-ton fuel tanks. Once refueled, the Starship lander will continue its journey toward the Moon.

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The UK's oldest satellite, Skynet-1A, mysteriously shifted from its original orbit above East Africa to a new position over the Americas, likely due to a mid-1970s command whose origins remain unknown. "The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?" asks the BBC. From the report: "It's still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours," says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves. "It's now in what we call a 'gravity well' at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis. "Because it's dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it's 'our' satellite we're still responsible for it," he explains. Dr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogues, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behaviour of Britain's oldest spacecraft. It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it's hard to hear the name "Skynet" without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise. But there's no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.

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Some time ago, poor Keith found himself working on an antique Classic ASP codebase. Classic ASP uses VBScript, which is like VisualBasic 6.0, but worse in most ways. That's not to say that VBScript code is automatically bad, but the language certainly doesn't help you write clean code.

In any case, the previous developer needed to make an 8 element array to store some data. Traditionally, in VBScript, you might declare it like so:

Dim params(8)

That's the easy, obvious way a normal developer might do it.

Keith's co-worker did this instead:

Dim params : params = Split(",,,,,,,", ",")

Yes, this creates an array using the Split function on a string of only commas. 7, to be exact. Which, when split, creates 8 empty substrings.

We make fun of stringly typed data a lot here, but this is an entirely new level of stringly typed initialization.

We can only hope that this code has finally been retired, but given that it was still in use well past the end-of-life for Classic ASP, it may continue to lurk out there, waiting for another hapless developer to stumble into its grasp.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A trend has emerged among a small group of climate tech founders who start with their eyes fixed on space and soon realize their technology would do a lot more good here on Earth. Halen Mattison and Luke Neise fit the bill. Mattison spent time at SpaceX, while Neise worked at Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory and Varda Space Industries. The pair originally wanted to sell reactors to SpaceX that could turn carbon dioxide into methane for use on Mars. Today, they're building them to replace natural gas that's pumped from underground. Their company, General Galactic, which emerged from stealth in April, has built a pilot system that can produce 2,000 liters of methane per day. Neise, General Galactic's CTO, told TechCrunch that he expects that figure to rise as the company replaces off-the-shelf components with versions designed in-house. "We think that's a big missing piece in the energy mix right now," said Mattison, the startup's CEO. "Being able to own our supply chains, to be able to fully control all of the parameters, to challenge the requirements between components, all of that unlocks some real elegance in the engineering solution." At commercial scale, the company's reactors will be assembled using mass production techniques. It's a contrast to how most petrochemical and energy facilities are built today. General Galactic is focused on producing methane. However, Mattison said the company isn't necessarily looking to displace the fuel from heating and energy. "Those are generally going toward electrification," he said. Instead, it intends to sell its methane to companies that use it as an ingredient or to power a process, like in chemical or plastic manufacturing. The company isn't ruling out transportation entirely either. Mattison hinted that General Galactic is working on other hydrocarbons that could be used for transportation, like jet fuel. "Stay tuned," he said. General Galactic plans to deploy its first modules next year. The startup "hopes its modules will be able to plug into existing infrastructure, speeding its adoption relative to other fuels like hydrogen," notes TechCrunch.

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Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses for delivery drivers to improve efficiency by offering turn-by-turn navigation. "Such directions could shave valuable seconds off each delivery by providing left or right directions off elevators and around obstacles such as gates or aggressive dogs," reports Reuters. "With millions of packages delivered daily, seconds add up. The glasses would also free drivers from using handheld Global Positioning System devices, allowing them to carry more packages." From the report: Amazon's delivery glasses, the people warned, could be shelved or delayed indefinitely if they do not work as envisioned, or for financial or other reasons. The sources said they may take years to perfect. "We are continuously innovating to create an even safer and better delivery experience for drivers," an Amazon spokesperson said, when asked about the driver eyeglasses. "We otherwise don't comment on our product roadmap." [...] The delivery glasses in development build on Amazon's Echo Frames smart glasses, which allow users to listen to audio and use voice commands from Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, the people said. Known by the internal code name Amelia, the delivery glasses would rely on a small display on one of the lenses and could take photos of delivered packages as proof for customers, the sources said. Amazon released in September an unrelated chatbot for third-party sellers that is also known as Amelia. But the technology is still in development and Amazon has had trouble making a battery that can last a full eight-hour shift, and still be light enough to wear all day without causing fatigue, the people said. As well, gathering complete data on each house, sidewalk, street, curb and driveway could take years, they said. Delivery drivers visit more than 100 customers per shift, Amazon has said. With increased efficiency, Amazon could ask drivers to ferry more packages and visit more homes. The Seattle company could face other obstacles, including convincing its thousands of drivers to use the eyeglasses, which may be uncomfortable, distracting or unsightly, the people said, not to mention the fact some drivers already wear corrective glasses. However, much of Amazon's delivery force consists of outside companies, meaning Amazon could make wearing the glasses a contractual requirement, the people said. [...] The embedded screen in development is also slated for a future generation of the Echo Frames that could be released as soon as 2026's second quarter, two of the people said.

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Android Authority's Rita El Khoury argues that the decline in punctuation use and capitalization in social media writing, especially among younger generations, can largely be attributed to the iPhone keyboard. "By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch, the iPhone keyboard encourages the biggest grammar fiends to be lazy and skip punctuation," writes El Khoury. She continues: Pundits will say that it's just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it's one extra tap too many. When you're firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you're doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed. [...] The real problem, at the end of the day, is that iPhones -- not Android phones -- are popular among Gen Z buyers, especially in the US -- a market with a huge online presence and influence. Add that most smartphone users tend to stick to default apps on their phones, so most of them end up with the default iPhone keyboard instead of looking at better (albeit often even slower) alternatives. And it's that same keyboard that's encouraging them to be lazy instead of making it easier to add punctuation. So yes, I blame the iPhone for killing the period and slaughtering the comma, and I think both of those are great offenders in the death of the capital letter. But trends are cyclical, and if the cassette player can make a comeback, so can the comma. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, writing like a five-year-old will be passe, too, and it'll be trendy to use proper grammar again.

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Customers have formed new habits of regularly pausing subscriptions and returning to them within a year. From a report: As subscription prices rise and streaming-centric home entertainment becomes the norm, families are establishing their own hierarchies of always-on services versus those that come and go with seasons of hit shows or sports. New data from subscription analytics provider Antenna offer a deeper look at the subscription pausing habits customers are developing as services like Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+ become the go-to way of watching TV in many households, instead of cable. The monthly median percentage of premium streaming video subscribers who rejoined the same service they had canceled within the prior year was 34.2% in the first nine months of 2024, up from 29.8% in 2022. The habit of pausing and resuming service means that the industrywide rate of customer defections, which has risen over the past year, is less pronounced than it appears. The average rate of U.S. customer cancellations among premium streaming video services reached 5.2% in August, but after factoring in re-subscribers, the rate of defections was lower at 3.5%. The increasingly ingrained habit underscores the importance of streamers regularly delivering hit shows and films as well as live fare such as sporting events. Streaming services are trying to use a mix of bundles, promotions, well-timed marketing emails and lower-cost ad-supported plans to lure customers back faster or help them feel they are getting enough value to stick around longer.

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D-Link confirmed no fix will be issued for the over 60,000 D-Link NAS devices that are vulnerable to a critical command injection flaw (CVE-2024-10914), allowing unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands through unsanitized HTTP requests. The networking company advises users to retire or isolate the affected devices from public internet access. BleepingComputer reports: The flaw impacts multiple models of D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices that are commonly used by small businesses: DNS-320 Version 1.00; DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012; DNS-325 Version 1.01, Version 1.02; and DNS-340L Version 1.08. [...] A search that Netsecfish conducted on the FOFA platform returned 61,147 results at 41,097 unique IP addresses for D-Link devices vulnerable to CVE-2024-10914. In a security bulletin today, D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming and the vendor recommends that users retire vulnerable products. If that is not possible at the moment, users should at least isolate them from the public internet or place them under stricter access conditions. The same researcher discovered in April this year an arbitrary command injection and hardcoded backdoor flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-3273, impacting mostly the same D-Link NAS models as the latest flaw.

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"Now and Then" by the Beatles has been nominated for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards -- marking the first time a song created with the assistance of AI has earned a Grammy nomination. From a report: When "Now and Then" first came out in late 2023, the disclosure that it was finalized utilizing AI caused an uproar. At the time, many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members -- Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr -- must have used generative AI to deepfake the late John Lennon. That was not actually the case. Instead, the Beatles used a form of AI known as "stem separation" to help them clean up a 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo recorded by Lennon during his lifetime and to make it useable in a finished master recording. With stem separation, the Beatles could isolate Lennon's vocal and get rid of excess noise. Proponents of this form of technology say it has major benefits for remastering and cleaning up older catalogs. Recently, AudioShake, a leading company in this space, struck a partnership with Disney Music Group to help the media giant clean up its older catalog to "unlock new listening and fan engagement experiences" like lyric videos, film/TV licensing opportunities, re-mastering and more.

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GIMP 3.0, the long-awaited upgrade from the popular open-source image editor, has entered the release candidate phase, signaling that a stable version may be available by the end of this year or early 2025. Tom's Hardware reports: So, what has changed with the debut of GIMP 3? The new interface is still quite recognizable to classic GIMP users but has been considerably smoothed out and is far more scalable to high-resolution displays than it used to be. Several familiar icons have been carefully converted to SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics, enabling supremely high-quality, scalable assets. While PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics, are also known to be high-quality due to their lack of compression, they are still suboptimal compared to SVGs when SVGs are applicable. The work of converting GIMP's tool icons to SVG is still in progress per the original blog post, but it's good that developer Denis Rangelov has already started on the work. Many aspects of the GIMP 3.0 update are almost wholly on the backend for ensuring project and plugin compatibility with past projects made with previous versions of GIMP. To summarize: a public GIMP API is being stabilized to make it easier to port GIMP 2.10-based plugins and scripts to GIMP 3.0. Several bugs related to color accuracy have been fixed to improve color management while still maintaining compatibility with past GIMP projects. You can read the GIMP team's blog post here.

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With iOS 18.2, Apple will allow you to share the location of a lost AirTag with other people and with more than 15 different airlines. The Verge reports: When using the feature, you can generate a Share Item Location link within the Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Once you share the link with someone, they can click on it to view an interactive map with the location of your lost item. Apple will update the website automatically when the lost item moves, and it will also display a timestamp when it moved last. Apple will turn off the feature once you find your lost item. You can also manually stop sharing the location of an AirTag at any time, or the link will "automatically expire after seven days." [...] As part of the rollout, Apple is partnering with over 15 airlines, including Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and more. All of these airlines will be able to "privately and securely" accept links to lost items, as "access to each link will be limited to a small number of people, and recipients will be required to authenticate in order to view the link through either their Apple Account or partner email address." This feature will be available to airlines in the "coming months." Additionally, SITA, a baggage tracing solution, will also implement Share Item Location into its luggage tracker.

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Amazon has confirmed that employee data was compromised after a "security event" at a third-party vendor. From a report: In a statement given to TechCrunch on Monday, Amazon spokesperson Adam Montgomery confirmed that employee information had been involved in a data breach. "Amazon and AWS systems remain secure, and we have not experienced a security event. We were notified about a security event at one of our property management vendors that impacted several of its customers including Amazon. The only Amazon information involved was employee work contact information, for example work email addresses, desk phone numbers, and building locations," Montgomery said. Amazon declined to say how many employees were impacted by the breach. It noted that the unnamed third-party vendor doesn't have access to sensitive data such as Social Security numbers or financial information and said the vendor had fixed the security vulnerability responsible for the data breach. The confirmation comes after a threat actor claimed to have published data stolen from Amazon on notorious hacking site BreachForums. The individual claims to have more than 2.8 million lines of data, which they say was stolen during last year's mass-exploitation of MOVEit Transfer.

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The FTX estate has filed a lawsuit against Binance and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, seeking to recover $1.76 billion, alleging a "fraudulent" 2021 share deal that involved funding from FTX's insolvent Alameda Research. The suit also accuses Zhao of misleading social media posts that allegedly spurred customer withdrawals and contributed to FTX's collapse. CNBC reports: In a Sunday filing with a Delaware court, FTX cites a 2021 transaction in which Binance, Zhao and others exited their investment in FTX, selling a 20% stake in the platform and a 18.4% stake in its U.S.-based entity West Realm Shires back to the company. The FTX estate alleges that the share repurchase was funded by FTX's Alameda Research division through a combination of the company's and Binance's exchange tokens, as well as Binance's dollar-pegged stablecoin. "Alameda was insolvent at the time of the share repurchase and could not afford to fund the transaction," the suit claims, labeling the deal agreed with FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried -- who's now serving a 25-year sentence over fraud linked to the downfall of his exchange -- a "constructive fraudulent transfer." Binance denies the allegations, saying in an emailed statement, "The claims are meritless, and we will vigorously defend ourselves."

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