9to5Mac has found evidence in the iOS 17.2 beta code that hints the company is moving towards enabling sideloading on iOS devices. From the report: iOS 17.2 has a new public framework called “Managed App Distribution.” While our first thought was that this API would be related to MDM solutions for installing enterprise apps (which is already possible on iOS), it seems that Apple has been working on something more significant than that. By analyzing the new API, we’ve learned that it has an extension endpoint declared in the system, which means that other apps can create extensions of this type. Digging even further, we found a new, unused entitlement that will give third-party apps permission to install other apps. In other words, this would allow developers to create their own app stores.

The API has basic controls for downloading, installing, and even updating apps from external sources. It can also check whether an app is compatible with a specific device or iOS version, which the App Store already does. Again, this could easily be used to modernize MDM solutions, but here’s another thing. We also found references to a region lock in this API, which suggests that Apple could restrict it to specific countries. This wouldn’t make sense for MDM solutions, but it does make sense for enabling sideloading in particular countries only when required by authorities — such as in the European Union. Under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, or DMA, big tech companies will be required to, among other things, allow users to install any apps they want from third-party sources. “In theory, Apple is required to comply with DMA legislation by March 2024,” reports 9to5Mac. “The company has even admitted in a Form 10-K filing that it expects to make changes that will impact the App Store’s business model.”

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Source: Slashdot – iOS 17.2 Hints At Apple Moving Towards Letting Users Sideload Apps

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The star of long-running videogame review series Zero Punctuation has quit after 16 years. Ben Croshaw, known as Yahtzee, was famous for his very fast, very rude, quickfire opinions on the latest games. His five-minute videos featuring crude cartoon characters were a weekly feature on gaming site The Escapist. But Yahtzee announced he was quitting the site with several colleagues after their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra was fired.

He said he wouldn’t be taking the Zero Punctuation name with him, but fans would hear his voice again ‘soon, in a new place’. Zero Punctuation, launched in 2007, is The Escapist’s most popular feature, with videos from the series comfortably outranking others on its YouTube channel. […] Yahtzee’s departure followed Calandra’s, who said he was fired by The Escapist’s parent company Gamurs for “not achieving goals that were never properly set out for us.” The pair were followed out of the door by a number of colleagues, most of them from the site’s video team.

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Source: Slashdot – Zero Punctuation Ends After 16 Years

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes: Forty years ago today Microsoft introduced its new Graphical User Interface for MS-DOS. Inspired by the Xerox PARC project Alto, as was the Apple Mac, it was their first attempt to address the user unfriendliness of the standard computer interface. Named Windows 1.0 after the “windows” it created to view individual running programs, it generated quite a bit of interest at the initial reveal. Unfortunately, difficulty in ironing out bugs (especially in memory management) delayed release for two years, to November 1985.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Windows Turns 40

Press2ToContinue writes: 01.AI, a Chinese AI startup, has stockpiled enough Nvidia AI and HPC GPUs to last 18 months, in anticipation of a U.S. export ban. Looks like 01.AI is taking “goo big or go home” to a new level with their GPU shopping spree. They’re basically the dragon from “The Hobbit,” but instead of gold, they’re hoarding Nvidia chips. Maybe they’re planning the ultimate LAN party or just really into extreme Minecraft graphics. Either way, it’s like they say: “In the land of tech embargoes, the one with the secret GPU stash is king.” Or in this case, playing 4D chess while the rest of us are stuck figuring out which port the HDMI cable goes into. “We have stockpiled a lot of Nvidia chips,” said 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with Bloomberg. “The jury is out on whether China in 1.5 years can make equivalent or nearly as good chips.”

“We will have two parallel universes. Americans will supply their products and technologies to the U.S. and other countries and Chinese companies will build for China and whoever else uses Chinese products. The reality is that they will not compete very much in the same marketplace.”

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Source: Slashdot – Nvidia’s Great Wall of GPUs: China’s Hoarding Spree

The Canadian federal government hired KPMG consultants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for advice on how to save money on consultants, documents show. From a report: New spending details tabled in Parliament show the department of Natural Resources, led by minister Jonathan Wilkinson, approved $669,650 for KPMG, a global professional services company, to provide managing consulting advice. The department said this work involved developing “recommendations that could be considered as options to ensure that Canadians’ tax dollars are being used efficiently and being invested in the priorities that matter most to them.”

Treasury Board President Anita Anand is currently leading a federal effort to save about $15-billion over five years from existing spending plans. She has promised to release the first wave of details this month. The Natural Resources contract work was part of that department’s contribution to the spending reduction effort. The Globe and Mail has reported that federal spending on outsourcing has grown sharply from when the Liberals promised in 2015 to cut back on the use of external consultants. The government has since singled out spending on outsourcing and consultants as an area of focus to find cuts. All federal departments were given a target of Oct. 2 to submit their proposed cuts to Ms. Anand’s department for review.

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Source: Slashdot – Ottawa Paid Nearly 0,000 for KPMG’s Advice on Cutting Consultant Costs

Despite having a population of just 1,400, until recently, Tokelau’s .tk domain had more users than any other country. Here’s why: Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone– only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD — the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL. Up until that moment, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn’t even know it had been assigned a ccTLD. “We discovered the .tk,” remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who at the time was general manager of Teletok, Tokelau’s sole telecom operator.

Zuurbier said “that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use,” remembers Vitale. It was all a bit of a surprise — but striking a deal with Zuurbier felt like a win-win for Tokelau, which lacked the resources to run its own domain. In the model pioneered by Zuurbier and his company, now named Freenom, users could register a free domain name for a year, in exchange for having advertisements hosted on their websites. If they wanted to get rid of ads, or to keep their website active in the long term, they could pay a fee.

In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant — but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. Everyone online has come across a .tk — even if they didn’t realize it. Because .tk addresses were offered for free, unlike most others, Tokelau quickly became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using .tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment information to displaying pop-up ads or delivering malware.

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Source: Slashdot – How a Tiny Pacific Island Became the Global Capital of Cybercrime

Scary play lets people — and other animals — rehearse coping skills for disturbing challenges in the real world. Scientific American: Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges — those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in. The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.

The monkeys were “satiating their horror,” as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom — it’s called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles. At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.

When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it’s not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction. Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it’s not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn’t always end in success.

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Source: Slashdot – The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn To Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Does Gmail want to be an instant messaging client? From a report: Last month the popular webmail app shipped an emoji reactions bar in the mobile app, where a single tap would send a new email with your emoji response. Now, a wild new UI experiment spotted by Android Police goes another step further: a quick reply bar that looks just like instant messaging input. Rather than the usual input block you get for writing paragraphs of overly formal text, this new Gmail experiment has a one-line input bar at the bottom for replies. A drop-down menu just above it lets you pick from the usual “reply,” “reply all,” or “forward” options. Besides that, you get an attachment and send button. An “expand” button will presumably launch the usual compose interface.

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Source: Slashdot – Does Gmail Want To Be Instant Messaging? New UI Experiment Says ‘Yes’

The latest entry in Activision Blizzard’s popular Call of Duty video-game series was made in half the time of previous iterations, a fact that may be contributing to a spate of bad reviews about the game’s storyline, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the development process. From the report: Critics have panned the game, the first big release since Microsoft closed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision last month, saying the storyline feels rushed. Most Call of Duty games are developed in around three years, but the bulk of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which comes out Friday, was made in less than a year and a half, said the people, who asked to not be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The abridged production schedule proved stressful for the development team, they said.

Call of Duty has generated more than $30 billion in revenue over the last two decades. It’s the most important series in Activision’s portfolio, with thousands of developers across the world. New Call of Duty games will always top the charts, but some of the makers of Modern Warfare III say they hope their new corporate owners don’t judge them too harshly for the negative reception after a shortened development cycle that was beyond the studio’s control. The process was hurried because this year’s game was conceived to fill a gap in the release schedule following the delay of another Call of Duty title previously planned for 2023. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was originally pitched to staff at Foster City, California-based developer Sledgehammer Games as an expansion to last year’s title, but it morphed into a full sequel during development, Bloomberg earlier reported.

The process was hurried because this year’s game was conceived to fill a gap in the release schedule following the delay of another Call of Duty title previously planned for 2023. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was originally pitched to staff at Foster City, California-based developer Sledgehammer Games as an expansion to last year’s title, but it morphed into a full sequel during development, Bloomberg earlier reported.

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Source: Slashdot – New ‘Call of Duty’ Draws Harsh Reviews After Rushed Development

A partnership between Qualcomm and Iridium to bring satellite connectivity to Android phones has fallen apart, almost a year after the deal was announced. From a report: In January, the two companies debuted the Snapdragon Satellite platform, a way to bring satellite-based SMS and emergency messaging to high-end smartphones. But on Thursday, Iridium said Qualcomm will cancel the partnership, effective Dec. 3. “The companies successfully developed and demonstrated the technology; however, notwithstanding this technical success, smartphone manufacturers have not included the technology in their devices,” Iridium said in the announcement. “Due to this, on November 3, 2023, Qualcomm notified Iridium that it has elected to terminate the agreements.”

Qualcomm didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the statement from Iridium suggests the Snapdragon Satellite platform suffered from technical issues, or perhaps failed to attract interest from smartphone vendors. Back in January, the companies also indicated that the Snapdragon Satellite platform would require supported phones to be manufactured with modems that could communicate with the Iridum network’s L-Band radio frequencies.

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Source: Slashdot – Qualcomm-Iridium Deal To Bring Satellite Connectivity To Phones Collapses

An anonymous reader shares a report: A young man sits in a car, pointing a cellphone camera out of the window, seemingly trying to remain undetected. As he breathes heavily in anticipation, he peers at a T-Mobile store across the road from where he is parked.

Suddenly, there is some commotion inside. An accomplice grabs something off a table where a T-Mobile employee is sitting. The accomplice, dressed in a mask and black baseball cap, then bursts out of the store and clumsily sprints towards the car. The man in the vehicle starts laughing, then giggling uncontrollably like a child. The pair got what they came for: a T-Mobile employee’s tablet, the sort workers use everyday when dealing with customer support issues or setting up a new phone.

To the people in the car, what this tablet is capable of is much more valuable than iPad hardware itself. The tablet lets them essentially become T-Mobile. It can grant them the ability to take over target phone numbers, and redirect any text messages or calls for the victim to the hacker’s own device, as part of a hack called a SIM swap. From there, they can easily break into email, cryptocurrency, and social media accounts.

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Source: Slashdot – How SIM Swappers Straight-Up Rob T-Mobile Stores

Tumblr is downscaling its ambitions after failing to reach goals for a new audience, aiming to move some staff members to other divisions of parent company Automattic. From a report: A leaked memo, which circulated on Tumblr and was confirmed in a Verge comment by Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, says that “the majority” of Tumblr’s non-support, safety, and moderation staff will “switch to other divisions.” In follow-up posts on Tumblr, Mullenweg stated that Automattic is planning “a more focused approach in 2024,” including an emphasis on the “core functionality” of the site.

[…] It describes implementing a backup plan to “reflect and decide where else we should concentrate our energy together” without laying off staff from Automattic — which also operates the WordPress.com and WordPress VIP hosting services. “This plan is happening now.” That involves transferring the majority of 139 people on a team identified as covering product development, marketing, and other tasks outside support, moderation, and security.

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Source: Slashdot – Tumblr is Downscaling After Failing To ‘Turn Around’ the Site

An anonymous reader writes: US Treasuries may face renewed selling pressure into the new year if one measure of the nation’s swelling debt repayment bill is any guide. Estimated annualized interest payments on the US government debt pile climbed past $1 trillion at the end of last month, Bloomberg analysis shows. That projected amount has doubled in the past 19 months from the equivalent figure forecast around the time. The estimated interest expense is calculated using US Treasury data which state the government’s monthly outstanding debt balances and the average interest it pays.

Of course, the gauge of estimated interest costs is different than what the Treasury actually paid. Interest costs in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 ultimately totaled $879.3 billion, up from $717.6 billion the previous year and about 14% of total outlays. But, looking forward, the rise in yields on long-term Treasuries in recent months suggests the government will continue to face an escalating interest bill.

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Source: Slashdot – US Debt Interest Bill Rockets Past a Cool Trillion a Year

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an ingenious study published this summer, US researchers showed that within a few months of the launch of ChatGPT, copywriters and graphic designers on major online freelancing platforms saw a significant drop in the number of jobs they got, and even steeper declines in earnings. This suggested not only that generative AI was taking their work, but also that it devalues the work they do still carry out.

Most strikingly, the study found that freelancers who previously had the highest earnings and completed the most jobs were no less likely to see their employment and earnings decline than other workers. If anything, they had worse outcomes. In other words, being more skilled was no shield against loss of work or earnings. But the online freelancing market covers a very particular form of white-collar work and of labour market. What about looking higher up the ranks of the knowledge worker class? For that, we can turn to a recent, fascinating Harvard Business School study, which monitored the impact of giving GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most advanced offering, to employees at Boston Consulting Group.

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Source: Slashdot – Generative AI Already Taking White Collar Jobs and Wages in Online Freelancing World

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI. But for a brief time on Thursday, employees of the software company weren’t allowed to use the startup’s most famous product, ChatGPT, CNBC reported. From a report: “Due to security and data concerns a number of AI tools are no longer available for employees to use,” Microsoft said in an update on an internal website. “While it is true that Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, and that ChatGPT has built-in safeguards to prevent improper use, the website is nevertheless a third-party external service,” Microsoft said. “That means you must exercise caution using it due to risks of privacy and security. This goes for any other external AI services, such as Midjourney or Replika, as well.”

The company initially said it was banning ChatGPT and design software Canva, but later removed a line in the advisory that included those products. After initial publication of this story, Microsoft reinstated access to ChatGPT. In a statement to CNBC, Microsoft said the ChatGPT temporary blockage was a mistake resulting from a test of systems for large language models. “We were testing endpoint control systems for LLMs and inadvertently turned them on for all employees,” a spokesperson said. “We restored service shortly after we identified our error. As we have said previously, we encourage employees and customers to use services like Bing Chat Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise that come with greater levels of privacy and security protections.”

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Briefly Restricted Employee Access To OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Citing Security Concerns

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Thursday, trades handled by the world’s largest bank in the globe’s biggest market traversed Manhattan on a USB stick. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China’s U.S. unit had been hit by a cyberattack, rendering it unable to clear swathes of U.S. Treasury trades after entities responsible for settling the transactions swiftly disconnected from the stricken systems. That forced ICBC to send the required settlement details to those parties by a messenger carrying a thumb drive as the state-owned lender raced to limit the damage.

The workaround — described by market participants — followed the attack by suspected perpetrator Lockbit, a prolific criminal gang with ties to Russia that has also been linked to hits on Boeing, ION Trading U.K. and the U.K.’s Royal Mail. The strike caused immediate disruption as market-makers, brokerages and banks were forced to reroute trades, with many uncertain when access would resume. The incident spotlights a danger that bank leaders concede keeps them up at night — the prospect of a cyber attack that could someday cripple a key piece of the financial system’s wiring, setting off a cascade of disruptions. Even brief episodes prompt bank leaders and their government overseers to call for more vigilance.

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Source: Slashdot – Cyber Attack Forces World’s Biggest Bank to Trade via USB Stick

Michael Kan reports via PCMag: Encrypted messaging service Signal is now testing usernames, which will offer people a more private way to share their contact details on the app. Signal kicked off the public test today through a new beta build available in its community forums. “After rounds of internal testing, we have hit the point where we think the community that powers these forums can help us test even further before public launch,” says Signal VP of Engineering Jim O’Leary.

The development is a big deal since Signal — an end-to-end encrypted messaging app — has long required users to sign up with a phone number. That same number also needs to be shared in order to message other users on the app. This can be problematic since sharing your phone number exposes you to privacy and hacking risks. For example, a contact on Signal could choose to call and message your number over an unencrypted cellular network or pass off the number to someone else.

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Source: Slashdot – Signal Messaging App Now Testing Usernames

The U.S. Space Force’s shadowy X-37B spaceplane is set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Dec. 7. It’ll mark the seventh mission for the X-37B, but the first time it’ll fly on a heavy-lift launcher. Space.com reports: Little is known about the capabilities and operations of the space plane, but Space Force says the mission will follow previous flights that used the X-37B as a test bed for launching experimental payloads and returning them to Earth. “We are excited to expand the envelope of the reusable X-37B’s capabilities, using the flight-proven service module and Falcon Heavy rocket to fly multiple cutting-edge experiments for the Department of the Air Force and its partners,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Fritschen, program director for the X-37B, in the statement.

It isn’t known why the X-37B is launching atop a Falcon Heavy for the USSF-52 mission. Five of the space plane’s previous missions launched on United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets, while its fifth mission, USA-277, took off on top of SpaceX’s smaller rocket, the Falcon 9 (Falcon Heavy consists of three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together). Such a change could suggest that the space plane is carrying heavier payloads or is sporting a new hardware configuration. So far, Space Force has only stated that the mission will “expand the United States Space Force’s knowledge of the space environment by experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies,” according to the statement. However, Space Force’s statement adds that the mission will carry a NASA experiment known as Seeds-2 that will test the effects that space-based radiation has on plant seeds during a long-duration spaceflight.

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Source: Slashdot – SpaceX Will Launch the Space Force’s Mysterious X-37B Space Plane On Falcon Heavy

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The government of Maine has confirmed over a million state residents had personal information stolen in a data breach earlier this year by a Russia-linked ransomware gang. In a statement published Thursday, the Maine government said hackers exploited a vulnerability in its MOVEit file-transfer system, which stored sensitive data on state residents. The hackers used the vulnerability to access and download files belonging to certain state agencies between May 28 and May 29, the statement read. The Maine government said it was disclosing the incident and notifying affected residents as its assessment of the impacted files “was recently completed.”

Maine said that the stolen information may include a person’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license and other state or taxpayer identification numbers. Some individuals had medical and health insurance information taken. The statement said the state holds information about residents “for various reasons, such as residency, employment, or interaction with a state agency,” and that the data it holds varies by person. According to the state’s breakdown of which agencies are affected, more than half of the stolen data relates to Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, with up to about a third of the data affecting the Maine’s Department of Education. The remaining data affects various other agencies, including Maine’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Maine’s Department of Corrections, though the government notes that the breakdown of information is subject to change. More than 1.3 million people live in the state of Maine, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Source: Slashdot – Maine Government Says Data Breach Affects 1.3 Million Residents

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: [O]n Wednesday, the company and utility planning to build the first small, modular nuclear plant in the U.S. announced it was cancelling the project. The U.S. has approved a single design for a small, modular nuclear reactor developed by the company NuScale Power. The government’s Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project. Under the plan, the national lab would maintain a few of the first reactors at the site, and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining ones.

With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project’s economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners, so it was being cancelled. In a statement, the pair accepted that “it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment.”

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Source: Slashdot – First Planned Small Nuclear Reactor Plant In the US Has Been Cancelled