Acceptable levels of “forever chemicals” in drinking water should be reduced tenfold and a new national chemicals agency created to protect public health, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has told the UK government. From a report: The chartered body wants to see a reduction in the cap on levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in tap water. PFAS are a family of about 10,000 widely used chemicals that do not break down easily in the environment. Some have been linked to cancers, liver and thyroid disease, immune and fertility problems, and developmental defects in unborn children.

The current limit in UK drinking water, which is a guideline and not a statutory cap, is 100 nanograms a litre for individual PFAS. The RSC wants this reduced to 10ng/l and a new overall limit introduced of 100ng/l for a wider range of PFAS in drinking water. “In the Drinking Water Inspectorate’s (DWI) own words, levels above 10ng/l pose a medium or high risk to public health,” said Stephanie Metzger, a policy adviser at the RSC. “We’re seeing more studies that link PFAS to a range of very serious medical conditions, and so we urgently need a new approach for the sake of public health.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Call on Ministers To Cut Limits For ‘Forever Chemicals’ in UK Tap Water

Google security researchers say they have found evidence that government-backed hackers linked to Russia and China are exploiting a since-patched vulnerability in WinRAR, the popular shareware archiving tool for Windows. From a report: The WinRAR vulnerability, first discovered by cybersecurity company Group-IB earlier this year and tracked as CVE-2023-38831, allows attackers to hide malicious scripts in archive files that masquerade as seemingly innocuous images or text documents. Group-IB said the flaw was exploited as a zero-day — since the developer had zero time to fix the bug before it was exploited — as far back as April to compromise the devices of at least 130 traders.

Rarlab, which makes the archiving tool, released an updated version of WinRAR (version 6.23) on August 2 to patch the vulnerability. Despite this, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said this week that its researchers have observed multiple government-backed hacking groups exploiting the security flaw, noting that “many users” who have not updated the app remain vulnerable. In research shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication, TAG says it has observed multiple campaigns exploiting the WinRAR zero-day bug, which it has tied to state-backed hacking groups with links to Russia and China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Russia and China-backed Hackers Are Exploiting WinRAR Zero-Day Bug, Google Says

Amazon has started delivering prescription medications by drone in a Texas city, broadening its still-experimental effort to deliver goods by air. From a report: The online retailer recently began listing drone delivery as an option for Amazon Pharmacy customers who are participating in a test program in College Station, one of two US cities where Amazon is delivering products using its unmanned, riding-lawnmower-sized vehicles. The company made the effort public on Wednesday ahead of a logistics press event held at a warehouse near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Quick delivery of medical supplies has emerged as one of the leading candidates for a viable delivery-by-drone business. Alphabet’s Wing, United Parcel Service and drone startup Zipline have all set out to deliver medical goods, sometimes in trial programs centered around hospital campuses or planned communities. In most places, drone use remains limited to narrowly prescribed tests as regulators hash out regulations to limit risk to other aircraft and people on the ground.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Amazon Starts Delivering Medications by Drone in Texas City

An anonymous reader shares a report: On May 4, 2022, NASA’s InSight lander detected the largest quake yet recorded on Mars, one with a 4.7 magnitude — fairly modest by Earth standards but strong for our planetary neighbor. Given Mars lacks the geological process called plate tectonics that generates earthquakes on our planet, scientists suspected a meteorite impact had caused this marsquake. But a search for an impact crater came up empty, leading scientists to conclude that this quake was caused by tectonic activity — rumbling in the planet’s interior — and giving them a deeper understanding about what makes Mars shake, rattle and roll.

“We concluded that the largest marsquake seen by InSight was tectonic, not an impact. This is important as it shows the faults on Mars can host hefty marsquakes,” said planetary scientist Ben Fernando of the University of Oxford in England, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “We really thought that this event might be an impact.” “This represents a significant step forward in our understanding of Martian seismic activity and takes us one step closer to better unraveling the planet’s tectonic processes,” added Imperial College London planetary scientist and study co-author Constantinos Charalambous, co-chair of InSight’s Geology Working Group.

NASA retired InSight in 2022 after four years of operations. In all, InSight’s seismometer instrument detected 1,319 marsquakes. Earth’s crust – its outermost layer – is divided into immense plates that continually shift, triggering quakes. The Martian crust is a single solid plate. But that does not mean all is quiet on the Martian front. “There are still faults that are active on Mars. The planet is still slowly shrinking and cooling, and there is still motion within the crust even though there are no active plate tectonic processes going on anymore. These faults can trigger quakes,” Fernando said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Surprised By Source of Largest Quake Detected on Mars

The Five Eyes countries’ intelligence chiefs came together on Tuesday to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence for hacking and spying against the nations, in a rare joint statement by the allies. From a report: The officials from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – known as the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network – made the comments following meetings with private companies in the U.S. innovation hub Silicon Valley. U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the “unprecedented” joint call was meant to confront the “unprecedented threat” China poses to innovation across the world.

From quantum technology and robotics to biotechnology and artificial intelligence, China was stealing secrets in various sectors, the officials said. “China has long targeted businesses with a web of techniques all at once: cyber intrusions, human intelligence operations, seemingly innocuous corporate investments and transactions,” Wray said. “Every strand of that web had become more brazen, and more dangerous.” In response, Chinese government spokesman Liu Pengyu said the country was committed to intellectual property protection.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Five Eyes Intelligence Chiefs Warn on China’s ‘Theft’ of IP

AI will likely lead to seismic changes to the workforce, eliminating many professions and requiring a societal rethink of how people spend their time, prominent tech leaders said Tuesday. From a report: Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the changes could hit some people in the economy more seriously than others, even if society as a whole improves. This will likely be a hard sell for the most affected people, he said. “We are really going to have to do something about this transition,” said Altman, who added that society will have to confront the speed at which the change happens. “People need to have agency, the ability to influence. We need to jointly be architects of the future.” Artificial intelligence is expected to transform the global economy by driving gains in both productivity and growth. But economists and tech entrepreneurs are divided on how quickly this shift could — and should — happen.

Earlier Tuesday, Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist whose firm was one of OpenAI’s earliest backers, laid out a stark timeline for AI’s transformation of work. Within 10 years AI will be able to “do 80% of 80% of all jobs that we know of today,” said Khosla, a tech investor and entrepreneur for more than 40 years. He pointed to many types of physicians and accountants as examples of professions that AI could largely supplant because these systems can more easily access a broad array of knowledge. Khosla likened the extent of the workforce changes to the disappearance of agricultural jobs in the U.S. in the 20th Century — a transition that took place over generations, not years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Tech Leaders Say AI Will Change What It Means To Have a Job

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1859 book “On the Origin of Species” — proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favor survival and reproduction — it provoked a revolution in scientific thought. Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more. It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.

Titled the “law of increasing functional information,” it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist — such as cellular mutation — that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions. […] The authors proposed three universal concepts of selection: the basic ability to endure; the enduring nature of active processes that may enable evolution; and the emergence of novel characteristics as an adaptation to an environment. Some biological examples of this “novelty generation” include organisms developing the ability to swim, walk, fly and think. Our species emerged after the human evolutionary lineage diverged from the chimpanzee lineage and acquired an array of traits including upright walking and increased brain size. The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Propose Sweeping New Law of Nature, Expanding On Evolution

One of the world’s largest private BitTorrent trackers, Filelist, has announced it will shut down soon. The site has been in operation for sixteen years and enjoys millions of monthly visits, mostly from Romania. Site admin EboLLa has chosen to devote time to other parts of life and without a trusted successor, it’s best to close the doors. TorrentFreak reports: Many private trackers have come and gone over the years. The Romanian-based tracker FileList.io is one of the bigger ones to survive, although it came close to shutting down a few years ago when Romanian authorities seized its domain name. The enforcement action was a wake-up call for both staff and users of the members-only tracker, but it didn’t mark the end of the road. FileList simply switched from the seized .ro domain to an .io version and with the database unscathed, it kept on going. According to recent traffic stats from SimilarWeb, the tracker hasn’t lost its appeal. With an estimated average of roughly six million monthly visits, the site continues to draw a massive audience. That, however, is about to change.

A few hours ago, FileList sysop “EboLLa” informed the site’s members that the doors will permanently close in a few weeks. This isn’t the result of legal pressure; it’s a conscious and well-evaluated life choice. “Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to run the site. A site like this requires quite a lot of commitment and my priorities in everyday life have changed in recent years. Time is the most precious resource for all of us and I have invested enough time here,” the operator writes. The decision was a difficult one. FileList’s operator long considered handing the reigns to a successor, but that is easier said than done, especially after the dream candidate was no longer an option.

“I don’t have anyone to leave it to. ToXiC, the one who was going to take my place is no longer with us,” EboLLa writes. […] “It is quite difficult to find a person who is integrated here and shares the same values and has the same dedication that you have enjoyed for the last 16 years. I decided that the best thing to do is to close the site rather than risk something like this.” “During this time you can still enjoy the site, download what you need from here and post your goodbye message in the thread. After ~3 months, sometime around January 2024, the site will be closed permanently,” EboLLa concludes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Private Torrent Tracker FileList to Shut Down After 16 Years

Michael Kan reports via PCMag: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has announced a new spacecraft that promises to help humanity build and maintain projects in outer space. The company today debuted Blue Ring, a so-called “space platform” that can orbit Earth, but also travel around the Moon, with the goal of providing delivery and logistics support to other space projects. To do so, Blue Ring functions as a maneuverable platform that can host, transport, and refuel other spacecraft. In addition, it can relay data while also offering an “in-space” cloud computing capability, according to Blue Origin’s announcement.

Other rockets, particularly those from rival SpaceX, can already send satellites up into predictable orbits around Earth. In contrast, Blue Ring is designed to serve customers for more “dynamic” space projects at varying orbits, Blue Origin Lars Hoffman VP tells Aviation Week. “It has a lot of capability and a lot of energy. It is a platform that has versatility across multiple missions and multiple customers on any given launch,” Hoffman says.

The company adds that Blue Ring can travel with payloads of over 6,600 pounds. According to Aviation Week, Blue Origin is eyeing 2025 as a realistic launch date for the spacecraft, which has already received some interest from customers. Hoffman also says Blue Ring will be “launch-vehicle agnostic,” allowing it to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket or Blue Origin’s own New Glenn, which is aiming to be used in its first mission next year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Blue Origin’s New Spacecraft Can Build Projects In Space

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Fewer than 26% of US households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week, a sharp decline from the early-2021 peak of 37%, according to the two latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Surveys. Only seven states plus Washington, DC, have a remote-work rate above 33%, the data shows, down from 31 states and DC mid-pandemic. […] At the state level, the data shows all 50 have seen work-from-home rates drop from their pandemic highs. But the unevenness in their rates of decline suggests the trend doesn’t have one cohesive explanation, and is instead the result of a hodgepodge of migration, socio-economic, gender and race factors, and possibly even politics — Democratic states tend to have higher remote-work rates than Republican ones. Illustrating the complexity: States whose remote-work rates have fallen by as much as half to around post-pandemic lows include Mississippi and Louisiana, which weren’t able to widely embrace remote work due to a reliance on in-person industries like manufacturing and oil and gas, but also more white-collar states that did welcome it, like California and Connecticut.

The latest Census data also underlines that employees’ demand for remote jobs is outpacing the number of companies offering them. In 157 of the largest metro areas in the US, more than half of job applications were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, according to LinkedIn data generated for Bloomberg, but postings for those jobs have been falling since early 2022, data from Indeed Inc. shows. In Colorado — widely seen as a work-from-home haven and one of the few states that has maintained a rate above one third — 76% of job applications in Colorado Springs were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, the LinkedIn data showed.

Some areas are capitalizing on that scarcity. Alabama, with a work-from-home rate of just 15% according to the Pulse data, offers $10,000 to remote workers who move to the state’s northwest Shoals area. The program has attracted about the same number of applications so far this year as in all of 2021 and 2022 combined, about 3,400. All 50 states pale in comparison to their largest cities’ metro areas. In Washington, DC, where government bureaucrats are loath to go back to their offices, the remote-work rate is above 50%, the data shows. Similarly, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco all had rates near or above 40%. Average office attendance across ten big US cities remains about 50% of pre-pandemic levels, according to security firm Kastle Systems International LLC, no higher than where it was early in 2023.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – American Work-From-Home Rates Drop To Lowest Since the Pandemic

In an analysis piece for The Guardian, Sean Ingle discusses some of the smart technology and artificial intelligence being used in sports to fight against brain injuries. From the report: There was a hidden spectator of the NFL match between the Baltimore Ravens and Tennessee Titans in London on Sunday: artificial intelligence. As crazy as it may sound, computers have now been taught to identify on-field head impacts in the NFL automatically, using multiple video angles and machine learning. So a process that would take 12 hours — for each game — is now done in minutes. The result? After every weekend, teams are sent a breakdown of which players got hit, and how often.

This tech wizardry, naturally, has a deeper purpose. Over breakfast the NFL’s chief medical officer, Allen Sills, explained how it was helping to reduce head impacts, and drive equipment innovation. Players who experience high numbers can, for instance, be taught better techniques. Meanwhile, nine NFL quarterbacks and 17 offensive linemen are wearing position-specific helmets, which have significantly more padding in the areas where they experience more impacts. What may be next? Getting accurate sensors in helmets, so the force of each tackle can also be estimated, is one area of interest. As is using biomarkers, such as saliva and blood, to better understand when to bring injured players back to action.

If that’s not impressive enough, this weekend rugby union became the first sport to adopt smart mouthguard technology, which flags big “hits” in real time. From January, whenever an elite player experiences an impact in a tackle or ruck that exceeds a certain threshold, they will automatically be taken off for a head injury assessment by a doctor. No wonder Dr Eanna Falvey, World Rugby’s chief medical officer, calls it a “gamechanger” in potentially identifying many of the 18% of concussions that now come to light only after a match.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – World Rugby To Introduce Smart Mouthguards To Detect Player Concussions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from U.Today:

The country was reimagined by Joseon King Andrew Lee as a digital nation without territory or borders. In this status, it was recognized by Antigua and Barbuda: the two countries inked a treaty that supports education, economic investment and other developmental initiatives and provides the basis for long-standing friendly relations.

Speaking to U.Today, representatives of the country stressed its unique legal design and state management model:

“Joseon is a crypto safe haven in this world where you can legally engage in crypto without any risk of any kind because sovereignty is the absolute authority in this world and another sovereignty doesn’t have authority over another sovereignty”

Per their official statement, cryptocurrencies represent legal tender in Joseon and can be used for investments, daily payments and cross-border transactions.

Another report from Bitcoinist details several companies launching in Joseon, including First Day Out Collective which represents a song from Rundown Spaz and Kanye West:

Let’s talk about the banger that’s making this all come alive: “First Day Out,: a fire track by Rundown Spaz featuring none other than Kanye West, now owned by a DAO and legally recognized corporation in the progressive cybernation of Joseon, which itself is a legally recognized nation-state.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Joseon Becomes First-ever Globally Recognized Cyber Nation-state

General Motors said it will delay production of electric pickups trucks at its plant in Michigan by another year as the No. 1 U.S. automaker grapples with flattening demand for electric vehicles. Reuters reports: The move is the latest sign that electric vehicle production and demand may not be as strong as forecast. GM had been set to begin production of the electric Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra in late 2024 at the suburban Detroit plant. The company said the plan now is to start it in late 2025.

GM said the change was being made “to better manage capital investment while aligning with evolving EV demand” but said the move does not impact its battery plant plans. GM said in July battery production at the Ultium joint venture plant Ohio has been hampered because “our automation equipment supplier is struggling with delivery issues.”

The automaker in July reiterated a previous target of building 400,000 EVs from 2022 through the first half of 2024, and projected EV revenue of $50 billion in 2025. GM has said it is targeting production of roughly 100,000 EVs in the second half of 2023. Reuters reported in July that the U.S. electric vehicle market is growing, but not quickly enough to prevent unsold EVs from stacking up at some automakers’ dealerships.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – GM Delays EV Truck Production At Michigan Plant By Another Year

Christopher Grimes reports via the Financial Times: Some of Netflix’s competitors are reversing a streaming war tactic by licensing their old TV shows and movies to the streamer — boosting its programming offerings but also potentially squeezing its profit margins, analysts say. Netflix relied heavily on programming that it licensed from other companies when it launched its streaming service in 2007. But after Walt Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and the then Time Warner launched their own streaming services, they pulled many of their shows from Netflix to avoid feeding a company that had grown into an arch-competitor. With legacy media groups under pressure to produce streaming profits, however, licensing revenue is looking attractive again — even if it comes from Netflix. This summer, Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO network began licensing a handful of older shows to Netflix, including Insecure, Six Feet Under, Ballers and Band of Brothers.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley said the return of licensing deals was a “long-term positive” for Netflix and would “pad” its lead over competitors in streaming. But the bank added that the cost of licensing — along with the Netflix’s investments in gaming and other sectors — could add pressure to its profit margins in 2024. The analysts raised their outlook for Netflix’s overall cash spending next year by $500mn to $17.7bn. Netflix will report results on Wednesday, with investors expected to focus on whether it plans to increase subscription prices and signs of progress on its new advertising tier. The latest data on its password sharing crackdown will also be watched.

[T]he studios’ experiments with licensing deals appear to have given some old shows new life. After NBCUniversal licensed its show Suits — which aired from 2011-19 and starred Meghan Markle — to Netflix in June, the show experienced a revival. The legal drama was in the top spot on the Nielsen Streaming top 10 for three months, an example of the “Netflix effect” on older shows. Bloys said licensing shows to Netflix had also boosted traffic for the programs on Warner Discovery’s Max streaming platform, home to HBO programming including Ballers, a sports drama that ran from 2015-19. Ballers entered the Nielsen top 10 after it went to Netflix, and Insecure, a comedy starring Issa Rae that ran from 2016-21, had a similar boost.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Netflix Effect’ Returns As Studios License Old Shows To Their Streaming Rival

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The IRS will test a free tax filing service in 2024 for a subset of lucky taxpayers in as many as 13 states, the agency announced today. Direct File, as the service is called, is a shot across the bows of Turbotax, H&R Block, and other paid tax prep services, whose owners have resisted free and simple tax filing for decades. “This is a critical step forward for this innovative effort that will test the feasibility of providing taxpayers a new option to file their returns for free directly with the IRS,” said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in a press release announcing the news.

Over the last year and a half, the IRS has been building out the pilot program, which it characterizes as being “one more potential option” on the continuum from self-managed Free File, to commercial products like Turbotax, to a tax prep professional. The IRS describes Direct File as “a mobile-friendly, interview-based service” available in English and Spanish, intended for people with simpler tax situations like W-2s and common income credits and deductions. Whether the interviews are with actual people or some kind of automated or semi-automated process is unclear. But this, like many of its specifics, will likely change as the agency receives feedback from this limited scale pilot.

Arizona, California, Massachusetts, and New York are the four states that are integrating with Direct File for 2024 (i.e. the 2023 tax year); Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming “may also be eligible,” due to not having state income tax, but it is not final. Every state was given the opportunity to participate in the Direct File program, but not all were “in a position to join.” Among the residents of these states, a limited number of individuals with “relatively simple returns” will have the opportunity to try Direct File. This will in turn “allow the IRS to evaluate the costs, benefits and operational challenges associated with providing a voluntary Direct File option to taxpayers.” In software terms, we’d probably call this an alpha.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – IRS Will Pilot Free, Direct Tax Filing In 2024

Last year, Andrew Appel, professor of computer science at Princeton University, wrote a 5-part series about Switzerland’s e-voting system, highlighting the inherent security vulnerabilities it faces and the safeguards the country has in place. Now, he’s writing about an interesting new vulnerability in the system that can be exploited to manipulate votes without anyone knowing. The vulnerability was discovered by Swiss computer scientist Andreas Kuster. From a blog post written by security technologist Bruce Schneier: “The Swiss Post e-voting system aims to protect your vote against vote manipulation and interference. The goal is to achieve this even if your own computer is infected by undetected malware that manipulates a user vote. This protection is implemented by special return codes (Prufcode), printed on the sheet of paper you receive by physical mail. Your computer doesn’t know these codes, so even if it’s infected by malware, it can’t successfully cheat you as long as, you follow the protocol.

Unfortunately, the protocol isn’t explained to you on the piece of paper you get by mail. It’s only explained to you online, when you visit the e-voting website. And of course, that’s part of the problem! If your computer is infected by malware, then it can already present to you a bogus website that instructs you to follow a different protocol, one that is cheatable. To demonstrate this, I built a proof-of-concept demonstration.”

Appel again: “Kuster’s fake protocol is not exactly what I imagined; it’s better. He explains it all in his blog post. Basically, in his malware-manipulated website, instead of displaying the verification codes for the voter to compare with what’s on the paper, the website asks the voter to enter the verification codes into a web form. Since the website doesn’t know what’s on the paper, that web-form entry is just for show. Of course, Kuster did not employ a botnet virus to distribute his malware to real voters! He keeps it contained on his own system and demonstrates it in a video.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Why Switzerland’s E-Voting System Is a Bad Idea

Long-time Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from Ars Technica, writing: “A new attack on the right to do with one’s property as the owner sees fit. First step, threaten without providing evidence.” From the report: Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could create some handy connections for their car. One CX60 driver had a charger that would only power on when it confirmed his car was plugged in and would alert him if he left the trunk open. Another used Home Assistant to control their charger based on the dynamic prices of an Agile Octopus energy plan. Yet another had really thought it through, using Home Assistant to check the gas before their morning commute, alert them if their windows were down before rain was forecast, and remotely unlock and start the car in cold conditions. The possibilities were vast, and purportedly beyond what Mazda’s official app offered.

Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler. In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler’s integration: contains code that “is violating [Mazda’s] copyright ownership”; used “certain Mazda information, including proprietary API information,” to “create code and information”; and contained code that “provides functionality same as what is currently” in Mazda’s apps posted to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for Android.

One day later, Rothweiler made a pull request to the Home Assistant core project: “I’m removing the Mazda integration due to a legal notice sent to me by Mazda.” The Home Assistant project pushed an update to remove the integration, posted about the removal, and noted that they were “disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position” and that “Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.” One of the many commenters confused by Mazda’s code claims said they couldn’t find any of the copyrighted code the company referenced. Additionally, Ars Technica suggests the project “could be considered a fair use exception to the DMCA, as explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

“When Mazda contacted me, my options were to either comply or open myself up to potential legal risk,” said Rothweiler. “Even if I believe that what I’m doing is morally correct and legally protected, legal processes still have a financial cost. I can’t afford to take on that financial risk for something that I do in my spare time to help others.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Mazda’s DMCA Takedown Kills a Hobbyist’s Smart Car API Tool

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An estimated 20,000 Britons have been approached by Chinese state actors on LinkedIn in the hope of stealing industrial or technological secrets, the head of MI5 has said. Ken McCallum said industrial espionage was happening at “real scale,” and he estimated that 10,000 UK businesses were at risk, particularly in artificial intelligence, quantum computing or synthetic biology where China was trying to gain a march. “Week by week, our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity by the likes of China in particular, but also Russia and Iran,” the MI5 director general said ahead of a summit of domestic spy chiefs from the Five Eyes agencies hosted by the FBI in California. “Activity not aimed just at government or military secrets. Not even just aimed at our critical infrastructure but increasingly [at] promising startups — innovative companies spun out of our universities, academic research itself, and people that understandably may not think national security is about them.”

A key attack vector, McCallum said, was to try and steal information by Chinese actors posing as recruitment consultants on LinkedIn. “We think we’re above 20,000 cases where that initial approach has been made online through sites of that sort,” he said, compared to 10,000 two and a half years ago. […] On Tuesday, the agency said it was aware of 20 instances of Chinese companies considering or pursuing use of “obfuscated investment, imaginative company structures” to circumvent regulations in order to gain access to technology developed by British companies and in universities. Details were scant but MI5 indicated it was aware of at least two Chinese companies trying to identify legal loopholes to access the sensitive technology of UK firms undetected, and another Chinese company acquiring research data stolen from a top UK university.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 20,000 Britons Approached By Chinese Agents On LinkedIn, Says MI5 Head

Meta will now let you block Instagram from collecting your data across the apps and websites you visit. From a report: The company says that it’s expanding the ability to disable this kind of tracking to Instagram, allowing you to review which businesses are sharing information with Meta, disconnect specific activity, or clear the collected information. You can now find this feature, called Activity Off-Meta Technologies, within the platform’s Accounts Center. It was previously only available for Facebook. Meta receives information from third-party websites that use its business tools, such as the Meta Pixel, which tracks users on the web and allows Meta to serve personalized ads on its platforms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Meta Will Now Let You Stop Instagram From Tracking You Across the Web

Amir Golestan, the 40-year-old CEO of the Charleston, S.C. based technology company Micfo, has been sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud. From a report: Golestan’s sentencing comes nearly two years after he pleaded guilty to using an elaborate network of phony companies to secure more than 735,000 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit which oversees IP addresses assigned to entities in the U.S., Canada, and parts of the Caribbean.

In 2018, ARIN sued Golestan and Micfo, alleging they had obtained hundreds of thousands of IP addresses under false pretenses. ARIN and Micfo settled that dispute in arbitration, with Micfo returning most of the addresses that it hadn’t already sold. ARIN’s civil case caught the attention of federal prosecutors in South Carolina, who in May 2019 filed criminal wire fraud charges against Golestan, alleging he’d orchestrated a network of shell companies and fake identities to prevent ARIN from knowing the addresses were all going to the same buyer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Tech CEO Sentenced To 5 Years in IP Address Scheme