An anonymous reader writes: Facebook unveiled a new compression technique they call 'Superpack compression.' In a blog post written by software engineer Sapan Bhatia, they claim that their compression improves Android app size by 20% over the default Zip compression used by Android. The post gives an overview of the compression ideas. The basis of these ideas is called out to be a key insight in Kolmogorov Complexity, that any data can be represented in the form of programs that generate that data. Facebook's tool, Superpack, mines out such small programs and optimizes them using compiler techniques.

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. From a report: The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed -- seriously at times -- for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality. The boost comes in the form of $15m raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan -- and the hurdles are far from trivial -- the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is temporarily banning social media companies from removing certain content, including his claims that the only way he'll lose next year's elections is if the vote is rigged -- one of the most significant steps by a democratically elected leader to control what can be said on the internet. From a report: The new social media rules, issued this week and effective immediately, appear to be the first time a national government has stopped internet companies from taking down content that violates their rules, according to internet law experts and officials at tech companies. And they come at a precarious moment for Brazil. Mr. Bolsonaro has used social media as a megaphone to build his political movement and make it to the president's office. Now, with polls showing he would lose the presidential elections if they were held today, he is using sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to try to undermine the legitimacy of the vote, following the playbook of his close ally, former President Donald J. Trump. On Tuesday, Mr. Bolsonaro repeated his claims about the election to thousands of supporters in two cities as part of nationwide demonstrations on Brazil's Independence Day.

New research by Mozilla Fellows Odanga Madung and Brian Obilo reveals that Kenyan journalists, judges, and other members of civil society are facing coordinated disinformation campaigns on Twitter -- and that Twitter is doing very little to stop it. Highlights of the investigation include: Disinformation campaigns are a lucrative business. One interviewee revealed that disinformation influencers are paid roughly between $10 and $15 USD to participate in three campaigns per day. Payments are made directly to the influencers through the mobile money platform MPESA.

Twitter's trending algorithm is amplifying these campaigns, and Twitter is placing ads amid all this misinformation. Eight of the 11 campaigns examined reached the trending section of Twitter. The campaigners we spoke to told us that this is their number one target, as it affords them the amplification they seek.

These campaigns run like a well-oiled machine. One of the influencers who researchers spoke to explained a complex system of using Whatsapp groups to coordinate and synchronize tweets and messaging. Anonymous organizers use these groups to send influencers cash, content, and detailed instructions.

These campaigns are increasingly targeting individuals. No longer focusing on just broad issues and events, disinformation campaigns are increasingly identifying and targeting individuals, like members of the Linda Katiba movement and the Kenyan judiciary. This work is also beginning to border on incitement and advocacy of hatred, which is against Kenyan Law.

Verified accounts are complicit. One influencer we spoke to claimed that the people who own coveted "blue check" accounts will often rent them out for disinformation campaigns. These verified accounts can improve the campaign's chances of trending.

President Biden will nominate Georgetown University law professor Alvaro Bedoya to be a Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, people familiar with the matter told Axios. From a report: Bedoya, founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown, will bring a bevy of experience on privacy issues to the FTC's work on tech. If confirmed, Bedoya will solidify the Democratic majority at the FTC with current commissioner Rohit Chopra set to leave the agency as Biden's nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Bedoya previously was chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary privacy subcommittee and worked on issues including mobile location data and facial recognition.

Mozilla has quietly made it easier to switch to Firefox on Windows recently. From a reporrt: While Microsoft offers a method to switch default browsers on Windows 10, it's more cumbersome than the simple one-click process to switch to Edge. This one-click process isn't officially available for anyone other than Microsoft, and Mozilla appears to have grown tired of the situation. In version 91 of Firefox, released on August 10th, Mozilla has reverse engineered the way Microsoft sets Edge as default in Windows 10, and enabled Firefox to quickly make itself the default. Before this change, Firefox users would be sent to the Settings part of Windows 10 to then have to select Firefox as a default browser and ignore Microsoft's plea to keep Edge. Mozilla's reverse engineering means you can now set Firefox as the default from within the browser, and it does all the work in the background with no additional prompts. This circumvents Microsoft's anti-hijacking protections that the company built into Windows 10 to ensure malware couldn't hijack default apps. Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows.

Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2972) brings this report from the BBC: Boeing's board of directors must face a lawsuit from shareholders over two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max plane, a U.S. judge has ruled. Morgan Zurn said the first crash was a "red flag" about a key safety system on the aircraft "that the board should have heeded but instead ignored".

She said the real victims were the dead and their families but investors had also lost billions of dollars... In her ruling the Delaware judge said: "While it may seem callous in the face of [the families'] losses, corporate law recognizes another set of victims: Boeing as an enterprise, and its stockholders...."

The crashes have already cost Boeing about $20bn in fines, cancelled orders and other costs.

This weekend finds some long-time Slashdot readers debating why research shows Firefox losing market share. Long-time Slashdot reader chiguy shares one theory: "Firefox keeps losing users, according to this rant, because it arrogantly refuses to listen to its users."

Slashdot reader BAReFO0t countered that that can't be the reason, "because Google does that too." (They blame Chrome's "feature" addition treadmill, where "they keep adding stupid kitchen sinks for the sole and only purpose to make others unable to keep up.")

Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K thinks that "All those totally unnecessary UI changes are what REALLY annoys users. Not only the immediately visible things in the header but also the renaming of items in the menus just bugs people." But long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo argues that "the most popular browser, Chrome, has all those things. In fact all the browsers that are more popular than Firefox do, so the idea that those are unpopular and driving people away doesn't really hold up... Firefox's decline is mostly due to Chrome just being really good, and [Firefox] not having a decent mobile version."

I'm still a loyal Firefox user. (Although the thing that annoyed me was when Firefox suddenly changed the keyboard shortcut for copying a link from CNTRL-A to CNTRL-L.) The "rant" at ItsFoss argues that Firefox's original sin was in 2009 when it decided to move tabs to the top of the browser, and when favorite features could no longer be re-enabled in Firefox's about:config file. But that's what I like about Firefox -- at it's best, it's ultimately customizable, with any feature you want easily enabled in what's essentially an incredibly detailed "preferences" menu. Maybe other browsers are just better at attracting new users through purely mechanical advantages like default placement on popular systems?

Long-time Slashdot reader zenlessyank is also a long-time Firefox user -- "Been using it since Netscape" -- and countered all the doubters with a comment headlined "Firefox rocks!"

"Doesn't matter to me how many other users there are or aren't I will still use it as long as it stays updated."

But what are your thoughts? Feel free to share your own opinions and experiences with Firefox in the comments.

"Facebook provided a data set to a consortium of social scientists last year that had serious errors," reports the Washington Post, "affecting the findings in an unknown number of academic papers, the company acknowledged Friday." The company used a regular monthly call on Friday with roughly three dozen researchers affiliated with Social Science One, a consortium founded in 2018 that Facebook hails as a model for collaboration with academics, to admit the error and apologize for the impact on their work. The data concerns the effect of social media on elections and democracy and includes what web addresses Facebook users click on, along with other information. The error resulted from Facebook accidentally excluding data from U.S. users who had no detectable political leanings — a group that amounted to roughly half of all of Facebook's users in the United States. Data from users in other countries was not affected...

Gary King, a Harvard professor who co-chairs Social Science One... said dozens of papers from researchers affiliated with Social Science One had relied on the data since Facebook shared the flawed set in February 2020, but he said the impact could be determined only after Facebook provided corrected data that could be reanalyzed. He said some of the errors may cause little or no problems, but others could be serious. Social Science One shared the flawed data with at least 110 researchers, King said. The group's former co-chairman, Stanford Law professor Nathaniel Persily, said of the incident: "This is a friggin' outrage and a fundamental breach of promises Facebook made to the research community. It also demonstrates why we need government regulation to force social media companies to develop secure data sharing programs with outside independent researchers."

An Italian researcher, Fabio Giglietto, discovered data anomalies last month and brought them to Facebook's attention. The company contacted researchers in recent days with news that they had failed to include roughly half of its U.S. users — a group that likely is less politically polarized than Facebook's overall user base. The New York Times first reported Facebook's error...

The anonymized data set is one of the largest in social science history, with 42 trillion numbers.
One Social Science One researcher told the New York Times this discovery "undermines trust researchers may have in Facebook...

"A lot of concern was initially voiced about whether we should trust that Facebook was giving Social Science One researchers good data. Now we know that we shouldn't have trusted Facebook so much and should have demanded more effort to show validity in the data."

"A pro-Chinese government online influence operation is targeting Americans in an effort to exploit divisions over the Covid-19 pandemic," reports CNN, "and 'physically mobilize protestors in the US in response,' according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant and experts at Google." The operation, which initially attempted to discredit pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, has expanded into a "global campaign that's operating in seven languages, on at least 30 social media platforms and across 40+ website & forums," experts at Mandiant and Google say, noting parallels to the Russian disinformation campaign around the 2016 presidential election. US officials believe the operation is linked to the Chinese government and have been monitoring its evolution, according to one source familiar with the situation....

[E]xperts have observed an "explosion of activity" across the world and the move to make physical protests happen in the US "demonstrates they are a very serious threat," Mandiant Threat Intelligence Vice President John Hulquist told CNN... [The report says] "While this attempt did not appear to achieve any success, we believe it is critical that observers continue to monitor for such attempts in case greater degrees of organic engagement are later realized by the network...." While there has been limited engagement with these pro-Chinese accounts, the operation's massive scope shows the actors responsible have "significantly expanded their online footprint and appear to be attempting to establish a presence on as many platforms as possible to reach a variety of global audiences," according to Mandiant's experts....

Cyber espionage from China against the United States has spiked since the Covid-19 outbreak began and Beijing has consistently sought to shape the global narrative through overt and covert means.
Shane Huntley, Director of Google's Threat Analysis Group, pointed out the scale and persistence of the group (despite its low engagement levels), adding "we've taken an aggressive approach to identifying and removing disinformation from this network."

I first saw the news on the front page of Yahoo.com. But every American remembers where they were when they heard the news. "The World Trade Towers in new york were crashed into by 2 planes, one on each tower, 18 minutes apart," CmdrTaco posted on Slashdot. "Nobody really knows who did it, but the planes were big ones.

"Normally I wouldn't consider posting this on Slashdot, but I'm making an exception this time because I can't get news through any of the conventional websites, and I assume I'm not alone."

CmdrTaco later posted an update. "Both towers havecollapsed, pentagon hit by 3rd plane. Part of it has collapsed."


It's 20 years later, and there's plenty of hindsight, recollections, and reflection around the web. But today back on the front page of Yahoo.com, ABC News brings this remembrance from a U.S. airman who'd been dispatched to crash her plane into one of the hijacked jetliners: As the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were unfolding, then-Air Force Lt. Heather Penney was given a mission to intercept hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 before it reached Washington, D.C. The rookie F-16 pilot said she believed she would not come back from that mission.

"[I remember] how crystal blue the skies were that day," she told ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis...

"I had raised my hand and swore an oath to protect and defend our nation," she said. "If this was where the universe had placed me at this moment in time... that this was my purpose. Anyone who had been in our position would have been willing to do the same thing.

"And the proof is in the pudding, because the passengers on Flight 93 did...."

Flight 93 passengers attempted to retake the plane, and in the struggle, the aircraft crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. It was the only one of the four hijacked aircrafts that day that did not reach the terrorists' intended target.

"Recently, browsing leader Mozilla shared the result of an independent security audit on its VPN service," reports Fossbytes.

"Upon inspection, a few vulnerabilities were discovered in the VPN, one of which was reportedly a major risk." In a blog post, Mozilla shared that Cure53, a Berlin-based cybersecurity firm, had identified and fixed the security vulnerabilities in its VPN... The most severe issue, labeled "FVP-02-014," made the user vulnerable to cross-site WebSocket hijacking. Moreover, the medium-risk vulnerabilities revolved around "VPN leak via captive portal detection" and "Auth code leak" by injecting the port. However, these sophisticated terms shouldn't worry you anymore as Cure53 has already addressed these weaknesses. There has also been no mention of any Mozilla VPN users falling victim to these either.

The Firefox developer's public post that outlines the security flaws detected by the German firm provides users an insight into the potential risks of using a VPN. Moreover, these audits also help Mozilla iron out any issues that its one-year-old VPN service might have.

"On Thursday evening, KrebsOnSecurity was the subject of a rather massive (and mercifully brief) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack," the site reports.

Citing a new blog post from DDoS protection firm Qrator Labs, Krebs writes that "The assault came from 'Meris,' the same new botnet behind record-shattering attacks against Russian search giant Yandex this week and internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare earlier this summer." A titanic and ongoing DDoS that hit Russian Internet search giant Yandex last week is estimated to have been launched by roughly 250,000 malware-infected devices globally, sending 21.8 million bogus requests-per-second. While last night's Meris attack on this site was far smaller than the recent Cloudflare DDoS, it was far larger than the Mirai DDoS attack in 2016 that held KrebsOnSecurity offline for nearly four days. The traffic deluge from Thursday's attack on this site was more than four times what Mirai threw at this site five years ago. This latest attack involved more than two million requests-per-second. By comparison, the 2016 Mirai DDoS generated approximately 450,000 requests-per-second.

According to Qrator, which is working with Yandex on combating the attack, Meris appears to be made up of Internet routers produced by MikroTik. Qrator says the United States is home to the most number of MikroTik routers that are potentially vulnerable to compromise by Meris — with more than 42 percent of the world's MikroTik systems connected to the Internet (followed by China — 18.9 percent- and a long tail of one- and two-percent countries). It's not immediately clear which security vulnerabilities led to these estimated 250,000 MikroTik routers getting hacked by Meris. "The spectrum of RouterOS versions we see across this botnet varies from years old to recent," the company wrote. "The largest share belongs to the version of firmware previous to the current stable one."
Krebs writes that the biggest contributor to the IoT botnet problem remains "a plethora of companies white-labeling [cheap] IoT devices that were never designed with security in mind and are often shipped to the customer in default-insecure states...

"The good news is that over the past five years, large Internet infrastructure companies like Akamai, Cloudflare and Google (which protects this site with its Project Shield initiative) have heavily invested in ramping up their ability to withstand these outsized attacks..."

One year earlier, back in 2015, Krebs had answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

The U.S. state of Texas "has made it illegal for social media platforms to ban users 'based on their political viewpoints'," repots the BBC: Prominent Republican politicians have accused Facebook, Twitter and others of censoring conservative views... The social networks have all denied stifling conservative views. However, they do enforce terms of service which prohibit content such as incitement to violence and co-ordinated disinformation. "Social media websites have become our modern-day public square," said Texas governor Greg Abbott, after signing the bill into law on Thursday. "They are a place for healthy public debate where information should be able to flow freely...."

The new law states social media platforms with more than 50 million users cannot ban people based on their political viewpoints. Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube are within its scope...

The law is due to come in to force in December, but may face legal challenges.
"Critics say the law does not respect the constitutional right of private businesses to decide what sort of content is allowed on their platforms," the BBC adds, with the president of NetChoice trade association arguing that the bill "would put the Texas government in charge of content policies."

CIStud writes: Sonos announces price hikes for Arc, Amp, Roam, Sub, Five, One and One SL speakers citing chip shortage and supply chain. Sonos Arc's price is leaping by $100 from $799 to $899. Not every product will be seeing a large jump in price, as some products like the Sonos Roam are seeing increases of just $10. Other products receiving only small price increases include the Sonos One and Sonos One SL ($20 increase), while others are not seeing pricing changes whatsoever like the Sonos Move and Sonos Port. Speaking of the far-reaching impact of the global chip shortage, Google and Indian telecom operator Jio announced this week they are delaying the launch of their affordable smartphone aimed at 300 million users.

A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January -- just minutes before President Trump left office -- has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses. New submitter echo123 shares a report: The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market.

Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla. The company also did not respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon did not announce the program or publicly acknowledge its existence until The Washington Post reported on it in April. And now it's done. Kind of.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon made a technical announcement -- visible mainly to network administrators around the world -- saying it was resuming control of the 175 million IP addresses and directing the traffic to its own servers. On Friday the Pentagon told The Post that the pilot program, which it previously had characterized as a cybersecurity measure designed to detect unspecified "vulnerabilities" and "prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space," was over. Parts of the Internet once managed by Global Resource Systems, the Pentagon said, now were being overseen by the Department of Defense Information Network, known by the acronym DODIN and part of U.S. Cyber Command, based at Fort Meade.

The company realized months ago that it could be running afoul of pay laws in a number of countries but has been slow to fix the problem, according to internal documents. From a report: In December, a group of Google managers responsible for overseeing thousands of its temporary staff members discovered the company had been underpaying some of those workers for years. The gap in so-called benchmark rates between what it paid full-time employees and temporary workers doing similar work had widened significantly, according to internal company emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times. This was especially problematic in countries with so-called pay parity laws requiring the company to pay temporary workers the same wages as full-time employees in similar positions.

But Google's lapse had gone undetected outside the company. The managers worried that fixing the shortfall by suddenly lifting hourly rates by 20 percent to 30 percent would call attention to the problem and invite negative publicity to a company already criticized for creating a two-tier work force of generously compensated full-time employees and less expensive temps and contractors who are easy to hire and fire. So Google landed on a fix that wouldn't call as much attention to the problem: It decided to apply the correct rates for only new hires starting in 2021 but held off on more expensive, wholesale changes, according to company emails reviewed by The Times.

Alan Barry, a Google compliance manager based in Ireland, wrote in an email to colleagues that adjusting the rates for all of its temps was the correct move from a "compliance perspective." However, doing so might increase the likelihood that its current temporary staff members could "connect the dots" about the reason behind the pay bump and place the staffing agencies who supply and pay the workers in "a difficult position, legally and ethically." "The cost is significant and it would give rise to a flurry of noise/frustration," Mr. Barry wrote. "I'm also not keen to invite the charge that we've allowed this situation to persist for so long that the correction required is significant."

PCGamer reports: Microsoft continues to double down on its assertion that the Windows 11 system requirements are absolutely necessary, and this whole TPM 2.0 schtick is vital for the safety of you, your PC, and maybe even the world. Okay, I made that last bit up, but the big M is sticking to its guns and has released another video backing its decision on excluding a whole lot of hardware that was fine with Windows 10. The latest claim is that you're going to see fewer blue screens of death -- or maybe black screens of death -- because of the new system requirements, citing a "99.8% crash-free experience in the [Windows 11] preview." Look, there's still a part of us that feels at some point in the future, maybe the distant future, Microsoft will turn around and say 'You know, what? We don't mind what processor you use with Windows 11,' but for right now this is where we're at. You need a modern CPU for Windows 11 for security and reliability.

And maybe a little performance. "So the requirement for Intel 8th Gen and AMD Ryzen 2000-series, and newer, chipsets does definitely contribute to performance," states Microsoft VP Steve Dispensa in the recent video. "But the main rationale here is actually the balanced security with performance. Security is at the core of these requirements." He does point to differences in how Windows 11 prioritises apps running in the foreground window. With the system running at 90% CPU load, it's still possible to get a responsive experience opening and using foreground apps thanks to these prioritisations.

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma.

"My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.

An anonymous reader shares a report:These are still early days for quantum computing, far too soon to talk about domain-specific quantum systems. But if there are areas hungrier than ever for what quantum is best at -- dense optimization problems at scale -- the future cannot arrive fast enough. More specifically, the golden grail for quantum computing -- the "traveling salesman" problem -- could revolutionize the transportation industry in particular, in addition to the world's largest retailers dependent on accurate shipping data. Quantum capabilities in this arena are so critical that the first production quantum systems at scale could be purpose-designed and optimized simply for this type of problem. While these days we don't think of Amazon's delivery aspects much since the carriers are so often the focus, the combined capability of vast search coupled with near-real-time delivery dates matched to location took Amazon years to get right -- and was a billion-plus dollar effort in compute time.

Peter Chapman says "infinite compute" can be brought to bear to refine the entire process that happens the moment you search for "USB drive" on Amazon, confirm your shipping location, and select only products that arrive tomorrow. The density of calculations required -- pulling from warehouse availability to planes, trains, and automobiles and their various routes through your own hometown -- is staggering. "It's the ultimate traveling salesman problem," he laughs. Chapman should know what this takes because he led the development of many of the technologies that became the fast, reliable Amazon Prime service. As director of engineering, his team of 240 engineers took Amazon from requiring customers to search and select a product and wait until checkout to find out how long delivery would take. "That meant a lot of abandoned carts and a bad user experience," he says.

With global products, shipping routes, customers, carriers, product availability and warehouse locations, the order was so tall, it took rearchitecting Amazon infrastructure to do it at reasonable enough scale. "There is a practical limit to the computational resources you can apply to this, even at Amazon. We could easily consume 100x the compute but Amazon couldn't afford it," Chapman says. "There is infinite need for compute for this problem so we had to find the right tradeoffs in optimization and find what you can get for a certain amount of money spent -- and we're talking billions here. Our goal was to make sure it wasn't $20 billion." He adds that the cost of these systems were growing faster than the top line of Amazon's sales.