Tom Singleton reports via the BBC: A man got so fed up with foxes and badgers fouling in his garden that he adapted cameras to help repel them. James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds. He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them. Mr Milward said it “sounds crazy” but the gadget he called the Furbinator 3000 has kept his garden clean.

Getting the camera system to understand what it was looking at was not straightforward though. “At first it recognised the badger as an umbrella,” he said. “I did some fine tuning and it came out as a sink, or a bear if I was lucky. Pretty much a spectacular failure.” He fed in pictures of the animals through an artificial intelligence process called machine learning and finally, the device worked. The camera spotted a badger, and the high frequency sound went off to send the unwanted night-time visitor on its way and leave the garden clean for Mr Milward’s children to play in. The code for the Furbinator 3000 is open source, with detailed instructions available in Milward’s Medium post.

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Source: Slashdot – Man Trains Home Cameras To Help Repel Badgers and Foxes

Amanda Hoover reports via Wired: As few as 2 percent of New York City’s previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself. The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city’s short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating.

The crackdown in New York has created a “black market” for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she’s seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. “People are going underground,” she says. New York’s crackdown on short-term rentals has dramatically reshaped the vacation rental market in the city. People are using sites like Craigslist, Facebook, Houfy, and others, where they can search for guests or places to book without the checks and balances of booking platforms like Airbnb. Hotel prices are expected to rise with more demand. After the rule change, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company would be shifting attention away from New York, which was once its biggest market.

“I was always hopeful that New York City would lead the way — that we would find a solution in New York, and people would say, ‘If they can make it in New York, they can make it anywhere,'” Chesky said during an event in September. “I think, unfortunately, New York is no longer leading the way — it’s probably a cautionary tale.”

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Source: Slashdot – New York’s Airbnb Ban Is Bolstering a Rental Black Market

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Major corporations like Apple and Disney will be forced to disclose their carbon emissions under a new Californian law approved on Monday. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill — passed by the state legislature — requiring companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to report greenhouse gas emissions. Similar efforts are moving slowly at the federal level. Mr Newsom praised the law’s aims, but questioned how it will be carried out.

“This important policy, once again, demonstrates California’s continued leadership with bold responses to the climate crisis,” Mr Newsom wrote in a signing statement. “However, the implementation deadlines in this bill are likely infeasible.” He added that he is “concerned about the overall financial impact of this bill on businesses.” The California Air Resources Board must put a system in place for reporting emissions by January 1, 2025, a little more than a year from now, under the law.

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Source: Slashdot – California Requires Companies To Report Carbon Emissions

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release. The Windows biz said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of “Deprecated features for Windows client.” “VBScript is being deprecated,” Microsoft said. “In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system.”

VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006. “Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service,” Redmond explains in its help documentation. Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Says VBScript Will Be Ripped From Windows In a Future Release

“A set of merge requests were opened to drop X.ORG (X11) from GNOME desktop,” writes Slashdot reader motang. Phoronix reports: This merge request would remove the X11 session targets within gnome-session: “This is the first step towards deprecating the x11 session, the systemd targets are removed, but the x11 functionality is still there in so you can restore the x11 session by installing the targets in the appropriate place on your own. X11 has been receiving less and less testing. We have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016 and it’s about time we drop the x11 session completely. Let’s remove the targets this cycle and maybe carry on with removing rest of the x11 session code next cycle.”

That was followed by this merge request that would land later on — more than likely, one cycle later — for actually removing the X11 session code. Dropping that code would lighten up gnome-session by 3.6k lines of code directly.

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Source: Slashdot – GNOME Merge Requests Opened To Drop X11 Session Support

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Here’s how your computer should work, according to Mustafa Abdelhai, the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Deta. Instead of a big empty screen full of icons, your desktop should be an infinite canvas on which you can take notes or watch movies or run full apps just by drawing a rectangle on the screen. Instead of logging in to a bunch of cloud services over which you ultimately have no control, you should be able to download software like PC users did 20 years ago, and the stuff you download should be completely yours. All your apps should talk to each other, so you can move data between them or even use multiple apps’ features simultaneously. You should be able to use AI to accomplish almost anything. And it should all happen in a browser tab.

For the last couple of years, the Berlin-based Deta has been building what it calls “the personal cloud computer.” The product Deta is launching today is called Space OS, and the way Abdelhai explains it, it’s the first step in putting the personal back in the personal computer. “Personal computing took a dive at the turn of the century,” he says, “when cloud computing became the big thing. We all moved to the cloud, moved our data, and we don’t own it anymore. It’s just somebody else’s computer.” Deta wants to give it back. […]

Deta’s idea is both a very new one and a very old one. It harkens back to the early days of computers when you bought software in a box at a store and installed it on your computer. The cloud era, of course, made computing vastly easier and more powerful but also systematically ate away at the idea that you could control anything on your devices. It’s an interesting thought experiment, actually: if every cloud service shut down tomorrow, what would be left on your phone or your laptop? Odds are, not much. Deta’s trying to undo that a bit, to embrace the cloud and the expansive universe of apps while giving you back the feeling that your computer — and everything on it — is yours and no one else’s. Because your computer should be yours — even if it’s on somebody’s server.

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Source: Slashdot – Deta’s Space OS Aims To Build the First ‘Personal Cloud Computer’

According to analyst forecasts, Samsung Electronics is expected to report a nearly 80% plunge in earnings in the third quarter. CNBC reports: The South Korean technology giant will issue earnings guidance on Wednesday. Analysts polled by LSEG expect operating profit of 2.3 trillion Korean won ($1.7 billion) for the September quarter, a 78.7% year-on-year decline. Revenue is expected to come in at 67.8 trillion won, a fall of 11.6%, according to LSEG consensus forecasts.

Samsung’s semiconductor business — typically the company’s cash cow — is expected to post a more than 3 trillion won loss for the third quarter, according to analyst forecasts, as it continues to face headwinds. Memory chip prices have fallen dramatically this year due to a glut caused by oversupply and low demand for end products like smartphones and laptops. This has hit Samsung’s profits hard. In its last earnings reports in July, the company predicted a pick-up in demand for chips in the second half of the year, although this does not appear to be playing out as fast as many had hoped.

The tech giant has cut production in a bid to help shore up prices, though the effect is not likely to be seen in the third-quarter results. Daiwa Capital Markets said in a note earlier this month that it expects Samsung earnings to miss consensus estimates “due to the higher cost burden from the memory production cut and ongoing soft demand” for its chip manufacturing unit, known as the foundry business. Daiwa analyst SK Kim sees operating profit for the third quarter at 1.65 trillion won, much lower than the average analyst estimate of 2.3 trillion won.

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Source: Slashdot – Samsung Expected To Report 80% Profit Plunge As Losses Mount At Chip Business

Waymo is significantly expanding its robotaxi service in San Francisco. According to The Verge, the company’s driverless ridehail operations will now be available to tens of thousands of people across 47 square miles of the city. From the report: To be sure, Waymo’s service isn’t yet available to anyone who downloads the Waymo app and wants to ride. The Alphabet-owned company is in the process of onboarding riders from its waitlist, which it expects to complete in short order. “This territory expansion applies to those riders who currently have access to our service and all those to be added from the waitlist in the near future,” Waymo spokesperson Christopher Bonelli said in an email. “We are still seeing very strong demand, so we want to scale responsibly to maintain service quality and good user experience.”

Growing the number of people who want to pay Waymo for trips is incredibly important for the company, which spent at least $1.1 billion on autonomous vehicles between 2009 and 2015 — a figure that has assuredly grown exponentially in the proceeding years. Waymo will need to increase its revenue significantly if it hopes to turn autonomous vehicles into the profitable business that tech prognosticators have been promising for years. [The company needs more paying customers as it seeks to increase revenue so it can afford to expand to new cities like Los Angeles.]

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Source: Slashdot – Waymo’s Robotaxi Service Is Now Available To Thousands In San Francisco

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled (PDF) last month that the platform’s practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law. The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform’s ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that “Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people.” Further, she alleged that Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to “lookalike audiences.” Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook “discriminates against women and older people,” by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads. This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that “often change and may expire” — deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her — allegedly because advertisers used the platform’s Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her — as an older woman […]. “As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services,” Liapes’ complaint alleged. […]

Initially, a court agreed with Facebook’s arguments that Liapes had not provided sufficient evidence establishing Facebook’s intent or demonstrating harms caused, but rather than amend her complaint, Liapes appealed. Then, in what tech law expert Eric Goldman on his blog called a “shocking conclusion,” a California court last month reversed that initial decision, finding instead that Facebook’s ad-targeting tools are not neutral, discriminate against users by age and gender, and are not immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Goldman — who joked that Liapes wanting more Facebook ads is “a desire shared by almost no one” — said that the potential impact of this ruling goes beyond possibly shaking up Facebook’s ad system. It also seemingly implicates every other ad network by finding that “any gender- or age-based ad targeting for any product or service (and targeting based on any other protected characteristics) could violate the Unruh Act.” If the ruling is upheld, that could “have devastating effects on the entire Internet ecosystem,” Goldman warned. “The court’s single-minded determination to find a valid discrimination claim under these conditions casts a long and troubling shadow over the online advertising industry,” Goldman wrote in his blog. “Who needs new privacy laws if the Unruh Act already bans most ad targeting?”

“The opinion never expressly says that the Unruh Act regulates ad targeting,” Goldman told Ars. “It takes some reading between the lines to reach that conclusion.”

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook’s Sexist, Ageist Ad-Targeting Violates California Law, Court Finds

Climate breakdown is already changing the taste and quality of beer, scientists have warned. From a report: The quantity and quality of hops, a key ingredient in most beers, is being affected by global heating, according to a study. As a result, beer may become more expensive and manufacturers will have to adapt their brewing methods. Researchers forecast that hop yields in European growing regions will fall by 4-18% by 2050 if farmers do not adapt to hotter and drier weather, while the content of alpha acids in the hops, which gives beers their distinctive taste and smell, will fall by 20-31%.

“Beer drinkers will definitely see the climate change, either in the price tag or the quality,” said Miroslav Trnka, a scientist at the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. “That seems to be inevitable from our data.” Beer, the third-most popular drink in the world after water and tea, is made by fermenting malted grains like barley with yeast. It is usually flavoured with aromatic hops grown mostly in the middle latitudes that are sensitive to changes in light, heat and water. Climate-induced decline in the quality and quantity of European hops calls for immediate adaptation measures (Nature).

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Source: Slashdot – Climate Crisis Will Make Europe’s Beer Cost More and Taste Worse, Say Scientists

Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity,” Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating. From a report: Finnish and Estonian gas system operators on Sunday said they noted an unusual drop in pressure in the Balticconnector pipeline after which they shut down the gas flow. The Finnish government on Tuesday said there was damage both to the gas pipeline and to a telecommunications cable between the two NATO countries. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo stopped short of calling the pipeline leak sabotage, but said it could not have been caused by regular operations. “According to a preliminary assessment, the observed damage could not have occurred as a result of normal use of the pipe or pressure fluctuations. It is likely that the damage is the result of external activity,” Orpo said. Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation was leading an investigation into the leak, Orpo said, adding that the leak occurred in Finland’s economic zone.

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Source: Slashdot – Finnish President Says Undersea Gas and Telecom Cables Damaged By ‘External Activity’

Adobe on Tuesday said it is rolling out new image-generation technology that can draw inspiration from an uploaded image and match its style, in its latest push to compete with startups challenging its core business. From a report: Image-generating technology from firms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have threatened Adobe’s customer base of creative professionals who use its tools like Photoshop. The San Jose, California-based company has responded by aggressively developing its own version of the technology and injecting it into its software programs. Adobe, which has promised its customers that generated images will be safe from legal challenges, said those customers have used the tools to generate three billion images, a billion of them in the last month alone.

The new generation of tools announced on Tuesday will include a feature called “Generative Match”. Like Adobe’s earlier tool, it will allow users to generate an image from a few words of text. But it will also allow users to upload as few as 10 to 20 images to use as a basis for the generated images. Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s chief technology officer for digital media, said the company aims to let big brands upload a handful of photos of a product or character and then use generative technology to automatically make hundreds or thousands of images for various needs like websites, social media campaigns and print advertisements.

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Source: Slashdot – Adobe Unveils New Image Generation Tools in AI Push

Valve says it has no plans for a macOS version of the recently released game Counter-Strike 2, the follow-up title replacing the hugely popular FPS Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. From a report: Valve confirmed its decision and gave its reasons in a newly published Steam support FAQ: “As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players. Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux.”

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Source: Slashdot – Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren’t Enough Players on Mac To Justify It

The chief executive of RISC-V International says that possible government restrictions on the open-source technology will slow down the development of new and better chips, holding back the global technology industry. From a report: The comments come after Reuters last week reported that a growing group of U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to impose export control restrictions around RISC-V, the open-source technology overseen by the RISC-V International nonprofit foundation. RISC-V technology can be used as an ingredient to create chips for smartphones or artificial intelligence. Major U.S. firms such as Qualcomm and Alphabet’s Google have embraced RISC-V, but so too have Chinese firms such as Huawei, which the U.S. lawmakers argue constitutes a national security concern.

In a blog post, Calista Redmond, chief of RISC-V International, which coordinates work among companies on the technology, said RISC-V is no different than other open technology standards like Ethernet, which helps computers on the internet talk with each other. “Contemplated actions by governments for an unprecedented restriction in open standards will have the consequence of diminished access to the global marketplace of products, solutions, and talent,” Redmond wrote. “Bifurcating on the standards level would lead to a world of incompatible solutions that duplicate effort and close off markets.”

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Source: Slashdot – RISC-V Group Says Restrictions on Open Technology Would Slow Innovation

Members of the vintage Mac community are in desperate need of a new supply of a specific, discontinued dongle that has become increasingly rare and extremely expensive on the secondary market. From a report: “Bring Back the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI Cable for Vintage Apple Macs!,” a change.org petition created this week by vintage Mac enthusiast Grant Woodward reads. “I am deeply concerned about the discontinuation of the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI cable. This essential piece of technology has become increasingly rare and difficult to find since it went out of production,” the petition reads. “For those unfamiliar with its significance, this cable allows vintage Apple Macintosh computers to connect with more recent monitors, breathing new life into these iconic machines. It is an invaluable tool for restoring, collecting, and preserving these pieces of computing history.” As Woodward notes, the adapter in question allows an older generation of Power Mac G3 and G4 from the early 2000s to connect to newer monitors.

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Source: Slashdot – Vintage Mac Community Begs Manufacturers for New Supply of Rare Dongle as Resellers Charge 0

wiredmikey writes: A zero-day vulnerability named ‘HTTP/2 Rapid Reset’ has been exploited by malicious actors to launch the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in internet history. One of the attacks seen by Cloudflare was three times larger than the record-breaking 71 million requests per second (RPS) attack reported by company in February. Specifically, the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS campaign peaked at 201 million RPS, while Google’s observed a DDoS attack that peaked at 398 million RPS. The new attack method abuses an HTTP/2 feature called ‘stream cancellation’, by repeatedly sending a request and immediately canceling it.

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Source: Slashdot – HTTP/2 Zero-Day Exploited To Launch Largest DDoS Attacks In History

Business interest in AI PCs is fizzing, at least according to IDC, even though the analyst admits “use cases have yet to be fully articulated.” From a report: Such is the hype around generative AI since ChatGPT was made publicly available that big software and hardware brands are looking to shoe horn the tech into every nook and cranny. Just last week HP boss Enrique Lores and Lenovo exec Luca Rossi joined in by confirming both companies are working on a range of AI PCs for general availability between July next year and early 2025. Neither went into fine technical detail on what those machines will have inside because they aren’t close to release.

IDC research veep for Devices & Displays, Linn Huang, didn’t pour any cold water on the hype this week when he said: “Generative AI could be a watershed moment for the PC industry. While uses cases have yet to be fully articulated, interest in the category is already strong. AI PCs promise organizations the ability to personalize the user experience at a deeper level all while being able to preserve data privacy and sovereignty.” That’s quite a billing. HP and Lenovo certainly seem to think there’s margin potential. Huang agreed. “As more of these devices launch next year, we expect a significant boost to overall selling prices.”

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Source: Slashdot – IDC: AI is a Solution for a PC Industry With a Sales Problem

The European Union will do all it can to halt fossil fuel use as part of its “ambitious” position at the upcoming COP28 climate summit despite some differences among EU countries, the bloc’s new climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said on Monday. From a report: “Our ambition is indeed to do as much as possible, also in terms of driving out fossil fuels,” Hoekstra told journalists after a meeting with Spain’s acting Energy Minister Teresa Ribera. The European Union’s own green agenda is facing growing political resistance from governments and lawmakers concerned about the cost of the proposals for voters. European Parliament elections will be held next year as citizens throughout the bloc are facing cost of living pressures. “Our goal will be one of ambition for the COP, from every single aspect: mitigation, adaptation, renewables,” Hoekstra said, even though “if you zoom out and look at the 27 member states, you might see differences.” Hoekstra declined to give details on the EU negotiating mandate for the COP28. “In our view there is no alternative to driving out fossil fuel asap,” he said. “The saying is that it takes two to tango. In this case, it takes almost 200.”

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Source: Slashdot – EU Will Do ‘as Much as Possible’ To Drive Out Fossil Fuels, Climate Chief Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain’s opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis. The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.

Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender — a deepfake detection business — disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: “We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that’s been going around (a transcoding). As we don’t have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case 75%) and never a definitive score (‘this is fake’ or ‘this is real’), leaning much more towards ‘this is likely manipulated’ than not,” said Colman. “It is also our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – UK Opposition Leader Targeted By AI-Generated Fake Audio Smear

Google has announced that passkeys, touted by the tech giant as the “beginning of the end” for passwords, are becoming the default sign-in method for all users. From a report: Passkeys are a phishing-resistant alternative to passwords that allow users to sign into accounts using the same biometrics or PINs they use to unlock their devices, or with a physical security key. This removes the need for users to rely on the traditional username-password combination, which has long been susceptible to phishing, credential stuffing attacks, keylogger malware, or simply being forgotten. While security technologies multi-factor authentication and password managers add an extra layer of security to password-protected accounts, they are not without flaws. Authentication codes sent via text messages can be intercepted by attackers, for example, and password managers can (and have been) hacked.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Makes Passkeys the Default Sign-in Method For All Users