“A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data,” reports Tom’s Hardware:

[T]he high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. Mouse sensors with a 20,000 DPI or higher are vulnerable to this attack. And with the best gaming mice becoming more affordable annually, even relatively affordable peripherals are at risk….

[T]his compromise does not necessarily mean a complicated virus installed through a backdoor — it can be as simple as an infected FOSS that requires high-frequency mouse data, like creative apps or video games. This means it’s not unusual for the software to gather this data. From there, the collected raw data can be extracted from the target computer and processed off-site. “With only a vulnerable mouse, and a victim’s computer running compromised or even benign software (in the case of a web-based attack surface), we show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms,” the researchers state.

The researchers created a video with raw audio samples from various stages in their pipeline on an accompanying web site where they calculate that “the majority of human speech” falls in a frequency range detectable by their pipeline. While the collected signal “is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization,” the researchers augment it with “successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech.”

They’ve titled their paper Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors. The paper’s conclusion? “The increasing precision of optical mouse sensors has enhanced user interface performance but also made them vulnerable to side-channel attacks exploiting their sensitivity.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“More than 800,000 drivers for ride-hailing companies in California will soon be able to join a union,” reports the Associated Press, “and bargain collectively for better wages and benefits under a measure signed Friday by Gov. Gavin Newsom.”
Supporters said the new law will open a path for the largest expansion of private sector collective bargaining rights in the state’s history. The legislation is a significant compromise in the yearslong battle between labor unions and tech companies.

California is the second state where Uber and Lyft drivers can unionize as independent contractors. Massachusetts voters passed a ballot referendum in November allowing unionization, while drivers in Illinois and Minnesota are pushing for similar rights…
The collective bargaining measure now allows rideshare workers in California to join a union while still being classified as independent contractors and requires gig companies to bargain in good faith.
“The new law doesn’t apply to drivers for delivery apps like DoorDash.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScienceAlert writes that some of the tiny nanoplastic fragments present in soil “can make their way into the edible parts of vegetables, research has found.”

A team of scientists from the University of Plymouth in the UK placed radishes into a hydroponic (water-based) system containing polystyrene nanoparticles. After five days, almost 5% of the nanoplastics had made their way into the radish roots. A quarter of those were in the edible, fleshy roots, while a tenth had traveled up to the higher leafy shoots, despite anatomical features within the plants that typically screen harmful material from the soil.

“Plants have a layer within their roots called the Casparian strip, which should act as a form of filter against particles, many of which can be harmful,” says physiologist Nathaniel Clark. “This is the first time a study has demonstrated nanoplastic particles could get beyond that barrier, with the potential for them to accumulate within plants and be passed on to anything that consumes them….”
There are some limitations to the study, as it didn’t use a real-world farming setup. The concentration of plastics in the liquid solution is higher than estimated for soil, and only one type of plastic and one kind of vegetable were tested. Nevertheless, the basic principle stands: the smallest plastic nanoparticles can apparently sneak past protective barriers in plants, and from there into the food we eat… “There is no reason to believe this is unique to this vegetable, with the clear possibility that nanoplastics are being absorbed into various types of produce being grown all over the world,” says Clark.

The research has been published in Environmental Research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast,” writes Cory Doctorow. Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
He succinctly explains “this moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening” using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. “And become a giant pile of shit.”

So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)…

These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too… [M]erchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts…

[Amazon] uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.

All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods…. Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot… [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it’s key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon…
If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you’ll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Doctorow knows what we need to do:

Ban predatory pricing — “selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again).”
Impose structural separation, “so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform.”
Curb junk fees, “which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in.”
End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants “to raise their prices everywhere else, too.
Unionise drivers and warehouse workers.
Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are.
These are policy solutions. (Because “You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly,” Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, “Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care.”
In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — “the enshitternet” — calling it “a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love.

“The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers mspohr and fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI and Jony Ive could still have some serious loose ends to tie up before releasing their highly anticipated AI device. According to a Financial Times report, the partnership is still struggling with some “technical issues” that could ultimately end up pushing back the device’s release date, which is expected to be sometime in 2026.

One of those lingering dilemmas involves figuring out the AI assistant’s voice and mannerisms, according to FT‘s sources. The AI device is meant to be “a friend who’s a computer who isn’t your weird AI girlfriend,” according to a FT source who was briefed on the plans. Beyond landing on a personality, OpenAI and Ive are still figuring out potential privacy concerns stemming from a device that’s always listening. On top of that, the budget could reportedly be a challenge due to the increased computing power necessary to run these mass-produced AI devices.

Outside these latest struggles, we still know very little about the upcoming product. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, reportedly offered some clues to employees that it could be pocket-sized, aware of its environment and sans display. There are still plenty of questions about what OpenAI’s first hardware project will amount to, but the company could be exercising more caution since similar devices, like the Humane AI Pin, were discontinued after failing to deliver on sales.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openais-first-device-with-jony-ive-could-be-delayed-due-to-technical-issues-182226416.html?src=rss

Friday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced two changes coming “soon” to Sora:

First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls…
Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.

“We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of ‘interactive fan fiction’,” Altman wrote, “and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Friday that grants rideshare drivers in the state the right to unionize. It’s the second state to grant organizing rights to rideshare drivers, who are independent contractors, following the passage of a similar law in Massachusetts in 2024. There are over 800,000 rideshare drivers in California, and the bill that was just signed into law “establishes a clear legal framework for union certification, bargaining processes and enforcement,” according to a press release from the office of Assemblymember Buffy Wicks.

This means drivers working for companies like Uber and Lyft will be able to collectively bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions. Under the terms of the law, driver organizations will be able to apply for union recognition starting in May 2026 as long as they have support from at least 10 percent of active rideshare drivers in the state. The organization would then need support from at least 30 percent of active drivers to begin bargaining on their behalf. 

As part of a deal made in September, Newsom also signed a measure that reduces the insurance coverage requirements for Uber and Lyft in the case of accidents caused by uninsured drivers, Associated Press reports.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/uber-and-lyft-drivers-in-california-are-able-to-unionize-under-new-law-171309594.html?src=rss