An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets -- and more specifically what we deposit into them. "We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool," says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. "We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool." As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyze waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months. "The toilet that you have in your home has not functionally changed in its design since it was first introduced," she says, in the second half of the 19th century. There are, of course, now loos with genital-washing capabilities, or heated seats, but this is basic compared with what Grego is envisaging. "All other aspects of your life -- your electricity, your communication, even your doorbell -- have enhanced capabilities."

Smart toilet innovators believe the loo could become the ultimate health monitoring tool. Grego believes her product -- which analyses and tracks stool samples and sends the data to an app -- will provide "information related to cancer and many chronic diseases." For general consumers, it will provide peace of mind, she says, by establishing "a healthy baseline": "Having technology that tracks what is normal for an individual could provide an early warning that a checkup is needed." For people with specific conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, the device could provide helpful monitoring for doctors. "It's very difficult to know when to escalate or de-escalate treatment," she says. "Stool-based biomarkers can provide that information." At some point, she thinks, a smart toilet could make lifestyle suggestions -- it could tell you to eat more fibre or certain nutrients, for instance, or work out what kind of food triggered an uncomfortable gastric episode. "The science of nutrition is really moving in the direction of personalized nutrition," says Grego. "Our technology will be an enabler of this, because you have information of what you eat, but we can make seamless the obtaining of information of what comes out." Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine have been working on technology that can analyze feces (including "stool dropping time") and track the velocity and color of urine, as well as test it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the researchers have partnered with Izen, a Korean toilet manufacturer that's developed a scanner that can recognize the physical characteristics of whoever is sitting on the toilet -- or, in the words of the researchers, "the distinctive features of their anoderm" (the skin of the anal canal). While many people are ready for the smart toilet era, Stanford's study of user acceptance found that the "least favored module is analprint."

The Guardian article continues: Is all this -- your analprint out in the world, the makeup of your bowel movements analyzed -- a privacy breach too far? "Can it be kept secure?" asks Eerke Boiten, a professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University in Leicester. [...] Many people "wouldn't, for very good reasons, like cameras pointing up their bottoms," says Phil Booth, the coordinator of MedConfidential, which campaigns for the confidentiality of medical records. That said, under the guidance of a medical professional, "there are not necessarily inherent privacy risks" in using a smart toilet as a medical device, he says. However, it might get interesting if the data created by general consumer use was owned by a company: "You may trust that particular company, but every company is pretty much buyable by Google or Facebook or Amazon. Then, what I thought was something for my own health monitoring has become fodder to business models I really know nothing about."

Where does it end? Could the police or others involved in surveillance track you by analprint, via the public and home smart lavatories you visit? Might you be asked to provide a print at a police station? [...] "Once you start to measure something that is of the body, the privacy line is stepped over," says Booth. "If you don't measure what's going on with someone's bowel movements, the bowel movement is private." This is an alarming thought -- but, says Booth with a laugh, it is not as though governments will mandate smart toilets. He says there will always be people -- those into the "quantified self" movement -- who are happy to measure and track themselves. If smart loos are considered clinical devices collecting medical data, "then it's a straight medical breach risk -- not special to toilets, but because you've turned the toilet into a medical data-generating experience. Are they managing those risks correctly?"

Facebook announced a new project on Thursday that will bring broadband service to thousands of households in Virginia this fall, in partnership with a local ISP and utility company. The Verge reports: The project began with fiber networks Facebook was already building to connect its data centers in Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. With that fiber already laid, Facebook partnered with Appalachian Power and GigaBeam Networks to extend the networks to roughly 6,000 households in Grayson County, VA. The homes are projected to have high-speed broadband access by the end of this fall. "These are really complicated problems that we're trying to solve. If they weren't complicated, then we still wouldn't have 19 million people that were unserved or underserved," Michele Kohler, Facebook's network investments team manager, told The Verge in an interview Wednesday. "We're trying to figure out how can we play in the equation, with these complex partnerships, to figure out how we can help people get connected faster."

Kohler also said that Facebook is providing "engineering and technical resources" to the partnering companies. The proposed network would leverage a new law approved by the Virginia legislature last year that allows electric and communications companies to string fiber along existing poles and conduits. Still, the future of these networks is unclear as utility companies like Rappahannock Electric Cooperative have been sued by property owners for infringing on their property rights when they've sought to invoke the new provisions.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever tried searching on Google for one of those TikTok or Instagram videos all your friends are gushing about -- such as sea shanties or the Renegade dance -- you'll notice something. The videos don't show up. Google is trying to fix that -- but there's no guarantee its efforts will succeed. Google executives have been quietly negotiating with their counterparts at the video apps' parent companies, ByteDance for TikTok and Facebook for Instagram, to get the data it needs to index and rank videos, according to three people who were briefed about the discussions. Right now, the best results users typically see when they search are previews of videos from Google-owned YouTube, which at times hosts lower-quality copies or ripoffs of TikTok and Instagram videos. The talks show how Google is trying to keep its search engine relevant with more users as it faces new competition and regulatory threats.

The FCC has sent out the first checks from its Emergency Connectivity Fund, an effort to help close the "homework gap" at schools by covering the cost of computers and internet services. From a report: Thousands of school districts, in every state plus D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico, will split this first $1.2 billion distribution, and there's still lots more to come. The problem they are looking to mitigate is the large number of students who, in an age when studying, homework and now even classes are all done online, lack a device or adequate internet connection to participate. This exacerbates an existing inequality, for these students often lack access to other resources and end up falling behind through no fault of their own. The ECF was conceived to combat this, and funded earlier this year as part of the big pandemic recovery bill. It's a $7 billion program in total, but the money is being distributed over time as schools and libraries make their formal requests, saying they need to cover the cost of this many tablets, or wireless hotspots, or broadband connections. The FCC seems to be picking up the bill as long as the request is reasonable and the paperwork is in order.

Starting in 2030, California will require all light-duty autonomous vehicles that operate in the state to emit zero emissions. From a report: Signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday, SB 500 represents the latest effort by the state to limit the sale of new internal combustion vehicles with an eye towards reducing greenhouse emissions. In 2020, Newsom signed an executive order that effectively banned the sale of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. That same year, the state's Air Resources Board mandated that all new trucks sold in California emit zero emissions by 2045. "We're grateful for California's leadership in ensuring this will be the industry standard," said Prashanthi Raman, head of global government affairs at Cruise, in a statement to Engadget. "The AV industry is primed to lead the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in cities, and it's why we've operated an all-electric, zero-emissions fleet from the start." Cruise backed SB 500 through its involvement with the Emission Zero Coalition, a group that also includes autonomous delivery startup Nuro.

A software outage temporarily affected the U.K. Border Force's automated entry gates, slowing arrivals at airports across the country. From a report: Hubs in London Heathrow and Manchester reported issues before the Home Office said the problem was resolved. "We're aware of a systems failure impacting the e-gates, which are staffed & operated by Border Force," Heathrow said in a tweet. "This issue is impacting a number of ports of entry." Travelers reported long lines at Heathrow, with documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux describing a "human logjam" at the nation's largest airport.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Verge has spotted an apparently new warning message in the Windows 11 Setup app that explicitly warns users of the dangers of installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware -- you may run into "compatibility issues," your PC "won't be entitled to receive updates," and that "damages to your PC due to lack of compatibility aren't covered under the manufacturer warranty." This is all stuff that we've heard from Microsoft before, but it's the first time that this policy has appeared during the Windows 11 setup process rather than in media reports. Once you click through this foreboding warning message, the Windows 11 installation is apparently allowed to proceed.

I've tried and failed to recreate this screen on multiple unsupported Windows 10 systems of different vintages, both with builds downloaded through the Insider program and installs directly from a manually downloaded Windows 11 ISO file. I also haven't seen any firsthand reports of it outside of the Verge report. This doesn't mean it isn't happening -- Microsoft is always rolling out different updates to different groups of people at different times -- just that I can only speculate as to when you will actually see this message and what it means. My guess is that it is eventually intended to replace another screen currently shown when you attempt a manual install of Windows on an unsupported system, one that totally blocks the upgrade if you don't meet Windows 11's processor, TPM, or Secure Boot requirements. The only way to get around that screen and proceed with installation for current builds of Windows 11 is to implement some registry edits that disable the system checks. This new screen would keep the checks in place while allowing people to perform the kind of manual, officially unsupported installs that the company has begrudgingly decided to allow.

The Salesforce CEO and owner of Time Magazine, Marc Benioff, sees a common thread for what ails America today: deception that is allowed to spread like wildfire on Facebook. "This digital revolution really kind of has the world in its grip. And in that grip, you can see the amount of mistrust and misinformation that is happening," Benioff told CNN. From a report: "Look at how it is affecting the world. You can talk about the political process. You can talk about climate. You can talk about the pandemic," Benioff said. "In each and every major topic, it gets connected back to the mistrust that is happening and especially the amount of it being seeded by the social networks. It must stop now."

"Some of these social media companies, especially Facebook, you can see that they don't really care that their platform is filled with all of this disinformation," Benioff said. The tech billionaire called for Congress to crack down on Facebook's disinformation problem. "I own Time and I am held accountable for what is produced on my platform," Benioff said, adding that CNN and other media outlets are also held accountable. "In regards to Facebook, they are not held accountable. So they do not have an incentive from the government. That has to change." Benioff urged Congress to review existing laws to try to stop the "level of deceit" happening on social networks.

According to multiple databases, researchers, and cybersecurity companies who spoke to MIT Technology Review, 2021 has had the highest number of zero-day exploits on record. "At least 66 zero-days have been found in use this year, according to databases such as the 0-day tracking project -- almost double the total for 2020, and more than in any other year on record," the report says. From the report: One contributing factor in the higher rate of reported zero-days is the rapid global proliferation of hacking tools. Powerful groups are all pouring heaps of cash into zero-days to use for themselves -- and they're reaping the rewards. At the top of the food chain are the government-sponsored hackers. China alone is suspected to be responsible for nine zero-days this year, says Jared Semrau, a director of vulnerability and exploitation at the American cybersecurity firm FireEye Mandiant. The US and its allies clearly possess some of the most sophisticated hacking capabilities, and there is rising talk of using those tools more aggressively.

Attackers are exploiting the same types of software vulnerabilities over and over again, because companies often miss the forest for the trees. And cybercriminals, too, have used zero-day attacks to make money in recent years, finding flaws in software that allow them to run valuable ransomware schemes. "Financially motivated actors are more sophisticated than ever," Semrau says. "One-third of the zero-days we've tracked recently can be traced directly back to financially motivated actors. So they're playing a significant role in this increase which I don't think many people are giving credit for."

While there may be an increasing number of people developing or buying zero-days, the record number reported isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some experts say it might be mostly good news. No one we spoke to believes that the total number of zero-day attacks more than doubled in such a short period of time -- just the number that have been caught. That suggests defenders are becoming better at catching hackers in the act. You can look at the data, such as Google's zero-day spreadsheet, which tracks nearly a decade of significant hacks that were caught in the wild. One change the trend may reflect is that there's more money available for defense, not least from larger bug bounties and rewards put forward by tech companies for the discovery of new zero-day vulnerabilities. But there are also better tools. Defenders have clearly gone from being able to catch only relatively simple attacks to detecting more complex hacks, says Mark Dowd, founder of Azimuth Security. "I think this denotes an escalation in the ability to detect more sophisticated attacks," he says. Further reading: Emergency Software Patches Are on the Rise

A collection containing data about more than 700 million users, believed to have been scraped from LinkedIn, was leaked online this week after hackers previously tried to sell it earlier this year in June. From a report: The collection, obtained by The Record from a source, is currently being shared in private Telegram channels in the form of a torrent file containing approximately 187 GB of archived data. The Record analyzed files from this collection and found the data to be authentic, with data points such as: LinkedIn profile names, LinkedIn ID, LinkedIn profile URL, location information (town, city, country), and email addresses. While the vast majority of the data points contained in the leak are already public information and pose no threat to LinkedIn users, the leak also contains email addresses that are not normally viewable to the public on the official LinkedIn site.

Is the FAA licensing spaceports that are doomed to fail? From a report: The latest launch attempt out of Kodiak, Alaska's spaceport shows in vivid detail just how quickly things can go sideways. In the video, rocket maker Astra's 3.3 skids horizontally for hundreds of yards, then shoots some 20 miles upwards, listing off course. Ground crew terminates the flight, and the craft free falls back to Earth in pieces, landing in a fireball. None of Astra's six test flights from Kodiak's Pacific Spaceport Complex have made it into orbit, and five have exploded. But, as Jeff Bezos says, failure and innovation are inseparable twins.

Analysts expect the commercial space industry to be worth $1 trillion by 2040, and increasingly, small towns are angling to get in on the action. One such community is Camden County, Georgia, where a group of county commissioners is longing for their own spaceport -- and the economic growth and diversification they hope will come with it. There's one caveat: Spaceport Camden's sole proposed launch trajectory would, in an unprecedented move, cross two populated islands, as well as a federally protected marshland and wilderness, just a few miles from the toxic brownfield set to become the launch site.

To some residents, this seems like an astronomically bad idea. But failures -- even explosive ones -- don't faze Camden County: according to spaceport planners, Astra is a prime launch tenant candidate, and Alaska Aerospace Corporation, which runs Kodiak's spaceport, could become an operation partner. All they need to get this plan off the ground is an operation license from the Federal Aviation Administration. And to secure that, they aren't basing their proposal on rockets like the one that blew up in Alaska -- instead, they're using models of rockets that don't exist.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It's neither a bird nor a plane, but a winged microchip as small as a grain of sand that can be carried by the wind as it monitors such things as pollution levels or the spread of airborne diseases. The tiny microfliers, whose development by engineers at Northwestern University was detailed in an article published by Nature this week, are being billed as the smallest-ever human-made flying structures.

The devices don't have a motor; engineers were instead inspired by the maple tree's free-falling propeller seeds -- technically known as samara fruit. The engineers optimized the aerodynamics of the microfliers so that "as these structures fall through the air, the interaction between the air and those wings cause a rotational motion that creates a very stable, slow falling velocity," said John A. Rogers, who led the development of the devices. "That allows these structures to interact for extended periods with ambient wind that really enhances the dispersal process," said the Northwestern professor of materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering and neurological surgery.

The wind would scatter the tiny microchips, which could sense their surrounding environments and collect information. The scientists say they could potentially be used to monitor for contamination, surveil populations or even track diseases. Their creators foresee microfliers becoming part of "large, distributed collections of miniaturized, wireless electronic devices." In other words, they could look like a swarm. "We think that we beat nature," Rogers said. "At least in the narrow sense that we have been able to build structures that fall with more stable trajectories and at slower terminal velocities than equivalent seeds that you would see from plants or trees."

Americans are habitually unattuned to the massive and profoundly human apparatus that brings us basically everything in our lives. Much of the country's pandemic response has treated us as somehow separate from the rest of the world and the challenges it endures, but unpredictably empty shelves, rising prices, and long waits are just more proof of how foolish that belief has always been. The Atlantic: When I called up Dan Hearsch, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners who specializes in supply-chain management, I described the current state of the industry to him as a little wonky. He laughed. "'A little wonky' is one way to say it," he said. "'Everything's broken' is another way." Hearsch told me about a friend whose company imports consumer goods -- stuff that's normally available in abundance at any Walmart or Target -- from China. Before the pandemic, according to the friend, shipping a container of that merchandise to the U.S. would have cost the company $2,000 to $5,000. Recently, though, the number is more like $30,000, at least for anything shipped on a predictable timeline. You can get it down to $20,000 if you're willing to deal with the possibility of your stuff arriving in a few months, or whenever space on a ship eventually opens up that's not already accounted for by companies willing to pay more.

Such severe price hikes aren't supposed to happen. Wealthy Western countries offloaded much of their manufacturing to Asia and Latin America precisely because container shipping has made moving goods between hemispheres so inexpensive. When that math tips into unprofitability, either companies stop shipping goods and wait for better rates, or they start charging you a lot more for the things they ship. Both options constrain supply further and raise prices on what's available. "You look at the price of cars, you look at the price of food -- the price of practically anything is up significantly from one year ago, from two years ago," Hearsch told me. "The differences are really, really quite shocking." The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that as of July, consumer prices had grown almost 5 percent since before the pandemic, with some types of goods showing much larger increases.

Overseas shipping is currently slow and expensive for lots of very complicated reasons and one big, important, relatively uncomplicated one: The countries trying to meet the huge demands of wealthy markets such as the United States are also trying to prevent mass-casualty events. Infection-prevention measures have recently closed high-volume shipping ports in China, the country that supplies the largest share of goods imported to the United States. In Vietnam and Malaysia, where workers churn out products as varied as a third of all shoes imported to the U.S. and chip components that are crucial to auto manufacturing, controlling the far more transmissible [...] Domestically, things aren't a whole lot better. Offshoring has systematically decimated America's capacity to manufacture most things at home, and even products that are made in the United States likely use at least some raw materials or components that need to be imported or are in short supply for other reasons.

Crypto heists are becoming increasingly common, but forensic investigators are getting savvier at figuring out who is behind specific accounts. From a report: Paolo Ardoino was on the front lines of one of the largest cryptocurrency heists of all time. He was flooded with calls and messages in August alerting him to a breach at Poly Network, a platform where users swap tokens among popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Binance and Dogecoin. Hackers had made off with $610 million in crypto, belonging to tens of thousands of people. Roughly $33 million of the funds were swiftly converted into Tether, a "stable coin" with a value that mirrors the U.S. dollar. Ardoino, Tether's chief technology officer, took note. Typically, when savvy cybercriminals make off with cryptocurrency, they transfer the assets among online wallets through difficult-to-trace transactions. And poof -- the money is lost. Ardoino sprang into action and minutes later froze the assets.

"We were really lucky," he said. "Minutes after we issued the freezing transaction, we saw the hacker attempt to move out his Tether. If we had waited five minutes more, all the Tether would be gone." Two weeks later, Tether released the money to its rightful owners. And after threats from Poly Network, the online bandit gave up the rest. The seizure pokes a hole in the long-held belief that cryptocurrency is impossible to trace. Cryptocurrency is computer code that allows people to send and receive funds, recording the transactions on a public ledger known as a blockchain, rather than retaining account holder info. Because of the lack of user data, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been hailed as a safe haven for criminal activity. Fueled by anonymity, the shadowy industry allows hackers, tax evaders and other bad actors to launder money secretively, outside of the traditional banking system. Online scammers made off with $2.6 billion in 2020, according to a Chainalysis report. That year, ransomware attacks more than quadrupled.

But forensics investigators are getting savvier at scrupulously mapping activity on blockchains and figuring out who is behind specific accounts. This has sparked a "novel cottage industry of data providers" who are able to track cryptocurrency accounts flagged for illicit activity, said Zachary Goldman, a lawyer at WilmerHale specializing in novel payment technologies. "That's never really been available before." Through tracking, agents have recouped stolen crypto funds in a handful of high-profile cases. In June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized the $2.3 million in bitcoin ransom Colonial Pipeline paid to hackers who infiltrated the company's computer network. Investigators used the blockchain to follow the flow of the ransom payment to track the perpetrators. In 2020, the crypto exchange KuCoin recovered almost all of the $281 million stolen by suspected North Korean hackers and refunded customers.

Thousands of green cards are about to go to waste, leaving Google, Microsoft and other tech companies fuming -- and pushing the Biden administration to ensure it doesn't happen again. Axios: Tech workers have waited years for green cards that will grant them permanent legal status in the U.S. -- but because of pandemic-related processing delays, they will have to wait even longer. The U.S. makes a certain number of family-based and employment-based green cards available each fiscal year. [...] Google and Microsoft are among the companies that have been urging federal officials to find a way to save the roughly 80,000 remaining employment-based green cards set to expire Sept. 30. Google says only 13% of its candidate applications filed since last October have been approved.

"The idea that we will leave tens of thousands of these applications unfilled at a time when businesses around the country are having a hard time finding qualified workers seems illogical," Google senior vice president of global affairs Kent Walker told Axios. "So we're really trying to encourage people to come together to fix this issue." What they're saying: Google and Microsoft say they have thousands of employees and their families awaiting green cards. "We have congressionally authorized numbers available right now that can help a significant number of people trapped in the backlog move to permanent residence," Jack Chen, associate general counsel at Microsoft, told Axios. "But without a fix, those numbers go into the shredder at the end of the month. It's a huge missed opportunity." Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook last week wrote to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on behalf of the Business Roundtable to press the issue.

At Google, a seemingly innocuous action can earn an employee the attention of the company's corporate security department. The Information: For example, when Google wants to find out who has been accessing or leaking sensitive corporate information, the company often homes in on employees who are thinking about leaving it. In the past, its security teams have flagged employees who search an internal website listing the cost of COBRA health insurance -- which gives workers a way to continue their coverage after leaving their employer -- for further investigation, according to a person with direct knowledge of its tactics. Employees who draft resignation letters or seek out internal checklists that help workers plan their departures from Google have also faced similar scrutiny, the person said. It has even looked at who has taken screenshots on work devices while running encrypted messaging services at the same time, according to current and former employees with knowledge of the practices. Bulk transfers of data onto USB storage devices and use of third-party online storage services can also raise eyebrows among Google's security staff.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Discord is starting to test YouTube integration, just weeks after Google-owned YouTube forced two popular Discord music bots offline. YouTube integration has started appearing in a small number of Discord servers today as part of what appears to be a new test of a collaboration between Discord and YouTube. The feature is called Watch Together, and as the name implies, it allows Discord members to watch YouTube videos together. A test of a similar Discord feature started 10 months ago before disappearing and resurfacing as Watch Together today, and we understand the company has re-prioritized this particular feature due to the recent music bot shutdowns.

Watch Together is very similar to the experience of someone broadcasting their screen in Discord, and the button to launch it even appears alongside the video and screen sharing options. It's designed specifically with YouTube in mind, allowing Discord server members to create a playlist of YouTube videos by searching or pasting in YouTube links. You can even toggle a remote button that lets other Discord server members share the ability to control playback. While it's not identical to the popular Rythm and Groovy Discord music bots, you can use Watch Together to listen to music through YouTube in Discord. You may end up hearing or seeing ads, though. Discord warns, when you first use the Watch Together feature, that "you may see ads during YouTube videos." [...] If you're interested in testing the feature, it's currently live in Discord's Game Labs server.

On Wednesday FedEx announced its first autonomously-driven Class 8 truck delivery route. Mashable reports: Working with truck maker PACCAR and self-driving company Aurora, which is backed by Amazon, FedEx will start making deliveries in Texas using an autonomous semi. The route on Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas is about 500 miles round trip, and expected to be busy as the holiday shopping season approaches. The test route will run multiple times each week starting Wednesday. The Aurora-modified trucks will drive in real, everyday traffic, and a safety driver will be behind the wheel, but the trucks will be operating in autonomous mode.

Inside the truck cab, Aurora's autonomous equipment includes a screen showing what the truck is seeing around it from the cameras, LiDAR, radar, and other sensors stacked onto the big-rig. Aurora has been developing Level 4 self-driving trucks with other partners like Volvo. At that level of autonomy, the truck can handle itself without human intervention in most situations and driving conditions.

The creator of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and founder of the first virtual reality startup, Mark Pesce, opines an IEEE Spectrum piece that we need software updates forever. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the article: Device makers are apt to drop support for old gadgets faster than the gadgets themselves wear out. Consumers have relied on the good graces of device makers to keep our gadget firmware and software secure and up-to-date. Doing so costs the manufacturer some of its profits. As a result, many of them are apt to drop support for old gadgets faster than the gadgets themselves wear out. This corporate stinginess consigns far too many of our devices to the trash heap before they have exhausted their usability. That's bad for consumers and bad for the planet. It needs to stop.

We have seen a global right-to-repair movement emerge from maker communities and start to influence public policy around such things as the availability of spare parts. I'd argue that there should be a parallel right-to-maintain movement. We should mandate that device manufacturers set aside a portion of the purchase price of a gadget to support ongoing software maintenance, forcing them to budget for a future they'd rather ignore. Or maybe they aren't ignoring the future so much as trying to manage it by speeding up product obsolescence, because it typically sparks another purchase.

Does this mean Sony and others should still be supporting products nearly two decades old, like my PSP? If that keeps them out of the landfill, I'd say yes: The benefits easily outweigh the costs. The devilish details come in decisions about who should bear those costs. But even if they fell wholly on the purchaser, consumers would, I suspect, be willing to pay a few dollars more for a gadget if that meant reliable access to software for it -- indefinitely. Yes, we all want shiny new toys -- and we'll have plenty of them -- but we shouldn't build that future atop the prematurely discarded remains of our electronic past.

TikTok users are watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress to help them determine which stocks to invest in. NPR reports: Among a certain community of individual investors on TikTok, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stock trading disclosures are a treasure trove. "Shouts out to Nancy Pelosi, the stock market's biggest whale," said user 'ceowatchlist.' Another said, "I've come to the conclusion that Nancy Pelosi is a psychic," while adding that she is the "queen of investing." "She knew," declared Chris Josephs, analyzing a particular trade in Pelosi's financial disclosures. "And you would have known if you had followed her portfolio." Last year, Josephs noticed that the trades, actually made by Pelosi's investor husband and merely disclosed by the speaker, were performing well.

Josephs is the co-founder of a company called Iris, which shows other people's stock trades. In the past year and a half, he has been taking advantage of a law called the Stock Act, which requires lawmakers to disclose stock trades and those of their spouses within 45 days. Now on Josephs' social investing platform, you can get a push notification every time Pelosi's stock trading disclosures are released. He is personally investing when he sees which stocks are picked: "I'm at the point where if you can't beat them, join them," Josephs told NPR, adding that if he sees trades on her disclosures, "I typically do buy... the next one she does, I'm going to buy." The report notes that Senate and House members have already filed more than 4,000 financial trading disclosures this year, with at least $315 million of stocks and bonds bought or sold. "That's according to Tim Carambat, who in 2020 created and now maintains two public databases of lawmaker financial transactions -- House Stock Watcher and Senate Stock Watcher," reports NPR. "He says there is a significant following for his work," reports NPR.