An anonymous reader shares a report: People are using Spotify playlist and podcast descriptions to distribute spam, malware, pirated software and cheat codes for video games. Cybersecurity researcher Karol Paciorek posted an example of this: A Spotify playlist titled "*Sony Vegas Pro*13 C-r-a-c-k Free Download 2024 m-y-s-o-f-t-w-a-r-e-f-r-e-e.com" acts as a free advertisement for piracy website m-y-s-o-f-t-w-a-r-e-f-r-e-e[dot]com, which hosts malicious software. "Cybercriminals exploit Spotify for #malware distribution," Paciorek posted on X. "Why? Spotify has a strong reputation and its pages are easily indexed by search engines, making it an effective platform to promote malicious links." "The playlist title in question has been removed," a spokesperson for Spotify told 404 Media in a statement. "Spotify's Platform Rules prohibit posting, sharing, or providing instructions on implementing malware or related malicious practices that seek to harm or gain unauthorized access to computers, networks, systems, or other technologies."

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schwit1 writes: Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold. And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students' MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses. This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year's $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.

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While master's degrees are increasingly popular -- with 40% of U.S. bachelor's degree holders now having postgraduate credentials -- new research reveals many don't deliver improved earnings despite soaring costs. Analysis from the U.S. and UK indicates that about 40% of U.S. master's programs fail to provide positive financial returns, with some even leading to financial losses for graduates, as captured in a new Economist story. Similarly, British master's graduates earn no more than bachelor's holders by age 35 after accounting for background factors. This is particularly significant because U.S. students now average $50,000 in postgraduate debt, triple the real cost since 2000, while UK fees have risen 70% since 2011 to $12,000 annually. Returns vary dramatically by field: computer science and engineering show strong gains, while humanities degrees often lead to reduced earnings compared to bachelor's-only peers. Women are more likely than men to see earnings increases, succeeding in 14 out of 31 subject areas compared to men's six. Choice of institution impacts outcomes, though data shows no strong correlation between program cost and graduate earnings.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet -- or roughly 57% of the world's population. Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies. [...] In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet -- 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So itâ(TM)s no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed. But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan -- where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.

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Valve's Steam platform is implementing stricter regulations for season pass sales, requiring detailed content descriptions and specific release windows for downloadable content (DLC), according to SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik. The company will restrict season pass offerings to established partners with proven track records and may issue refunds if developers miss deadlines or deliver unsatisfactory content. Developers must outline DLC components and commit to three-month launch windows, with one possible delay allowed. "If you aren't ready to clearly communicate about the content included in each DLC AND when each DLC will be ready for launch, you shouldn't offer a Season Pass on Steam," Valve stated.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily News could perform searches for their copyrighted content in its AI training sets. In a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that they and experts they hired have spent over 150 hours since November 1 searching OpenAI's training data. But on November 14, OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers' search data stored on one of the virtual machines, according to the aforementioned letter, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late Wednesday. OpenAI tried to recover the data -- and was mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were "irretrievably" lost, the recovered data "cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs' copied articles were used to build [OpenAI's] models," per the letter. "News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time," counsel for The Times and Daily News wrote.

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Workers in the U.S. are running in place -- feeling stuck in jobs with dimmed prospects of advancement and seeing fewer opportunities to jump ship for something better. From a report: It's a sharp contrast to the heady days of 2022 -- when employees were quitting their jobs at record high rates, open roles proliferated and the possibility of a higher paycheck always seemed just around the corner. Employers are sitting tight, says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at job site Glassdoor. Companies aren't making big changes to hiring strategy. That means "fewer opportunities for workers to climb the career ladder," he says. They're still plugging away at the same role they've had for years without the opportunity to move up internally or at a new company. 65% of the 3,400 professionals surveyed by Glassdoor last month said they feel stuck in their current role. "As workers feel stuck, pent-up resentment boils under the surface," Zhao writes in a report out yesterday.

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Sony has announced the a1 II flagship mirrorless camera, retaining its predecessor's 50.1-megapixel stacked sensor while adding AI capabilities and improved stabilization. The camera features a new dedicated AI processor, enhancing autofocus performance with claimed improvements of 50% for bird eye detection and 30% for both animal and human subjects. Its in-body stabilization system now offers 8.5 stops of correction. The a1 II maintains the original's 30 frames-per-second shooting speed and 759-point autofocus system. New features include pre-capture shooting with a one-second buffer and a multi-angle LCD screen borrowed from the a9 III. Connectivity upgrades include a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, while dual card slots support both CFexpress Type A and UHS-II SD cards. The Sony a1 II will be available mid-December for $6,499.

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Owners of older models of D-Link VPN routers are being told to retire and replace their devices following the disclosure of a serious remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. From a report: Most of the details about the bug are being kept under wraps given the potential for wide exploitation. The vendor hasn't assigned it a CVE identifier or really said much about it at all other than that it's a buffer overflow bug that leads to unauthenticated RCE. Unauthenticated RCE issues are essentially as bad as vulnerabilities get, and D-Link warned that if customers continued to use the affected products, the devices connected to them would also be put at risk. Previous bugs in similar products from other vendors have carried warnings that attackers could exploit them to install rootkits and use that persistent access to surveil an organization's web traffic, potentially stealing data such as credentials. Further reading: D-Link Won't Fix Critical Flaw Affecting 60,000 Older NAS Devices.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday morning, the air quality in India's capital under a widely used index stood at 485. While that is almost five times the threshold for healthy breathing, it felt like a relief: The day before, the reading had shot up to 1,785. Infinitesimal air particles were still clogging lungs and arteries, but it was possible to see sunlight again, and to smell things. [...] Every year this suffocating smog accompanies the drop in temperatures as the plains of north India shed their unbearable heat for wintertime cool. And like clockwork, political leaders roll out emergency measures intended to quit making the problem worse. Yet India seems powerless to reduce the effects of this public health catastrophe, as its politicians stay busy trading blame and trying to outmaneuver one another in legal battles. The haze was so shocking this week that Delhi's chief minister, Atishi, who goes by one name, declared it a "medical emergency" endangering the lives of children and older people. The Supreme Court, whose members also live in the capital, chided the national government for responding too slowly and ordered special measures: halting construction work and blocking some vehicles from the roads. Schools were closed indefinitely to protect students.

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Apple has pushed out security updates that it says are "recommended for all users," after fixing a pair of security bugs used in active cyberattacks targeting Mac users. From a report: In a security advisory on its website, Apple said it was aware of two vulnerabilities that "may have been actively exploited on Intel-based Mac systems." The bugs are considered "zero day" vulnerabilities because they were unknown to Apple at the time they were exploited. [...] The vulnerabilities were reported by security researchers at Google's Threat Analysis Group, which investigates government-backed hacking and cyberattacks, suggesting that a government actor may be involved in the attacks.

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TV Time's parent company criticized Apple's App Store control after the tech giant removed its streaming app over an intellectual property dispute. "Apple holds significant power over app developers by controlling access to a massive market and, in this case, seems to have acted on a complaint without requiring robust evidence from the complainant," Jerry Inman, CMO of Whip Media, which operates the app, told TechCrunch. The app was pulled from the store by Apple after the developer refused to pay a settlement fee related to user-uploaded cover art. The app has since been reinstated.

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Scientists unveiled on Wednesday the first blueprint of human skeletal development as they make progress toward the goal of completing a biological atlas of every cell type in the body to better understand human health and diagnose and treat disease. From a report: The work is part of the ongoing Human Cell Atlas project that was begun in 2016 and involves researchers around the world. The human body comprises roughly 37 trillion cells, with each cell type having a unique function. The researchers aim to have a first draft of the atlas done in the next year or two. Aviv Regev, founding co-chair of the project and currently executive vice president and head of research and early development at U.S. biotech company Genentech, said the work is important on two levels. "First of all, it's our basic human curiosity. We want to know what we're made of. I think humans have always wanted to know what they're made of. And, in fact, biologists have been mapping cells since the 1600s for that reason," Regev said. "The second and very pragmatic reason is that this is essential for us in order to understand and treat disease. Cells are the basic unit of life, and when things go wrong, they go wrong with our cells, first and foremost," Regev said.

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Half of young Norwegians find online piracy acceptable when streaming services are too expensive, according to a new government survey released this week. The Ipsos poll of 1,411 respondents found that 32% of all Norwegians justify using pirate sites to save money, with acceptance rising to 50% among those under 30. The rates increase further when specifically asked about pirating due to high streaming costs. Despite concerns about piracy, 61% of Norwegians paid for streaming services in the past year, including 64% of those under 30. Among active pirates, 41% said they would stop if legal services were more affordable, while 35% wanted broader content per service. Only 47% of respondents believed piracy supports organized crime, with 24% expressing uncertainty about this connection.

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AI tools remain prediction engines despite new capabilities, requiring both quality data and human judgment for successful deployment, according to new analysis. While generative AI can now handle complex tasks like writing and coding, its fundamental nature as a prediction machine means organizations must understand its limitations and provide appropriate oversight, argue Ajay Agrawal (Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management), Joshua Gans (Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School, and the chief economist at the Creative Destruction Lab), and Avi Goldfarb (Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare at the Rotman School) in a piece published on Harvard Business Review. Poor data can lead to errors, while lack of human judgment in deployment can result in strategic failures, particularly in high-stakes situations. An excerpt from the story: Thinking of computers as arithmetic machines is more important than most people intuitively grasp because that understanding is fundamental to using computers effectively, whether for work or entertainment. While video game players and photographers may not think about their computer as an arithmetic machine, successfully using a (pre-AI) computer requires an understanding that it strictly follows instructions. Imprecise instructions lead to incorrect results. Playing and winning at early computer games required an understanding of the underlying logic of the game. [...] AI's evolution has mirrored this trajectory, with many early applications directly related to well-established prediction tasks and, more recently, AI reframing a wide number of applications as predictions. Thus, the higher value AI applications have moved from predicting loan defaults and machine breakdowns to a reframing of writing, drawing, and other tasks as prediction.

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Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace. The Guardian:The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world's biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy. Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace's Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to "change the conversation" away from "simplistic bans of plastic" which were being proposed across the world in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health. Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15m tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as "just too ambitious." The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW's chairmanship, the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66. The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years -- more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

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Google has warned websites they will be penalized for hosting marketing content designed to exploit search rankings, regardless of whether they created or outsourced the material. The crackdown on so-called "parasite SEO" targets websites that leverage their search rankings to promote unrelated content, such as news sites hiding shopping coupon codes or educational platforms publishing affiliate marketing material. Chris Nelson from Google's search quality team said the policy applies even when content involves "white label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements." The move follows Google's March announcement targeting site reputation abuse, which gained attention after Sports Illustrated was found publishing AI-generated product reviews through third-party marketing firm AdVon Commerce.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The global gaming phenomenon Minecraft is coming to the real world for the first time in a global deal to open themed rides, attractions, hotel rooms and retail outlets, starting with the UK and US. Minecraft has struck a deal with UK-headquartered Merlin Entertainments -- Europe's largest theme park operator and the second biggest globally after Disney -- which runs more than 135 attractions in 23 countries including Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, Madame Tussauds and the London Eye. Under the terms of the deal, Merlin will invest more than $110 million in the first two attractions. They are due to open in the UK and the US in 2026 and 2027, in either an existing theme park or as new city centre attractions. Over the longer term the two companies plan to expand the strategic partnership, which is called "Adventures Made Real," to other countries and territories. Minecraft is the bestselling video game of all time, with 140 million players each month, in territories as disparate as Antarctica and Vatican City, and there are more than 1.3 trillion videos posted by game players on YouTube.

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Microsoft has announced sweeping changes to Windows security architecture, including new recovery capabilities designed to prevent system-wide outages following July's CrowdStrike incident that disabled 8.5 million Windows devices. The Windows Resiliency Initiative introduces Quick Machine Recovery, allowing IT administrators to remotely fix unbootable systems through an enhanced Windows Recovery Environment. Microsoft is also mandating stricter testing and deployment practices for security vendors under its Microsoft Virus Initiative, including gradual rollouts and monitoring procedures. The company is also developing a framework to move antivirus processing outside the Windows kernel, with a preview planned for security partners in July 2025.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit "bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior," according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is "committed to pursuing innovation within our agency" but are still "working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way." Paul Fucito, press secretary for the USPTO, clarified to WIRED that employees can use "state-of-the-art generative AI models" at work -- but only inside the agency's internal testing environment. "Innovators from across the USPTO are now using the AI Lab to better understand generative AI's capabilities and limitations and to prototype AI-powered solutions to critical business needs," Fucito wrote in an email.

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