An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Ikea is taking on the likes of eBay, Craigslist, and Gumtree with a peer-to-peer marketplace for customers to sell secondhand furniture to each other. Ikea Preowned will be tested in Madrid and Oslo until the end of the year with the aim of rolling out the buying and selling platform globally, according to Jesper Brodin, chief executive of Ingka, the main operator of Ikea stores. [...] Ikea has had a small offering under which it buys used furniture from customers and resells it in store. But the new platform is more ambitious, aiming to tackle the secondhand market for customers selling directly to each other -- an area where Brodin estimates Ikea has a higher market share than in new furniture sales. Customers enter their product, their own pictures, and a selling price, while Ikea's own artificial intelligence-enabled database brings in its own promotional images and measurements. The buyer collects the furniture directly from the seller, who has the option of receiving money or a voucher from Ikea with a 15 percent bonus. "Very often there is a monopoly or oligopoly on platforms that operate," said Brodin, talking about eBay or digital classified ad services such as Gumtree in the UK and Finn in Norway. Finn has 8,700 items from Ikea listed in Oslo alone. Early offerings on Ikea Preowned include large items such as sofas for up to $670 (600 euros) and wardrobes for $500 (450 euros) as well as smaller items such as a toilet roll holder for $4.50 (4 euros). Listings are free, but Brodin said Ikea could eventually charge "a symbolic fee, a humble fee." He added: "We're going to verify the full scope including the economics. If a lot of people use the offer to get a discount with Ikea -- it's a good way to reconnect with customers. I am very curious. I think it makes business sense." Ikea has previously tested selling its new furniture on third-party platforms such as Alibaba's Tmall in China, but the Preowned platform marks its first foray into secondhand marketplaces. It also dovetails with the retailer's wish to become "circular and climate positive" by 2030.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI lacks advanced security and customer support. It's just a research company, not an established cloud provider. The ChatGPT-maker is not focused enough on corporate customers. These are just some of the talking points Amazon Web Services' salespeople are told to follow when dealing with customers using, or close to buying, OpenAI's products, according to internal sales guidelines obtained by Business Insider. Other talking points from the documents include OpenAI's lack of access to third-party AI models and weak enterprise-level contracts. AWS salespeople should dispel the hype around AI chatbots like ChatGPT, and steer the conversation toward AWS's strength of running the cloud infrastructure behind popular AI services, the guidelines added. [...] The effort to criticize OpenAI is also unusual for Amazon, which often says it's so customer-obsessed that it pays little attention to competitors. This is the latest sign that suggests Amazon knows it has work to do to catch up in the AI race. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have taken an early lead and could become the main platforms where developers build new AI products and tools. Though Amazon created a new AGI team last year, the company's existing AI models are considered less powerful than those made by its biggest competitors. Instead, Amazon has prioritized selling AI tools like Bedrock, which gives customers access to third-party AI models. AWS also offers cloud access to in-house AI chips that compete with Nvidia GPUs, with mixed results so far.

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Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire co-founder of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France in connection with an investigation into criminal activity on the platform and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement, prosecutors announced on Monday. From a report: Durov, who has French citizenship, was detained at Le Bourget airport, just outside Paris, on Saturday evening after arriving from Azerbaijan on his private jet. His surprise arrest has sparked debate over free speech worldwide and led to an outcry in Moscow. The Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the investigation concerned crimes related to illicit transactions, child sexual abuse, fraud and the refusal to communicate information to authorities. Earlier in the day the French president, Emmanuel Macron, gave the first confirmation that Durov had been arrested as part of a judicial inquiry in relation to Telegram. "In a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights," Macron wrote on X, adding that the arrest was "in no way a political decision." "It is up to the judiciary, in full independence, to enforce the law," he said. A senior official at Ofmin, a French agency set up last year to prevent violence against children, said Durov's arrest was linked to Telegram's failure to properly fight crime on the app, including the spread of child sexual abuse material.

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Car buyers are increasingly skeptical of advanced automotive technologies, a new JD Power survey reveals. The study found that while drivers appreciate practical innovations like blind spot monitoring, they see little value in features such as automatic parking systems and passenger-side infotainment screens. The survey measured user experiences with new vehicle technologies. Results show that systems partially automating driving tasks had low perceived usefulness, aligning with recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety data indicating no safety improvements from such features. The survey identified AI-based smart climate control as popular among users. However, facial recognition, fingerprint scanners, and gesture controls were largely viewed negatively.

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Millions of Australians just got official permission to ignore their bosses outside of working hours, thanks to a new law enshrining their "right to disconnect." From a report: The law doesn't strictly prohibit employers from calling or messaging their workers after hours. But it does protect employees who "refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact outside their working hours, unless their refusal is unreasonable," according to the Fair Work Commission, Australia's workplace relations tribunal. That includes outreach from their employer, as well as other people "if the contact or attempted contact is work-related." The law, which passed in February, took effect on Monday for most workers and will apply to small businesses of fewer than 15 people starting in August 2025. It adds Australia to a growing list of countries aiming to protect workers' free time. "It's really about trying to bring back some work-life balance and make sure that people aren't racking up hours of unpaid overtime for checking emails and responding to things at a time when they're not being paid," said Sen. Murray Watt, Australia's minister for employment and workplace relations. The law doesn't give employees a complete pass, however.

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theodp writes: Typos happen to the best of us, but spelling still counts when it comes to software development. So, it's kind of surprising to see that both Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and former AWS CEO Adam Selipsky failed to notice an embarrassing typo in a demo video they offered to their millions of followers on social media as evidence of Amazon Q AI's Java upgrade capabilities, which Amazon has been trumpeting for months in SEC filings, shareholder communication, and Amazon's latest earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Just 37 seconds into the demo of the software that Amazon says saved it 4,500 developer-years of work and provided an additional $260M in annualized efficiency gains, Amazon Q kicks off the Java upgrade conversation by saying, "I can help you upgrade your Jave [sic] 8 and 11 codebases to Java 17." The embarrassing misspelling did prompt Twitter user @archo5dev to alert Jassy to the typo, but there's been no response yet from Jassy, who boasted that Amazon developers were unable to find any mistakes in Q's work in "79% of the auto-generated code reviews." It's probably worth noting that both Jassy and Selipsky opted to showcase a drop-dead simple demo of Amazon Q Code Transformation rather than some of the lengthier and less-magical demos of the product.

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President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the French government was not involved in the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. From a report: "The arrest of Telegram's president on French territory took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation. This is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to decide," Macron said. Durov was detained Saturday night after his private jet arrived in Paris. The Paris prosecutor has not yet communicated the reasons for the arrest of Durov, who founded the messaging app in 2013. The tech chief currently remains in policy custody. The arrest follows probes "accusing Telegram of being complicit in numerous affairs linked to drug trafficking, apology for terrorism and cyberbullying," French daily Le Monde reported. In a statement, Telegram said that its CEO -- a Russian-born French-Emirati citizen -- had "nothing to hide" and that the company abided by EU law. [...] "More than anything else, France is committed to freedom of expression and communication, innovation and entrepreneurship," Macron said Monday. "In a state governed by the rule of law, on social networks as in real life, freedoms are exercised within a framework established by law to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights."

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IBM is the latest American company to downsize its presence in China amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing. From a report: China's efforts to decrease its dependence on the West have ratcheted up local market competition -- and U.S. tech giants including Microsoft are looking elsewhere to house their operations. IBM will shut down its research and development department in China, impacting about 1,000 jobs, multiple outlets reported Monday. The Chinese government has encouraged domestic companies to overtake and push out U.S. tech dominance out of the country in a bid for self-sufficiency in the sector, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year. IBM has faced mounting competition in China in recent years, IBM executive Jack Hergenrother told employees virtually Monday, per the Journal. IBM reportedly plans to move its R&D operations to other overseas facilities. According to the company's 2023 annual report released earlier this year, the company saw its revenue in China drop 19.6% last year.

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Messaging app Telegram has said its CEO Pavel Durov, who was detained in France on Saturday, has "nothing to hide." From a report: Mr Durov was arrested at an airport north of Paris under a warrant for offences related to the app, according to officials. The investigation is reportedly about insufficient moderation, with Mr Durov accused of failing to take steps to curb criminal uses of Telegram. The app is accused of failure to co-operate with law enforcement over drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud. Telegram said in a statement that "its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving." The app added: "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform." Telegram said Mr Durov travels in Europe frequently and added that it abides by European Union laws, including the Digital Services Act, which aims to ensure a safe and accountable online environment. "Almost a billion users globally use Telegram as means of communication and as a source of vital information," the app's statement read. "We're awaiting a prompt resolution of this situation. Telegram is with you all." Judicial sources quoted by AFP news agency say Mr Durov's detention was extended on Sunday and could last as long as 96 hours.

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This weekend NASA said they'd turn to SpaceX to return two astronauts from the International Space Station, notes the Associated Press, "rather than risk using the Boeing Starliner capsule that delivered them." (They add that Boeing's capsule "has been plagued by problems with its propulsion system.") But Reuters reported that even before the setback, Boeing and Lockheed Martin were "in talks to sell their rocket-launching joint venture United Launch Alliance to Sierra Space, two people familiar with the discussions said." A deal to sell ULA, a major provider of launch services to the U.S. government and a top rival to Elon Musk's SpaceX, would mark a significant shift in the U.S. space launch industry as ULA separates from two of the largest defense contractors to a smaller, privately held firm. The potential sale comes after years of speculation about ULA's future and failed attempts to divest the joint venture over the past decade. In 2019, Boeing and Lockheed Martin reportedly explored selling ULA but couldn't agree on terms with potential buyers... Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Cerberus Capital Management had placed bids in early 2023 for the company, according to people familiar with the negotiations. Rocket Lab had also expressed interest, two people said. None of those discussions led to a deal... A potential deal could accelerate deployment of [Sierra Space's] crewed spaceflight business, analysts said. A ULA acquisition, they said, would give the company in-house access to launch vehicles that could send its spaceplane and space-station components into Earth's orbit, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars for those launches as a customer... ULA has faced challenges in scaling Vulcan production and upping its launch rate to meet commercial demand and fulfill contract obligations with the Space Force, which in 2021 picked Vulcan for a sizable chunk of national security missions alongside SpaceX's Falcon fleet. A sale of ULA would unshackle the company from Boeing and Lockheed, whose boards have long resisted ideas from ULA to expand the business beyond rockets and into new competitive markets such as lunar habitats or maneuverable spacecraft, according to former executives. While Reuters's sources say the negotiations could still end without a deal, they also said ULA could be valued between $2 billion and $3 billion, giving Boeing some cash while shifting its focus to its core businesses of aerospace and defense. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Google may be the most successful company in the world. But a Washington Post reporter argues that Google "makes you largely responsible for dodging the criminals who are hurting legitimate businesses and swindling people." On Monday, I found what appeared to be impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency company, in the "People also ask" section high up in Google. A group of people experienced in Google's intricacies also said this week that it took about 22 minutes to fool Google into highlighting a bogus business phone number in a prominent spot in search results... If you look at the two impostor phone numbers in Google for Delta and Coinbase, there are red flags. There are odd fonts and a website below the bogus numbers that wasn't for either company. (I notified Google about the apparent scams on Monday and I still saw them 24 hours later.) The correct customer help numbers did appear at the very top, and Google says businesses have clear instructions to make their customer service information visible to people searching Google. The larger issue is "a persistent pattern of bad guys finding ways to trick Google into showing scammers' numbers for airlines, hotels, local repair companies, banks or other businesses." The toll can be devastating when people are duped by these bogus business numbers. Fortune recently reported on a man who called what a Google listing said was Coinbase customer support, and instead it was an impostor who Fortune said tricked the man and stole $100,000... Most of the time, you will find correct customer service numbers by Googling. But the company doesn't say how often people are tricked out of time and money by bogus listings — nor why Google can't stop the scams from recurring. The article makes two points. Google says when they identify listings violating their rules, they move quickly against them. "Impostor numbers pop up so persistently that I am once again begging you to be wary of Google or Google Maps listings for business phone numbers... You still might see bogus phone numbers in some spots in Google. And if you're stressed trying to find help with a flight or a financial problem, you might overlook warning signs. Scams work because humans make errors in judgment, especially when we're confused or panicky. And business impostors aren't always obvious."

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To build the massive datacenters generative AI requires, major companies like Amazon and Microsoft "are going nuclear," reports CIO magazine. AWS: Earlier this year, AWS paid $650 million to purchase Talen Energy's Cumulus Data Assets, a 960-megawatt nuclear-powered data center on site at Talen's Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, nuclear plant, with additional data centers planned — pending approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency... In addition to its purchase of the Cumulus data center, AWS will have access to nuclear energy as part of a 10-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) from the Susquehanna site. Microsoft: Last year, Constellation signed a deal giving Microsoft the rights to receive up to 35% of its power from nuclear sources in addition to its existing solar and wind purchases from Constellation for Microsoft's Boydton, Va., data center. Microsoft has also signed a nuclear carbon credits deal with Ontario Power Generation for its operations in Canada. The broader industry: Many of the deals under discussion are with existing nuclear power providers for hyperscalars [large-scale datacenters] to access energy or to employ small module nuclear reactors (SMRs) with smaller carbon footprints that will be annexed to existing nuclear power plants. Nucor, Oklo, Rolls-Royce SMR, Westinghouse Electric, Moltex Energy, Terrestrial Energy, General Electric, Hitachi Nuclear Energy, and X-energy are among the roster of companies with SMRs under development to meet the growing needs of AI data centers... One energy analyst does not expect nuclear SMRs to be operational until 2030, yet he and many others acknowledge the need for sustainable, carbon-free alternatives to electricity, wind, and solar is very pressing. "Today's electric grids are struggling to keep up with demand, even as datacenter companies are planning huge new additions to their fleets to power generative AI applications. As a result, companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are increasingly taking matters into their own hands and getting creative. They are now looking at on-site nuclear-based SMRs, and even fusion reactors," says Peter Kelly-Detwiler, principal of Northbridge Energy Partners. "This global arms race for power arose pretty quickly, and it's like nothing we have ever seen before." Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the news.

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America's Department of Energy has three R&D labs, according to Wikipedia, one of which is Sandia National Labs. And that New Mexico-based lab has just announced that "A milestone in quantum sensing is drawing closer, promising exquisitely accurate, GPS-free navigation." with research into "a motion sensor so precise it could minimize the nation's reliance on global positioning satellites." Until recently, such a sensor — a thousand times more sensitive than today's navigation-grade devices — would have filled a moving truck. But advancements are dramatically shrinking the size and cost of this technology. For the first time, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have used silicon photonic microchip components to perform a quantum sensing technique called atom interferometry, an ultra-precise way of measuring acceleration. It is the latest milestone toward developing a kind of quantum compass for navigation when GPS signals are unavailable. The team published its findings and introduced a new high-performance silicon photonic modulator — a device that controls light on a microchip — as the cover story in the journal Science Advances... The new modulator is the centerpiece of a laser system on a microchip. Rugged enough to handle heavy vibrations, it would replace a conventional laser system typically the size of a refrigerator... Besides size, cost has been a major obstacle to deploying quantum navigation devices. Every atom interferometer needs a laser system, and laser systems need modulators. "Just one full-size single-sideband modulator, a commercially available one, is more than $10,000," said Sandia scientist Jongmin Lee. Miniaturizing bulky, expensive components into silicon photonic chips helps drive down these costs. "We can make hundreds of modulators on a single 8-inch wafer and even more on a 12-inch wafer," Kodigala said. And since they can be manufactured using the same process as virtually all computer chips, "This sophisticated four-channel component, including additional custom features, can be mass-produced at a much lower cost compared to today's commercial alternatives, enabling the production of quantum inertial measurement units at a reduced cost," Lee said. As the technology gets closer to field deployment, the team is exploring other uses beyond navigation. Researchers are investigating whether it could help locate underground cavities and resources by detecting the tiny changes these make to Earth's gravitational force. They also see potential for the optical components they invented, including the modulator, in LIDAR, quantum computing, and optical communications. Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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SecurityWeek reports: A significant backdoor in millions of contactless cards made by China-based Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group allows instantaneous cloning of RFID smart cards used to open office doors and hotel rooms around the world. French security services firm Quarkslab has made an eye-popping discovery... Although the backdoor requires just a few minutes of physical proximity to an affected card to conduct an attack, an attacker in a position to carry out a supply chain attack could execute such attacks instantaneously at scale, researcher Philippe Teuwen explained in a paper. Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the article.

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A university in Taiwan was breached with "a previously unseen backdoor (Backdoor.Msupedge) utilizing an infrequently seen technique," Symantec reports. The most notable feature of this backdoor is that it communicates with a command-and-control server via DNS traffic... The code for the DNS tunneling tool is based on the publicly available dnscat2 tool. It receives commands by performing name resolution... Msupedge not only receives commands via DNS traffic but also uses the resolved IP address of the C&C server (ctl.msedeapi[.]net) as a command. The third octet of the resolved IP address is a switch case. The behavior of the backdoor will change based on the value of the third octet of the resolved IP address minus seven... The initial intrusion was likely through the exploit of a recently patched PHP vulnerability (CVE-2024-4577). The vulnerability is a CGI argument injection flaw affecting all versions of PHP installed on the Windows operating system. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability can lead to remote code execution. Symantec has seen multiple threat actors scanning for vulnerable systems in recent weeks. To date, we have found no evidence allowing us to attribute this threat and the motive behind the attack remains unknown. More from The Record: Compared to more obvious methods like HTTP or HTTPS tunneling, this technique can be harder to detect because DNS traffic is generally considered benign and is often overlooked by security tools. Earlier in June, researchers discovered a campaign by suspected Chinese state-sponsored hackers, known as RedJuliett, targeting dozens of organizations in Taiwan, including universities, state agencies, electronics manufacturers, and religious organizations. Like many other Chinese threat actors, the group likely targeted vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices such as firewalls and enterprise VPNs for initial access because these devices often have limited visibility and security solutions, researchers said. Additional coverage at The Hacker News. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

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Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack explains: A blog post at the SANS Internet Storm Center suggests that OpenAI actions are being abused to scan for WordPress vulnerabilities. Honeypot sensors at the Storm Center detected scans for URLs targeting WordPress that originated exclusively from OpenAI systems. The URLs requested all pages including the pattern '%%target%%', which may indicate that the scan is meant to include additional path components but the expansion of the template failed. The scans were not only identified by the unique user agent but also by the origin IP addresses matching addresses OpenAI published as being used for OpenAI actions. OpenAI actions allow OpenAI to connect to external APIs. Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research, SANS.edu, wrote that OpenAI seems to be scanning random IP addresses — including honeypots.

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Long-time Slashdot reader mmell writes: Recent reports have indicated a near-complete collapse in the population of Snow Crabs in the Bering Sea. Scientists with the US Government's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that warming in the environment has led to vast numbers of snow crabs starving to death. There has been a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of argument on whether or how much humanity has had an effect on the fundamental ecology of our planet... Here is a fine example of anthropogenic change to the planet's weather, ecosystems and even the planet's very ability to feed us. From the government's findings on the NOAA web site: What is particularly noteworthy is these boreal conditions associated with the snow crab collapse are more than 200 times likely to occur in the present climate (1.0 –1.5 of warming rate) than in the preindustrial era," said Mike Litzow, lead author and director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center's Kodiak Lab. âoeEven more concerning is that Arctic conditions conducive for snow crabs to retain their dominant role in the southeastern Bering Sea are expected to continue to decline in the future.â [...] Litzow and his team expect to see Arctic conditions in only 8 percent of future years in the southeastern Bering Sea. The warmer temperatures brought existential threats including including a fatal disease and more crab-eating predators, their study found. CNN reports that the crabs' "horrific demise appears to be just one impact of the massive transition unfolding in the region, scientists reported... Parts of the Bering Sea are literally becoming less Arctic." Billions of crabs ultimately starved to death, devastating Alaskaâ(TM)s fishing industry in the years that followed... The decline of the Alaskan snow crab signals a wider ecosystem change in the Arctic, as oceans warm and sea ice disappears. The ocean around Alaska is now becoming inhospitable for several marine species, including red king crab and sea lions, experts say... The Arctic region has warmed four times faster than the rest of the planet, scientists have reported. Litzow called whatâ(TM)s happening in the Bering Sea a âoebellwetherâ of whatâ(TM)s to come. âoeAll of us need to recognize the impacts of climate change,â he said.

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An anonymous reader shared this story from the blog Decrypt: Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite, an account of the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, has argued that the disgraced FTX founder didn't have "the character of a thief" in a new The Washington Post article. "His crime was of a piece with his character. The character wasn't the character of a thief. It was the character of a person numb to risk." Lewis explained in the final paragraphs of a 4,500 word essay adapted from a new introduction to his book. "Unable to feel risk himself, he can't really imagine other people feeling much at all about the risk he has subjected them to...." Lewis doubled down on previous claims that Bankman-Fried wasn't running a Ponzi scheme, arguing that "The crime was unnecessary to the business in a way that, say, Bernie Madoff's was not," and that "The crime made no sense." The collapse of FTX, he added, "might have been avoided and FTX might have survived." "That doesn't mean I think that Sam Bankman-Fried is innocent. It merely informs how I feel about him," Lewis explained. "I think the truth is closer to 'young person with an intellectually defensible but socially unacceptable moral code makes a huge mistake in trying to live by it' than "criminal on the loose in the financial system.'" From from The Daily Beast: Lewis also pointed to bankruptcy court filings from FTX in the weeks after Bankman-Fried's sentencing showing that "against the $8.7 billion in missing customer deposits, FTX was now sitting on something like $14.5 to $16.3 billion." "Whatever the exact sum, it was enough to repay all depositors and various other creditors at least 118 cents on the dollar — that is, everyone who imagined they had lost money back in November 2022 would get their money back, with interest," Lewis writes. Michael Lewis's article offers some vivid details: Inside of three years, he'd gone from socially and emotionally isolated 25-year-old with an upper-middle-class bank account to leader of a small army of math nerds and (according to Forbes magazine) not merely the world's richest person under 30 but maybe the fastest creator of wealth in recorded history... He'd gone from having no friends as a child to having too many as an adult without ever developing a capacity for friendship.... The prosecutors didn't need Sam's help. Sam helped them anyway by ignoring the counsel of his lawyers and testifying on his own behalf... As Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who presided over the case, said later: "When he wasn't outright lying, he was often evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I've been doing this job for close to 30 years. I've never seen a performance quite like that...." [T]he judge ordered Sam to rise so that he might address him directly. Two hours or so earlier, Sam had shuffled into the courtroom in prison khakis with his head down and his hands oddly clasped behind his back. Just before he'd entered, his guards had told him he was meant to be wearing handcuffs and asked if he could create the impression that he was doing so... "There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it's not a trivial risk, not a trivial risk at all," said the judge. "So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him." He then sentenced Sam to 25 years in prison, with no possibility of parole. A few minutes later, Sam dutifully clasped his hands behind his back and shuffled out of the courtroom. Lewis adapted his 4,500-word article from the upcoming (updated) paperback edition of his book — which was originally published in 2023 on the same day jurors were selected for Bankman-Fried's trial...

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One of Slashdot's most-visited stories of all time was the 2016 story asking: Can Cow Backpacks Reduce Global Methane Emissions? "Enteric fermentation," or livestock's digestive process, accounts for 22 percent of all U.S. methane emissions, and the manure they produce makes up eight percent more, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency... Methane, like carbon, is a greenhouse gas, but methane's global warming impact per molecule is 25 times greater than carbon's, according to the EPA. Cow methane still "heats the Earth more than every flight across the world combined," the Washington Post added today, reporting on a new $30 million genetic engineering experiment undertaken by the Innovative Genomics Institute and the University of California at Davis. Its mission: to transform a cow's gut so it no longer releases methane. Using tools that snip and transfer DNA, researchers plan to genetically engineer microbes in the cow stomach to eliminate those emissions. If they succeed, they could wipe out the world's largest human-made source of methane and help change the trajectory of planetary warming... The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization... Scientists envision a kind of probiotic pill, given to the cow at birth, that can transform its microbiome permanently... The current project doesn't target only a particular cow species — it takes aim at the microbiome itself, offering a solution that could apply to all of them. Brad Ringeisen, executive director at the genomics institute, cut his teeth running biotechnology at the U.S. defense research agency DARPA, which helped pioneer transformative innovations including the internet, miniaturized GPS, stealth aircraft and the computer mouse. "I'm taking the DARPA mentality here," he said. "Let's solve it for all cows, not just a fraction of the cows." ...] "There's no reason a cow has to produce methane," Ringeisen said. So what if scientists could just ... turn it off? "I personally think this is the one that can make the biggest impact in the world," Ringeisen said. "Say you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all those emissions." The article says that currently the scientists are feeding red-seaweed oil to a cow to measure the changes, to prepare for their final goal: "replicate those changes with gene editing." (They're using machine learning to reassemble the hundreds of pieces of each miccroorganism's DNA, so they can understand which changes they need to make with their early-intervention probiotic.) Such a probiotic could also improve a farm's productivity. Cows can lose up to 12 percent of their energy through burping up methane; other ruminants, like sheep and goats, also lose energy in this way. "If there is a way to redirect that hydrogen and convert it into milk, meat, wool — it would be much more accepted by farmers," said Ermias Kebreab [a professor of animal science at UC-Davis]. Early treatments will be tested on the cows at Davis, with researchers tracking their burps to evaluate the drop-off in methane emissions. There is still a long way to go. While scientists have proved that they can gene-edit microbes, researchers have so far only shown that they can edit a small fraction of the microbes in the cow gut — or the human gut, for that matter. Institute researchers are developing microbial gene-editing tools, even as they are mapping the species of the microbiome. They are building the plane while flying it. The teams have received enough funding for seven years of research. The project started last year, and they hope to have a trial treatment ready for testing in cows in the next two years.

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The nonprofit American Radio Relay League — founded in 1914 — has approximately 161,000 members, according to Wikipedia (with over 7,000 members outside the U.S.) But sometime in early May its systems network was compromised, "by threat actors using information they had purchased on the dark web," the nonprofit announced this week. The attackers accessed the ARRL's on-site systems — as well as most of its cloud-based systems — using "a wide variety of payloads affecting everything from desktops and laptops to Windows-based and Linux-based servers." Despite the wide variety of target configurations, the threat actors seemed to have a payload that would host and execute encryption or deletion of network-based IT assets, as well as launch demands for a ransom payment, for every system... The FBI categorized the attack as "unique" as they had not seen this level of sophistication among the many other attacks, they have experience with. Within 3 hours a crisis management team had been constructed of ARRL management, an outside vendor with extensive resources and experience in the ransomware recovery space, attorneys experienced with managing the legal aspects of the attack including interfacing with the authorities, and our insurance carrier. The authorities were contacted immediately as was the ARRL President... [R]ansom demands were dramatically weakened by the fact that they did not have access to any compromising data. It was also clear that they believed ARRL had extensive insurance coverage that would cover a multi-million-dollar ransom payment. After days of tense negotiation and brinkmanship, ARRL agreed to pay a $1 million ransom. That payment, along with the cost of restoration, has been largely covered by our insurance policy... Today, most systems have been restored or are waiting for interfaces to come back online to interconnect them. While we have been in restoration mode, we have also been working to simplify the infrastructure to the extent possible. We anticipate that it may take another month or two to complete restoration under the new infrastructure guidelines and new standards. ARRL's called the attack "extensive", "sophisticated", "highly coordinated" and "an act of organized crime". And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30335) shared this detail from BleepingComputer. "While the organization has not yet linked the attack to a specific ransomware operation, sources told BleepingComputer that the Embargo ransomware gang was behind the breach."

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