Ever since mutantkind became ascendant in the Dawn of X—and the establishment of the mutant nation state Krakoa—enemies of the children of the atom have been lying in wait to strike out at mutants all over the place. But one with sinister connections to mutantkind’s greatest foe has been revealed, and now poor Scott…
Source: Gizmodo – Captain Krakoa’s Origin Story Is All About How Cyclops Got Played
The New York City Tri-State area is in for a bomb cyclone this coming weekend. But how much snow the city and surrounding area will see is still up in the air. Big time.
Source: Gizmodo – Why This Weekend’s Bomb Cyclone Could Be a Huge Snowmaker—or a Complete Dud
YouTube Gaming’s top boss, Ryan Wyatt, is leaving the company to join the cryptocurrency company Polygon Studios. Wyatt is expected to depart YouTube at the end of February. GameSpot reports: Wyatt, a former higher-up at Major League Gaming, joined Google in 2014 and has been the global head of gaming at the company since then. “I will miss YouTube dearly, but it is time for me to pursue other endeavors in life and where my passions are taking me,” Wyatt said. “I am fascinated by blockchain app development and am beyond thrilled to enter the web3 space.”
Wyatt is becoming the CEO of Polygon Technology Studios where he will head up efforts to grow the “developer ecosystem” by way of investment, marketing, and developer support. “I’ll be leading the Polygon Studios organization across Gaming, Entertainment, Fashion, News, Sports, and more. I’m excited to work with developers and builders across the Polygon ecosystem and I’ll be sharing more about my journey over the coming months,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt said in a video that he understands the issues and concerns people have with blockchain video games. One of the leading blockchain games today is Axie, and Watt said a lot of people don’t quite understand what the game is really all about or believe it’s not for them. But Watt said he foresees a future with MMOs, shooters, and RPGs in the blockchain space that people will be excited about. Engadget adds that Jamie Byrne, senior director of creator partnerships, and vice president and global head of product partnerships, Heather Rivera, are departing too.
“Like many other companies, we’ve seen some of our people choose a new direction in the new year,” YouTube told Tubefilter. “We are also fortunate to have a deep bench of talented leaders to take our business forward. We thank Heather, Jamie, and Ryan for their incredible contribution to YouTube over the years and can’t wait to see what they do next.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – YouTube Gaming Boss Leaving To Join Crypto Company
Disney’s Encanto has become one of the studios most beloved animated features on the strength of its fabulous songs (written by Lin-Manuel Miranda), amazing animation (directed by Byron Howard and Jared Bush), and a heartfelt story about a girl who doesn’t feel special among her extraordinary family.
Source: Gizmodo – The Magical Madrigal Branches of Disney’s Encanto Family Tree
For years, one-time Linux Netfilter developer Patrick McHardy made money by threatening users with legal action for using “his” open-source code. That won’t happen again.
The post Attempt to Shake Down Linux users for Netfilter Code use Resolved appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Attempt to Shake Down Linux users for Netfilter Code use Resolved
It’s official: Valve’s Steam Deck gaming portable will go on sale starting February 25th. The Verge reports: According to the company’s blog, customers who have reservations will get an email on that day and have three days to place an order. Valve also says that it’ll release new batches on a weekly basis, so if you’ve got a reservation, March will be the time to keep an eye on your email.
Here’s some more info from Valve’s announcement: “We will start sending invites shortly after 10:00 am on February 25th, PST. Order emails are sent in the same order that reservations were made. You can only order the Steam Deck model that you originally reserved. Your reservation deposit will be applied to the final price of Steam Deck, and shipping costs are included.” Valve says that the orders placed on the 25th will start shipping out on the 28th.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Valve Will Start Selling the Steam Deck Next Month
SAS JMP (pronounced “jump”) is a suite of computer programs for statistical analysis. Find the best free and open source alternatives to SAS JMP here.
The post Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to SAS JMP appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to SAS JMP
Enlarge / Neil Young performs at FirstMerit Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island during Farm Aid 30 on September 19, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. (credit: Getty Images | Raymond Boyd)
With Neil Young having told Spotify that it can keep him or podcaster Joe Rogan but not both, the streaming company today said it will remove Young’s catalog of music.
“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,” Spotify said in a statement to Deadline and other media organizations. “With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place, and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify but hope to welcome him back soon.”
Young’s music was still on Spotify as of this writing but will presumably be removed soon unless either Young or Spotify change their minds. Objecting to misinformation about COVID aired on Rogan’s podcast, Young told Warner Records this week that Spotify “has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Spotify says it will remove Neil Young’s music instead of dropping Joe Rogan
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: North Korea’s internet appears to have been hit by a second wave of outages in as many weeks, possibly caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, researchers said on Wednesday. The latest incident took place for about six hours on Wednesday morning local time, and came a day after North Korea conducted its fifth missile test this month.
Junade Ali, a cybersecurity researcher in Britain who monitors a range of different North Korean web and email servers, said that at the height of the apparent attack, all traffic to and from North Korea was taken down. “When someone would try to connect to an IP address in North Korea, the internet would literally be unable to route their data into the country,” he told Reuters. Hours later, servers that handle email were accessible, but some individual web servers of institutions such as the Air Koryo airline, North Korea’s ministry of foreign affairs, and Naenara, which is the official portal for the North Korean government, continued to experience stress and downtime. “It’s common for one server to go offline for some periods of time, but these incidents have seen all web properties go offline concurrently,” said Ali. “It isn’t common to see their entire internet dropped offline.”
During the incidents, operational degradation would build up first with network timeouts, then individual servers going offline and then their key routers dropping off the internet, Ali said. “This indicates to me that this is the result of some form of network stress rather than something like a power cut.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – North Korean Internet Downed By Suspected Cyber Attacks
Fresh is a nearly two-hour movie that doesn’t let you in on its secret for almost a quarter of that time. It starts all quirky and nice with a young woman named Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) navigating the world of modern dating. She’s on all the apps, meets guys who are real assholes, some of them send her unsolicited dick…
Source: Gizmodo – Fresh Is Your Worst Dating Nightmare Brought to Gory Life
Brian Kernighan shares his inspiration and research behind the latest edition of his book, Understanding the Digital World.
Source: LXer – Talking digital with Brian Kernighan
Enlarge / Medical Director of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) checks the vital signs of a COVID-19 patien while her husband rests in a bed next to her at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, California, on January 3, 2021. (credit: Getty | Apu Gomes)
Despite its widespread reputation for being mild, the ultratransmissible omicron coronavirus variant is sending a record number of people to emergency departments and hospital rooms in the US, swamping health care systems nationwide.
As of January 15, omicron’s highest seven-day average of daily cases was nearly 799,000—a 386 percent increase from the highest average of daily cases seen during the delta wave (from July to the end of October). Similarly, omicron’s highest daily average of emergency department visits was 86 percent higher than that of delta’s, and hospital admissions were 76 percent higher.
The latest data comes from a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday. The study highlights that, even though the omicron wave has been marked by relatively smaller proportions of severe cases and deaths, the variant’s extraordinary spread has still overwhelmed hospitals and extracted a devastating toll.
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Source: Ars Technica – Omicron’s wave is at least 386% taller than delta’s—and crushing hospitals
Following a profitable — and, ahem, notable — 2021, Tesla remains at the forefront of EV production in America as we enter the new year. With deliveries up nearly 90 percent over 2020’s figures, Tesla achieved “the highest quarterly operating margin among all volume OEMs,” during that time frame, according to the company’s Q4 figures released Wednesday The company not only hit $5.5 billion in net income despite a $6.5 billion outlay for new production facilities in Berlin and Austin, Texas, it also exceeded its own revenue goals by a cool billion dollars.
In Q4, 2021, Tesla produced 930,000 electric vehicles (99 percent of which were Model Xs and Ys) and delivered 936,000 of them to customers around the world. At the same time, the company expanded its proprietary Supercharger network by a third, now totalling 3,476 stations. The company also announced that it will likely be looking at new production facility locations throughout 2022 but does not currently have a list of candidate sites available for the public.
Despite widespread supply chain issues impacting the entire automotive industry, Tesla maintained its production capabilities better than virtually any other automaker. The Fremont factory churned out around 600,000 vehicles last year with plans to increase that figure even after the Austin and Berlin plants come online later this year. Production in the Shanghai plant continues to ramp up as well. According to Tesla, it has managed to lower the per unit cost of producing its vehicles to around $36,000 (and did so in both Q3 and Q4, 2021).
Tesla CEO Elon Musk doubled down on his bullish outlook for the company’s Full Self-Driving feature on Wednesday’s call. “Over time we think Full Self-Driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla,” he noted. Tesla expanded its FSD beta program from a few thousand vehicles in Q3 up to 60,000 vehicles in Q4. However, he also confirmed that the company will not be releasing new vehicle models in 2022, such as the Roadster, Cybertruck, or rumored “$25,000 car” the company was developing. “If we were to introduce new vehicles, our total vehicle output would decrease,” due to ongoing processor chip supply chain woes, Musk explained.
Developing…
Source: Engadget – Tesla kept its record 2021 profits rolling right through Q4
This new political breed accepts paychecks in Bitcoin. The mayors also want to use buzzy new tech like NFTs to raise money for public projects. From a report: The ballooning popularity of Bitcoin and other digital currencies has given rise to a strange new political breed: the crypto mayor. Eric Adams, New York’s new mayor, accepted his first paycheck in Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency, Ether. Francis Suarez, Miami’s mayor, headlines crypto conferences. Now even mayors of smaller towns are trying to incorporate crypto into municipal government, courting start-ups and experimenting with buzzy new technologies like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, to raise money for public projects. Their growing ranks reflect the increasing mainstream acceptance of digital currencies, which are highly volatile and have fallen in value in recent days. The mayors’ embrace of crypto is also a recognition that its underlying blockchain technology — essentially a distributed ledger system — may create new revenue streams for cities and reshape some basic functions of local government.
“Mayors rationally want to attract high-income citizens who pay their taxes and impose few costs on the municipality,” said Joseph Grundfest, a business professor at Stanford. “Crypto geeks fit this bill perfectly.” But as with many ambitious crypto projects, it’s unclear whether these local initiatives will ultimately amount to much. So far, most are either largely symbolic or largely theoretical. And the mayors’ aims are partly political: Crypto boosterism has a useful bipartisan appeal, garnering popularity among both antigovernment conservatives and socially liberal tech moguls. “You can do these things because you want to be associated with dudes with AR-15s, or you want to be associated with Meta,” said Finn Brunton, a technology studies professor at the University of California, Davis, who wrote a 2019 book about the history of crypto. “A lot of it is hype and hot air.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – The Rise of the Crypto Mayors
We can all agree that NFTs suck, right? They chew through energy like termites eating wood and shit out a ton of greenhouse gas emissions, destroying our world one crypto sell at a time. On top of that, you don’t get anything physical, just a digital certificate of blockchain ownership. Thankfully, the internet is…
Source: Kotaku – Forget Just Right Clicking, Now We’re Printing NFTs With Game Boys
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
A banking-fraud trojan that has been targeting Android users for three years has been updated to create even more grief. Besides draining bank accounts, the trojan can now activate a kill switch that performs a factory reset and wipes infected devices clean.
Brata was first documented in a post from security firm Kaspersky, which reported that the Android malware had been circulating since at least January 2019. The malware spread primarily through Google Play but also through third-party marketplaces, push notifications on compromised websites, sponsored links on Google, and messages delivered by WhatsApp or SMS. At the time, Brata targeted people with accounts from Brazil-based banks.
Now Brata is back with a host of new capabilities, the most significant of which is the ability to perform a factory reset on infected devices to erase any trace of the malware after an unauthorized wire transfer has been attempted. Security firm Cleafy Labs, which first reported the kill switch, said other features recently added to Brata include GPS tracking, improved communication with control servers, the ability to continuously monitor victims’ bank apps, and the ability to target the accounts of banks located in additional countries. The trojan now works with banks located in Europe, the US, and Latin America.
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Source: Ars Technica – Android malware can factory-reset phones after draining bank accounts
Enlarge / Cardboard boxes made to resemble Amazon packages during a protest outside the home of Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos in New York on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020. (credit: Getty Images / Bloomberg Collection)
Amazon must shut down the price-fixing program known as “Sold by Amazon” (SBA) under a legally binding resolution announced today by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Amazon had already suspended the program amid an investigation, but the settlement prevents the program from being restarted.
“The ‘Sold by Amazon’ program allowed the online retailer to agree on price with third-party sellers, rather than compete with them,” the announcement said. Ferguson alleged that Amazon violated antitrust laws by “unreasonably restrain[ing] competition in order to maximize its own profits off third-party sales” and that “this conduct constituted unlawful price-fixing.”
Ferguson filed a lawsuit against Amazon and the consent decree in King County Superior Court today.
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Source: Ars Technica – AG says he forced Amazon to shut down “unlawful price-fixing” program
If you haven’t been keeping up with Windows news, Windows 11 is really trying to be tough on security. As part of that push, one of its major requirements is that your system must have a Trusted Platform Module, or TPM. Historically speaking, that was a physical device on your motherboard that provided an immutable security key for the system
Source: Hot Hardware – Bugs In AMD Ryzen fTPM Are Reportedly Causing Stuttering Issues In Windows 11
Terry Pratchett’s work in Discworld may have flung us into a magical world of animated luggage and daring sorcery, but its insightful, often furious view of class dynamics and social injustice is what made it such a powerfully enduring series. Now it’s lending some of that fury to highlight a new campaign against…
Source: Gizmodo – Discworld’s Famous ‘Boots Theory’ Is Putting a Spotlight on Poverty in the UK
Spotify already has an answer to Neil Young’s ultimatum following outrage over allegations Joe Rogan is spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. As The Wall Street Journalreports, Spotify is in the midst of removing Young’s music from the streaming service worldwide. His (very large) catalog was still available as of this writing, but we’d suggest listening to Harvest one more time just in case.
Young has reportedly been in talks with Spotify and his label Warner Records since posting an open letter threatening to pull his albums. The artist made the formal request on Wednesday (January 26th), and the music is apparently poised to disappear within “several hours.”
In a statement to Engadget, Spotify said it “regret[ted]” Young’s decision and hoped to have him back “soon.” It also defended its anti-misinformation practices, claiming it accepted a “great responsibility” in juggling both listener safety and creator freedom. The company added it had pulled over 20,000 podcast COVID-related episodes since the pandemic began. It didn’t say why it was still hosting Joe Rogan Experience episodes that contained misinformation, though, including unsupported claims from Dr. Robert Malone that “psychosis” led people to believe vaccines were effective.
Spotify also didn’t offer reasons for its decision. However, the company is believed to have paid over $100 million to land a multi-year distribution deal with Rogan. While the exact terms of the agreement aren’t clear, Spotify might suffer financial and legal consequences if it pulls Rogan’s episodes. CEO Daniel Ek has also argued that his firm doesn’t have editorial responsibility despite its recent practices.
You can read Spotify’s full statement below:
We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.
Source: Engadget – Spotify will remove Neil Young music following Joe Rogan dispute
