An anonymous reader shares a report: Households on individual streets will be targeted with personalised adverts under plans being rolled out by Channel 4. The channel is to use new technology which will allow brands to tailor who sees their advert by enabling them to select a demographic within a specific location down to street level. For example, someone watching Made in Chelsea on Channel 4's streaming service could be served an ad for a fashion brand in a local outlet to them if a particular fashion trend is being discussed. Advertisers can further optimise their campaign by selecting from 26 programme genres, as well as time of day and device the show is being watched on. It forms part of a wider update to Channel 4's streaming platform that the broadcaster hopes could boost revenues by as much as $13m. The company will launch a new private marketplace enabling brands to buy advertising space directly in real-time. This will allow advertisers to amend their campaigns to respond to events, whether that be real-world events such as local weather or developments in fictional storylines within TV shows. Channel 4's new ad targeting also includes more detailed data to track whether a viewer has made a purchase after seeing an ad, as well as new viewer profiles for brands to target.

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AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices' companion app is uncertain.

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smooth wombat writes: In 2013, James Howell's partner inadvertently threw out a hard drive along with other trash. Unknown to this person, this hard drive contained approximately 8,000 bitcoins. For the past decade Howell has been petitioning the town council of Newport to excavate the landfill in the hope of recovering the drive which would now hold approximately $647 million worth of cryptocurrency. Now he is suing the council in an attempt to force them to let him excavate. Should the hard drive be recovered, Howells thinks there is an 80 percent chance that the coins on it would be retrievable. If it all works out, he has offered the council 10% of the recovered Bitcoin: $65 million worth. But, citing environmental concerns, the council has rejected his proposal to dig through over a decade's worth of garbage. The council issued a report wherein a spokesperson said, "The council has told Mr. Howells multiple times that excavation is not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area. The council is the only body authorized to carry out operations on the site."

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New research challenges assumptions about decision-making, revealing people tend to believe they have sufficient information regardless of actual data at hand. A study by Gehlbach, Robinson, and Fletcher, published earlier this month, found participants consistently overestimated their knowledge when given partial information on a hypothetical school merger scenario. Nearly 90% favored merger when presented pro-merger facts, while only 25% did when given opposing data. However, opinions shifted when full information was provided, suggesting malleability of views despite initial overconfidence. Researchers caution this bias could be exploited in today's fractured media landscape, where partial or misleading information often circulates unchecked.

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In a rather critical analysis of the 2024 Economics Nobel, commentator Noah Smith has questioned the prize's shift back to "big-think" theories. He argues that Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's (the winner of the 2024 Economics Nobel) influential work on institutions and development, while intriguing, lacks robust empirical validation. From his blog: The science prizes rely very heavily on external validity to determine who gets the prize -- your theory or your invention has to work, basically. If it doesn't, you can be the biggest genius in the world, but you'll never get a Nobel. The physicist Ed Witten won a Fields Medal, which is even harder to get than a Nobel, for the math he invented for string theory. But he'll almost certainly never get a Physics Nobel, because string theory can't be empirically tested. The Econ Nobel is different. Traditionally, it's given to economists whose ideas are most influential within the economics profession. If a whole bunch of other economists do research that follows up on your research, or which uses theoretical or empirical techniques you pioneered, you get an Econ Nobel. Your theory doesn't have to be validated, your specific empirical findings can already have been overturned by the time the prize is awarded, but if you were influential, you get the prize. You could argue that this is appropriate for what Thomas Kuhn would call a "pre-paradigmatic" science -- a field that's still looking for a set of basic concepts and tools. But it's been 55 years since they started giving the prize, and that seems like an awfully long time for a field to still be tooling up. Meanwhile, making "influence within the economics profession" the criterion for successful research seems a little too much like a popularity contest. It's how you end up with prizes like the one in 2004, which was given to some macroeconomic theorists whose theory said that recessions are caused by technological slowdowns and that mass unemployment is a voluntary vacation. In recent years, that looked like it might be changing. Often, the prize was given to empirical economists associated with the so-called "credibility revolution" -- basically, quasi-experiments. Those cases include Goldin in 2023, Card/Angrist/Imbens in 2021, and Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer in 2019. And when it was given to theorists, they tended to be game theorists whose theories are very predictive of real-world outcomes -- Milgrom/Wilson in 2020, Hart/Holmstrom in 2016, Tirole in 2014, and Roth/Shapley in 2012. Even when the prize was given to macro -- a field where validity is much harder to establish -- it was given to economists whose theories have seen immediate application to pressing problems of the day, such as Bernanke/Diamond/Dybvig in 2022 and Nordhaus in 2018. In other words, the recent Nobels have made it seem like economics might be becoming more like a natural science, where practical applications and external validity are the ultimate arbiter of the value of research, rather than cultural influence within the economics profession. But this year's prize seems like a step away from that, and back toward the sort of big-think that used to be more popular in the prize's early years.

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Digital River has not paid numerous merchants since midsummer for software and digital products they sold through its MyCommerce platform. The Register: "After over 20 years of partnership with Digital River, Traction Software Ltd has been left feeling as though we've been 'rug pulled,'" Lee Midgley, managing director of Traction Software, told The Register. "For the past three months, we've experienced a complete halt in software sales revenue payments with no support, no direct contact, and only additional terms and conditions designed to delay resolution and extract more money from us. "Astonishingly, Digital River continued to take sales from our loyal customers until we removed them from the order system. It now appears they have no intention of making payments and may be entering a liquidation process under a new CEO who has been involved in similar situations before." The new CEO, Barry Kasoff, was first noted on the e-commerce biz website in August. Kasoff is also listed as the president of Realization Services, "a full-service strategic consulting firm specializing in turnaround management and value enhancement..." The privately-owned, Minnesota-based business appears to have laid off a significant number of employees, presumably the result of what its UK subsidiary describes as cost reduction initiatives implemented in late 2022.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission adopted a final rule on Wednesday requiring businesses to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions and memberships as it is to sign up, in the agency's last major rulemaking before the Nov. 5 election. From a report: The "click to cancel" rule requires retailers, gyms and other businesses to get consumers' consent for subscriptions, auto-renewals and free trials that convert to paid memberships. The cancellation method must be "at least as easy to use" as the sign up process. FTC Chair Lina Khan said in an interview that the rule is an overdue response to a rising number of consumer complaints about situations in which it is "extraordinarily easy to sign up for a subscription, but absurdly difficult to cancel." "Companies shouldn't be able to trick you into paying for subscriptions that you don't want," Khan said. The rule prohibits requiring consumers who signed up through an app or a website to go through a chat bot or agent to cancel. For in-person signups, companies must provide means to cancel by phone or online. "The pandemic brought to the surface just how businesses are making people jump through endless hoops," Khan said. Requiring in-person cancellations while the businesses themselves were closed "really highlighted the absurdity of these practices," she said.

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Amazon has unveiled its first color e-reader, the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, priced at $279.99. The 7-inch device, available for preorder with shipments starting October 30th, utilizes E Ink's Kaleido technology and a new display stack. Kevin Keith, head of Kindle products, claims the Colorsoft maintains Kindle's hallmark features while introducing color without compromising performance. The e-reader boasts a 300ppi screen, enhanced LED pixels, and improved light distribution for vivid colors. It offers faster page turns and book openings compared to previous models. The color screen enhances the user interface, allowing for full-color book covers and a more vibrant standby display.

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Amazon said on Wednesday it has signed three agreements on developing the nuclear power technology called small modular reactors, becoming the latest big tech company to push for new sources to meet surging electricity demand from data centers. From a report: Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near a Northwest Energy site in Washington state. The SMR is planned to be developed by X-Energy. Financial details were not disclosed. Under the agreement, Amazon will have the right to purchase electricity from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities, will have the option to add up to eight 80 MW modules, resulting in a total capacity up to 960 MWs, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes. The additional power would be available to Amazon and utilities to power homes and businesses. "Our agreements will encourage the construction of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come," said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. SMRs will have their components built in a factory to reduce construction costs. [...] Amazon said it is also leading a funding round for $500 million to support X-Energy's development of SMRs. Amazon and X-Energy aim to bring more than 5 gigawatts online in the United States by 2039, which the companies call the largest commercial deployment target of SMRs yet. Amazon also signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, opens new tab to explore the development of an SMR project near the utility's existing power station in Virginia. The about 300 megawatt project would help meet power needs in a region where demand is expected to jump 85% in 15 years, Dominion said.

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New submitter king*jojo writes: The owners of WinAmp have just deleted their entire repo one month after uploading the source code to GitHub. Lots of source code, and quite possibly, not all of it theirs. The deletion happened soon after The Register enquired about the seeming inclusion of Shoutcast DNAS code and some Microsoft and Intel codecs.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Korean game publisher Nexon is using the U.S. legal system to address online copyright infringement. The company obtained a DMCA subpoena that requires Discord to hand over the personal details of suspected pirates. While Discord has shared information in the past, it doesn't plan to cooperate any longer, refusing to play the role of 'anti-piracy police'. [...] The messaging platform wrote that it is prepared to file a motion to quash the subpoena, if needed. It further urged Nexon to withdraw their demands, and cease sending any similar 'defective' subpoenas going forward. To support its stance, Discord made a list of twenty-two general objections and reservations. Among other things, the company wants to protect user privacy and their first amendment right to anonymous speech. "Discord objects to the Requests as infringing its users' decisions to remain anonymous, an aspect of their freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Requests improperly seek to unmask anonymous speakers and consequently compel disclosure of material protected by the First Amendment," it reads. This strongly-worded letter didn't have the desired result, however. Instead of backing off, Nexon doubled down, filing a motion to compel (PDF) at a Texas federal court late last week. The game company refutes Discord's objections and asks the court to enter an order requiring Discord to produce the requested user data. Nexon says that it needs this information to protect its copyrights. "Discord's failure to cooperate discovery has impeded Nexon's ability to discover relevant, non-privileged information that will support its potential claims against the users who have provided access to the infringing material," Nexon writes. While the court has yet to rule on the matter, Discord is expected to file a formal motion to quash the subpoena in response, as indicated in its earlier communications.

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The University of Toronto is constructing a 14-story building using mass timber, one of the largest and most recent projects to employ this innovative building technology. "Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions," reports Knowable Magazine. "Though experts are still debating mass timber's role in fighting climate change, many are betting it's better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource." From the report: Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report (PDF) from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023. [...] In principle, mass timber is like plywood but on a much larger scale: The smaller pieces are layered and glued together under pressure in large specialized presses. Today, beams up to 50 meters long, usually made of what's called glue-laminated timber, or glulam, can replace steel elements. Panels up to 50 centimeters thick, typically cross-laminated timber, or CLT, replace concrete for walls and floors. These wood composites can be surprisingly strong -- stronger than steel by weight. But a mass timber element must be bulkier to achieve that same strength. As a building gets higher, the wooden supports must get thicker; at some point, they simply take up too much space. So for taller mass timber buildings, including the Ascent skyscraper, architects often turn to a combination of wood, steel and concrete.

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The Euclid mission has revealed the first part of a 3D map of the universe, showcasing 14 million galaxies and tens of millions of stars with unprecedented detail. "The Euclid mission, launched in 2023 and run by the European Space Agency (Esa) with contributions from Nasa, sent its first snapshots in November of that year and in May 2024," reports The Guardian. "The goal of Euclid is to enable the creation of a 3D map in time and space of the universe, in an attempt to elucidate its evolution and, as a result, shed light on the mysterious phenomena of dark energy and dark matter that together make up 95% of the universe." From the report: The newly released data is a mosaic of 208 gigapixels and covers 1% of what will be the final map. The completed map is expected to involve six years of observations and will take in a third of the sky, with observations expected to capture billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years. [...] Images released by Esa highlight the area of the sky covered by the new mosaic, together with the mosaic itself and zoomed-in views within it. Esa said regions of light blue that can be seen in the mosaic were galactic cirrus clouds that sit between stars in the Milky Way. These wispy clouds, composed of gas and dust, reflect optical light, allowing them to be captured by the mission's super-sensitive visible light camera. Zoom in on the mosaic further and other features can be seen, including the spiral galaxy NGC 2188 and the galaxy cluster Abell 3381. In a view zoomed in 600 times relative to the original mosaic, a distant swirling galaxy is visible in incredible detail.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: There's a valley in rural southwest Utah that's become a hub for renewable energy. Dozens of tall white wind turbines whoosh up in the sky. A sea of solar panels glistens in the distance. But the new kid on the block is mostly hidden underground. From the surface, Fervo Energy's Cape Station looks more or less like an oil derrick, with a thin metal tower rising above the sagebrush steppe. But this $2 billion geothermal project, which broke ground last year, is not drilling for gas. It's drilling for underground heat that CEO Tim Latimer believes holds the key to generating carbon-free power -- lots of it. "Just these three well pads alone will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Around-the-clock, 24/7 electricity," he said. Latimer stood overlooking the project, which is currently under construction, on one of the drill rig's metal platforms 40 feet off the ground. This well is one of the 24 Fervo is in the process of completing at Cape Station to harness the Earth's natural heat and generate electricity. This isn't the type of geothermal that's already active in volcanic hot spots like Iceland or The Geysers project in California. It's called an enhanced geothermal system. Cold water goes down into a well that curves like a hockey stick as it reaches more than 13,000 feet underground. Then the water squeezes through cracks in 400-degree rock. The water heats up and returns to the surface through a second well that runs parallel to the first. That creates steam that turns turbines to produce electricity, and the water gets sent back underground in a closed loop. This horizontal well technique has been pioneered at a $300 million federal research project called Utah FORGE located in this same valley, which has paved the way for private companies to take the tech and run with it. Recent innovations like better drill bits -- made with synthetic diamonds to eat through hard subterranean granite -- have helped Fervo drill its latest well in a quarter of the time that it took just a couple of years ago. That efficiency has meant an 80% drop in drilling costs, Latimer said. Last year, Fervo's pilot project in Nevada used similar techniques to begin sending electricity to a Google data center. And the company's early tests at Cape Station in Utah show the new project can produce power at triple the rate of its Nevada pilot. "This is now a proven tech. That's not a statement you could have made two or three years ago," Latimer said. "Now, it just comes down to how do we get more of these megawatts on the grid so we have a bigger impact?" The report notes that Fervo signed a landmark deal with Southern California Edison, one of the country's largest electric utilities with 15 million customers. "It will send the first 70 megawatts of geothermal juice to the grid in 2026," reports NPR. "By the time the project is fully completed in 2028, this Utah plant will deliver 320 megawatts total -- enough to power 350,000 homes. The project's full output will be 400 megawatts."

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The Register's Jessica Lyons reports: Apple wants to shorten SSL/TLS security certificates' lifespans, down from 398 days now to just 45 days by 2027, and sysadmins have some very strong feelings about this "nightmarish" plan. As one of the hundreds that took to Reddit to lament the proposal said: "This will suck. My least favorite vendor manages something like 10 websites for us, and we have to provide the certs manually every time. Between live and test this is gonna suck." The Apple proposal, a draft ballot measure that will likely go up for a vote among Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/B Forum) members in the upcoming months, was unveiled by the iThings maker during the Forum's fall meeting. If approved, it will affect all Safari certificates, which follows a similar push by Google, that plans to reduce the max-validity period on Chrome for these digital trust files down to 90 days. ... [W]hile it's generally agreed that shorter lifespans improve internet security overall -- longer certificate terms mean criminals have more time to exploit vulnerabilities and old website certificates -- the burden of managing these expired certs will fall squarely on the shoulders of systems administrators. [...] Even certificate provider Sectigo, which sponsored the Apple proposal, admitted that the shortened lifespans "will no doubt prove a headache for busy IT security teams, juggling with lots of certificates expiring at different times." While automation is often touted as the solution to this problem, sysadmins were quick to point out that some SSL certs can't be automated. "This is somewhat nightmarish," said one sysadmin. "I have about 20 appliance like services that have no support for automation. Almost everything in my environment is automated to the extent that is practical. SSL renewal is the lone achilles heel that I have to deal with once every 365 days."

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Donald Trump's new crypto project, World Liberty Financial, had a rocky start today with frequent website outages during its token sale. According to CNBC, only about 4% of registered investors have bought tokens, and the project sold less than 3% of the 20 billion tokens available. From the report: WLF's website suffered regular and lengthy outages for much of the morning and early afternoon, contributing to a limited number of sales. Only about 4,300 unique walled addresses hold the token as of Tuesday afternoon, according to blockchain data tracked by Etherscan, representing roughly 4% of the total number of people who registered. The platform says it has sold more than 532 million tokens at 15 cents per token. That is less than 3% of the 20 billion tokens made available for public sale. Over the course of the day, the website frequently showed a page saying, "We are under maintenance." The glitchy launch is a potential setback to the Republican presidential nominee with just three weeks until the election. Trump and his family have been touting the project since August, branding it as "The DeFiant Ones," a play on DeFi, which is short for decentralized finance.

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Longtime Slashdot reader mprindle shares a report from BleepingComputer: Cisco has confirmed to BleepingComputer that it is investigating recent claims that it suffered a breach after a threat actor began selling allegedly stolen data on a hacking forum. [...] This statement comes after a well-known threat actor named "IntelBroker" said that he and two others called "EnergyWeaponUser and "zjj" breached Cisco on October 6, 2024, and stole a large amount of developer data from the company. "Compromised data: Github projects, Gitlab Projects, SonarQube projects, Source code, hard coded credentials, Certificates, Customer SRCs, Cisco Confidential Documents, Jira tickets, API tokens, AWS Private buckets, Cisco Technology SRCs, Docker Builds, Azure Storage buckets, Private & Public keys, SSL Certificates, Cisco Premium Products & More!," reads the post to a hacking forum. IntelBroker also shared samples of the alleged stolen data, including a database, customer information, various customer documentation, and screenshots of customer management portals. However, the threat actor did not provide further details about how the data was obtained.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Global sales of fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles rose by an annual 30.5% in September, as China surpassed its record numbers recorded in August and Europe resumed growth, market research firm Rho Motion said on Tuesday. Gains in the U.S. market have been slow and steady in anticipation of the Nov. 5 election, which makes it difficult to predict future trends in the country, data manager Charles Lester told Reuters. EVs -- whether fully electric (BEV) or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) -- sold worldwide reached 1.69 million in September, Rho Motion data showed. Sales in China jumped 47.9% in September and reached 1.12 million vehicles, while in the United States and Canada they were up 4.3% to 0.15 million. In Europe, EV sales rose 4.2% to 0.3 million units, thanks to a 24% jump in the United Kingdom and gains in Italy, Germany and Denmark, Lester said. In the Chinese market, the penetration rate of BEV and PHEV is growing faster than some expected and sales "could be a record every month until the end of the year", Lester said. He added that Germany's 7% year-on-year growth was "definitely positive news", and that intermediate carbon emission reduction goals set in the EU for next year will test the bloc's market.

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Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Intel and AMD are forming this x86 ecosystem advisory group to help foster collaboration and innovations around the x86 (x86_64) ISA. [...] Besides Intel amd AMD, other founding members include Broadcom, Dell, Google, HPE, HP Inc, Lenovo, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. Here are the "intended outcomes" for the group, as stated in the press release: The intended outcomes include: - Enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features. - Simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and standardize interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD. - Enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and applications.

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In a press release this morning, Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a faster A17 Pro chip that supports Apple Intelligence. The Verge reports: The new Mini is mostly a spec bump: it runs a new A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has a 30 percent faster CPU, 25 percent faster GPU, and a Neural Engine twice as fast as the previous model. The device also supports the new Apple Pencil Pro, which is a nice touch for the Mini-toting artists out there, and comes with 128GB of storage in the base model rather than 64GB. (Those AI models need all the space they can get.) The Wi-Fi 6E chip is faster, the USB-C port is faster, everything about the iPad Mini is the same as before only faster this time. The only real design change with the new Mini is the colors. Apple's gone more colorful with a lot of its products this year, and the Mini comes in new purple and blue models. In photos they look muted rather than vivid, though, so don't expect the eye-popping new colors on the iPhone 16.

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