Microsoft is opening up its own app store in Windows even further today, inviting third-party app stores to integrate into the Microsoft Store. It's a significant change that will see both Amazon and Epic Games Store discoverable in the Microsoft Store in the coming months. From a report: "Just like any other app, third-party storefront apps will have a product detail page -- which can be found via search or by browsing -- so that users can easily find and install it with the same confidence as any other app in the Microsoft Store on Windows," explains Giorgio Sardo, general manager of the Microsoft Store. "Today, we are sharing that Amazon and Epic Games will bring their storefront apps to the Microsoft Store over the next few months, and we look forward to welcoming other stores as well in the future." The news comes months after Microsoft announced some major changes to the Microsoft Store. Not only is the store being overhauled for Windows 11 and eventually Windows 10, but Microsoft will also let developers keep 100 percent of the revenue from apps if they use alternative payment platforms. The only exception is that this doesn't apply to games.

1Password is launching a new feature to let users create unique email aliases for logins, much like Apple's iCloud Plus Hide My Email function. From a report: 1Password is partnering with Fastmail to bring its masked email feature to the password manager, giving all users the option of hiding their email addresses from apps and services. "Your email address is your online identity," explains Bron Gondwana, CEO of Fastmail. "If your credentials are compromised in a data breach, having a randomly generated email address adds a second line of defense because it can't be associated with your primary email address, and therefore, your identity." This new masked email feature will be ideal for registering accounts for temporary purposes, like a free Wi-Fi network. But they can also be used to hide your personal email address from any app or service as the aliases don't expire unless a 1Password user manually deletes them.

Google is so successful that it's the most searched for term on Microsoft's Bing search engine, the company's lawyer told a European Union court on Tuesday. From a report: "We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is by far Google," Alfonso Lamadrid, a lawyer for the Alphabet unit, said at the EU's General Court in Luxembourg. The tech giant has asked EU judges to overturn a record $5 billion fine and strike down a 2018 antitrust order that said Google unfairly pushed its search app on mobile phones running its Android software.

Electric car inquiries are soaring as petrol stations in parts of the UK have started running out of fuel on Friday. The Guardian reports: While scenes of chaos play out at petrol stations across the country amid shortages, for many electric vehicle (EV) dealers the fuel crisis has led to an unexpected surge in inquiries and sales. EVA England, a non-profit representing new and prospective EV drivers, reports a rise in electric car inquiries and in interest at EV dealers, particularly in the last week. Along with existing factors such as the expansion of London's ultra-low emission zone, the fuel crisis has proved to be another trigger point, he said. "People were using it as 'this is the moment where I'm not going to put this off any longer,'" [said Martin Miller, owner of an electric car dealership in Guildford, Surrey].

The EV market is no longer the preserve of innovators and early adopters, he said, with the most popular models the Nissan Leaf, Volkswagen ID 3 and Jaguar I-Pace. Ben Strzalko, the owner of Electric Cars UK in Leyland, Lancashire, said that as a small business it would take a few months to feel the knock-on effect of the fuel crisis on sales. But every time there are problems with petrol or diesel, he said they acted as "one more tick for people making that transition to electric cars." Matt Cleevely, the owner of Cleevely Electric Vehicles in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which specialises in used EVs, had a surge of inquiries over the weekend and on Monday morning from customers citing the fuel crisis as a reason for switching to electric. He expects enthusiasm to continue rising, with petrol shortages adding "fuel to the fire." Further reading: Europe's Energy Crisis Is About To Go Global As Gas Prices Soar (Bloomberg)

schwit1 shares a report from GPS Daily: Engineering researchers have developed a method to use signals broadcast by Starlink internet service satellites to accurately locate a position here on Earth, much like GPS does. It is the first time the Starlink system has been harnessed by researchers outside SpaceX for navigation. The researchers used signals from six Starlink satellites to pinpoint a location on Earth within 8 meters of accuracy. The researchers did not need assistance from SpaceX to use the satellite signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites -- only to information related to the satellite's location and movement.

For this research, [Zak Kassas, director of the Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal Assured Navigation (CARMEN), a multi-institution transportation center housed at The Ohio State University] and his research team studied the Starlink system and analyzed signals being sent by the satellites. They developed an algorithm that could use the signals of multiple satellites to locate a position on Earth. Then, they set up an antenna on the campus of UCI and tried to use the network to pinpoint the antenna's location. Using Starlink, they identified the antenna's location within about 7.7 meters. GPS, by comparison, generally identifies a device's location within 0.3 and 5 meters. The team has used similar techniques with other low Earth orbit satellite constellations, but with less accuracy, pinpointing locations within about 23 meters, Kassas said. The team has also been working with the U.S. Air Force to pinpoint locations of high-altitude aircraft; they were able to come within 5 meters using land-based cellular signals, Kassas said. The research paper has been published in the journal IEEE Xplore.

Ford has issued a recall of 5,000 Mustang Mach-E electric SUVs in Canada over a risk of the glass roof and windshield potentially coming loose and falling off. Ironically, the automaker mocked Tesla for the same problem just a year ago. Electrek reports: The automaker just issued two recalls in Canada, and one of them is specifically about the risk of the glass roof coming off: "On certain vehicles, the glass panel of the panoramic sunroof may not be properly attached. Over time, the glass could become loose and separate from the vehicle."

Ford says that it affects 1,812 2021 Mustang Mach-E vehicles in Canada. On another 3,178 Mach-Es, Ford says that there's a similar problem that could result in the windshield coming off: "On certain vehicles, the windshield may not be properly attached. As a result, the glass can become loose and could separate from the vehicle in a crash." In both cases, Ford plans to notify the affected owners, check the roof and windshield, and reassemble them with more adhesive if needed. For now, it looks like the recalls are limited to Canadian Mach-Es, even though Ford produces all its electric SUVs at the same factory in Mexico.

YouTube Chief Executive Officer Susan Wojcicki said Google's video platform is beneficial to adolescents' mental health, amid growing concern that rival Instagram may be "toxic" for teenage girls. From a report: "We certainly do see for a lot of really tough issues that YouTube can be a really valuable resource," Wojcicki said in a Bloomberg Television interview. "So body positivity, mental health, we see a lot of creators actually talk about mental health and that, for a lot of kids, really it destigmatizes, and enables people to talk about what's happening and what's going on with them. So we do take it very seriously."

Technologist, physicist, and virtual reality professional Paul Tomlinson shares what it's like to spend 4,500+ hours "banging away at real work on virtual screens." Slashdot reader Keighvin shares an excerpt from his report, with the caption: "Portions of the 'metaverse' have leaked into 2021 from the future." Tomlinson writes: I float in space, surrounded on all sides by a grand view of the Milky Way Galaxy. A movie-theater-sized screen hangs before me, gently curved, everything at the perfect viewing distance. Eight different panes glitter with code, facets of a technological jewel granting views into the brain of a system responsible for moving tens of millions of dollars a day. A communications console canted like a drafting table at my fingertips holds a workshop of quick-fire exchanges with my colleagues, my meeting calendar, various API references, and camera feeds of the 'real' world. To my left, abutting the mammoth array of code, a two-story tall portrait display shows the specifications for the task at hand atop an ever-present Spotify playlist. I crank the tunes and get into my flow.

But this isn't an excerpt from some Ernest Cline novel -- this is my every-day experience. I'll spend 40-50 hours in Virtual Reality this week, like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2 1/2 years. It's not just fun and games -- there are plenty of those, along with exercise, meditation, creativity, socializing, etc. -- but for this article, I'm only focusing on (and counting) the work. [...] It's not a stretch to say I'm in the top few percent of VR users on the planet; I've spent much time watching developments in the field and extrapolating future possibilities. I don't insist on my version of the future, but I hope what I've seen is worth sharing. Keighvin asks: "How close are we to ditching screens? What would it take for you to work in VR or AR? What are the deal breakers?"

University students in courses from engineering to physics are having to be taught what files and folders are, The Verge reports, because that's not how they've grown up using computers. Whenever they need a file, they just search for it. PCGamer summarizes the findings: "I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it," astrophysicist Catherine Garland said. "They see it like one bucket, and everything's in the bucket." Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don't see their hard drives the same way.

"Students have had these computers in my lab; they'll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized," Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. "I'm kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files." As The Verge points out, "The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s [...] While many of today's professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today's students increasingly don't remember a world without them."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a reason to recoil in horror because how dare the youth of today do things differently, why the very idea. "When I was a student, I'm sure there was a professor that said, 'Oh my god, I don't understand how this person doesn't know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,'" Plavachan said. "This kind of generational issue has always been around." And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don't even need these subfolders," she said.

Alphabet unit Google on Monday blasted EU antitrust regulators for ignoring rival Apple as it launched a bid to get Europe's second-highest court to annul a record 4.34-billion euro ($5.1 billion) fine related to its Android operating system. From a report: Far from holding back rivals and harming users, Android has been a massive success story of competition at work, representatives of Google told a panel of five judges at the General Court at the start of a five-day hearing. The European Commission fined Google in 2018, saying that it had used Android since 2011 to thwart rivals and cement its dominance in general internet search. Regardless of how the court rules, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook will have to change their business models in the coming years to ensure a level playing field for rivals following tough new rules proposed by European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager.

"The Commission shut its eyes to the real competitive dynamic in this industry, that between Apple and Android," Google's lawyer Meredith Pickford told the court. "By defining markets too narrowly and downplaying the potent constraint imposed by the highly powerful Apple, the Commission has mistakenly found Google to be dominant in mobile operating systems and app stores, when it was in fact a vigorous market disrupter," he said. Pickford said Android "is an exceptional success story of the power of competition in action."

Facebook has announced a $50 million fund that it says will help it develop the metaverse more responsibly. From a report: It's officially called the XR Programs and Research Fund, and the company says it'll be invested into "programs and external research" over the course of two years. Facebook has previously funded academic research into the social impact of AR wearables and solicited VR hardware proposals. Facebook's announcement blog calls the metaverse the "next computing platform" and says that the company will be working with policymakers, researchers, and industry partners while building it. The announcement also gives us Facebook's definition of the sometimes nebulous word "metaverse." The company describes it as "virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people" that you're not physically with, spread out over a variety of products and services.

Instagram is pressing pause on plans to develop a version of its service for kids under 13 after facing pressure from lawmakers to back down on the effort and new questions about the impact the photo-sharing service has on teen girls. From a report: "While we stand by the need to develop this experience, we've decided to pause this project," Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote in a blog post published Monday. "This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today." The move comes just days before the US Senate was set to hold a hearing entitled "Protecting Kids Online: Facebook, Instagram, and Mental Health Harms" to discuss the pressure today's youth face on social media. That hearing comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation around what Facebook knows about how Instagram affects teen users, including their mental health. In the blog post Monday, Mosseri acknowledged that the Journal's reporting "has raised a lot of questions for people."

TikTok announced in a blog post today that 1 billion people use TikTok every month. From a report: That means that on this big rock in space that we call home, about one in seven-and-a-half people are regularly watching short-form videos of dancing, dangerous "milk crate challenges" and even actual educational content. For context, Facebook said that in June it had 2.9 billion monthly active users, up 7% year over year. But TikTok's growth is rapid -- this new user data marks a 45% increase in monthly active users since July 2020, when it had 689 million users. Plus, this July, TikTok became the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion global downloads, per app analytics firm SensorTower. The competition that TikTok poses to Western tech giants is palpable -- Instagram, owned by Facebook, has radically shifted its focus, declaring that it's no longer a photo-sharing app. Instagram is heavily promoting Reels, its TikTok clone, and even discussion forums like Reddit are enticed by the promise of short-form video feeds. Instagram even advised creators that if they recycle watermarked TikToks as posts on Reels, the content will be less discoverable.

When America's law enforcement investigators serve tech companies with subpoenas or search warrants,"the target of the investigation has no idea their data is being seized," the Washington Post pointed out this weekend.

It's becoming surprisingly common in the U.S. "And if investigators obtain a gag order, the records must be handed over without the person's knowledge or consent — depriving the person of an opportunity to challenge the seizure in court." Every year, Facebook, Google and other technology companies receive hundreds of thousands of orders from law enforcement agencies seeking data people stash online: private messages, photos, search histories, calendar items — a potentially rich trove for criminal investigators. Often, those requests are accompanied by secrecy orders, also known as nondisclosure or gag orders, that require the tech companies to keep their customers in the dark, potentially for years...

In the last six months of 2020, Facebook received 61,262 government requests for user data in the United States, said spokesman Andy Stone. Most — 69 percent — came with secrecy orders. Meanwhile, Microsoft has received between 2,400 and 3,500 secrecy orders from federal law enforcement each year since 2016 — or seven to 10 per day — according to congressional testimony by vice president of customer security and trust Tom Burt. Google and Apple declined to disclose the number of gag orders they've received. But in the first half of 2020, Google said U.S. law enforcement made 39,536 requests for information about 84,662 accounts — with many of the requests targeting multiple accounts. Apple said it received 11,363 requests...

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal prosecutors are required to seek digital information from tech companies, not their customers. Since then, prosecutors have routinely used gag orders to prevent the companies from spilling the beans to suspects who might destroy evidence, go into hiding or threaten someone's life. But the practice has mushroomed over the past two decades, part of a broader surveillance ramp-up following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, lawyers said. As the orders have proliferated, privacy advocates and the tech companies themselves have become increasingly concerned. Some tech company officials have accused prosecutors of reflexively requesting gag orders for routine investigations, regardless of whether the cases actually require such secrecy. And an array of company officials and legal experts argue that the practice robs tech company customers of their constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

"Across all the rest of society, it's understood that government doesn't get to take your stuff, doesn't get to come in and into your house, doesn't get to break into your file folders or your lock box at the bank without a warrant. And you get to know about that warrant and you get to exercise your legal rights," Microsoft's Burt said in an interview. "Someone cannot exercise their Fourth Amendment rights when their data has been taken in secret."
U.S. lawmakers are considering changes, the article points out. One idea? Require tech companies "to preserve digital files that are the subject of court orders and permit customers to challenge the orders in court before the information is turned over to prosecutors."

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon points out that's how wiretaps currently work — and is also drafting a measure that would finally require federal courts to publish statistics on the number of surveillance and secrecy orders they've issued.

America's Department of Defense "is taking input on its plan to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho," reports the Associated Press: The department began a 45-day comment period on Friday with the release of a draft environmental impact study evaluating alternatives for building and operating the microreactor that could produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power. The department's energy needs are expected to increase, it said. "A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that would not add to the DoD's fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments," the Defense Department said.

The draft environmental impact statement cites President Joe Biden's January 27 executive order prioritizing climate change considerations in national security as another reason for pursuing microreactors. The draft document said alternative energy sources such as wind and solar were problematic because they are limited by location, weather and available land area, and would require redundant power supplies. The department said it uses 30 terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons (37.9 million liters) of fuel per day. Powering bases using diesel generators strains operations and planning, the department said, and need is expected to grow during a transition to an electrical, non-tactical vehicle fleet. Thirty terawatt-hours is more energy than many small countries use in a year.

The department in the 314-page draft environmental impact statement said it wants to reduce reliance on local electric grids, which are highly vulnerable to prolonged outages from natural disasters, cyberattacks, domestic terrorism and failure from lack of maintenance. The department also said new technologies such as drones and radar systems increase energy demands...

The Defense Department said a final environmental impact statement and decision about how or whether to move forward is expected in early 2022. If approved, preparing testing sites at the Idaho National Lab and then building and testing of the microreactor would take about three years.

Slashdot reader Striek writes: VoIP.ms, a Canadian VoIP provider [also serving the US], has been under a sustained, and presumably massive DDoS attack which started on the September 16th, 2021. The attack has been disruptive enough to be covered by major media outlets, including Hacker News, ZDNet, Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, CTV News, and The Toronto Star.

They have so far refused to pay a ransom demand, which has grown from 1 bitcoin at the outset ($45,000 USD at that time), to 100 bitcoin now, or $45 million. Similar attacks have occurred recently on several UK based VOiP providers.

With DDoS attacks against VOiP infrastructure difficult to defend against — or at least more difficult than your bog-standard denial of service, this may be setting a worrying trend.
Bleeping Computer reported Monday that the attack was "severely disrupting the company's operation: As customers configured their VoIP equipment to connect to the company's domain name, the DDoS attack disrupted telephony services, preventing them from receiving or making phone calls. As DNS was no longer working, the company advised customers to modify their HOSTS file to point the domain at their IP address to bypass DNS resolution. However, this just led the threat actors to perform DDoS attacks directly at that IP address as well.

To mitigate the attacks, VoIP.ms moved their website and DNS servers to Cloudflare, and while they reported some success, the company's site and VoIP infrastructure still have issues due to the continued denial-of-service attack.
ZDNet has been following the story: In an update on Wednesday, VoIP.ms apologized to customers and confirmed it was still being targeted by what it described as a 'ransom DDoS attack' . VoIP.ms says it has over 80,000 customers in 125 countries.
And in addition, this afternoon the company's Twitter account announced that "Our main U.S. upstream carrier is currently experiencing major issues on their network affecting inbound and outbound calls and messaging to US numbers. We have already been in contact with their senior leadership team and they are on it along with their whole NOC."

"Harassment and abuse are all too common on the modern internet," writes the New York Times. "Yet it was supposed to be different in Germany." In 2017, the country enacted one of the world's toughest laws against online hate speech. It requires Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove illegal comments, pictures or videos within 24 hours of being notified about them or risk fines of up to 50 million euros, or $59 million. Supporters hailed it as a watershed moment for internet regulation and a model for other countries. But an influx of hate speech and harassment in the run-up to the German election, in which the country will choose a new leader to replace Angela Merkel, its longtime chancellor, has exposed some of the law's weaknesses...

Some critics of the law say it is too weak, with limited enforcement and oversight. They also maintain that many forms of abuse are deemed legal by the platforms, such as certain kinds of harassment of women and public officials. And when companies do remove illegal material, critics say, they often do not alert the authorities or share information about the posts, making prosecutions of the people publishing the material far more difficult. Another loophole, they say, is that smaller platforms like the messaging app Telegram, popular among far-right groups, are not subject to the law. Free-expression groups criticize the law on other grounds. They argue that the law should be abolished not only because it fails to protect victims of online abuse and harassment, but also because it sets a dangerous precedent for government censorship of the internet.

To address concerns that companies were not alerting the authorities to illegal posts, German policymakers this year passed amendments to the law. They require Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to turn over data to the police about accounts that post material that German law would consider illegal speech. The Justice Ministry was also given more powers to enforce the law... Facebook and Google have filed a legal challenge to block the new rules, arguing that providing the police with personal information about users violates their privacy.
An activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Berlin tells the Times the law could encourage companies to remove offensive-but-legal speech. And Twitter shared a statement with additional concerns. "Threats, abusive content and harassment all have the potential to silence individuals. However, regulation and legislation such as this also has the potential to chill free speech by emboldening regimes around the world to legislate as a way to stifle dissent and legitimate speech."

Yet Germany's experience may ultimately influence policy across Europe, the Times points out, since German officials "are playing a key role in drafting one of the world's most anticipated new internet regulations, a European Union law called the Digital Services Act, which will require Facebook and other online platforms to do more to address the vitriol, misinformation and illicit content on their sites."

Google used its "huge financial muscle" to illegally hurt competitors, the Competition Commission of India found after an antitrust investigation. But now Reuters says Google is suing the commission — for leaking the results of that investigation to the press: "We cooperated fully and maintained confidentiality throughout the investigative process, and we hope and expect the same level of confidentiality from the institutions we engage with," Google's statement added...

India's antitrust authority ordered a probe in 2019, saying Google appeared to have leveraged its dominance to reduce device makers' ability to opt for alternate versions of its mobile operating system and force them to pre-install Google apps. Its 750-page report subsequently found the mandatory pre-installation of apps "amounts to imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers" in violation of India's competition law. The report, which has been seen by Reuters but which is not public, also found the company leveraged the position of its Play Store app store to protect its dominance.

Google Photos' Locked Folder feature, which lets you hide sensitive photos and videos from your main library and secure them in a passcode- or biometric-protected folder, is coming to all devices running Android 6 and above. The Verge reports: The feature was released exclusively on newer Pixel phones in June. Google hasn't provided an exact date for when the feature is releasing more widely, noting only that it's "rolling out soon." When it announced the feature onstage at Google I/O in May, Google gave the wholesome example of the feature being used by parents hiding photos of a newly purchased puppy from their children. But I think it's fair to say that most people are going to have very different photos stored in their Locked Folder. I don't know about you, but in all the times I've had to wrench my phone out of someone's hand to stop them scrolling through my photos, it's never been because of a puppy picture.

Paul Ratner writes via Interesting Engineering: Theoretical inventions known as the "UFO patents" have been inflaming worldwide curiosity. A product of the American engineer Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, the patents were filed during his work for the U.S. Navy and are so ambitious in their scope and imagination that they continue to draw interest despite any clear evidence that they are feasible. The patents include designs for a futuristic hybrid vehicle with a radical propulsion system that would work equally well in the air, underwater, and in space, as well as a compact fusion reactor, a gravitational wave generator, and even a "spacetime modification weapon." The technology involved could impact reality itself, claims its inventor, whose maverick audacity rivals that of Nikola Tesla.

How real are these ideas? While you can read the patents for yourself, it's evident that the tech necessary to actually create the devices described is beyond our current capabilities. Yet research into many of these fields has gone on for years, which may explain why the Navy expressed an interest. Another likely influence is the fact that the Chinese government seems to be working to develop similar technology. The fantastical inventions devised by Dr. Pais largely build upon an idea that he calls "The Pais Effect." In his patent write-ups and in an interview with The Drive, he described it as "the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes (and hence high local energy densities) generated by controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma states) subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin, via rapid acceleration transients." This effect amounts to the ability to spin electromagnetic fields to contain a fusion reaction. The electromagnetic energy fields would be so powerful that they could "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level," writes Pais. In practical terms, this invention could lead to a veritable revolution in propulsion, quantum communications, and create an abundance of cheaply-produced energy. Certainly, an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, as posits the Sagan standard.

Despite the well-founded unease at Dr. Pais's inventions, the Navy took them seriously enough to run experiments for three years and even found some of them "operable," although the extent of that alleged operability is under debate. In the patent documents, two Navy officials seemed to assert the operability of the inventions. Furthermore, in correspondence with The Drive's "War Zone," Timothy Boulay of NAWCAD, stated that Pais's High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator was, in fact, tested from 2016 until 2019, at a cost of $508,000. The team working on the project consisted of at least 10 technicians and engineers and put in some 1,600 hours of work. But upon the conclusion of the testing, the Pais Effect "could not be proven," shared Boulay. What happened subsequently with the tested device and further investigations is not known at this point. There are indications in documents obtained by The Drive's WarZone through the Freedom of Information Act that the inventions could be moved to another research department in the Navy or the Air Force, or possibly even to NASA or DARPA, but whether that really happened is not clear. "One of the most attention-grabbing designs by Dr. Pais is the 2018 patent for a cone-shaped craft of unprecedented range and speed," writes Ratner. "Another futuristic patent with far-reaching ramifications is Pais' Plasma Compression Fusion Device. [...] Notes from researchers who worked on vetting Pais' ideas indicate that a possible outcome of the plasma fusion device and the high energy levels it may generate is the 'Spacetime Modification Weapon' (SMW). Research documents refer to it as 'a weapon that can make the Hydrogen bomb seem more like a firecracker, in comparison.'"

Pais also has a patent for an electromagnetic field generator, which could create "an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets." Another device conceived by Pais that could deflect asteroids is the high-frequency gravitational wave generator.