An anonymous reader writes: This column about a writer's struggle to find the perfect note-taking app resonated a lot with me. "A singular productivity tool that works for everyone is a unicorn -- beautiful, perfect, and completely fictional. Still, there has to be some sort of middle ground between an unachievable fantasy and the current landscape. I would happily settle for two, maybe three apps. Honestly, less than 10 is all I'm asking for. Until then, my phone and laptop will be a cluttered mess of productivity apps that only do half their jobs," writes Victoria Song.

Over the years, I have tried Notion, Apple Notes, the good old Windows' Notepad, Roam Research, Obsidian, Google Keep, Google Docs, and OneNote among possibly many more that I am unable to recall anymore. Some support Apple Pencil, which is one of the usecases I find useful. Roam Research did not even have a native app for mobile devices for the longest time. Some applications are good, but they don't support online syncing, or support syncing with only a particular storage service. And have you noticed just how expensive some of these apps could get? As much as $15-$30 a month! Out of curiosity, and forget my usecases -- as I admit I have not mentioned many -- how do you maintain your notes for work and personal life. (I have been using physical notepads a lot more in recent months but would like an app for digital notes.)

It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes those things were documented, or at least hinted at, in blog posts that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95. From a report: A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch. Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds.

Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: "provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks."

Mozilla recently fixed a bug that was first reported 18 years ago in Firebox 1.0, reports How-to Geek: Bug 290125 was first reported on April 12, 2005, only a few days before the release of Firefox 1.0.3, and outlined an issue with how Firefox rendered text with the ::first-letter CSS pseudo-element. The author said, "when floating left a :first-letter (to produce a dropcap), Gecko ignores any declared line-height and inherits the line-height of the parent box. [...] Both Opera 7.5+ and Safari 1.0+ correctly handle this."

The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers.

The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned." "They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...."

"It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.]

[...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.

"A Microsoft employee appears to have accidentally announced that Windows 11's Notepad app is getting a tabs feature," reports the Verge: The employee, a senior product manager at Microsoft, posted a photo of a version of Notepad with tabs, enthusiastically announcing "Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!" with a loudspeaker emoji.

The tweet was deleted minutes later, but not before Windows Central and several Windows enthusiast Twitter accounts had spotted the mistake. The Notepad screenshot includes a Microsoft internal warning: "Confidential Don't discuss features or take screenshots...."

The addition of tabs in Notepad could signal a shift towards tabs appearing in more built-in Windows apps.

Ars Technica reports on a dangerously "wormable" Windows vulnerability that allowed attackers to execute malicious code with no authentication required — a vulnerability that was present "in a much broader range of network protocols, giving attackers more flexibility than they had when exploiting the older vulnerability." Microsoft fixed CVE-2022-37958 in September during its monthly Patch Tuesday rollout of security fixes. At the time, however, Microsoft researchers believed the vulnerability allowed only the disclosure of potentially sensitive information. As such, Microsoft gave the vulnerability a designation of "important." In the routine course of analyzing vulnerabilities after they're patched, IBM security researcher Valentina Palmiotti discovered it allowed for remote code execution in much the way EternalBlue did [the flaw used to detonate WannaCry]. Last week, Microsoft revised the designation to critical and gave it a severity rating of 8.1, the same given to EternalBlue....

One potentially mitigating factor is that a patch for CVE-2022-37958 has been available for three months. EternalBlue, by contrast, was initially exploited by the NSA as a zero-day. The NSA's highly weaponized exploit was then released into the wild by a mysterious group calling itself Shadow Brokers. The leak, one of the worst in the history of the NSA, gave hackers around the world access to a potent nation-state-grade exploit. Palmiotti said there's reason for optimism but also for risk: "While EternalBlue was an 0-Day, luckily this is an N-Day with a 3 month patching lead time," said Palmiotti.
There's still some risk, Palmiotti tells Ars Technica. "As we've seen with other major vulnerabilities over the years, such as MS17-010 which was exploited with EternalBlue, some organizations have been slow deploying patches for several months or lack an accurate inventory of systems exposed to the internet and miss patching systems altogether."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Neal Stephenson coined the phrase "metaverse" in his 1992 book Snow Crash. 30 years later, Stephenson is part of a blockchain startup "optimized for the Open Metaverse" called Lamina1. This week they announced their "first-of-its-kind fund" for investing in early stage Layer 1 blockchain projects ("largely focused" on the Open Metaverse). .

The goal is "to provide broad economic access to global accredited investors looking to support the next era of the internet," according to the announcement — and to also provide Web3 builders "a vehicle for raising capital for their Open Metaverse ventures." The fund will be led by Lamina1's co-founder Peter Vessenes (who, among other things, was the first Chairman of the Bitcoin foundation), "offering investors a chance to join him at the forefront of the emerging Open Metaverse economy..."

"Investors and builders can both apply to participate immediately." The fund launch will be closely followed by the much-anticipated launch of Lamina1's testnet.... The L1EF fund works by allowing accredited investors to access and co-invest in companies and entrepreneurs through quarterly subscriptions.

Investments will be largely focused on the technology and experiences users can access in the Open Metaverse, ranging from immersive computing to open AI at scale. To support the rapid advancement and expansion of the Open Metaverse, L1EF is simultaneously focused on investing in builders and creators who will foster the quality tech and infrastructure necessary to support the protocol, and create immersive experiences that bring Lamina1's vision of an Open Metaverse to life. Some of these early stage projects include layer 2 protocols, DeFi, GameFi, marketplaces, bridges, and many more.

"We're thrilled to introduce L1EF to serve both creators and investors who are actively promoting the development of an Open Metaverse," said Rebecca Barkin, President of Lamina1. "Peter has a deep understanding and demonstrated success of growing economies around a chain, and his approach to grant builders early access to capital — right as we're preparing to place testnet in their hands — is in perfect alignment with our mission to build the open infrastructure that brings together the most powerful creative community on the planet...."

In addition to capital, projects that are part of L1EF will receive early access and support for Lamina1 developer tooling through the forthcoming Lamina1 Early Access Program.
"The team has a front row seat to all happening in the ecosystem," Vessenes said this week, "and essentially gets a 'first look' at what many of the most compelling creators and storytellers of our time are doing, building, making, and producing around the world.

"We want to share that front row seat with as many people as possible."


In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor three journalists' physical location using their IP addresses, reports Forbes, "to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company's ongoing links to China." As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.... "It is standard practice for companies to have an internal audit group authorized to investigate code of conduct violations," TikTok General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a second internal email shared with Forbes. "However, in this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data...."

"This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People's Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected," Senator Mark Warner told Forbes....

ByteDance is not the first tech giant to use an app to monitor specific users. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties.... Both Uber and Facebook also reportedly tracked the location of journalists reporting on their apps.
Ironically, TikTok's journalist-tracking project involved the company's Chief Security and Privacy Office, according to Forbes, and targeted three Forbes journalists who had formerly worked at BuzzFeed News.

It was back in October that Forbes first reported ByteDance had discussed tracking journallists. ByteDance had immediately denied the charges on Twitter, saying "TikTok has never been used to 'target' any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists," and that "TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested."

Forbes also notes that in 2021, TikTok became the most visited website in the world.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader newbie_fantod for submitting the story!

Meta, Microsoft and Apple, and Google all want carbon-free power. But Google "says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities," reports the New York Times, especially those in America's Southeastern states which aren't facing a competitive market. Google's battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what's good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region's electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so. Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies....

Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities — a revolution that bypassed the Southeast. Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.

Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM....

The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it's not enough. In the region, the proposed solar projects' generating capacity is equivalent to just over a fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80 percent for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration. "Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers," Mr. Norris said.

For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

Under the bipartisan spending bill that passed both chambers of Congress as of Friday, TikTok will be banned from government devices, underscoring the growing concern about the popular video-sharing app owned by China's ByteDance. From a report: The bill, which still has to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, also calls on e-commerce platforms to do more vetting to help deter counterfeit goods from being sold online, and forces companies pursuing large mergers to pay more to file with federal antitrust agencies.

Congress failed to pass many of the most aggressive bills targeting tech, including antitrust legislation that would require app stores developed by Apple and Google to give developers more payment options, and a measure mandating new guardrails to protect kids online. And though Congress made more headway this year than in the past toward a compromise bill on national privacy standards, there remains only a patchwork of state laws determining how consumer data is protected. Center-left tech industry group Chamber of Progress cheered the exclusion of several antitrust bills that would have targeted its backers, which include Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users' personal information. From a report: The proposed settlement, which was disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday, would resolve a long-running lawsuit prompted by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users. Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the proposed settlement the largest to ever be achieved in a U.S. data privacy class action and the most that Meta has ever paid to resolve a class action lawsuit.

"This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case," the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, said in a joint statement. Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which is subject to the approval of a federal judge in San Francisco. The company said in a statement settling was "in the best interest of our community and shareholders." "Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program," Meta said.

b0s0z0ku writes: The European Union is proposing a law requiring easily replaceable batteries in new appliances and portable electronic devices. The law also sets targets for collection and recycling of those batteries, requiring 73% compliance by 2030. "Companies would get plenty of notice, however, as the requirement would only come into force 3.5 years after the legislation takes effect," adds 9to5Mac. "Companies will also be legally required to accept and recycle old batteries."

Additionally, the European Commission is "expected to consider outlawing the use of non-rechargeable portable batteries," though this would likely come with many exceptions and wouldn't happen before the end of the decade.

Further reading: EU Sets December 28, 2024, Deadline For All New Phones To Use USB-C for Wired Charging

The FBI is recommending the use of ad blockers, warning in an alert this week that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results to steal or extort money from victims. TechCrunch reports: In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with "minimum distinction" between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware. One of the FBI's recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands. Ad blockers don't just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history. "Of course, you can switch your ad blocker off any time you want, and even allow or deny ads for entire websites," adds the report.

"Ads are still an important part of what keeps the internet largely free and accessible, including TechCrunch (and Slashdot!), even as subscriptions and paywalls are increasingly becoming the norm."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: DuckDuckGo, the internet's favorite private search engine, is rolling out a new feature across its service Wednesday called Google Sign-in Pop-up Protection, It's on by default, saving your eyes and your time from Google's nagging. You can still sign in with Google whenever you want, you just don't have to deal with Google's prompts. "They popups are invasive, annoying and they undermine user privacy," said Peter Dolanjski, director of product for DuckDuckGo. "Google is employing a dark pattern by pushing you to sign in when you might not have otherwise. When you do, Google is is tracking what you do on those websites and linking it to your identity."

Google Sign In is nothing new, but the popups are a subtle but pervasive change to the web. You can find them on Booking.com, Pinterest, Reddit, Trulio, Zillo and countless more. "We believe google is pitching the popups to these websites as a win-win," Dolanjski said. "If they can get more users to sign in, it opens up more data collection both for Google and publishers, and it lets Google better target users with ads." That means more money for everyone involved, except you.

A small but growing number of universities are now blocking access to TikTok on school-owned devices or WiFi networks, in the latest sign of a widening crackdown on the popular short-form video app. From a report: The University of Oklahoma and Auburn University in Alabama have each said they will restrict student and faculty access to TikTok, in order to comply with recent moves from the governors in their respective states to ban TikTok on government-issued devices. The 26 universities and colleges in the University System of Georgia are also reportedly taking a similar step.

"In compliance with the Governor's Executive Order 2022-33, effective immediately, no university employee or student shall access the TikTok application or website on University-owned or operated devices, including OU wired and wireless networks," the University of Oklahoma said in an email this week. According to the email, the school will also require that university-administered TikTok accounts be deleted and "alternate social media platforms utilized in their place." Further reading: TikTok steps up efforts to clinch U.S. security deal.

A proposal to force cellphone companies to block certain spam texts is gaining momentum. From a report: California Attorney General Rob Bonta has expressed his support for a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to put an end to illegal and malicious texts. By doing so, he joined attorneys general from the other 49 states and Washington D.C., who had all previously expressed their support of the proposal. In a letter signed by all 51 attorneys general to the FCC, supporting them in their hopes to require cellular providers to block illegal text messages from invalid or unused numbers, as well as blocking any phone numbers found on a "do not originate" list, numbers which have previously been proved to have been used for fraudulent activity.

A new wave of chat bots like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine. From a report: Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape's web browser, Google's search engine and Apple's iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs. Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry's next big disrupter. [...] Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google's management to declare a "code red." For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm. Some fear the company may be approaching a moment that the biggest Silicon Valley outfits dread -- the arrival of an enormous technological change that could upend the business.

For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world's primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. One Google executive described the efforts as make or break for Google's future. ChatGPT was released by an aggressive research lab called OpenAI, and Google is among the many other companies, labs and researchers that have helped build this technology. But experts believe the tech giant could struggle to compete with the newer, smaller companies developing these chat bots, because of the many ways the technology could damage its business.

Google has announced that two of its latest privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including one that blurs objects in a video, will be provided to anyone for free via open source. From a report: The new tools are part of Google's Protected Computing initiative designed to transform "how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety," the company said. The first is an internal project called Magritte, now out on Github, which uses machine learning to detect objects and apply a blur as soon as they appear on screen. It can disguise arbitrary objects like license plates, tattoos and more.

The other with the unwieldy name "Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Transpiler, allows developers to perform computations on encrypted data without being able to access personally identifiable information. Google says it can help industries like financial services, healthcare and government, "where a robust security guarantee around the processing of sensitive data is of highest importance." Google notes that PETs are starting to enter the mainstream after being mostly an academic exercise. The White House recently touted the technology, saying "it will allow researchers, physicians, and others permitted access to gain insights from sensitive data without ever having access to the data itself."

The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection. From a report: In September, Kris Kashtanova announced that they had received a U.S. copyright on his comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book inspired by their late grandmother that she created with the text-to-image engine Midjourney. Kashtanova referred to herself as a "prompt engineer" and explained at the time that she went to get the copyright so that she could "make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI."