Dell says it has ceased all Russian operations after closing its offices in mid-August, the latest in a growing list of Western firms to exit Russia. From a report: The U.S. computer firm, a vital supplier of servers in Russia, has joined others in curtailing operations since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Dell suspended sales in Ukraine and Russia in February, saying it would monitor the situation to determine next steps. "In mid-August, we closed our offices and ceased all Russian operations," Dell spokesperson Mike Siemienas told Reuters. "Back in February, we made the decision to not sell, service or support products in Russia, Belarus and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, in addition to the already embargoed Crimea."

Trademark filings suggest that Apple may be staking claim to potential names for its highly anticipated mixed-reality headset, part of the tech giant's push into its first new product category in years. From a report: Applications were filed in the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica and Uruguay for the names "Reality One," "Reality Pro" and "Reality Processor." Though Apple itself didn't make the filings, they follow a pattern that the iPhone maker has used in the past -- including relying on law firms that the company has previously enlisted to lock down brands. Apple's headset is expected to combine virtual and augmented reality technology and vault the company into closer competition with Meta Platforms, the leading provider of VR gear. It's been seven years since the company last went after a new hardware category with the Apple Watch.

An anonymous reader quotes a story from the Linux/Open Source news site It's FOSS: While Firefox is still the default web browser in Debian, you can find the Chromium browser in the repositories. Chromium is the open source project upon which Google has built its Chrome web browser. It is also preferred by many Linux users as it provides almost the same features as Google Chrome.

Earlier, Chromium used Google as the default search engine in Debian. However, Debian is going to use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine for Chromium.

It all started when bug report #956012 was filed in April 2020, stating to use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine for the Chromium package. You can see the decision was not taken in any hurry, as the maintainers took more than two years to close the bug report.

The reason for the change goes as stated in the official package update announcement.

Change default search engine to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons. Set a different search engine under Settings -> Search Engine (closes: #956012).

The Washington Post shares a little-acknowledged downside to electric cars: recharging takes "upward of 15 to 30 minutes."

But scientists are already working on improvements: In a report released this week, government researchers said they have found a way to charge electric car batteries up to 90 percent in just 10 minutes. The method is likely five years away from making its way into the market, scientists said, but would mark a fundamental shift. "The goal is to get very, very close to [times] you would see at the gas pump," said Eric Dufek, a lead author of the study and scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research center run by the Department of Energy....

At issue is the delicate balance of trying to charge an electric vehicle battery quicker, but not doing it so fast that a rapid charge does long-term damage to the battery or plays a role in causing them to explode. Charging electric batteries fast can cause damage, reducing the battery's life span and performance, scientists said. "You've had batteries when you first got it, they were great, but after a couple years or a few hundred charge cycles, they don't perform as well," said Eric D. Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, an energy research organization at the University of Maryland. To try to solve this, Dufek and his team used machine learning to figure out how batteries age when charging fast. Their algorithm was trained to analyze 20,000 to 30,000 data points which indicated how well the battery was charging and whether it was aging or degrading....

Wachsman said the new research is helpful for the field. "Not too fast, not too slow," he said of Dufek's charging approach. "It's just right in that Goldilocks [zone]." But the bigger benefit, he said, would be if this method spurs car companies to make electric vehicles with smaller batteries, since they'd now have batteries that could be charged quicker and allow consumers to feel less worried about stopping periodically to get a quick recharge.

"Smaller batteries are cheaper cars," he said.

The Rand Corporation is an American (nonprofit) think tank. And veliath (Slashdot reader #5,435) spotted their recent warning about "a plausible scenario that could soon take place in the metaverse." A political candidate is giving a speech to millions of people. While each viewer thinks they are seeing the same version of the candidate, in virtual reality they are actually each seeing a slightly different version. For each and every viewer, the candidate's face has been subtly modified to resemble the viewer.... The viewers are unaware of any manipulation of the image. Yet they are strongly influenced by it: Each member of the audience is more favorably disposed to the candidate than they would have been without any digital manipulation.

This is not speculation. It has long been known that mimicry can be exploited as a powerful tool for influence. A series of experiments by Stanford researchers has shown that slightly changing the features of an unfamiliar political figure to resemble each voter made people rate politicians more favorably. The experiments took pictures of study participants and real candidates in a mock-up of an election campaign. The pictures of each candidate were modified to resemble each participant. The studies found that even if 40 percent of the participant's features were blended into the candidate's face, the participants were entirely unaware the image had been manipulated.

In the metaverse, it's easy to imagine this type of mimicry at a massive scale.

At the heart of all deception is emotional manipulation. Virtual reality environments, such as Facebook's (now Meta's) metaverse, will enable psychological and emotional manipulation of its users at a level unimaginable in today's media.... We are not even close to being able to defend users against the threats posed by this coming new medium.... In VR, body language and nonverbal signals such as eye gaze, gestures, or facial expressions can be used to communicate intentions and emotions. Unlike verbal language, we often produce and perceive body language subconsciously....

We must not wait until these technologies are fully realized to consider appropriate guardrails for them. We can reap the benefits of the metaverse while minimizing its potential for great harm.
They recommend developing technology that detect the application of this kind of VR manipulation.

"Society did not start paying serious attention to classical social media — meaning Facebook, Twitter, and the like — until things got completely out of hand. Let us not make the same mistake as social media blossoms into the metaverse."

"Google employees are receiving regular notifications from management of Covid-19 infections," CNBC report Friday — "causing some to question the company's return-to-office mandates." The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly....

The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth in 15 years. Google has offered full-time employees the option to request permanent remote work, but it's unclear how many workers have been approved.

Google's Covid-19 outbreak in Los Angeles is currently the largest of any employer in LA., according to the city's public health dashboard. Deadline.com first reported that the tech giant's trendy Silicon Beach campus in Venice, Calif., recorded 145 infections while 135 cases were recorded at the company's large Playa Vista campus.

Staffers have been filling Memegen, an internal company image-sharing site, with memes about the increased number of exposure notifications they're receiving. One meme, which was upvoted 2,840 times, showed a photo of an inbox with the email subject from a San Francisco-based facilities manager stating "We're so excited to see you back in the office!" and a subsequent email subject line stating "Notification of Confirmed COVID-19 Case...."

Some employees said they received a spike in notifications from the Mountain View, Calif. headquarters and in San Francisco offices after the company held a return-to-office celebration, where Grammy award-winning artist Lizzo performed for thousands of employees at the Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google's main campus.
Defending the safety of working on-site, a Google spokesperson told CNBC they hadn't been experiencing a sudden recent spike in their Covid cases, arguing that instead the hundreds of Covid cases had been occurring over "the last few months."

"Facebook's corporate parent has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world's largest social network service allowed millions of its users' personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica," reports the Associated Press: Terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, weren't disclosed in court documents filed late Friday. The filing in San Francisco federal court requested a 60-day stay of the action while lawyers finalize the settlement. That timeline suggested further details could be disclosed by late October.

The accord was reached just a few weeks before a Sept. 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his long-time chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to submit to depositions during the final phases of pre-trial evidence gathering, according to court documents... The lawsuit, which had been seeking to be certified as a class action representing Facebook users, had asserted the privacy breach proved Facebook is a "data broker and surveillance firm," as well as a social network.
Some background from UPI: The Facebook users sued the platform in June 2018, accusing it of violating privacy rules when it shared personal data with Cambridge Analytica and other third parties.... In March 2018, whistleblower and Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wylie revealed the data mining company was holding onto Facebook user data without the users' consent even after Facebook told the company to delete it.
Reuters describes Cambridge Analytica as "the now-defunct British political consultancy."

Politico reports that now lawyers for both Facebook and the plaintiffs have "asked the judge to put the lawsuit on hold for 60 days to allow the parties to 'finalize a written settlement agreement' and present it for preliminary approval by the court."

"Google launched a carbon emissions tool for its flight tracker last fall," remembers Gizmodo, "allowing consumers to see the individual emissions created by each flight they were browsing..."

"But last month the tech giant quietly shifted the algorithm to exclude a crucial component of the overall greenhouse gas impact of air travel."

The BBC reports: Flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before. "Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry's climate impacts from its pages" says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace. With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people's travel decisions.

The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners".

It affects the carbon calculator embedded in the company's "Google Flights" search tool.... [I]n July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2. Some experts say Google's calculations now represent just over half of the real impact on the climate of flights. "It now significantly understates the global impact of aviation on the climate", says Professor David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University, the author of the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the contribution of air travel to global warming.

Flying affects the climate in lots of ways in addition to the CO2 produced by burning aviation fuel. These include the creation of long thin clouds high up in the atmosphere — known as contrails — which trap heat radiated by the Earth, leading to a net warming effect on our planet. These additional warming impacts mean that although aviation is only responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions, the sector is actually responsible for around 3.5% of the warming caused by human activity.

"Since 2012 researchers in the Georgia Tech Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory have uncovered 47,337 malicious plugins across 24,931 unique WordPress websites through a web development tool they named YODA," warns an announcement released Friday: According to a newly released paper about the eight-year study, the researchers found that every compromised website in their dataset had two or more infected plugins.

The findings also indicated that 94% of those plugins are still actively infected.

"This is an under-explored space," said Ph.D. student Ranjita Pai Kasturi who was the lead researcher on the project. "Attackers do not try very hard to hide their tracks and often rightly assume that website owners will not find them."

YODA is not only able to detect active malware in plugins, but it can also trace the malicious software back to its source. This allowed the researchers to determine that these malicious plugins were either sold on the open market or distributed from pirating sites, injected into the website by exploiting a vulnerability, or in most cases, infected after the plugin was added to a website. According to the paper written by Kasturi and her colleagues, over 40,000 plugins in their dataset were shown to have been infected after they were deployed. The team found that the malware would attack other plugins on the site to spread the infection.

"These infections were a result of two scenarios. The first is cross-plugin infection, in which case a particular plugin developer cannot do much," said Kasturi. "Or it was infected by exploiting existing plugin vulnerabilities. To fix this, plugin developers can scan for vulnerabilities before releasing their plugins for public use."

Although these malicious plugins can be damaging, Kasturi adds that it's not too late to save a website that has a compromised plugin. Website owners can purge malicious plugins entirely from their websites and reinstall a malware free version that has been scanned for vulnerabilities. To give web developers an edge over this problem, the Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory has made the YODA code available to the public on GitHub.

Are there better ways to fight misinformation? "Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)

Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...." The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.

One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings."

Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said.

Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation....

The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."

Thursday Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant was cut off from the country's electricity grid, causing "widespread power outages across southern Ukraine," according to the New York Times. Friday afternoon it was reconnected to Ukraine's national power grid, the Times adds — "but its time offline renewed concerns about the safe operation of the plant..."

The Guardian notes it's the first such disconnection in nearly 40 years. Three other power lines connecting the reactors to the grid "had already been taken out during the war," though when the fourth and final line went out, "the plant still received supplies of electricity from one remaining backup line connected to the nearby conventional power plant." (Though two other lines to that power plant were already also down.) "Disconnecting the plant from the grid is dangerous because it raises the risk of catastrophic failure of the electricity-run cooling systems for its reactors and spent fuel rods.... If all external connections go down, it must rely on diesel-fuelled generators for power. If they break down, engineers only have 90 minutes to stave off dangerous overheating." (Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that during the break in power, back-up diesel generators did indeed immediately kick in to ensure continuous power supply, according to Reuters.)

But is Russia executing a larger strategy here? Earlier, Russian engineers informed plant workers that the nuclear plant would be switched to Russia's power network in the event of an emergency, according to the head of Ukraine's atomic energy company. Speaking to the Guardian, he adds that the plant's workers were told that "The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system" — and he worries that Russia is now attempting to create those preconditions.

He's not the only one thinking that. Voice of America interviewed a nuclear engineer at the plant who claims that Russian troops have several times "bombed places that cannot affect the safe operation of the power plant. I think that the Russians are trying to discredit the armed forces of Ukraine for the purpose of propaganda.... At the same time, the Russians deliberately damaged the high-voltage power lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant with the Ukrainian power system.... [T]he Russians want to arrange a small accident and stop Zaporizhzhia for a short time, then supply us with electricity from Crimea and automatically switch the nuclear power plant to the Russian energy system."

He also claims to have seen Russian military equipment stored in the plant. For example, "Different types of Russian artillery and missile installations are located both inside the territory of the nuclear power plant and around it, on the perimeter, near the Kakhovka Reservoir."

The last power line connecting the reactors to the grid was disconnected by fires "caused by shelling," the Guardian reported.

The New York Times reports on the aftermath: Ukrainian engineers were able to restore damaged external power lines after repeated shelling on Thursday, ensuring the facility was able to meet its own power needs and continue to operate safely, according to Ukrainian and international officials, but efforts to reconnect it to the grid took longer. With fires raging around the plant, new shelling in and around the facility on a near daily basis and an exhausted and stressed team of Ukrainian engineers tasked with keeping the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant running safely, however, calls for international intervention grew louder.

Negotiations with Ukraine and Russia to allow safety experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit and inspect the plant appeared to be making progress, as U.N. officials indicated they expected an agreement soon. "We are in active consultations for an imminent I.A.E.A. mission," a spokesman for the agency said.

The stakes are high.

"Nowhere in the history of this world has a nuclear power plant become a part of a combat zone, so this really has to stop immediately," Bonnie Denise Jenkins, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Russian actions, she said, "have created a serious risk of a nuclear incident — a dangerous radiation release — that could threaten not only the people and environment of Ukraine, but also affect neighboring countries and the entire international community."
Here's the opinion of that nuclear engineer at the Ukrainian nuclear plant (interviewed by Voice of America). "The expectation is that after the [International Atomic Energy] agency's conclusion, international pressure on Moscow will intensify, and Russia will be required to withdraw heavy weapons and troops from the nuclear power plant.

"I think this is unrealistic. The Russians will not leave here by their own will. Without a war, it is impossible."

The hackers that breached Twilio earlier this month also compromised more than 130 other organizations during their hacking spree that netted the credentials of close to 10,000 employees. TechCrunch: Twilio's recent network intrusion allowed the hackers to access the data of 125 Twilio customers and companies -- including end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal -- after tricking employees into handing over their corporate login credentials and two-factor codes from SMS phishing messages that purported to come from Twilio's IT department. At the time, TechCrunch learned of phishing pages impersonating other companies, including a U.S. internet company, an IT outsourcing company and a customer service provider, but the scale of the campaign remained unclear.

Now, cybersecurity company Group-IB says the attack on Twilio was part of a wider campaign by the hacking group it's calling "0ktapus," a reference to how the hackers predominantly target organizations that use Okta as a single sign-on provider. Group-IB, which launched an investigation after one of its customers was targeted by a linked phishing attack, said in findings shared with TechCrunch that the vast majority of the targeted companies are headquartered in the U.S. or have U.S.-based staff. The attackers have stolen at least 9,931 user credentials since March, according to Group-IB's findings, with more than half containing captured multi-factor authentication codes used to access a company's network.

New submitter alfabravoteam writes: Password management company LastPass has published information about a security incident. "We have determined that an unauthorized party gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information," reads the official message published.

They also clarify that no user data was lost. "We never store or have knowledge of your Master Password," the firm said in an FAQ. "We utilize an industry standard Zero Knowledge architecture that ensures LastPass can never know or gain access to our customers' Master Password", they inform. Hence, no action is required to users to follow.

Mark Zuckerberg says waking up every day as chief executive of Meta is like getting punched in the stomach. From a report: "You wake up in the morning, look at my phone, you get like a million messages, right, of stuff that come in. It's usually not good," Mr. Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in an episode on his show that aired Thursday. "It's almost like every day you wake up and you're, like, punched in the stomach," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "Now I need to, like, go reset myself and be able to kind of be productive and not be stressed about this." After processing the information he's given, he said he spends an hour or two doing physical activity such as surfing or mixed martial arts.

Justice Department lawyers are in the early stages of drafting a potential antitrust complaint against Apple, Politico reported Friday, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter -- a sign that a long-running investigation may be nearing a decision point and a suit could be coming soon. From the report: Various groups of prosecutors inside DOJ are assembling the pieces for a potential lawsuit, the individual said, adding that the department's antitrust division hopes to file suit by the end of the year. Still, the Justice Department has made no decisions whether or when to sue Apple, the world's most valuable public company, cautioned that person and one other familiar with the probe -- and it's still possible no case will be filed. Both were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation.

The company behind the bright green marijuana-themed trucks that crowd Manhattan's tourist districts is now paying the price for repeatedly breaking the law. They haven't been fined for selling anything illicit, but for being top contributors to one of the city's other infamous scourges: illegal parking. From a report: The New York City department of finance confirmed to the Guardian that Weed World Candies had paid $200,000 in parking fines to get back several vehicles that had been towed in June by the city's sheriff's office.

But while Weed World is apparently getting on the right side of the law, its payments only equal a fraction of the $534.5m the city is owed in unpaid parking fines, according to the agency, as serial offenders skirt the rules in one of the world's most maddening places to get around. In Midtown Manhattan, where competition for parking is cutthroat in a grid of cramped and chaotic roadways, trucks habitually stop in bike lanes, forcing cyclists into busy traffic; cars double-park as drivers sprint into bodegas to buy their increasingly expensive bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches. Police often turn a blind eye, amid allegations that they illegally park their personal cars and harassed a cyclist who reported them.

The vaccine manufacturer Moderna sued Pfizer and BioNTech on Friday, claiming that its rivals' Covid-19 shot violates its patents protecting its groundbreaking technology. NPR reports: The lawsuit alleges the two companies used certain key features of technology Moderna developed to make their COVID-19 vaccine. It argues that Pfizer and BioNtech's vaccine infringes patents Moderna filed between 2010 and 2016 for its messenger RNA or mRNA technology.

All three companies' COVID-19 vaccines used mRNA technology which is a new way to make vaccines. In the past, vaccines were generally made using parts of a virus, or inactivated virus, to stimulate an immune response. With mRNA technology, the vaccine uses messenger RNA created in a lab to send genetic instructions that teach our cells to make a protein or part of a protein that triggers an immune response. In October 2020, Moderna pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents while the pandemic was ongoing, according to a statement from the company. In March this year, it said it will stick to its commitment not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents in low and middle-income countries, but expects rival companies like Pfizer to respect its intellectual property.

Twitter founder and former chief executive Jack Dorsey says he regrets the social media platform became a company. From a report: "The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company," Dorsey tweeted in response to a question about whether Twitter turned out the way he had envisioned. Dorsey stands to receive $978 million if the agreement for billionaire Elon Musk to buy Twitter is completed. When asked about what structure he wished Twitter would operate under, Dorsey said that it should be "a protocol" and that Twitter should not be owned by a state or another company. If it were a protocol, Twitter would operate much like email, which is not controlled by one centralized entity, and people using different email providers are able to communicate with one another.

U.S wireless carrier T-Mobile will use Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's Starlink satellites to provide mobile users with network access in parts of the United States, the companies announced on Thursday, outlining plans to connect users' mobile phones directly to satellites in orbit. From a report: The new plans, which would exist alongside T-mobile's existing cellular services, would cut out the need for cell towers and offer service for sending texts and images where cell coverage does not currently exist, key for emergency situations in remote areas, Musk said at a flashy event on Thursday at his company's south Texas rocket facility. Starlink's satellites will use T-Mobile's mid-band spectrum to create a new network. Most phones used by the company's customers will be compatible with the new service, which will start with texting services in a beta phase beginning by the end of next year.

joshuark shares a report from PCMag: The official Windows developer documentation team at Microsoft decided to ask Microsoft Archivist Amy Stevenson "What was the largest piece of software we ever shipped?" The answer may surprise you... [T]he award goes to Microsoft C/C++ compiler with the Windows SDK, which was released in 1992 and weighed over 40 pounds. It included Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 in a box that was more than two feet long and allowed a developer to produce MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2 applications. As Stevenson points out, "we never did that again," and the next product launched was Visual C++.