Yes, we’re all recovering from some con or anotther, but don’t let your guard down yet, dice warrior. Essen Speil awarded Dorfromantik: The Board Game (adapted from the video game of the same name) game of the year. We’ve also got Candela Obscura (from Critical Role) coming out in November, and even more games to look…
Source: Gizmodo – The Gaming Shelf Embraces the Violence of Gubat Banwa
Jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will become an honorary citizen of Rome by early next year following a vote this week by its local assembly, the city’s former mayor Virginia Raggi said on Thursday. Reuters reports: Assange, 52, has been in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019 and is wanted in the United States over the release of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables in 2010. His supporters see his prosecution as a politically motivated assault on journalism and free speech. Washington says the release of secret documents put lives in danger.
The motion to make him a citizen of the Eternal City was spearheaded by Raggi, from the left-leaning Five Star Movement, and won cross-party support. “Assange is a symbol of free speech which is essential for any genuine democracy,” Raggi, who ran Rome’s city hall between 2016 and 2021, told Reuters. “He has been deprived of his own liberty for years, in awful conditions, for doing his job as a journalist,” she said.
The motion was approved on Tuesday, kick-starting a process that Raggi said she hoped could be completed by Christmas but may take slightly longer. Other Italian cities have taken similar steps. The northern city of Reggio Emilia granted Assange citizenship last month, while Naples is set to follow shortly. Further reading: Australian MPs To Lobby US To Drop Julian Assange Prosecution or Risk ‘Very Dangerous’ Precedent for Russia and China
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Julian Assange To Be Made Honorary Citizen of Rome
Enlarge / The Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (credit: Getty | Bobby Bank)
Nonprofit hospitals are under increasing scrutiny for skimping on charity care, relentlessly pursuing payments from low-income patients, and paying executives massive multi-million-dollar salaries—all while earning tax breaks totaling billions.
One such hospital system is RWJBarnabas Health, a large nonprofit chain in New Jersey, whose CEO made a whopping $17 million in 2021, while the hospital system only spent 1.65 percent of its nearly $6 billion in revenue on charity care.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is gearing up for a showdown next week with the CEO of RWJBarnabas Health, Mark Manigan. Nurses at one of the chain’s locations, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, are on strike, saying that the facility has become a dangerous place to work due to inadequate staffing levels.
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Source: Ars Technica – Nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity while CEOs reap millions, report finds
Everything you love about the films of Hayao Miyazaki is on full display in his new film, The Boy and the Heron. The way the legendary animator creates the most evocative, gorgeous, and goofy worlds, then turns them into something poignant and meaningful. Characters that defy imagination thrill and delight, but also…
Source: Gizmodo – The Boy and the Heron Is a Pure Shot of Hayao Miyazaki
Enlarge (credit: Justin Paget)
On Tuesday, the US National Academies of Science released a report entitled “Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States.” The report follows up on a 2021 analysis entitled, “Accelerating Decarbonization in the US Energy System.” When the earlier report was prepared, the US didn’t have a decarbonization policy, although the growth of natural gas and renewables was dropping the emissions involved in producing electricity. Within the following year, the US passed an infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), all of which contained provisions intended to help cut the US’s emissions in half by 2030. The Environmental Protection Agency has also formulated policies that should radically reduce the emissions of generating electricity.
In other words, shortly after the report’s release, the US formulated a plan to accelerate decarbonization and a target of a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030.
Rather than pat themselves on the back, however, the experts who prepared the original report recognized that the US’s climate goals require it to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, and that will require lots of policy changes beyond the ones already in place. The new report is largely a call for people to start thinking of what we need to implement to ensure emissions keep dropping after 2030.
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Source: Ars Technica – Report: US needs much more than the IRA to get to net zero by 2050
Chinese multinational Zotac has announced a mini-PC built around two solid-state active cooling chips called the AirJet Pro and AirJet Mini. They’re designed by a company called Frore Systems. New Atlas reports: The AirJet tech is described as a self-contained active heat sink featuring membranes inside that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency, generating “a powerful flow of air” that’s pushed through vents at the top of the unit. These “high-velocity pulsating jets” remove heat from the processor and push it out through an integrated spout. Back at Computex 2023 in May, Zotac’s new Zbox mini-PC was announced as the first recipient of Frore’s cooling technology, in the shape of two near-silent AirJet Minis. Now The Zbox PI430AJ has launched to “select regions.” Zotac reckons that the active cooling modules can only be heard if the user places an ear against the Zbox’s housing.
The processor of choice for this “world’s first” device is an Intel Core i3-N300 octacore chip that can clock up to 3.8 GHz. This features integrated UHD graphics, and is supported by 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. The Windows flavor comes with 512 GB of SSD storage, while users who opt for the barebones version will need to install their own. The 114.8 x 76 x 23.8-mm (4.52 x 2.99 x 0.95-in) mini-PC sports two USB 3.2 Type-A ports plus one USB-C, HDMI and DisplayPort, Ethernet LAN and a combo headphone/microphone jack. Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6 are cooked in for wireless needs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – First Mini-PC With Solid-State Active Cooling System Launches
Prime Video has gone ahead and renewed Gen V for a second season.
Source: Gizmodo – Shocker, Gen V is Renewed for Season 2
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday released a landmark proposal restricting how financial institutions handle consumer data. […] The proposed rule — which faces months of feedback and lobbying from industry and consumer groups before it’s approved — would bar financial firms from “hoarding” a consumer’s data, the agency said. It would require companies to share information, at a customer’s request, with other businesses offering competing products and prevent them from charging for it.
Banks would be required to make personal financial data available to consumers free of charge, and companies that access a person’s data would not be able to use it for targeted advertising. Access to a person’s data would have to be reauthorized annually, and consumers would have the right to revoke access at any time. The proposal, which implements Section 1033 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, also “seeks to move the market away from risky data collection practices” such as screen scraping, the CFPB said. “It is often really daunting for a consumer to switch banks, in part because it’s difficult to take their financial transaction history data to a new bank,” White House National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard said on a call with reporters. “Today’s rule will help ensure financial companies compete based on service quality and pricing.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – CFPB Moves To Bar Financial Firms From ‘Hoarding’ a Consumer’s Data
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
A critical vulnerability that hackers have exploited since August, which allows them to bypass multifactor authentication in Citrix networking hardware, has received a patch from the manufacturer. Unfortunately, applying it isn’t enough to protect affected systems.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-4966 and carrying a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10, resides in the NetScaler Application Delivery Controller and NetScaler Gateway, which provide load balancing and single sign-on in enterprise networks, respectively. Stemming from a flaw in a currently unknown function, the information-disclosure vulnerability can be exploited so hackers can intercept encrypted communications passing between devices. The vulnerability can be exploited remotely and with no human action required, even when attackers have no system privileges on a vulnerable system.
Citrix released a patch for the vulnerability last week, along with an advisory that provided few details. On Wednesday, researchers from security firm Mandiant said that the vulnerability has been under active exploitation since August, possibly for espionage against professional services, technology, and government organizations. Mandiant warned that patching the vulnerability wasn’t sufficient to lock down affected networks because any sessions hijacked before the security update would persist afterward.
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Source: Ars Technica – The latest high-severity Citrix vulnerability under attack isn’t easy to fix
You may not know Onmyoji, but you’ve definitely seen its affect on popular culture. If you’ve ever played Pokémon, congrats! You’ve been introduced to the basics of Yin-Yang Mastery. Now, the popular Japanese novels by Baku Yumemakura are being turned into an anime for the very first time. Check out the trailer below.
Source: Gizmodo – Netflix’s Onmyoji Anime Will Retell Folkloric Japanese History
Enlarge / Detail from left panel of the the Melun Diptych (circa 1455) by medieval French painter and miniaturist Jean Fouquet. The strangely shaped rock in the lower right hand corner is most likely a Stone Age hand ax, a recent analysis concluded. (credit: Public domain)
Around 1455, a medieval French painter and miniaturist named Jean Fouquet painted a small diptych with two panels, one of which depicts St. Stephen holding a strangely shaped stone—usually interpreted as a symbol of the saint’s martyrdom by stoning. A new analysis by researchers from Dartmouth University and the University of Cambridge has concluded that the stone depicted in the so-called Melun Diptych is most likely a prehistoric stone hand ax, according to a recent paper published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Originally housed in the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame in Melun in northwest France, the diptych is painted in oil. The left panel depicts Etienne Chevalier, who served as treasurer to King Charles VII, clad in a crimson robe while kneeling in prayer. The figure to his right is St. Stephen, Chevalier’s patron saint, in dark blue robes, holding a book in his left hand with the mysterious jagged rock resting on it, while his right arm drapes across Chevalier’s shoulder. The right panel depicts the Madonna breastfeeding the Christ Child, possibly a portrait of the king’s mistress Agnes Sorel, or possibly the king’s wife Catherine Bude.
The two panels were once connected by a hinge, with a small medallion believed to be a mini-portrait of Fouquet as a kind of signature (he otherwise never signed his work). By 1775, the Collegiate Church was in dire need of funds for a restoration and sold the diptych, breaking it apart. The left panel is now housed at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, while the right panel belongs to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. As for the medallion, it’s now part of the Louvre’s collection in Paris.
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Source: Ars Technica – Mysterious rock depicted in 15th century painting is most likely a Stone Age tool
The EPA is inching closer toward regulating the use of leaded fuel often used in smaller planes. In a statement, it highlighted some of the environmental and public health risks associated with lead emissions. EPA administrator Michael Regan said that the White House should “move forward” and propose new standards to limit the use of leaded gasoline in aviation.
Planes that operate on lead fuel are typically smaller piston-engine aircrafts, which are usually flying in and out of smaller airports and exposing nearby residents. Lead pollution can cause “irreversible and life-long health effects” but this is especially true for children. Average levels of lead exposure in the US has gone down dramatically since the 1980s thanks to the heavy regulation of products in homes and schools. However, the risk for exposure is higher if you live near these smaller airports that operate aircraft that rely on leaded gasoline.
Now that the EPA has formally declared what it already knew — that leaded gasoline is bad — it can work with the FAA to iron out regulations limiting its use. Although the FAA does not have direct regulatory authority over what fuels airplanes use, the aviation agency has committed to transition all piston-engine aircrafts away from lead-filled aviation fuels before the end of 2030.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-epa-takes-initial-step-towards-regulating-lead-fuel-used-by-small-planes-212425524.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The EPA takes initial step towards regulating lead fuel used by small planes
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2015, researchers reported a surprising discovery that stoked industry-wide security concerns — an attack called RowHammer that could corrupt, modify, or steal sensitive data when a simple user-level application repeatedly accessed certain regions of DDR memory chips. In the coming years, memory chipmakers scrambled to develop defenses that prevented the attack, mainly by limiting the number of times programs could open and close the targeted chip regions in a given time. Recently, researchers devised a new method for creating the same types of RowHammer-induced bitflips even on a newer generation of chips, known as DDR4, that have the RowHammer mitigations built into them. Known as RowPress, the new attack works not by “hammering” carefully selected regions repeatedly, but instead by leaving them open for longer periods than normal. Bitflips refer to the phenomenon of bits represented as ones change to zeros and vice versa.
Further amplifying the vulnerability of DDR4 chips to read-disturbance attacks — the generic term for inducing bitflips through abnormal accesses to memory chips — RowPress bitflips can be enhanced by combining them with RowHammer accesses. Curiously, raising the temperature of the chip also intensifies the effect. “We demonstrate a proof of concept RowPress program that can cause bitflips in a real system that already employs protections against RowHammer,” Onur Mutlu, a professor at ETH Zurich and a co-author of a recently published paper titled RowPress: Amplifying Read Disturbance in Modern DRAM Chips [PDF], wrote in an email. “Note that this is not in itself an attack. It simply shows that bitflips are possible and plenty, which can easily form the basis of an attack. As many prior works in security have shown, once you can induce a bitflip, you can use that bitflip for various attacks.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – There’s a New Way To Flip Bits in DRAM, and It Works Against the Latest Defenses
Enlarge / Artist’s illustration of Varda’s reentry capsule. (credit: Varda Space Industries)
Varda Space Industries says it has reached an agreement with a private range operator in Australia for spacecraft landings as early as next year after the US government declined to grant approval for the reentry of Varda’s first experimental mission carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in orbit.
After years of applications, reviews, and discussion, the Federal Aviation Administration and the US Air Force would not clear Varda’s spacecraft to land at a military test range in the Utah desert last month. An Air Force spokesperson told Ars it did not grant approval for the landing “due to the overall safety, risk, and impact analysis.”
Likewise, the FAA denied Varda’s application for a commercial reentry license in early September. Varda’s first small satellite mission launched The company’s leaders say they are still working with the FAA and the Air Force in hopes of getting the spacecraft back to Earth in Utah in the coming months, but now they’re looking at other options for future missions.
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Source: Ars Technica – Varda looks to Australia after delays in obtaining US reentry approval
Arianespace’s latest Vega mission failed to deploy two of its payloads to orbit, likely due to a failure with the release mechanism with the rocket’s upper stage.
Source: Gizmodo – Two Cubesats Likely Lost in Latest European Rocket Mishap
All that metaverse tech — whatever that term means at this point — will get a big connectivity boost thanks to federal regulators.
Source: Gizmodo – FCC Gives Metaverse Go-Ahead to Operate on 6GHz Wi-Fi Band
Star Trek loves itself a cave episode. You can do a bunch of different stories in similar looking sets, you can restrict which members of the cast are the focus, you can thrust unlikely pairings together and force them to bounce off each other. Caves are good! Lower Decks not only agrees with this, but uses what is…
Source: io9 – Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Ode to Caves Is Bigger Than Just One Set
Discord is overhauling the way it moderates its platform with a new warning system and teen safety assist feature. From a report: The new Discord warning system has been totally revamped to be far more transparent, educating Discord users how they’ve broken rules and are restricted from parts of the service rather than permanently banning them. “The new system gives users more room to learn from their mistakes and correct misjudgments,” explains Savannah Badalich, Discord’s senior director of policy, in a briefing with The Verge. “We’re moving away from permanent bans to one-year temporary bans for many violations, except for violations that are extremely harmful.”
In the coming weeks, Discord will start to limit features for rule breakers, instead of banning them outright. If a Discord user violates the rules, then they’ll be met with a DM from Discord letting them know about the warning or violation and what action Discord is taking. So, if a Discord user uploads an image that breaks the rules, they might temporarily take away the ability to post images.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Discord is Going To Give Out Warnings Instead of Permanent Bans
New research links the rare neurological condition Guillain-Barré syndrome to covid-19. The study tracked millions of people in Israel, finding that those with a recent history of covid-19 infection were noticeably more likely to develop Guillain-Barré than those without one. Conversely, covid-19 vaccination appeared…
Source: Gizmodo – Covid-19 Might Trigger a Rare Paralyzing Condition
Instagram has started allowing some users to create polls in the comments on their posts, giving creators yet another way to milk their content for more engagement. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, announced the test to his broadcast channel, noting that polls can be added to the comments on both regular feed posts and Reels. It’s just a small test for now, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his own update that it will be “rolling out to everyone soon.”
Polls in the comments section will look much like they do in Stories, where they’ve already been available to users for years in the form of a sticker. Per the screenshot shared by Mosseri, other users will be able to see how many people voted on a given poll. It’s unclear right now how long polls will remain open after they’re posted, or if users will have the option to choose from different time frames to continue receiving votes, like users on Twitter can.
Instagram has been working on making its comment section more of an interactive space, and this past spring finally added the ability for users to post GIFs in the comments. The platform is also testing options for a more tailored Stories experience that builds on what it started with Close Friends, letting users create multiple lists to reserve certain content for specific groups of people.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-will-soon-let-you-create-polls-in-the-comments-section-of-your-posts-203110464.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Instagram will soon let you create polls in the comments section of your posts
