An anonymous reader shares a report: Pentagon officials say the U.S. stands at the precipice of a new golden age of defense innovation driven by upstart contractors, advances in technology and a world brimming with threats. The Defense Department's inability to make unorthodox bets, feed a vibrant industrial base and embrace readily available technologies has rendered it under-supplied, the target of dual-use evangelists and vulnerable to more nimble adversaries. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a speech last week the department "cannot tolerate the same old mindsets" as it butts heads with Russia and China, while also invoking America's mass production overhaul during World War II. Heidi Shyu, the Pentagon's chief tech officer, separately called the clip of "nontraditional, venture-backed companies" entering the defense industry "unprecedented," adding: "They're nipping at the heels, I tell you. I have traditional defense contractors say, 'Hey, this isn't fair.'" Defense Innovation Unit director Doug Beck said the department is at a "positive tipping point." "We've been given the tools, and now it's about execution and delivery," Beck said. "I think we're well on our way out of the dark age." Hicks' declaration comes one year after she stuck her neck out for Replicator, meant to arm troops with thousands of drones and prove the Pentagon can be agile. That $1 billion gambit is on track, with more than 1,000 AeroVironment-made Switchblade 600 drones already in the pipeline, according to officials.

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New submitter beamdriver writes: As is being reported in Newsday, Disney has asked a Florida court to dismiss a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the husband of a Carle Place physician who suffered a fatal allergic reaction after eating at a Disney Springs restaurant. The company cited legal language agreed to years earlier when Jeffrey Piccolo, widower of Kanokporn Tangsuan, 42, of Plainview, signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service that requires users to arbitrate all disputes with the company, records show. Kanokporn Tangsuan, died in October after dining with her husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, at a restaurant in a section of the Walt Disney World Resort. Despite informing the waitstaff several times of her severe peanut and dairy allergies and receiving assurances that her meal would be allergen-free, she began having severe difficulty breathing shortly after dinner. She self-administered an epi-pen and was transported to a hospital, where she later died. A medical examiner attributed her death to anaphylaxis due to elevated levels of dairy and nuts in her system, according to the suit.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: After much back and forth earlier this year, Spotify on Wednesday says it's now received approval from Apple to display pricing information in its iOS app for users in the EU. The company is not opting into Apple's new business rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act, but rather is taking advantage of new antitrust guidelines imposed by the EU specifically for music streaming apps. Apple in March was fined by European regulators nearly $2 billion for breaching antitrust rules in the market. Spotify and Apple have also gone back and forth over an update to Spotify's app that would allow the music streamer to share pricing information with EU users. Now, Spotify says its app update has been approved, and it will be able to display the pricing for things like Spotify subscriptions and digital goods, including Spotify's more recently added collection of audiobooks. The latter includes the ability to show the pricing for subscription plans that include audiobook streaming, as well as "top off" hours users can buy to complete their audiobook listening and a la carte audiobook prices.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Florida's ban on cultivated meat is being challenged in federal court in a lawsuit that was filed yesterday. The case is being brought by the cultivated meat firm Upside Foods and the Institute of Justice (IJ), a nonprofit public interest law firm. Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the legislation making the sale of cultivated meat illegal in Florida on May 1, and the bill came into effect on July 1. Alabama passed a similar bill banning cultivated meat that will come into effect from October 1. The case brought by Upside Foods and the IJ argues that Florida's ban is unconstitutional in three different ways. First, they argue, the ban violates theSupremacy Clause that gives federal law priority over state law in certain instances. The court case argues that the Florida ban violates two different provisions in the Federal Meat Inspection Act and Poultry Products Inspection Act. The legal complaint (PDF) also alleges that the ban violates theCommerce Clause, which gives the US Congress exclusive power to regulate interstate commerce. The IJ argues that the Commerce Clause restricts states from enacting laws that unduly restrict interstate commerce, and that Florida's ban in its current form has the effect of discriminating against it. "Florida's law has nothing to do with protecting health and safety," said IJ senior attorney Paul Sherman in a press conference today. "It is a transparent example of economic protectionism." Sherman said that Upside Foods and the IJ would also apply for a preliminary injunction that would allow the company to sell cultivated meat in Florida while the legal challenge is still ongoing. The complaint says that Upside had planned to distribute its cultivated chicken at Art Basel in Miami in early December 2024. The company protested the Florida ban by holding a tasting of its chicken on June 27 in Miami, shortly before the ban came into effect. Sherman said that the Alabama ban was also "in our sights" but that the IJ had targeted the Florida law as it came into effect before the Alabama ban. "We're hoping we'll be able to get a quick ruling [in Florida] on a preliminary injunction there," and use that as a precedent to challenge the Alabama ban, he said. "Consumers should decide what kind of meat they want to buy and feed their families -- not politicians," said the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit focused on advancing alternative proteins and which is serving as a consulting consul in this case. "This lawsuit seeks to protect these consumer rights, along with the rights of companies to compete in a fair and open marketplace."

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Valve designer Lawrence Yang confirmed to The Verge that the company plans to support SteamOS on the rival Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld. From the report: A few days ago, some spotted an intriguing line in Valve's latest SteamOS release notes: "Added support for extra ROG Ally keys." We didn't know Valve was supporting any ROG Ally keys at all, let alone extras! Maybe Valve was just supporting those keys in the Steam desktop client on a Windows, where it offers a Steam Deck-like Big Picture Mode interface for any PC, and the line mistakenly made it into these patch notes? I asked to be safe. But no: this is indeed about Valve eventually supporting the ROG Ally and other rival handhelds! "The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS. The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS," Yang tells me. That doesn't mean Asus will officially bless Valve's installer or sell the Ally with SteamOS, of course. (Asus has told me there are many reasons why it ships with Windows; a big one is that Microsoft has dedicated validation teams that ensure its operating system works across many different hardware configurations and chips.) And it's not like Valve is suggesting it'll offer SteamOS for rival handhelds anytime soon, either. Valve is "making steady progress," Yang tells me, but it "isn't ready to run out of the box yet." Valve has announced plans for a general release of SteamOS 3 that can be installed on non-handheld PCs; however, Yang says it's not quite ready yet. As for turning Steam Decks into dual-booting Windows machines, here's what Yang said: "As for Windows, we're preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED available (you might have seen that we are prepping firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There's no update on the timing for dual boot support -- it's still a priority, but we haven't been able to get to it just yet."

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ZipNada writes: New research reveals that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT cannot learn independently or acquire new skills without explicit instructions, making them predictable and controllable. The study dispels fears of these models developing complex reasoning abilities, emphasizing that while LLMs can generate sophisticated language, they are unlikely to pose existential threats. However, the potential misuse of AI, such as generating fake news, still requires attention. The study, published today as part of the proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) -- the premier international conference in natural language processing -- reveals that LLMs have a superficial ability to follow instructions and excel at proficiency in language, however, they have no potential to master new skills without explicit instruction. This means they remain inherently controllable, predictable and safe. "The prevailing narrative that this type of AI is a threat to humanity prevents the widespread adoption and development of these technologies, and also diverts attention from the genuine issues that require our focus," said Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi, computer scientist at the University of Bath and co-author of the new study on the 'emergent abilities' of LLMs. Professor Iryna Gurevych added: "... our results do not mean that AI is not a threat at all. Rather, we show that the purported emergence of complex thinking skills associated with specific threats is not supported by evidence and that we can control the learning process of LLMs very well after all. Future research should therefore focus on other risks posed by the models, such as their potential to be used to generate fake news."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The World Health Organization (WHO) is poised to scrap controversial drinking water guidelines proposed for two toxic PFAS "forever chemicals." The move follows allegations that the process of developing the figures was corrupted by industry-linked researchers aiming to undercut strict new US PFAS limits and weaken standards in the developing world. Many independent scientists charged that the proposed WHO drinking water guidelines for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) were weak, did not fully protect human health, ignored credible research, and were far above limits set by regulators in the US and EU. The guidelines would have allowed far more PFAS in drinking water than what is allowed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Though the earlier guidelines were drafts, and proposed rules all go through a revision process, the WHO is conducting an entirely new review of scientific literature and disbanded the panel of scientists who developed the draft guidelines. It established a new panel with fewer industry-linked scientists and more regulatory officials, moves that have not happened in other revisions, said Betsy Southerland, a former EPA manager in the agency's water division. "This is unprecedented, but the WHO got unprecedented criticism," Southerland said. The WHO told the Guardian in a statement that the moves are part of "an ongoing process" and will include guidelines for other PFAS compounds. Scientists critical of the limits charged that the WHO ignored high-quality research to create a sense of doubt about the science around PFAS. EPA and EU regulators carried out an exhaustive literature review to find all human and animal studies, and used the best of those papers to establish their limits, Southerland said. The WHO, however, ignored all human studies and determined most animal studies were "too flawed" to use, Southerland said. The organization concluded there was not enough research to set health-based guidelines, which she called a "shocking decision." "There is far more health data for these chemicals than has ever been available for any pollutant in the history of the WHO," Southerland said. Instead, the WHO largely based its guidelines on its review of technological research, but ignored most of those studies as well, Southerland said. The body concluded filtration systems could reliably remove PFOA and PFOS at 100ppt, even though US water utilities remove it below four ppt. The decisions bear industry's prints, researchers say.

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A recent study reveals that 94% of spreadsheets used in business decision-making contain errors, highlighting significant risks of financial and operational mistakes. Phys.org reports: Errors in spreadsheets can lead to poor decisions, resulting in financial losses, pricing mistakes, and operational problems in fields like health care and nuclear operations. "These mistakes can cause major issues in various sectors," adds Prof. Pak-Lok Poon, the lead author of the study. Spreadsheets are crucial tools in many fields, such as linear programming and neuroscience. However, with more people creating their own spreadsheets without formal training, the number of faulty spreadsheets has increased. "Many end-users lack proper software development training, leading to more errors," explains Prof. Poon. The research team reviewed studies from the past 35.5 years for journal articles and 10.5 years for conference papers, focusing on spreadsheet quality and related techniques across different fields. The study found that most research focuses on testing and fixing spreadsheets after they are created, rather than on early development stages like planning and design. This approach can be more costly and risky. Prof. Poon emphasizes the need for more focus on the early stages of spreadsheet development to prevent errors. The study suggests that adopting a life cycle approach to spreadsheet quality can help reduce errors. Addressing quality from the beginning can help businesses lower risks and improve the reliability of their decision-making tools. The study has been published in the journal Frontiers of Computer Science.

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In a press release today, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he has filed a lawsuit against General Motors, alleging the carmaker illegally collected and sold drivers' data to insurance companies without their consent or knowledge. CNN reports: In car models from 2015 and later, the Detroit-based car manufacturer allegedly used technology to "collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data about each time a driver used their vehicle," according to the AG's statement. General Motors sold this information to several other companies, including to at least two companies for the purpose of generating "Driving Scores" about GM's customers, the AG alleged. The suit said those two companies then sold these scores to insurance companies. Insurance companies can use data to see how many times people exceeded a speed limit or obeyed other traffic laws. Some insurance firms ask customers if they want to voluntarily opt-in to such programs, promising lower rates for safer drivers. But the attorney general's office claimed GM "deceived" its Texan customers by encouraging them to enroll in programs such as OnStar Smart Driver. But by agreeing to join these programs, customers also unknowingly agreed to the collection and sale of their data, the attorney general's office said. "Despite lengthy and convoluted disclosures, General Motors never informed its customers of its actual conduct -- the systematic collection and sale of their highly detailed driving data," the AG's office said in a statement. The filing can be read here (PDF).

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Google's Brian Rakowski announced today that the new Pixel 9 lineup will be the first Android phones to feature Satellite SOS. The Verge reports: The feature launches first in the US "regardless of your carrier plan," Rakowski said, though it won't be available in Hawaii and Alaska, per a support page. According to fine print shown during Google's livestream, the service will be included "at no additional charge for the first two years after activation of devices." A blog post by Rakowski qualifies that further, saying that it will be free for those first two years "on Pixel." And it's unclear when the feature might arrive for other Android phones.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: The family of a French mariner who died on the imploded Titan submersible last year has sued Titan's maker, OceanGate Expeditions, for more than $50 million. The lawsuit claims OceanGate is responsible for explorers' suffering immediately preceding their deaths, as well as for failing to disclose the extent of the submersible's risks. Among those risks are Titan's cheap materials, including the $30 Logitech gaming controller used aboard the vehicle. [...] The lawsuit points at Titan's "hip, contemporary, wireless electronics system" and then alleges that none of the controllers or gauges inside Titan would operate without a constant source of power and a wireless signal. One of those controllers was a modified Logitech F710 Gamepad, a $30 to $40 device designed for, well, gaming. The gamepad quickly became the subject of internet mockery following the loss of Titan; some speculators said the submersible must have been doomed to fail if it used such cheap components. The lawsuit even claims the controller's Bluetooth (rather than wired) connectivity set it up for failure. Still, other speculators believe the controller wouldn't have had much impact on the submersible's operational durability. Instead, the issue would have been with the vehicle's carbon fiber pressure cylinder, which Rush allegedly bought off Boeing at a discount after the material passed its "airplane shelf life." Regardless of the exact material, it seems the consensus among members of the public is that for OceanGate, quality was an afterthought.

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"T-Mobile will be shutting down their 2G network beginning next month, making older phones obsolete," writes Slashdot reader Dustin Destree. From the Mobile Report: Most phones today use 4G and 5G, and T-Mobile's 2G service somehow managed to outlive the company's 3G service, which was killed off in 2022. Nonetheless, after postponing a previous shutdown date of April 2nd, we seem to finally have a date for T-Mobile sunsetting its 2G service, and it's pretty soon. T-Mobile has added a date for when its 2G service's capacity and coverage is "expected to change." The service should begin shutdown on September 1st, 2024. The date was quietly added without a major announcement, and it was added sometime after August 5th, as a former Google cache of the page (which has now also been updated) previously showed.

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Starting today, users of the social magazine app Flipboard can follow any federated accounts, "meaning those that participate in the social network of interconnected servers known as the fediverse," writes TechCrunch's Sarah Perez. "This now includes Threads accounts in addition to Mastodon accounts and others." From the report: With the update, which deepens Flipboard's connection with the ActivityPub social graph, any Flipboard user can follow user profiles from any other federated service. If their Flipboard account is also federated, they can interact with those users' posts and participate in conversations, as well. Flipboard's user base, however, is currently undisclosed. [...] The Flipboard app supports full fediverse integration, but the company hasn't yet allowed all users to turn on federation as it's a phased rollout. We're told the goal is to make federation a setting users can select later this year, similar to how Threads added a "fediverse sharing" option in June. When federation is enabled, people will be able to not only share to the fediverse but also see and engage with conversations around their Flipboard posts that are taking place in the fediverse. With Tuesday's update on Flipboard, people can find and follow others in the fediverse across three areas of its app: Search, Explore and Community. In search results, Flipboard will surface federated accounts and profile results in a new section, "Fediverse Accounts." Editorial recommendations can also be found in the app's "Explore" tab under "Fediverse," and every week a new selection of accounts will be featured in the Community section. Activity from the fediverse will also be displayed in the Flipboard notifications panel, allowing people to engage and follow others in the fediverse directly from their notifications. For Flipboard users, that means they can now follow user profiles from Threads and Mastodon in the Flipboard app, including high-profile users like President Joe Biden (POTUS) and former President Barack Obama on Threads, as well as various creators, like Marques Brownlee, and journalists, like Kara Swisher.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the past few days, a software package called Deep-Live-Cam has been going viral on social media because it can take the face of a person extracted from a single photo and apply it to a live webcam video source while following pose, lighting, and expressions performed by the person on the webcam. While the results aren't perfect, the software shows how quickly the tech is developing -- and how the capability to deceive others remotely is getting dramatically easier over time. The Deep-Live-Cam software project has been in the works since late last year, but example videos that show a person imitating Elon Musk and Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance (among others) in real time have been making the rounds online. The avalanche of attention briefly made the open source project leap to No. 1 on GitHub's trending repositories list (it's currently at No. 4 as of this writing), where it is available for download for free. [...] Like many open source GitHub projects, Deep-Live-Cam wraps together several existing software packages under a new interface (and is itself a fork of an earlier project called "roop"). It first detects faces in both the source and target images (such as a frame of live video). It then uses a pre-trained AI model called "inswapper" to perform the actual face swap and another model called GFPGAN to improve the quality of the swapped faces by enhancing details and correcting artifacts that occur during the face-swapping process. The inswapper model, developed by a project called InsightFace, can guess what a person (in a provided photo) might look like using different expressions and from different angles because it was trained on a vast dataset containing millions of facial images of thousands of individuals captured from various angles, under different lighting conditions, and with diverse expressions. During training, the neural network underlying the inswapper model developed an "understanding" of facial structures and their dynamics under various conditions, including learning the ability to infer the three-dimensional structure of a face from a two-dimensional image. It also became capable of separating identity-specific features, which remain constant across different images of the same person, from pose-specific features that change with angle and expression. This separation allows the model to generate new face images that combine the identity of one face with the pose, expression, and lighting of another.

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National-security authorities have warned for years that today's encryption will become vulnerable to hackers when quantum computers are widely available. Companies can now start to integrate new cryptographic algorithms into their products to protect them from future hacks. From a report: Some companies have already taken steps to replace current forms of encryption with post-quantum algorithms. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department, published three new algorithms for post-quantum encryption Tuesday. The three algorithms that NIST selected use different types of encryption to protect digital signatures that authenticates information, and cryptographic key exchange, which keeps data confidential. IBM researchers were part of teams that submitted algorithms that NIST selected. International Business Machines is working with companies in telecommunications, online payments and other industries on how to implement the new standards. "Our digital economy is toast unless people go in and change the cryptography," said Scott Crowder, vice president of IBM's quantum adoption group. The new standards from NIST will be influential because they will replace encryption algorithms in use all over the world, said Joost Renes, principal cryptographer at NXP Semiconductors, a key provider of chips to the auto industry. NXP customers in different industries have been asking about the new encryption algorithms and want to make sure their suppliers are prepared to migrate to post-quantum cryptography, Renes said. He said NXP will start using the algorithms as soon as possible but declined to comment on when that will be. "You should really look at this as a kind of ongoing transition project which is going to take quite some time," he said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite a law enforcement takedown six months ago, LockBit 3.0 remains the most prolific encryption and extortion gang, at least so far, this year, according to Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. Of the 53 ransomware groups whose underworld websites, where the crooks name their victims and leak stolen data, that the incident response team monitored, just six accounted for more than half of the total infections observed. For its analysis, Unit 42 reviewed announcements posted on these crews' dedicated leak sites during the first six months of 2024 and counted 1,762 posts, which represents a 4.3 percent year-over-year increase from 2023. Before we get into the top six gangs' victims count, a note on how Unit 42 tracks nation-state and cybercrime groups: It combines a modifier with a constellation. And Scorpius is the lucky constellation that Unit 42 connects to ransomware gangs.

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A rare bid to break up Alphabet's Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The move would be Washington's first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google's web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has announced Pixel Screenshots, a new AI-powered app for its Pixel 9 lineup that lets you save, organize, and surface information from screenshots. Pixel Screenshot uses Google's private, on-device Gemini Nano AI model to analyze the content of an image and make it searchable. During a demo at its Pixel launch event, Google showed how you can take a screenshot and then save it to a collection, like "gift ideas." You can also search through all your other screenshots by typing in a keyword, like "bikes" or "shoes." Pixel Screenshots will then pull up all relevant results. Additionally, Pixel Screenshots can give you information about what's inside an image. Further reading: Microsoft Postpones Windows Recall After Major Backlash.

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Google unveiled its latest Pixel smartphone series on Tuesday, introducing four new models with enhanced AI capabilities and updated designs. The Pixel 9 lineup includes the standard Pixel 9, two Pro models, and a foldable device. The new Pixel phones feature flat sides and an elongated camera module on the rear, departing from the curved edges of previous generations. Screen sizes range from 6.3 inches on the standard Pixel 9 to 6.8 inches on the Pixel 9 Pro XL. All models are powered by Google's new Tensor G4 processor and come with increased RAM, with Pro models boasting 16GB. The devices run on Android 14 and will receive seven years of OS updates and security patches. Google has significantly expanded the AI capabilities of the new Pixels. An updated on-device Gemini Nano model can now analyze images and speech in addition to text. New features include automatic screenshot cataloging and retrieval, and an AI-powered illustration generator called Pixel Studio. Camera improvements are a key focus, with all models receiving upgraded ultrawide lenses and the Pro versions featuring a new 42-megapixel selfie camera with autofocus. Google has introduced "Magic Editor," allowing users to transform parts of an image using text prompts and generative AI. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Google's second-generation foldable device, is thinner than its predecessor at 5.1mm when unfolded. It features a larger 8-inch inner display with increased brightness, reaching up to 2,700 nits in peak mode. Pricing for the new Pixel lineup starts at $799 for the standard Pixel 9, representing a $100 increase from last year's model. The Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL are priced at $999 and $1,099 respectively, while the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will retail for $1,799. The devices will be released in stages, with the Pixel 9 and 9 Pro XL available from August 22, followed by the 9 Pro in September and the Pro Fold on September 4.

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Hackers at the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas identified vulnerabilities in voting machines slated for use in the 2024 U.S. election, but fixes are unlikely to be implemented before November 5, organizers said. The annual "Voting Village" event, held away from the main conference floor due to security concerns, drew election officials and cybersecurity experts. Organizers plan to release a detailed report on the vulnerabilities found. Catherine Terranova, an event organizer, said major systemic changes are difficult to make 90 days before an election, particularly given heightened scrutiny of election security in 2024. The process of addressing vulnerabilities involves manufacturer approval, recertification by authorities, and updating individual devices. This typically takes longer than the time remaining before the election, according to Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology-Information Sharing and Analysis Center. The event comes amid ongoing concerns about foreign targeting of U.S. elections, including a recent hack of former President Donald Trump's campaign, reportedly by Iran.

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