According to analyst forecasts, Samsung Electronics is expected to report a nearly 80% plunge in earnings in the third quarter. CNBC reports: The South Korean technology giant will issue earnings guidance on Wednesday. Analysts polled by LSEG expect operating profit of 2.3 trillion Korean won ($1.7 billion) for the September quarter, a 78.7% year-on-year decline. Revenue is expected to come in at 67.8 trillion won, a fall of 11.6%, according to LSEG consensus forecasts.

Samsung’s semiconductor business — typically the company’s cash cow — is expected to post a more than 3 trillion won loss for the third quarter, according to analyst forecasts, as it continues to face headwinds. Memory chip prices have fallen dramatically this year due to a glut caused by oversupply and low demand for end products like smartphones and laptops. This has hit Samsung’s profits hard. In its last earnings reports in July, the company predicted a pick-up in demand for chips in the second half of the year, although this does not appear to be playing out as fast as many had hoped.

The tech giant has cut production in a bid to help shore up prices, though the effect is not likely to be seen in the third-quarter results. Daiwa Capital Markets said in a note earlier this month that it expects Samsung earnings to miss consensus estimates “due to the higher cost burden from the memory production cut and ongoing soft demand” for its chip manufacturing unit, known as the foundry business. Daiwa analyst SK Kim sees operating profit for the third quarter at 1.65 trillion won, much lower than the average analyst estimate of 2.3 trillion won.

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Source: Slashdot – Samsung Expected To Report 80% Profit Plunge As Losses Mount At Chip Business

Waymo is significantly expanding its robotaxi service in San Francisco. According to The Verge, the company’s driverless ridehail operations will now be available to tens of thousands of people across 47 square miles of the city. From the report: To be sure, Waymo’s service isn’t yet available to anyone who downloads the Waymo app and wants to ride. The Alphabet-owned company is in the process of onboarding riders from its waitlist, which it expects to complete in short order. “This territory expansion applies to those riders who currently have access to our service and all those to be added from the waitlist in the near future,” Waymo spokesperson Christopher Bonelli said in an email. “We are still seeing very strong demand, so we want to scale responsibly to maintain service quality and good user experience.”

Growing the number of people who want to pay Waymo for trips is incredibly important for the company, which spent at least $1.1 billion on autonomous vehicles between 2009 and 2015 — a figure that has assuredly grown exponentially in the proceeding years. Waymo will need to increase its revenue significantly if it hopes to turn autonomous vehicles into the profitable business that tech prognosticators have been promising for years. [The company needs more paying customers as it seeks to increase revenue so it can afford to expand to new cities like Los Angeles.]

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Source: Slashdot – Waymo’s Robotaxi Service Is Now Available To Thousands In San Francisco

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled (PDF) last month that the platform’s practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law. The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform’s ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that “Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people.” Further, she alleged that Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to “lookalike audiences.” Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook “discriminates against women and older people,” by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads. This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that “often change and may expire” — deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her — allegedly because advertisers used the platform’s Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her — as an older woman […]. “As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services,” Liapes’ complaint alleged. […]

Initially, a court agreed with Facebook’s arguments that Liapes had not provided sufficient evidence establishing Facebook’s intent or demonstrating harms caused, but rather than amend her complaint, Liapes appealed. Then, in what tech law expert Eric Goldman on his blog called a “shocking conclusion,” a California court last month reversed that initial decision, finding instead that Facebook’s ad-targeting tools are not neutral, discriminate against users by age and gender, and are not immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Goldman — who joked that Liapes wanting more Facebook ads is “a desire shared by almost no one” — said that the potential impact of this ruling goes beyond possibly shaking up Facebook’s ad system. It also seemingly implicates every other ad network by finding that “any gender- or age-based ad targeting for any product or service (and targeting based on any other protected characteristics) could violate the Unruh Act.” If the ruling is upheld, that could “have devastating effects on the entire Internet ecosystem,” Goldman warned. “The court’s single-minded determination to find a valid discrimination claim under these conditions casts a long and troubling shadow over the online advertising industry,” Goldman wrote in his blog. “Who needs new privacy laws if the Unruh Act already bans most ad targeting?”

“The opinion never expressly says that the Unruh Act regulates ad targeting,” Goldman told Ars. “It takes some reading between the lines to reach that conclusion.”

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook’s Sexist, Ageist Ad-Targeting Violates California Law, Court Finds

Climate breakdown is already changing the taste and quality of beer, scientists have warned. From a report: The quantity and quality of hops, a key ingredient in most beers, is being affected by global heating, according to a study. As a result, beer may become more expensive and manufacturers will have to adapt their brewing methods. Researchers forecast that hop yields in European growing regions will fall by 4-18% by 2050 if farmers do not adapt to hotter and drier weather, while the content of alpha acids in the hops, which gives beers their distinctive taste and smell, will fall by 20-31%.

“Beer drinkers will definitely see the climate change, either in the price tag or the quality,” said Miroslav Trnka, a scientist at the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. “That seems to be inevitable from our data.” Beer, the third-most popular drink in the world after water and tea, is made by fermenting malted grains like barley with yeast. It is usually flavoured with aromatic hops grown mostly in the middle latitudes that are sensitive to changes in light, heat and water. Climate-induced decline in the quality and quantity of European hops calls for immediate adaptation measures (Nature).

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Source: Slashdot – Climate Crisis Will Make Europe’s Beer Cost More and Taste Worse, Say Scientists

Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity,” Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating. From a report: Finnish and Estonian gas system operators on Sunday said they noted an unusual drop in pressure in the Balticconnector pipeline after which they shut down the gas flow. The Finnish government on Tuesday said there was damage both to the gas pipeline and to a telecommunications cable between the two NATO countries. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo stopped short of calling the pipeline leak sabotage, but said it could not have been caused by regular operations. “According to a preliminary assessment, the observed damage could not have occurred as a result of normal use of the pipe or pressure fluctuations. It is likely that the damage is the result of external activity,” Orpo said. Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation was leading an investigation into the leak, Orpo said, adding that the leak occurred in Finland’s economic zone.

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Source: Slashdot – Finnish President Says Undersea Gas and Telecom Cables Damaged By ‘External Activity’

Adobe on Tuesday said it is rolling out new image-generation technology that can draw inspiration from an uploaded image and match its style, in its latest push to compete with startups challenging its core business. From a report: Image-generating technology from firms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have threatened Adobe’s customer base of creative professionals who use its tools like Photoshop. The San Jose, California-based company has responded by aggressively developing its own version of the technology and injecting it into its software programs. Adobe, which has promised its customers that generated images will be safe from legal challenges, said those customers have used the tools to generate three billion images, a billion of them in the last month alone.

The new generation of tools announced on Tuesday will include a feature called “Generative Match”. Like Adobe’s earlier tool, it will allow users to generate an image from a few words of text. But it will also allow users to upload as few as 10 to 20 images to use as a basis for the generated images. Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s chief technology officer for digital media, said the company aims to let big brands upload a handful of photos of a product or character and then use generative technology to automatically make hundreds or thousands of images for various needs like websites, social media campaigns and print advertisements.

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Source: Slashdot – Adobe Unveils New Image Generation Tools in AI Push

Valve says it has no plans for a macOS version of the recently released game Counter-Strike 2, the follow-up title replacing the hugely popular FPS Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. From a report: Valve confirmed its decision and gave its reasons in a newly published Steam support FAQ: “As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players. Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux.”

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Source: Slashdot – Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren’t Enough Players on Mac To Justify It

The chief executive of RISC-V International says that possible government restrictions on the open-source technology will slow down the development of new and better chips, holding back the global technology industry. From a report: The comments come after Reuters last week reported that a growing group of U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to impose export control restrictions around RISC-V, the open-source technology overseen by the RISC-V International nonprofit foundation. RISC-V technology can be used as an ingredient to create chips for smartphones or artificial intelligence. Major U.S. firms such as Qualcomm and Alphabet’s Google have embraced RISC-V, but so too have Chinese firms such as Huawei, which the U.S. lawmakers argue constitutes a national security concern.

In a blog post, Calista Redmond, chief of RISC-V International, which coordinates work among companies on the technology, said RISC-V is no different than other open technology standards like Ethernet, which helps computers on the internet talk with each other. “Contemplated actions by governments for an unprecedented restriction in open standards will have the consequence of diminished access to the global marketplace of products, solutions, and talent,” Redmond wrote. “Bifurcating on the standards level would lead to a world of incompatible solutions that duplicate effort and close off markets.”

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Source: Slashdot – RISC-V Group Says Restrictions on Open Technology Would Slow Innovation

Members of the vintage Mac community are in desperate need of a new supply of a specific, discontinued dongle that has become increasingly rare and extremely expensive on the secondary market. From a report: “Bring Back the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI Cable for Vintage Apple Macs!,” a change.org petition created this week by vintage Mac enthusiast Grant Woodward reads. “I am deeply concerned about the discontinuation of the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI cable. This essential piece of technology has become increasingly rare and difficult to find since it went out of production,” the petition reads. “For those unfamiliar with its significance, this cable allows vintage Apple Macintosh computers to connect with more recent monitors, breathing new life into these iconic machines. It is an invaluable tool for restoring, collecting, and preserving these pieces of computing history.” As Woodward notes, the adapter in question allows an older generation of Power Mac G3 and G4 from the early 2000s to connect to newer monitors.

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Source: Slashdot – Vintage Mac Community Begs Manufacturers for New Supply of Rare Dongle as Resellers Charge 0

wiredmikey writes: A zero-day vulnerability named ‘HTTP/2 Rapid Reset’ has been exploited by malicious actors to launch the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in internet history. One of the attacks seen by Cloudflare was three times larger than the record-breaking 71 million requests per second (RPS) attack reported by company in February. Specifically, the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS campaign peaked at 201 million RPS, while Google’s observed a DDoS attack that peaked at 398 million RPS. The new attack method abuses an HTTP/2 feature called ‘stream cancellation’, by repeatedly sending a request and immediately canceling it.

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Source: Slashdot – HTTP/2 Zero-Day Exploited To Launch Largest DDoS Attacks In History

Business interest in AI PCs is fizzing, at least according to IDC, even though the analyst admits “use cases have yet to be fully articulated.” From a report: Such is the hype around generative AI since ChatGPT was made publicly available that big software and hardware brands are looking to shoe horn the tech into every nook and cranny. Just last week HP boss Enrique Lores and Lenovo exec Luca Rossi joined in by confirming both companies are working on a range of AI PCs for general availability between July next year and early 2025. Neither went into fine technical detail on what those machines will have inside because they aren’t close to release.

IDC research veep for Devices & Displays, Linn Huang, didn’t pour any cold water on the hype this week when he said: “Generative AI could be a watershed moment for the PC industry. While uses cases have yet to be fully articulated, interest in the category is already strong. AI PCs promise organizations the ability to personalize the user experience at a deeper level all while being able to preserve data privacy and sovereignty.” That’s quite a billing. HP and Lenovo certainly seem to think there’s margin potential. Huang agreed. “As more of these devices launch next year, we expect a significant boost to overall selling prices.”

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Source: Slashdot – IDC: AI is a Solution for a PC Industry With a Sales Problem

The European Union will do all it can to halt fossil fuel use as part of its “ambitious” position at the upcoming COP28 climate summit despite some differences among EU countries, the bloc’s new climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said on Monday. From a report: “Our ambition is indeed to do as much as possible, also in terms of driving out fossil fuels,” Hoekstra told journalists after a meeting with Spain’s acting Energy Minister Teresa Ribera. The European Union’s own green agenda is facing growing political resistance from governments and lawmakers concerned about the cost of the proposals for voters. European Parliament elections will be held next year as citizens throughout the bloc are facing cost of living pressures. “Our goal will be one of ambition for the COP, from every single aspect: mitigation, adaptation, renewables,” Hoekstra said, even though “if you zoom out and look at the 27 member states, you might see differences.” Hoekstra declined to give details on the EU negotiating mandate for the COP28. “In our view there is no alternative to driving out fossil fuel asap,” he said. “The saying is that it takes two to tango. In this case, it takes almost 200.”

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Source: Slashdot – EU Will Do ‘as Much as Possible’ To Drive Out Fossil Fuels, Climate Chief Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain’s opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis. The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.

Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender — a deepfake detection business — disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: “We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that’s been going around (a transcoding). As we don’t have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case 75%) and never a definitive score (‘this is fake’ or ‘this is real’), leaning much more towards ‘this is likely manipulated’ than not,” said Colman. “It is also our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – UK Opposition Leader Targeted By AI-Generated Fake Audio Smear

Google has announced that passkeys, touted by the tech giant as the “beginning of the end” for passwords, are becoming the default sign-in method for all users. From a report: Passkeys are a phishing-resistant alternative to passwords that allow users to sign into accounts using the same biometrics or PINs they use to unlock their devices, or with a physical security key. This removes the need for users to rely on the traditional username-password combination, which has long been susceptible to phishing, credential stuffing attacks, keylogger malware, or simply being forgotten. While security technologies multi-factor authentication and password managers add an extra layer of security to password-protected accounts, they are not without flaws. Authentication codes sent via text messages can be intercepted by attackers, for example, and password managers can (and have been) hacked.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Makes Passkeys the Default Sign-in Method For All Users

A physicist from the University of Portsmouth has explored whether a new law of physics could support the theory that we’re living in a computer simulation. Phys.Org reports: Dr. Melvin Vopson has previously published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles — the smallest known building blocks of the universe — store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. In 2022, he discovered a new law of physics that could predict genetic mutations in organisms, including viruses, and help judge their potential consequences. It is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy — a measure of disorder in an isolated system — can only increase or stay the same. Dr. Vopson had expected that the entropy in information systems would also increase over time, but on examining the evolution of these systems he realized it remains constant or decreases. That’s when he established the second law of information dynamics, or infodynamics, which could significantly impact genetics research and evolution theory.

A new paper, published in AIP Advances, examines the scientific implications of the new law on a number of other physical systems and environments, including biological, atomic physics, and cosmology. Key findings include:

– Biological systems: The second law of infodynamics challenges the conventional understanding of genetic mutations, suggesting that they follow a pattern governed by information entropy. This discovery has profound implications for fields such as genetic research, evolutionary biology, genetic therapies, pharmacology, virology, and pandemic monitoring.

– Atomic physics: The paper explains the behavior of electrons in multi-electron atoms, providing insights into phenomena like Hund’s rule; which states that the term with maximum multiplicity lies lowest in energy. Electrons arrange themselves in a way that minimizes their information entropy, shedding light on atomic physics and stability of chemicals.

– Cosmology: The second law of infodynamics is shown to be a cosmological necessity, with thermodynamic considerations applied to an adiabatically expanding universe supporting its validity. “The paper also provides an explanation for the prevalence of symmetry in the universe,” added Dr. Vopson. “Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be. My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature’s inclination towards it.”

“This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.”

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Source: Slashdot – A New Law of Physics Could Support the Idea We’re Living In a Simulation

Federal regulators have issued a preliminary “yellow” warning to Dominion Energy after cracks were discovered again in a backup emergency fuel line at their South Carolina nuclear plant. ABC News reports: Small cracks have been found a half-dozen times in the past 20 years in pipes that carry fuel to emergency generators that provide cooling water for a reactor if electricity fails at the V.C. Summer plant near Columbia, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is the second most serious category and only seven similar warnings have been issued across the country since 2009, nuclear power expert David Lochbaum told The State newspaper after reviewing records from federal regulators.

A crack first appeared on a diesel fuel pipe in 2003, and similar pipes have had other cracks since then. During a 24-hour test of the system in November, a small diesel fuel leak grew larger, according to NRC records. The agency issued the preliminary yellow warning because of the repeated problems.

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Source: Slashdot – SC Nuclear Plant Gets Yellow Warning Over Another Cracked Emergency Fuel Pipe

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity. The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants. The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses — would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own. “Call us the un-utility,” Mari McClure, Green Mountain’s chief executive, said in an interview before the company’s filing. “We’re completely flipping the model, decentralizing it.”

Green Mountain’s plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years — money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity. Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.

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Source: Slashdot – Vermont Utility Plans To End Outages By Giving Customers Batteries

South Korea firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be allowed to supply U.S. chip equipment to their Chinese factories indefinitely without separate U.S. approvals. Reuters reports: “Uncertainties about South Korean semiconductor firms’ operations and investments in China have been greatly eased; they will be able to calmly seek long-term global management strategies,” said Choi Sang-mok, senior presidential secretary for economic affairs. The U.S. has already notified Samsung and SK Hynix of the decision, indicating that it is in effect, Choi said.

The U.S. Department of Commerce is updating its “validated end user” list, denoting which entities can receive exports of which technology, to allow Samsung and SK Hynix to keep supplying certain U.S. chipmaking tools to their China factories, the presidential office said. Once included in the list, there is no need to obtain permission for separate export cases. Samsung and SK Hynix, the world’s largest and second-largest memory chipmakers, had invested billions of dollars in their chip production facilities in China and welcomed the move.

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Source: Slashdot – South Korea Firms Get Indefinite Waiver On US Chip Gear Supplies To China

A network connectivity error caused Mastodon to severely undercount its users. According to founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the decentralized social network actually has 407,814 more monthly active users than it had been reporting previously. “The adjustment also included a gain of 2.34 million registered users across an additional 727 servers that had not been counted due to the error,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: The issue was impacting the metrics reported on Mastodon’s statistics aggregator on its joinmastodon.org/servers page, which had been undercounting users between October 2 and October 8. This issue has now been resolved, Rochko said. That leaves Mastodon with a total of 1.8 million monthly active users at present, an increase of 5% month-over-month and 10,000 servers, up 12% — a testament to Mastodon’s current upward swing at a time when the nature of X continues to remain in flux.

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Source: Slashdot – Mastodon Actually Has 407K+ More Monthly Users Than It Thought

Amy Hawkins reports via The Guardian: A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1 million yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall.” The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on August 18. The notice said Ma had used “unauthorised channels” to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company. The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan ($145,092) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as “illegal income,” as well as fining him 200 yuan ($27). Charlie Smith (a pseudonym), the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet censorship in China, said: “Even if this decision is overturned in court, a message has been sent and damage has been done. Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?”

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Source: Slashdot – Chinese Programmer Ordered To Pay 1 Million Yuan For Using VPN