Sunday, April 21st, 2024

Time	Event
1:34a	Volla Successfully Crowdfunds a Privacy-Focused Tablet on Kickstarter It's "the new generation of Tablet for simplicity and privacy..." according to its Kickstarter page. "Top-tier performance, lightweight design and completely Google-free." And it's already reached its funding goal of $53,312 — climbing to over $75,000 from 115 backers with another 26 days still to go. 9to5Linux reports: Volla, the maker of the Volla Phone smartphones, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for their first tablet device, the Volla Tablet, which will also support the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS. Featuring a 12.3-inch Quad HD display with 2650Ã--1600 pixel resolution, the Volla Tablet uses a powerful MediaTek Gaming G99 8-core processor, 12 GB RAM, and 256 GB internal storage. It also comes with a long-lasting 10,000 mAh battery, 2G/3G/4G cellular network support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 13+5 MP main camera. By default, Volla Tablet ships with Volla OS 13, Volla's in-house operating system based on the free Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but users will be able to buy the tablet with Ubuntu Touch featuring built-in convergence and support for Android apps with WayDroid container. "Users will also be able to use desktop apps like Firefox or LibreOffice thanks to the help of the Libertine container," according to the article. ("Volla says that Volla Tablet with Ubuntu Touch is ideal for Linux enthusiasts and minimalists seeking a simplified, efficient, and familiar operating system experience.") Its Kickstarter page points out the tablet even offers options like "hide.me VPN" and private speech recognition that's "cloud-independent for secure, confidential interactions." ("For U.S. users, please note that only roaming SIM cards from abroad can be used.") Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34a	Insufficient Redundancy? Light-Pole Installation Cut Fiber Line, Triggered Three-State 911 Outage "Workers installing a light pole in Missouri cut into a fiber line," reports the Associated Press, knocking out 911 phone service "for emergency agencies in Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota, an official with the company that operates the line said Thursday." In Kansas City, Missouri, workers installing a light pole for another company Wednesday cut into a Lumen Technologies fiber line, Lumen global issues director Mark Molzen said in an email to The Associated Press. Service was restored within 2 1/2 hours, he said. There were no reports of 911 outages in Kansas City... The Dundy County Sheriff's Office in Nebraska warned in a social media post Wednesday night that 911 callers would receive a busy signal and urged people to instead call the administrative phone line. About three hours later, officials said mobile and landline 911 services had been restored. In Douglas County, home to Omaha and more than a quarter of Nebraska's residents, officials first learned there was a problem when calls from certain cellphone companies showed up in a system that maps calls but didn't go through over the phone. Operators started calling back anyone whose call didn't go through, and officials reached out to Lumen, which confirmed the outage. Service was restored by 4 a.m. Kyle Kramer, the technical manager for Douglas County's 911 Center, said the outage highlights the potential problems of having so many calls go over the same network. "As things become more interconnected in our modern world, whether you're on a wireless device or a landline now, those are no longer going over the traditional old copper phone wires that may have different paths in different areas," Kramer said. "Large networks usually have some aggregation point, and those aggregation points can be a high risk." Kramer said this incident and the two previous 911 outages he has seen in the past year in Omaha make him concerned that communications companies aren't building enough redundancy into their networks. South Dakota officials called the state-wide outage "unprecedented," with their Department of Public Safety reporting the outage lasted two hours (though texting to 911 still worked in most locations — and of course, people could still call local emergency services using their non-emergency lines.) America's FCC has already begun an investigation. The article notes that "The outages, ironically, occurred in the midst of National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader davidwr for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:34a	Some Astronomers Will Re-Examine a 102-Year-Old Theory About the Universe's Expansion Several "high-profile astronomers" will meet at London's Royal Society (the UK's national academy of sciences), "to question some of the most fundamental aspects of our understanding of the universe.reports Futurism: As The Guardian reports, the luminaries of cosmology will be re-examining some basic assumptions about the universe — right down to the over-a-century-old theory that it's expanding at a constant rate. "We are, in cosmology, using a model that was first formulated in 1922," coorganizer and Oxford cosmologist Subir Sarkar told the newspaper, in an apparent reference to the year Russian astronomer Alexander Friedmann outlined the possibility of cosmic expansion based on Einstein's general theory of relativity. "We have great data, but the theoretical basis is past its sell-by date," he added. "More and more people are saying the same thing and these are respected astronomers." A number of researchers have found evidence that the universe may be expanding more quickly in some areas compared to others, raising the tantalizing possibility that megastructures could be influencing the universe's growth in significant ways. Sarkar and his colleagues, for instance, are suggesting that the universe is "lopsided" after studying over a million quasars, which are the active nuclei of galaxies where gas and dust are being gobbled up by a supermassive black hole. The article notes that another theory is that the so-called cosmological constant that's been used for decades "actually varies across space." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
11:34a	Ziplines Drones Complete Their 1 Millionth Delivery, Flying Over 70 Million Miles San Francisco-based drone-delivery service Zipline "said Friday that it hit its 1 millionth delivery to customers," reports CNBC, "and that it's eyeing restaurant partnerships in its next phase of growth." Zipline's clients already include more than 4,700 hospitals, according to the article, as well as major brands like Walmart. A Panera executive even told CNBC they hope to test Zipline deliveries in Seattle next year, expecting they won't cost the company any more than third-party delivery services: The company said its zero-emission drones have now flown more than 70 million autonomous commercial miles across four continents and delivered more than 10 million products. The milestone 1 millionth delivery carried two bags of IV fluid from a Zipline distribution center in Ghana to a local health facility... Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton told CNBC that 70% of the company's deliveries have happened in the past two years and, in the future, the goal is to do 1 million deliveries a day... "We need to start using vehicles that are light, fast, autonomous and zero-emission," Cliffton said. "Delivering in this way is 10 times as fast, it's less expensive ... and relative to the traditional delivery apps that most restaurants will be working with, we triple the service radius, which means you actually [get] 10 times the number of customers who are reachable via instant delivery." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:34p	EU: Meta Cannot Rely On 'Pay Or Okay' The EU's European Data Protection Board oversees its privacy-protecting GDPR policies. Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that nearly two dozen civil society groups and nonprofits wrote the Board an open letter "urging it not to endorse a strategy used by Meta that they say is intended to bypass the EU's privacy protections for commercial gain." Meta's strategy is sometimes called "Pay or Okay," writes long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo : Meta offers users a choice: "consent" to tracking, or pay over €250/year to use its sites without invasive monetization of personal data. Meta prefers the phrase "subsccription for no ads," and told TechCrunch it makes them compliant with EU laws: A raft of complaints have been filed against Meta's implementation of the pay-or-consent tactic since it launched the "no ads" subscription offer last fall. Additionally, in a notable step last month, the European Union opened a formal investigation into Meta's tactic, seeking to find whether it breaches obligations that apply to Facebook and Instagram under the competition-focused Digital Markets Act. That probe remains ongoing. The letter to the Board called for "robust protections that prioritize data subjects' agency and control over their information." And Wednesday the board issued its first decision: "[I]n most cases, it will not be possible for [social media services] to comply with the requirements for valid consent, if they confront users only with a choice between consenting to processing of personal data for behavioural advertising purposes and paying a fee." The EDPB considers that offering only a paid alternative to services which involve the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising purposes should not be the default way forward for controllers. When developing alternatives, large online platforms should consider providing individuals with an 'equivalent alternative' that does not entail the payment of a fee. If controllers do opt to charge a fee for access to the 'equivalent alternative', they should give significant consideration to offering an additional alternative. This free alternative should be without behavioural advertising, e.g. with a form of advertising involving the processing of less or no personal data. EDPB Chair, Anu Talus added: "Controllers should take care at all times to avoid transforming the fundamental right to data protection into a feature that individuals have to pay to enjoy." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34p	How a Renewable Energy-Powered Bitcoin Startup Helps Electrify Rural Africa CNBC visited a small group of bitcoin miners who "set up shop at the site of an extinct volcano" near Kenya's Hell's Gate National Park. Their mine "consists of a single 500-kilowatt mobile container that, from the outside, looks like a small residential trailer." But what's more interesting is it's operated by a startup called Gridless. (According to its web site Gridless "designs, builds, and operates bitcoin mining sites alongside small-scale renewable energy producers in rural Africa where excess energy is not utilized...") Backed by Jack Dorsey's Block, Gridless electrifies its machines with a mix of solar power and the stranded, wasted energy from a nearby geothermal site. It's one of six mines run by the company in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, powered by a mix of renewable inputs and working toward a broader mission of securing and decentralizing the bitcoin network... In early 2022, [the three Gridless co-founders] began brainstorming creative solutions for the divide between power generation and capacity, and the lack of access to electricity in Africa. They landed on the idea of bitcoin mining, which could potentially solve a big problem for renewable energy developers by taking their stranded power and spreading it to other parts of the continent. In Africa, 43% of the population, or roughly 600 million people, lack access to electricity.... Africa is home to an estimated 10 terawatts of solar capacity, 350 gigawatts of hydro and another 110 gigawatts of wind. Some of this renewable energy is being harnessed already, but a lot isn't because building the specialized infrastructure to capture it is expensive. Even with 60% of the best solar resources globally, Africa only has 1% of installed solar PV capacity. Enter bitcoin miners. Bitcoin gets a bad rap for the amount of energy it consumes, but it can also help unlock these trapped renewable sources of power. Miners are essentially energy buyers, and co-locating with renewables creates a financial incentive to bolster production. "As often happens, you'll have an overage of power during the day or even at night, and there's nobody to soak that power up," said Hersman. He said his company's 50-kilowatt mining container can "take up whatever is extra throughout the day...." Demand from bitcoin miners on these semi-stranded assets is making renewables in Africa economically viable. The power supplier benefits from selling energy that previously had been discarded, while the energy plants will sometimes lower costs for the customer. At one of the Gridless pilot sites in Kenya, the hydro plant dropped the price of power from 35 cents per kilowatt hour to 25 cents per kWh. The buildout of capacity is also electrifying households. Gridless says its sites have powered 1,200 houses in Zambia, 1,800 in Malawi and 5,000 in Kenya. The company's mines also have delivered power for containerized cold storage for local farmers, battery charging stations for electric motorcycles and public WiFi points. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34p	LXQt 2.0 Released: Lightweight Desktop is Almost Wayland Compatible This week saw the release of the LXQt 2.0 desktop environment, reports 9to5Linux. And besides bringing Qt 6 support (and a new default application menu), it also brings support for the Wayland display protocol to more components: The LXQt development is confident that the next major release, LXQt 2.1, will be fully Wayland compatible. The components that need to be ported to Wayland include ScreenGrab, LXQt Global Shortcuts, LXQt Panel's task-bar and keyboard indicator, some input settings, and settings of monitor, power button, and screen locker. "Wayland will be the main target for LXQt 2.1.0, as Qt6 was for LXQt 2.0.0" said the devs. "Most Wayland compositors have tools that can be used instead of them, such that an LXQt-Wayland session is already possible for advanced users." The lightweight Linux distro Lubuntu uses LXQtplace in place of GNOME — and Lubuntu 24.04 LTS will include an optional Wayland session alongside its default Xorg one, according to 9to5Linux: I said it before and I'll say it again, 2024 is the year of the Wayland desktop... The Lubuntu team plans to support the Xorg session until 2026 to aid users with older GPUs... However, the tables will be turned next year with the Lubuntu 24.10 release, which will be shipping with Wayland by default. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:34p	Should Automakers Feel Threatened by China's Exports of Electric Cars? The Los Angeles Times reports that the U.S.-China rivalry "has a new flashpoint in the battle for technology supremacy: electric cars." "So far, the U.S. is losing." Last year, China became the world's foremost auto exporter, according to the China Passenger Car Assn., surpassing Japan with more than 5 million sales overseas. New energy vehicles accounted for about 25% of those exports, and more than half of those were created by Chinese brands, a shift from the traditional assembly role China has played for foreign automakers. "The big growth has happened in the last three years," said Stephen Dyer, head of the Asia automotive and industrials unit at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. "With Chinese automakers making inroads for most of the market share, that's a huge challenge for foreign automakers." China's rapid expansion domestically and abroad has added fuel to a series of clashes between the U.S. and China over trade and advanced technology, as competition intensifies between the two superpowers... One area in which Chinese automakers handily beat Western competitors is on price, thanks to government subsidies that supported the industry's initial rise as well as cheap access to critical minerals and components such as lithium-ion batteries, which account for about a third of the overall cost of production... In March, BYD cut the price of its cheapest EV model in China to less than $10,000. According to Kelley Blue Book, the average EV retail price is $55,343 in the U.S., compared with $48,247 across all vehicles... Though 27.5% tariffs have in effect locked Chinese EVs out of the U.S. market, the fear that the cheaper models could eventually undermine American automakers has started to spread. The Alliance of American Manufacturing warned in a February report that allowing Chinese EVs into the country would be an "extinction-level event" for the U.S. auto industry. The group also cited the risks of Chinese auto companies building facilities across the border in Mexico that could circumvent tariffs.... "When the global market is flooded by artificially cheap Chinese products, the viability of American and other foreign firms is put into question," [said America's Treasury Secretary in April]. The European Union has opened an investigation into government subsidies utilized by China's EV industry and whether such support violates international trade laws. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:05p	Lying to Investors? Co-Founder of Startup 'HeadSpin' Gets 18-Month Prison Sentence for Fraud The co-founder of Silicon Valley-based software testing startup HeadSpin was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison and a $1 million fine, reports SFGate — for defrauding investors. Lachwani pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and a count of securities fraud in April 2023, after federal prosecutors accused him of, for years, lying to investors about HeadSpin's finances to raise more money. HeadSpin, founded in 2015, grew to a $1.1 billion valuation by 2020 with over $115 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures and Iconiq Capital... He had personally altered invoices, lied to the company accountant and sent slide decks with fraudulent information to investors, [according to the government's 2021 criminal complaint]... Breyer, per the New York Times, rejected Lachwani's lawyer's argument that because HeadSpin investors didn't end up losing money, he should receive a light sentence. The judge, who often oversees tech industry cases, reportedly said: "If you win, there are no serious consequences — that simply can't be the law." Still, the sentencing was far lighter than it could have been. The government's prosecuting attorneys had asked for a five-year prison term. The New York Times reported in December that HeadSpin's financial statements had "often arrived months late, if at all, investors said in legal declarations," while the company's financial department "consisted of one external accountant who worked mostly from home using QuickBooks." And the comnpany also had no human resources department or organizational chart... After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software start-up HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company's revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin's cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created fake invoices to cover it all up. What was especially breathtaking was how easily Mr. Lachwani, now 48, pulled all that off... [HeadSpin] had no chief financial officer, had no human resources department and was never audited. Mr. Lachwani used that lack of oversight to paint a rosier picture of HeadSpin's growth. Even though its main investors knew the start-up's financials were not accurate, according to Mr. Lachwani's lawyers, they chose to invest anyway, eventually propelling HeadSpin to a $1.1 billion valuation in 2020. When the investors pushed Mr. Lachwani to add a chief financial officer and share more details about the company's finances, he simply brushed them off. These details emerged this month in filings in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after Mr. Lachwani had pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud in April... The absence of controls at HeadSpin is part of an increasingly noticeable pattern at Silicon Valley start-ups that have run into trouble. Over the past decade, investors in tech start-ups were so eager to back hot companies that many often overlooked reckless behavior and gave up key controls like board seats, all in the service of fast growth and disruption. Then when founders took the ethos of "fake it till you make it" too far, their investors were often unaware or helpless... Now, amid a start-up shakeout, more frauds have started coming to light. The founder of the college aid company Frank has been charged, the internet connectivity start-up Cloudbrink has been sued, and the social media app IRL has been investigated and sued. Last month, Mike Rothenberg, a Silicon Valley investor, was found guilty on 21 counts of fraud and money laundering. On Monday, Trevor Milton, founder of the electric vehicle company Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison for lying about Nikola's technological capabilities. The Times points out that similarly, FTX only had a three-person board "with barely any influence over the company, tracked its finances on QuickBooks and used a small, little-known accounting firm." And that Theranos had no financial audits for six years. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:05p	Is Rivos Building an RISC-V AI Chip? Remember when Apple filed a lawsuit against chip startup Rivos (saying that in one year Rivos hired more than 40 former Apple employees to work on competing system-on-a-chip technology)? Apple settled that suit in February. And now Tuesday Rivos announced that it raised $250 million, according to Reuters, "in a funding round that will enable it to manufacture its first server chip geared for artificial intelligence," combining a CPU with an AI-accelerating component optimized for LLMs and data analytics. Nvidia gobbled up more than 80% market share of AI chips in 2023. But a host of startups and chip giants have started to launch competing products, such as Intel's Gaudi 3 and Meta's inference chip — both unveiled last week. Rivos is tight-lipped about the specifics of the product, but has disclosed that its plans include designing chips based on the RISC-V architecture, which is an open source alternative to the architectures made by Arm, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices.. [U]sing the open source alternative means Rivos does not have to pay a license fee to Arm. "RISC-V doesn't have a (large) software ecosystem, so I decided to form a company and then build software-defined hardware — just like what CUDA did with Nvidia," said Lip-Bu Tan, founding managing partner at Walden Catalyst, one of Rivos' investors. Meanwhile, there's a rumor that Allen Wu, former chief executive of Arm China, has founded a new company that will develop chips based on RISC-V. Tom's Hardware writes: Under the leadership of the controversial Allen Wu, Zhongzhi Chip is reportedly attracting a notable influx of talent, including numerous former employees of Arm, indicating the new company's serious ambitions in the chip sector... [T]he company's operational focus remains partially unclear, with speculation around whether it will primarily engage in its own R&D initiatives or represent Tenstorrent in China as its agent... which develops HPC CPUs and AI processors based on the RISC-V ISA... Based on the source report, Zhongzhi Chip is leveraging its connections and forming alliances with several other leading global RISC-V chip developers. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
9:05p	GPT-4 Can Exploit Real Vulnerabilities By Reading Security Advisories Long-time Slashdot reader tippen shared this report from the Register: AI agents, which combine large language models with automation software, can successfully exploit real world security vulnerabilities by reading security advisories, academics have claimed. In a newly released paper, four University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) computer scientists — Richard Fang, Rohan Bindu, Akul Gupta, and Daniel Kang — report that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM) can autonomously exploit vulnerabilities in real-world systems if given a CVE advisory describing the flaw. "To show this, we collected a dataset of 15 one-day vulnerabilities that include ones categorized as critical severity in the CVE description," the US-based authors explain in their paper. "When given the CVE description, GPT-4 is capable of exploiting 87 percent of these vulnerabilities compared to 0 percent for every other model we test (GPT-3.5, open-source LLMs) and open-source vulnerability scanners (ZAP and Metasploit)...." The researchers' work builds upon prior findings that LLMs can be used to automate attacks on websites in a sandboxed environment. GPT-4, said Daniel Kang, assistant professor at UIUC, in an email to The Register, "can actually autonomously carry out the steps to perform certain exploits that open-source vulnerability scanners cannot find (at the time of writing)." The researchers wrote that "Our vulnerabilities span website vulnerabilities, container vulnerabilities, and vulnerable Python packages. Over half are categorized as 'high' or 'critical' severity by the CVE description...." "Kang and his colleagues computed the cost to conduct a successful LLM agent attack and came up with a figure of $8.80 per exploit" Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:25p	The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Just Sent Its Last Message Home Two months ago the team behind NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter released a video reflecting on its historic explorations of Mars, flying 10.5 miles (17.0 kilometers) in 72 different flights over three years. It was the team's way of saying goodbye, according to NASA's video. And this week, LiveScience reports, Ingenuity answered back: On April 16, Ingenuity beamed back its final signal to Earth, which included the remaining data it had stored in its memory bank and information about its final flight. Ingenuity mission scientists gathered in a control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California to celebrate and analyze the helicopter's final message, which was received via NASA's Deep Space Network, made up of ground stations located across the globe. In addition to the remaining data files, Ingenuity sent the team a goodbye message including the names of all the people who worked on the mission. This special message had been sent to Perseverance the day before and relayed to Ingenuity to send home. The helicopter, which still has power, will now spend the rest of its days collecting data from its final landing spot in Valinor Hills, named after a location in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" books. The chopper will wake up daily to test its equipment, collect a temperature reading and take a single photo of its surroundings. It will continue to do this until it loses power or fills up its remaining memory space, which could take 20 years. Such a long-term dataset could not only benefit future designs for Martian vehicles but also "provide a long-term perspective on Martian weather patterns and dust movement," researchers wrote in the statement. However, the data will be kept on board the helicopter and not beamed back to Earth, so it must be retrieved by future Martian vehicles or astronauts. "Whenever humanity revisits Valinor Hills — either with a rover, a new aircraft, or future astronauts — Ingenuity will be waiting with her last gift of data," Teddy Tzanetos, an Ingenuity scientist at JPL, said in the statement. Thursday NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released another new video tracing the entire route of Ingenuity's expedition over the surface of Mars. "Ingenuity's success could pave the way for more extensive aerial exploration of Mars down the road," adds Spacae.com: Mission team members are already working on designs for larger, more capable rotorcraft that could collect a variety of science data on the Red Planet, for example. And Mars isn't the only drone target: In 2028, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly, a $3.3 billion mission to Saturn's huge moon Titan, which hosts lakes, seas and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons on its frigid surface. The 1,000-pound (450 kg) Dragonfly will hop from spot to spot on Titan, characterizing the moon's various environments and assessing its habitability. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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