An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: U.S. life expectancy rose last year, hitting its highest level since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, released Thursday, found that life expectancy at birth was 78.4 years in 2023. That's a significant rise — nearly a full year — from the life expectancy of 77.5 years in 2022. "The increase we had this year — the 0.9 year — that's unheard of prior to the pandemic," said Ken Kochanek, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics who co-authored the report. "Life expectancy in the United States never goes up or down any more than one- or two-tenths," he said. "But then when Covid happened, you had this gigantic drop, and now we have a gigantic drop in Covid. So, you have this gigantic increase in life expectancy." From 2019 to 2021, U.S. life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years to 76.4. Covid deaths fell significantly last year: Whereas Covid was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022, it was the 10th in 2023, according to the new report. Last year, Covid was the underlying or contributing cause of more than 76,000 deaths, according to an August CDC report, compared with more than 350,000 such deaths in 2020. The new findings are based on an analysis of death certificates from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The results showed that the overall death rate for the U.S. population decreased by 6%. "According to the new report, the top five causes of death in the U.S. last year were heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Death rates fell for nine of the top 10 causes in 2023, while the rate of cancer deaths remained fairly unchanged..." The Atlantic shares some other positive statistics, including reports that America's traffic fatalities keep declining, while drug-overdose deaths also dropped 3% between 2022 and 2023 and there was also a double-digit drop in murder rates. "America is suddenly getting healthier," they write. "No one knows why."

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Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe is also long-time Slashdot reader ReneR — and popped by with a special announcement for the holidays: The T2 Linux team has unveiled T2 Linux SDE 24.12, codenamed "Sky's the Limit!", delivering a massive update for this highly portable source-based Linux distribution... With 3,280 package updates, 206 new features, and the ability to boot on systems with as little as 512MB RAM, this release further strengthens T2 Linux's position as the ultimate tool for developers working across diverse hardware and embedded systems. Some highlights from Rene's announcement: "The release includes 37 pre-compiled ISOs with Glibc, Musl, and uClibc, supporting 25 CPU architectures like ARM(64), RISCV(64), Loongarch64, SPARC(64), and vintage retro computing platforms such as M68k, Alpha, and even initial Nintendo Wii U support added." " The Cosmic Desktop, a modern Rust-based environment, debuts alongside expanded application support for non-mainstream RISC architectures, now featuring LibreOffice, OpenJDK, and QEMU." And T2sde.org gives this glimpse of the future: "While initially created for the Linux kernel, T2 already has proof-of-concept support for building 'home-brew' pkg for Other OS, including: BSDs, macOS and Haiku. Work on alternative micro kernels, such as L4, Fuchsia, RedoxOS or integrating building 'AOSP' Android is being worked on as well."

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"Voyager 1 is currently exploring interstellar space at a distance of 15.5 billion miles (24.9 billion kilometers) away from Earth," writes Gizmodo. And yet a team of amateur astronomers in the Netherlands was able to receive Voyager's signals on a 1950s telescope designed to detect weak, low-frequency emissions from deep space: NASA uses the [Earth-based] Deep Space Network (DSN) to communicate with its spacecraft, but the global array of giant radio antennas is optimized for higher frequency signals. Though NASA's DSN antennas are capable of detecting S-band missives from Voyager — it can also communicate in X-band — the spacecraft's signal can appear to drop due to how far Voyager is from Earth. The Dwingeloo telescope, on the other hand, is designed for observing at lower frequencies than the 8.4 gigahertz telemetry transmitted by Voyager 1, according to the C.A. Muller Radio Astronomy Station... [W]hen Voyager 1 switched to a lower frequency, its messages fell within Dwingeloo's frequency band. Thus, the astronomers took advantage of the spacecraft's communication glitch to listen in on its faint signals to NASA. The astronomers used orbital predictions of Voyager 1's position in space to correct for the Doppler shift in frequency caused by the motion of Earth, as well as the motion of the spacecraft through space. The weak signal was found live, and further analysis later confirmed that it corresponded to the position of Voyager 1. Thankfully, the mission team at NASA turned Voyager 1's X-band transmitter back on in November, and is currently carrying out a few remaining tasks to get the spacecraft back to its regular state. Fortunately, radio telescopes like Dwingeloo can help fill in the gaps while NASA's communications array has trouble reaching its spacecraft. Scientific American shares an interesting perspective on the Voyager probes: we everyday Earthlings may simplistically think of the sun as a compact distant ball of light, in part because our plush atmosphere protects us from our star's worst hazards. But in reality the sun is a roiling mass of plasma and magnetism radiating itself across billions of miles in the form of the solar wind, which is a constant stream of charged plasma that flows off our star. The sun's magnetic field travels with the solar wind and also influences the space between planets. The heliosphere grows and shrinks in response to changes in the sun's activity levels over the course of an 11-year cycle... [Jamie Rankin, a space physicist at Princeton University and deputy project scientist of the Voyager mission] notes, astronomers of all stripes are trapped within that chaotic background in ways that may or may not affect their data and interpretations. "Every one of our measurements to date, until the Voyagers crossed the heliopause, has been filtered through all the different layers of the sun," Rankin says. On their trek to interstellar space, the Voyagers had to cross a set of boundaries: first a termination shock some seven billion or eight billion miles away from the sun, where the solar wind abruptly begins to slow, then the heliopause, where the outward pressure from the solar wind is equaled by the inward pressure of the interstellar medium. Between these two stark borders lies the heliosheath, a region where solar material continues to slow and even reverse direction. The trek through these boundaries took Voyager 1, the faster of the twin probes, nearly eight years; such is the vastness of the scale at play. Beyond the heliopause is interstellar space, which Voyager 1 entered in 2012 and Voyager 2 reached in 2018. It's a very different environment from the one inside our heliosphere — quieter but hardly quiescent. "It's a relic of the environment the solar system was born out of," Rankin says of the interstellar medium. Within it are energetic atomic fragments called galactic cosmic rays, as well as dust expelled by dying stars across the universe's eons, among other ingredient. Earlier this month Wired noted " The secret of the Voyagers lies in their atomic hearts: both are equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs — small power generators that can produce power directly on board. Each RTG contains 24 plutonium-238 oxide spheres with a total mass of 4.5 kilograms..." But as time passes, the plutonium on board is depleted, and so the RTGs produce less and less energy. The Voyagers are therefore slowly dying. Nuclear batteries have a maximum lifespan of 60 years. In order to conserve the probes' remaining energy, the mission team is gradually shutting down the various instruments on the probes that are still active... Four active instruments remain, including a magnetometer as well as other instruments used to study the galactic environment, with its cosmic rays and interstellar magnetic field. But these are in their last years. In the next decade — it's hard to say exactly when — the batteries of both probes will be drained forever.

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On Thursday New Jersey lawmakers passed a resolution "calling on the federal government to conduct a 'rigorous and ongoing' investigation into the drone sightings in the state," reports the Associated Press: Meanwhile, federal and local authorities are warning against pointing lasers at suspected drones, because aircraft pilots are being hit in the eyes more often. Authorities also said they are concerned people might fire weapons at manned aircraft that they have mistaken for drones... White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said Monday that the federal government has yet to identify any public safety or national security risks. "There are more than 1 million drones that are lawfully registered with the Federal Aviation Administration here in the United States," Kirby said. "And there are thousands of commercial, hobbyist and law enforcement drones that are lawfully in the sky on any given day. That is the ecosystem that we are dealing with." The federal government has deployed personnel and advanced technology to investigate the reports in New Jersey and other states, and is evaluating each tip reported by citizens, he said. About 100 of the more than 5,000 drone sightings reported to the FBI in recent weeks were deemed credible enough to warrant more investigation, according to a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense. Speculation has raged online, with some expressing concerns the drones could be part of a nefarious plot by foreign agents or clandestine operations by the U.S. government. Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said it's unlikely the drones are engaged in intelligence gathering, given how loud and bright they are. He repeated Tuesday that the drones being reported are not being operated by the Department of Defense. Asked whether military contractors might be operating drones in the New Jersey area, Ryder rebuffed the notion, saying there are "no military operations, no military drone or experiment operations in this corridor." Ryder said additional drone-detecting technology was being moved to some military installations, including the Picatinny Arsenal... U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, said he has heard nothing to support the notion that the government is hiding anything. He said a lack of faith in institutions is playing a key part in the saga.

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Nature magazine reports that "A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published." Researchers had critiqued the controversial paper many times, raising concerns about its data quality and an unclear ethics-approval process. Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille's Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired. The paper, which has received almost 3,400 citations according to the Web of Science database, is the highest-cited paper on COVID-19 to be retracted, and the second-most-cited retracted paper of any kind.... Because it contributed so much to the HCQ hype, "the most important unintended effect of this study was to partially side-track and slow down the development of anti-COVID-19 drugs at a time when the need for effective treatments was critical", says Ole Søgaard, an infectious-disease physician at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, who was not involved with the work or its critiques. "The study was clearly hastily conducted and did not adhere to common scientific and ethical standards...." Three of the study's co-authors had asked to have their names removed from the paper, saying they had doubts about its methods, the retraction notice said. Nature includes this quote from a scientific-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "This paper should never have been published — or it should have been retracted immediately after its publication." "The report caught the eye of the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz," the Atlantic reported in April of 2020 (also noting that co-author Raoult "has made news in recent years as a pan-disciplinary provocateur; he has questioned climate change and Darwinian evolution...") And Nature points out that while the study claimed good results for the 20 patients treated with HCQ, six more HCQ-treated people in the study actually dropped out before it was finished. And of those six people, one died, while three more "were transferred to an intensive-care unit." Thanks to Slashdot reader backslashdot for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft's popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access... There are some limitations to the free version, which is geared toward occasional users, not major work on a big project. Developers on the free plan will get access to 2,000 code completions per month, for example, and as a GitHub spokesperson told me, each Copilot code suggestion will count against this limit — not just accepted suggestions. And while GitHub recently added the ability to switch between different foundation models, users on the free plan are limited to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. (The paid plans also include Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini.) For Copilot Chat, the number of chat messages is limited to 50, but otherwise, there aren't any major limitations to the free service. Developers still get access to all Copilot Extensions and skills. The free Copilot SKU will work in a number of editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains, as well as on GitHub.com. GitHub's announcement ends with the words "Happy coding!" and calls the service "GitHub Copilot Free." But TechCrunch points out there's already competition from services like Amazon Q Developer, as well as from companies like Tabnine and Qodo (previously known as Codium) — and they typically offer a free tier. But in addition, "With Copilot Free, we are returning to our freemium roots," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told TechCrunch, as well as "laying the groundwork for something far greater: AI represents our best path to enabling a GitHub with one billion developers. "There should be no barrier to entry for experiencing the joy of creating software. Now six years after being acquired by Microsoft, it indeed appears GitHub is still GitHub — and we are doing our thing." Or, as GitHub CEO Satya Nadella said in a video posted on LinkedIn, "The joy of coding is back! And we are looking forward to bringing the same experience to so many more people around the world."

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"California's population grew this year by nearly a quarter of a million residents," reports the Los Angeles Daily News, "closing in on record-high population levels the Golden State reached before the pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday." Although "Data showed the state is growing more slowly than the country as a whole and other large states in the South..." The Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 population estimates show California's population on July 1, 2024 was 39,431,000, an increase of 233,000 from the year before, and just 125,000 short of the 2020 high point. For Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, there are two ways to look at the new data. "There's the optimistic look that in the past year, we have seen the population increase... bigger increases than we have in a decade, so I do think there is some truth to the narrative of folks coming back to California," he said. On the other hand, California is still far behind the population gains made in states like Florida and Texas. "We are still trying to claw back to where we were pre-pandemic," Bellisario said. "It's going to take us a few more years to get to solid population growth numbers." California had the third most new residents, with the population growing by about 0.59%. Florida and Texas saw more new residents, and top the list of states with the largest increases by raw numbers... Overall, the population of the entire country grew by about 0.9%, slightly outpacing California's growth. A graph accompanying the article shows California's population increasing steadily until the pandemic — which produced a sudden drop that the article seems to attribute to pandemic restrictions (including restrictions on entering the country). And then this year there was a sudden spike back to nearly where it was before the pandemic.

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The Linux Foundation partnered with GitHub and Harvard's Laboratory for Innovation Science to research organization-driven investments in open source software — the how and the why — surveying over 500 organizations around the world. So what are the highlights from the published report? The median responding organization invests $520,600 (2023 USD) of annual value to OSS. Responding organizations annually invest $1.7 billion in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested across the entire open source ecosystem annually. 86% of investment is in the form of contribution labor by employees and contractors working for the funding organization, with the remaining 14% being direct financial contributions. But the ultimate goal of the research was ideas "to improve monitoring and investing in open source" (to "create a more sustainable and impactful open source economy...") In this research, we discovered a few key obstacles that make this kind of data capture challenging... [O]rganizations have blind spots when it comes to the specifics of their contributions. Many respondents knew where they contribute, but only a portion of those could answer how many labor hours went into their OSS contributions or the percentage of budget that went to OSS. Second, the decentralized nature of organizational contributions, without explicit policies or centralized groups that encourage and organize this effort, make reporting even more challenging... [W]e recommend that policies and practices are put in place to encourage employees to self-report their contributions, and do so using their employee email addresses to leave fingerprints on their work. We also suggest that open source work is consolidated under a single banner, such as an Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Finally, we suggest incorporating contribution monitoring into the organization's pipeline. We developed a toolkit to help improve data capture and monitoring.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: With a few keystrokes, anyone can ask an artificial intelligence (AI) program such as ChatGPT to write them a term paper, a rap song, or a play. But don't expect William Shakespeare's originality. A new study finds such output remains derivative -- at least for now. [...] [O]bjectively testing this creativity has been tricky. Scientists have generally taken two tacks. One is to use another computer program to search for signs of plagiarism -- though a lack of plagiarism does not necessarily equal creativity. The other approach is to have humans judge the AI output themselves, rating factors such as fluency and originality. But that's subjective and time intensive. So Ximing Lu, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, and colleagues created a program featuring both objectivity and a bit of nuance. Called DJ Search, it collects pieces of text of a minimum length from whatever the AI outputs and searches for them in large online databases. DJ Search doesn't just look for identical matches; it also scans for strings whose words have similar meanings. To evaluate the meaning of a word or phrase, the program itself relies on a separate AI algorithm that produces a set of numbers called an "embedding," which roughly represents the contexts in which words are typically found. Synonymous words have numerically close embeddings. For example, phrases that swap "anticipation" and "excitement" are considered matches. After removing all matches, the program calculates the ratio of the remaining words to the original document length, which should give an estimate of how much of the AI's output is novel. The program conducts this process for various string lengths (the study uses a minimum of five words) and combines the ratios into one index of linguistic novelty. (The team calls it a "creativity index," but creativity requires both novelty and quality -- random gibberish is novel but not creative.) The researchers compared the linguistic novelty of published novels, poetry, and speeches with works written by recent LLMs. Humans outscored AIs by about 80% in poetry, 100% in novels, and 150% in speeches, the researchers report in a preprint posted on OpenReview and currently under peer review. Although DJ Search was designed for comparing people and machines, it can also be used to compare two or more humanmade works. For example, Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel The Hunger Games scored 35% higher in linguistic originality than Stephenie Meyer's 2005 hit Twilight. (You can try the tool online.)

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Last week, startup Embodied announced it was closing down, and its product, an $800 robot for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked. Now, in a blog post published on Friday, CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared that Embodied's technical team is working on a way to open-source the robot, ensuring it can continue operating indefinitely. Ars Technica reports: The notice says that after releasing OpenMoxie, Embodied plans to release "all necessary code and documentation" for developers and users. Pirjanian said that an over-the-air (OTA) update is now available for download that will allow previously purchased Moxies to support OpenMoxie. The executive noted that Embodied is still "seeking long-term answers" but claimed that the update is a "vital first step" to "keep the door open" for the robot's continued functionality. At this time, OpenMoxie isn't available and doesn't have a release date. Embodied's wording also seems careful to leave an opening for OpenMoxie to not actually release; although, the company seems optimistic. However, there's also a risk of users failing to update their robots in time and properly. Embodied noted that it won't be able to support users who have trouble with the update or with OpenMoxie post-release. Updating the robot includes connecting to Wi-Fi and leaving it on for at least an hour. "It is extremely important that you update your Moxie with this OTA as soon as possible because once the cloud servers stop working you will not be able to update your robot," the document reads. Embodied hasn't said when exactly its cloud servers still stop working.

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Axiom Space has revised its plan for assembling its commercial space station by launching the Payload, Power, and Thermal module first, enabling it to operate as a free-flying platform as early as 2028 -- two years ahead of the original timeline. Space.com reports: NASA awarded Axiom Space a contract in 2020 to attach one or more modules to the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to retire by 2030 at the earliest. The original plan called for Axiom to detach a multi-module group from the ISS, creating a commercial outpost in low Earth orbit that will continue operating after the ISS is gone. But that plan has now been altered. To create its space station, Axiom plans to launch five modules: a payload/power/thermal element, an airlock, a research/manufacturing hub, and a pair of habitat modules. The original plan was for Axiom to launch the Habitat 1 module to the ISS first, followed by the additional elements. The new assembly sequence will see the Payload, Power and Thermal module launch to the ISS first. This module could detach from the station -- and become a free flyer called Axiom Station -- as soon as 2028, according to the company. After that happens, Axiom will continue assembling the outpost, launching the Habitat 1 module to meet up with it. Habitat 1 will be followed by the airlock, the Habitat 2 module, and then the research and manufacturing facility. Angela Hart, a manager for the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said: "The updated assembly sequence has been coordinated with NASA to support both NASA and Axiom Space needs and plans for a smooth transition in low Earth orbit."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Malaysia has agreed to resume the search for the wreckage of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, its transport minister said on Friday, more than 10 years after it disappeared in one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. [...] MH370's last transmission was about 40 minutes after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. The pilots signed off as the plane entered Vietnamese air space over the Gulf of Thailand and soon after its transponder was turned off. "Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin," Transport Minister Anthony Loke told a press conference. "We hope this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families." Further reading: Could Sea Explosions Finally Locate the 2014 Crash Site of Flight MH370?

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Five years ago, journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow published a short story that explored the radicalization of individuals denied healthcare coverage. As The Guardian notes in a recent article, the story "might seem eerily similar" to the recent shooting of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. While it appears that the alleged shooter never read the story, Doctorow said: "I feel like the most important thing about that is that it tells you that this is not a unique insight." Doctorow continued: "that the question that I had is a question other people have had." As an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, it's important to note that Doctorow advocates for systemic reform through collective action rather than violence. Here's an excerpt from the The Guardian's article: In Radicalized, one of four novellas comprising a science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow charts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers whose partners or children have been denied healthcare coverage by their insurers after his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and denied coverage for an experimental treatment. Slowly, over the course of the story, the men of the forum become radicalized by their grief and begin plotting -- and executing -- murders of health insurance executives and politicians who vote against universal healthcare. In the wake of the December 4 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which unleashed a wave of outrage at the U.S. health system, Doctorow's novella has been called prescient. When the American Prospect magazine republished the story last week, it wrote: "It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it." But Doctorow doesn't think he was on to something that no one else in the U.S. understood. [...] In one part of the story, a man whose young daughter died after an insurance company refused to pay for brain surgery bombs the insurer's headquarters. "It's not vengeance. I don't have a vengeful bone in my body. Nothing I do will bring Lisa back, so why would I want revenge? This is a public service. There's another dad just like me," he shares in a video message on the forum. "And right now, that dad is talking to someone at Cigna, or Humana, or BlueCross BlueShield, and the person on the phone is telling that dad that his little girl has. To. Die. Someone in that building made the decision to kill my little girl, and everyone else in that building went along with it. Not one of them is innocent, and not one of them is afraid. They're going to be afraid, after this." "Because they must know in their hearts," he goes on. "Them, their lobbyists, the men in Congress who enabled them. They're parents. They know. Anyone who hurt their precious children, they'd hunt that person down like a dog. The only amazing thing about any of this is that no one has done it yet. I'm going to make a prediction right now, that even though I'm the first, I sure as hell will not be the last. There's more to come."

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The rise of AI has rendered traditional CAPTCHA tests increasingly ineffective, as bots can now "[solve] these puzzles in milliseconds using artificial intelligence (AI)," reports The Conversation. "How ironic. The tools designed to prove we're human are now obstructing us more than the machines they're supposed to be keeping at bay." The report warns that the imminent arrival of AI agents -- software programs designed to autonomously interact with websites on our behalf -- will further complicate matters. From the report: Developers are continually coming up with new ways to verify humans. Some systems, like Google's ReCaptcha v3 (introduced in 2018), don't ask you to solve puzzles anymore. Instead, they watch how you interact with a website. Do you move your cursor naturally? Do you type like a person? Humans have subtle, imperfect behaviors that bots still struggle to mimic. Not everyone likes ReCaptcha v3 because it raises privacy issues -- plus the web company needs to assess user scores to determine who is a bot, and the bots can beat the system anyway. There are alternatives that use similar logic, such as "slider" puzzles that ask users to move jigsaw pieces around, but these too can be overcome. Some websites are now turning to biometrics to verify humans, such as fingerprint scans or voice recognition, while face ID is also a possibility. Biometrics are harder for bots to fake, but they come with their own problems -- privacy concerns, expensive tech and limited access for some users, say because they can't afford the relevant smartphone or can't speak because of a disability. The imminent arrival of AI agents will add another layer of complexity. It will mean we increasingly want bots to visit sites and do things on our behalf, so web companies will need to start distinguishing between "good" bots and "bad" bots. This area still needs a lot more consideration, but digital authentication certificates are proposed as one possible solution. In sum, Captcha is no longer the simple, reliable tool it once was. AI has forced us to rethink how we verify people online, and it's only going to get more challenging as these systems get smarter. Whatever becomes the next technological standard, it's going to have to be easy to use for humans, but one step ahead of the bad actors. So the next time you find yourself clicking on blurry traffic lights and getting infuriated, remember you're part of a bigger fight. The future of proving humanity is still being written, and the bots won't be giving up any time soon.

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The EU is pushing Apple to make iOS more interoperable with other platforms, requiring features like AirDrop and AirPlay to work seamlessly with Android and third-party devices, while also enabling background app functionality and cross-platform notifications. 9to5Google reports: A new document released (PDF) by the European Commission this week reveals a number of ways the EU wants Apple to change iOS and its features to be more interoperable with other platforms. There are some changes to iOS itself, such as opening up notifications to work on third-party smartwatches as they do with the Apple Watch. Similarly, the EU wants Apple to let iOS apps work in the background as Apple's first-party apps do, as this is a struggle of some apps, especially companion apps for accessories such as smartwatches (other than the Apple Watch, of course). But there are also some iOS features that the EU directly wants Apple to open up to other platforms, including Android. [...] As our sister site 9to5Mac points out, Apple has responded (PDF) to this EU document, prominently criticizing the EU for putting out a mandate that "could expose your private information." Apple's document primarily focuses in on Meta, which the company says has made "more interoperability requests" than anyone else. Apple says that opening AirPlay to Meta would "[create] a new class of privacy and security issues, while giving them data about users homes." The EU is taking consultation on this case until January 9, 2025, and if Apple doesn't comply when the order is eventually put into effect, it could result in heavy fines.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Amazon employees are striking after the online retail giant missed a deadline to begin negotiations for a union contract. Roughly 10,000 employees have gone on strike as of Dec. 19. Workers are forming picket lines in New York City, Atlanta, Southern California, San Francisco, and Skokie, IL. Per a press release from the Teamsters, employees at other facilities have authorized strikes as well. Local unions are also putting up picket lines at hundreds of fulfillment centers nationwide, which could cause package delays ahead of the holidays. "If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon's insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it," says Teamsters General President Sean M. O'Brien. "These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they've pushed workers to the limit and now they're paying the price. This strike is on them." The Teamsters say this is "the largest strike against Amazon in US history." Amazon tells CBS News it doesn't expect it to impact its operations; the company employs 1.5 million people in its warehouses and corporate offices. The workers claim that Amazon has engaged in illegal anti-union behavior while failing to provide employees with better pay and better working conditions. "They talk a big game about taking care of their workers, but when it comes down to it, Amazon does not respect us and our right to negotiate for better working conditions and wages," said Gabriel Irizarry, a driver at DIL7 in Skokie, IL. "We can't even afford to pay our bills." For its part, Amazon claims the Teamsters have "continued to intentionally mislead the public" about the situation. An Amazon spokesperson told NBC News: "The truth is that Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union." You can read the Teamster's press release here.

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The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Russian-Israeli national, Rostislav Panev, for his alleged role as a developer in the LockBit ransomware group, accused of designing malware and maintaining infrastructure for attacks that extorted over $500 million and caused billions in global damages. CyberScoop reports: The arrest is part of a broader campaign by international law enforcement agencies to dismantle LockBit. In February, a coordinated operation led by the U.K.'s National Crime Agency in cooperation with the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department disrupted LockBit's infrastructure, seizing websites and servers critical to its operations. These efforts significantly curtailed the group's ability to launch further attacks and extort victims. Panev is one of several individuals charged in connection with LockBit. Alongside him, other key figures have been indicted, including Dmitry Khoroshev, alleged to be "LockBitSupp," the group's primary creator and administrator. Khoroshev, still at large, is accused of developing the ransomware and coordinating attacks on an international scale. The State Department has offered a reward of up to $10 million for his capture. Meanwhile, numerous members linked to LockBit remain fugitives, such as Russian nationals Artur Sungatov and Ivan Kondratyev, each facing charges for deploying ransomware against multiple industries globally. Mikhail Matveev, another alleged LockBit affiliate, is also at large, with a $10 million reward for his capture. Matveev was recently charged with computer crimes in Russia. You can read the full criminal complaint against Panev here (PDF).

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Jurors delivered a mixed verdict on Friday, ruling that Qualcomm had properly licensed its central processor chips from Arm. This decision effectively concludes Arm's lawsuit against Qualcomm, which had the potential to disrupt the global smartphone and PC chip markets. The dispute stemmed from Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of chip startup Nuvia in 2021. Arm claimed Qualcomm breached contract terms by using Nuvia's designs without permission, while Qualcomm maintained its existing agreement covers the acquired technology. Arm demanded Qualcomm destroy the Nuvia designs created before the acquisition. Reuters reports: An eight-person jury in U.S. federal court deadlocked on the question of whether Nuvia, a startup that Qualcomm purchased for $1.4 billion in 2021, breached the terms of its license with Arm. But the jury found that Qualcomm did not breach Nuvia's license with Arm. The jury also found that Qualcomm's chips created using Nuvia technology, which have been central to Qualcomm's push into the personal computer market, are properly licensed under its own agreement with Arm, clearing the way for Qualcomm to continue selling them.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The newest online-only school greenlighted (PDF) by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools comes with a twist: The academic curriculum will be taught entirely by AI. Charter schools -- independently operated but publicly funded -- typically get greater autonomy compared to traditional public schools when it comes to how subjects are taught. But Unbound Academy's application, which proposes an "AI-driven adaptive learning technology" that "condenses academic instruction into a two-hour window," is a first for the model. (Unbound's founders have been running a similar program at a "high-end private school" in Texas, which appears to be in-person.) Unbound's approach leans on edtech platforms like IXL and Khan Academy, and students engage with "interactive, AI-powered platforms that continuously adjust to their individual learning pace and style." There will be humans, just fewer of them, and maybe not actual accredited teachers: It will adopt a "human-in-the-loop" approach with "skilled guides" monitoring progress who can provide "targeted interventions" and coaching for each student. Academic instruction is whittled down to just two hours. The remainder of the students' day will include "life-skills workshops" covering areas such as critical thinking, creative problem-solving, financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, and entrepreneurship. The online-only school targets students from fourth to eighth grades.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing America's three largest banks, accusing the institutions of failing to protect customers from fraud on Zelle, the payment platform they co-own. From a report: According to the suit, which also targets Early Warning Services LLC, Zelle's official operator, Zelle users have lost more than $870 million over the network's seven-year existence due to these alleged failures. "The nation's largest banks felt threatened by competing payment apps, so they rushed to put out Zelle," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement. "By their failing to put in place proper safeguards, Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while often leaving victims to fend for themselves." Among the charges: 1. Poor identity verification methods, which have allowed bad actors to quickly create accounts and target Zelle users. 2. Allowing repeat offenders to continue to gain access to the platform 3. Ignoring and failing to report instances of fraud 4. Failing to properly investigate consumer complaints The CFPB's suit seeks to change the platform's operations, as well as obtain a civil money penalty, that would be paid into the CFPB's victims relief fund.

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