Saturday, August 17th, 2024

Time	Event
12:02a	Dubai Court Recognizes Crypto As a Valid Salary Payment The Dubai Court of First Instance has declared that cryptocurrency can be used as a legal form of salary under employment contracts. CoinTelegraph reports: Irina Heaver, a partner at UAE law firm NeosLegal, explained that the ruling in case number 1739 of 2024 shows a shift from the court's earlier stance in 2023, where a similar claim was denied because the crypto involved lacked precise valuation. Heaver believes this shows a "progressive approach" to integrating digital currencies into the country's legal and economic framework. Heaver said that the case involved an employee who filed a lawsuit claiming that the employer had not paid their wages, wrongful termination compensation and other benefits. The worker's employment contract stipulated a monthly salary in fiat and 5,250 in EcoWatt tokens. The dispute stems from the employer's inability to pay the tokens portion of the employee's salary in six months. In 2023, the court acknowledged the inclusion of the EcoWatts tokens in the contract. Still, it did not enforce the payment in crypto, as the employee failed to provide a clear method for valuing the currency in fiat terms. "This decision reflected a traditional viewpoint, emphasizing the need for concrete evidence when dealing with unconventional payment forms," Heaver said. However, the lawyer said that in 2024, the court "took a step forward," ruling in favor of the employee and ordering the payment of the crypto salary as per the employment contract without converting it into fiat. Heaver added that the court's reliance on the UAE Civil Transactions Law and Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 in both judgments shows the consistent application of legal principles in wage determination. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
12:45a	US Fines T-Mobile $60 Million, Its Largest Penalty Ever, Over Unauthorized Data Access The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) fined T-Mobile $60 million, its largest penalty ever, for failing to prevent and report unauthorized access to sensitive data tied to violations of a mitigation agreement from its 2020 merger with Sprint. "The size of the fine, and CFIUS's unprecedented decision to make it public, show the committee is taking a more muscular approach to enforcement as it seeks to deter future violations," reports Reuters. From the report: T-Mobile said in a statement that it experienced technical issues during its post-merger integration with Sprint that affected "information shared from a small number of law enforcement information requests." It stressed that the data never left the law enforcement community, was reported "in a timely manner" and was "quickly addressed." The failure of T-Mobile to report the incidents promptly delayed CFIUS' efforts to investigate and mitigate any potential harm to U.S. national security, they added, without providing further details. "The $60 million penalty announcement highlights the committee's commitment to ramping up CFIUS enforcement by holding companies accountable when they fail to comply with their obligations," one of the U.S. officials said, adding that transparency around enforcement actions incentivizes other companies to comply with their obligations. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
1:25a	National Public Data Confirms Breach Exposing Social Security Numbers BleepingComputer's Ionut Ilascu reports: Background check service National Public Data confirms that hackers breached its systems after threat actors leaked a stolen database with millions of social security numbers and other sensitive personal information. The company states that the breached data may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers (SSNs), and postal addresses. In the statement disclosing the security incident, National Public Data says that "the information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es)." The company acknowledges the "leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024" and believes the breach is associated with a threat actor "that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023." NPD says they investigated the incident, cooperated with law enforcement, and reviewed the potentially affected records. If significant developments occur, the company "will try to notify" the impacted individuals. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:30a	US Presses the 'Reset Button' On Technology That Lets Cars Talk To Each Other An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Safety advocates have been touting the potential of technology that allows vehicles to communicate wirelessly for years. So far, the rollout has been slow and uneven. Now the U.S. Department of Transportation is releasing a roadmap it hopes will speed up deployment of that technology -- and save thousands of lives in the process. "This is proven technology that works," Shailen Bhatt, head of the Federal Highway Administration, said at an event Friday to mark the release of the deployment plan (PDF) for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. Users could send and receive frequent messages to and from each other, continuously sharing information about speed, position, and road conditions -- even in situations with poor visibility, including around corners or in dense fog or heavy rain. [...] Despite enthusiasm from safety advocates and federal regulators, the technology has faced a bumpy rollout. During the Obama administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed making the technology mandatory on cars and light trucks. But the agency later dropped that idea during the Trump administration. The deployment of V2X has been "hampered by regulatory uncertainty," said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group that represents automakers. But he's optimistic that the new plan will help. "This is the reset button," Bozzella said at Friday's announcement. "This deployment plan is a big deal. It is a crucial piece of this V2X puzzle." The plan lays out some goals and targets for the new technology. In the short-term, the plan aims to have V2X infrastructure in place on 20% of the National Highway System by 2028, and for 25% of the nation's largest metro areas to have V2X enabled at signalized intersections. V2X technology still faces some daunting questions, including how to pay for the rollout of critical infrastructure and how to protect connected vehicles from cyberattack. But safety advocates say it's past time to find the answers. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:00a	NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour Citizen scientists from NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project discovered a hypervelocity object, CWISE J1249, moving fast enough to escape the Milky Way. "This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or less than that of a small star," reports NASA's Science Editorial Team, suggesting the object may have originated from a binary star system or a globular cluster. From the report: A few years ago, longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden spotted a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, marching across their screens in the WISE images. Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These citizen scientists are now co-authors on the team's study about this discovery published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (a pre-print version is available here). CWISE J1249 is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it also stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn't steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star. Ordinary brown dwarfs are not that rare. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have discovered more than 4,000 of them! But none of the others are known to be on their way out of the galaxy. This new object has yet another unique property. Data obtained with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii, show that it has much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy. Why does this object move at such high speed? One hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion. Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:00a	An Insider's Perspective Into the Pentagon's UFO Hunt In his new memoir, Imminent, former senior intelligence official Luis Elizondo claims that a supersecret program has been retrieving technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin for decades, warning that these phenomena could pose a serious national security threat or even an existential threat to humanity. The New York Times reports: Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Elizondo's disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin. Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:34p	GitHub Promises 'Additional Guardrails' After Wednesday's Update Triggers Short Outage Wednesday GitHub "broke itself," reports the Register, writing that "the Microsoft-owned code-hosting outfit says it made a change involving its database infrastructure, which sparked a global outage of its various services." Or, as the Verge puts it, GitHub experienced "some major issues" which apparently lasted for 36 minutes: When we first published this story, navigating to the main GitHub website showed an error message that said "no server is currently available to service your request," but the website was working again soon after. (The error message also featured an image of an angry unicorn.) GitHub's report of the incident also listed problems with things like pull requests, GitHub Pages, Copilot, and the GitHub API. GitHub attributed the downtime to "an erroneous configuration change rolled out to all GitHub.com databases that impacted the ability of the database to respond to health check pings from the routing service. As a result, the routing service could not detect healthy databases to route application traffic to. This led to widespread impact on GitHub.com starting at 23:02 UTC." (Downdetector showed "more than 10,000 user reports of problems," according to the Verge, "and that the problems were reported quite suddenly.") GitHub's incident report adds that "Given the severity of this incident, follow-up items are the highest priority work for teams at this time." To prevent recurrence we are implementing additional guardrails in our database change management process. We are also prioritizing several repair items such as faster rollback functionality and more resilience to dependency failures. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34p	Space Telescope Data Reignites Debate Over How Fast Our Universe Is Expanding "A new front has opened in the longstanding debate over how fast the universe is expanding," writes Science magazine: For years astronomers have argued over a gulf between the expansion rate as measured from galaxies in the local universe and as calculated from studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Bang. The disparity was so large and persistent that some astronomers thought the standard theory of the universe might have to be tweaked. But over the past week, results from NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope orbiting observatory suggest the problem may be more mundane: some systematic error in the strategies used to measure the distance to nearby galaxies. "The evidence based on these data does not suggest the need for additional physics," says Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who leads [the Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program, or CCHP] that calculated the expansion rate from JWST data using three different galactic distance measurements and released the results on the arXiv preprint server. (The papers have not yet been peer reviewed.) The methods disagreed about the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, or H0, and two were close to the CMB prediction. Specifically, the team used JWST to measure the distance to 10 local galaxies using three stars with a predictable brightness: Cepheids, the brightest red giant stars, and carbon stars. Science notes that the last two methods "agreed to about 1%, but differed from the Cepheid-based distance by 2.5% to 4%." Combining all three methods the team derived a value "just shy of 70 km/s per Mpc," according to the article — leading the University of Chicago's Freedman to say "There's something systematic in the measurements. Until we can establish unambiguously where the issue lies in the nearby universe, we can't be claiming that there's additional physics in the distant universe." But the controversy continues, according to Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University (leader of a team of Hubble Constant researchers known as SH0ES). Riess points out that other teams have used JWST to measure distances with all three methods separately and have come up with values closer to the original SH0ES result. He also questions why CCHP excluded data from telescopes other than JWST. "I don't see a compelling justification for excluding the data they do," he says. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34p	Preparing to Monetize, Threads Launches New Tools for Users "We're testing a few new ways to plan and manage your presence on Threads," announced top Threads/Instagram executive Adam Mosseri, promising their 200 million-plus users "enhanced insights to help you better understand your followers and how posts perform, and the ability to save multiple drafts with scheduling coming soon." Axios reports: Helping creators avoid burnout has become a growing focus for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in July that the company's new generative AI tools can alleviate certain tasks like communicating with followers. Thursday's announcement was positioned as helping both businesses and creators — suggesting that Meta is ramping up plans to start monetizing Threads, which could be as early as this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:34p	Can the US Regulate Algorithm-Based Price Fixing on Rental Housing? "Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it." That's a U.S. presidential candidate, speaking yesterday in North Carolina to warn that the practice "is anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices." Ironically, it's a problem caused by technology that's impacting some of America's major tech-industry cities. Investopedia reports: Harris proposed a slate of policies aimed at curbing the high cost of housing, which many economists have traced to a long-standing shortage. The affordability situation for both renters and first-time buyers took a turn for the worse starting in 2020 when home prices and rents rose sharply. Harris's plan called for the construction of 3 million new houses to close the gap between how many homes exist in the country, and how many are needed, with the aim of evening out supply and demand and putting downward pressure on prices. This would be accomplished by offering tax incentives to builders for constructing starter homes, by funding local construction, and by cutting bureaucratic red tape that slows down construction projects. Harris would also help buyers out directly, through the first-time buyer credit. For renters, Harris said she would crack down on companies that own many apartments, who she said have "colluded" to raise rents using pricing algorithms. She also called for a law blocking large investors from buying houses to rent out, a practice she said was driving up prices by competing with individual private buyers. Harris's focus on corporate crackdowns extended to the food business, where she called for a "federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries," without going into specifics about what exact behavior the ban would target. Investopedia reminds readers that the executive branch is just one of three branches of the U.S. government: Should Harris win the 2024 election and become president, her ideas are still not guaranteed to be implemented, since many would require the support of Congress. Lawmakers are currently divided with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Democrats in control of the Senate. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:34p	To Fight Censorship Order, X.com Announces It's Ending Business Operations in Brazil X.com "says it's ending business operations in Brazil effective immediately," reports Engadget, "but the service will remain available to users in the country." The company says Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the Superior Electoral Court and a justice of the Supreme Federal Court, threatened one of X's legal representatives with arrest if it did not "comply with his censorship orders." According to Reuters, de Moreas demanded that X remove certain content from its platform. Rather than comply, X has opted to end its local operations "to protect the safety of our staff." According to X, de Moraes made the threat in a "secret order," which it shared publicly. X owner Elon Musk claimed that the demand "would require us to break (in secret) Brazilian, Argentinian, American and international law." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:34p	2024's Hugo Award Winners Announced Slashdot reader Dave Knott writes: After once again being plagued by controversy, this time due to a thwarted ballot-stuffing campaign, the 2024 Hugo Awards have been awarded at the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention. This year's winners are: * Best Novel: Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh * Best Novella: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher * Best Novelette: "The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer * Best Short Story: "Better Living Through Algorithms", by Naomi Kritzer * Best Series: Imperial Radch, by Ann Leckie * Best Graphic Story or Comic: Saga, Vol. 11, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples * Best Related Work: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith * Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves * Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: The Last of Us: "Long, Long Time", written by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, directed by Peter Hoar * Best Game or Interactive Work: Baldur's Gate 3, produced by Larian Studios * Best Editor Short Form: Neil Clarke * Best Editor Long Form: Ruoxi Chen * Best Professional Artist: Rovina Cai * Best Semiprozine: Strange Horizons, by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective * Best Fanzine: Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, Adri Joy, G. Brown, Vance Kotrla * Best Fancast: Octothorpe, by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty * Best Fan Writer: Paul Weimer * Best Fan Artist: Laya Rose * Lodestar Award for Best YA Book: To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose * Astounding Award for Best New Writer: Xiran Jay Zhao Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:34p	Paul Allen's Estate Auction Includes Vintage Apple-1, CP/M and DOS-Powered Computers Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Christie's this week announced the items that will be auctioned in three sales from the Paul G. Allen Collection, including historic computers and artifacts from the late Microsoft co-founder's former Living Computers Museum + Labs in Seattle. They include an Apple-1 from the desk of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, estimated at $500,000 to $800,000, to be auctioned as part of a live sale on Sept. 10 at Christie's Rockefeller Center in New York. Among the lot of "Firsts" from the Paul Allen Collection is a circa-1984 PC's Limited Personal Computer (est. $600-$800), which comes with a manual for the Microsoft-developed IBM DOS. Also being offered is a circa-1975 IMSAI 8080 microcomputer (est. $2,000-$3,000). Both computers ran operating systems that can be traced back to the efforts of Digital Research founder Gary Kildall. Kildall's CP/M was adapted for IMSAI in 1975 and inspired the "CP/M work-alike" Quick And Dirty Operating System (QDOS) that Microsoft purchased in 1981, ported to the new IBM PC as MS-DOS, and licensed to IBM, who in turn offered it as PC-DOS... Interestingly, not present in the any of the three Christie's Paul G. Allen Collection auctions is Allen's rare unedited copy of Kildall's Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry (edited version available at CHM), one of only 20 copies that were originally distributed to family and friends shortly before Kildall's death in 1994. (In the unpublished memoir, Kildall's Seattle Times obit reported, Kildall called DOS "plain and simple theft" of CP/M). Documents released in response to a 2018 Washington Public Records Act request revealed that one of those copies found its way into the hands of Allen in 2017, gifted by University of Washington CS professor Ed Lazowska, who led fundraising campaigns for UW's Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:39p	'AI-Powered Remediation': GitHub Now Offers 'Copilot Autofix' Suggestions for Code Vulnerabilities InfoWorld reports that Microsoft-owned GitHub "has unveiled Copilot Autofix, an AI-powered software vulnerability remediation service." The feature became available Wednesday as part of the GitHub Advanced Security (or GHAS) service: "Copilot Autofix analyzes vulnerabilities in code, explains why they matter, and offers code suggestions that help developers fix vulnerabilities as fast as they are found," GitHub said in the announcement. GHAS customers on GitHub Enterprise Cloud already have Copilot Autofix included in their subscription. GitHub has enabled Copilot Autofix by default for these customers in their GHAS code scanning settings. Beginning in September, Copilot Autofix will be offered for free in pull requests to open source projects. During the public beta, which began in March, GitHub found that developers using Copilot Autofix were fixing code vulnerabilities more than three times faster than those doing it manually, demonstrating how AI agents such as Copilot Autofix can radically simplify and accelerate software development. "Since implementing Copilot Autofix, we've observed a 60% reduction in the time spent on security-related code reviews," says one principal engineer quoted in GitHub's announcement, "and a 25% increase in overall development productivity." The announcement also notes that Copilot Autofix "leverages the CodeQL engine, GPT-4o, and a combination of heuristics and GitHub Copilot APIs." Code scanning tools detect vulnerabilities, but they don't address the fundamental problem: remediation takes security expertise and time, two valuable resources in critically short supply. In other words, finding vulnerabilities isn't the problem. Fixing them is... Developers can keep new vulnerabilities out of their code with Copilot Autofix in the pull request, and now also pay down the backlog of security debt by generating fixes for existing vulnerabilities... Fixes can be generated for dozens of classes of code vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, which developers can dismiss, edit, or commit in their pull request.... For developers who aren't necessarily security experts, Copilot Autofix is like having the expertise of your security team at your fingertips while you review code... As the global home of the open source community, GitHub is uniquely positioned to help maintainers detect and remediate vulnerabilities so that open source software is safer and more reliable for everyone. We firmly believe that it's highly important to be both a responsible consumer of open source software and contributor back to it, which is why open source maintainers can already take advantage of GitHub's code scanning, secret scanning, dependency management, and private vulnerability reporting tools at no cost. Starting in September, we're thrilled to add Copilot Autofix in pull requests to this list and offer it for free to all open source projects... While responsibility for software security continues to rest on the shoulders of developers, we believe that AI agents can help relieve much of the burden.... With Copilot Autofix, we are one step closer to our vision where a vulnerability found means a vulnerability fixed. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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