Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: The world's largest airplane, when it's built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that's sprouted wings — aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale. Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it'll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it's transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn't be moved over land, since they wouldn't fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails. So the WindRunner's developer, Radia of Boulder, Colorado, has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there... Radia's plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious — an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia's supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job — the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger. Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble...? Having fewer total turbines means a wind farm could space them farther apart, avoiding airflow interference. The turbines would be nearly twice as tall, so they'll reach a higher, gustier part of the atmosphere. And big turbines don't need to spin as quickly, so they would make economic sense in places with average wind speeds around 5 meters per second compared with the roughly 7 m/s needed to sustain smaller units. "The result...is more than a doubling of the acres in the world where wind is viable," says Mark Lundstrom [Radia's founder and CEO]. The executive director at America's National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation points out that one day blades could just be 3D-printed on-site — negating the need for the airplane altogether. But 3D printing for turbines is still in its earliest stages.

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India's IT services industry saw entry-level hiring collapse by 70% between fiscal years 2023 and 2024, as the country's four largest IT exporters reduced fresh graduate recruitment from 225,000 to 60,000. Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys shed a combined 38,000 employees in fiscal 2024, marking the sector's first workforce contraction in decades. Studies indicate generative AI could automate 30-40% of junior developer and tester tasks. The proportion of employees under 30 at Infosys declined from 81% in 2010 to a projected 53% by fiscal 2025. India adds 8-9 million people to its workforce annually while the IT sector projects just 50,000 net new jobs per year from fiscal 2026-28. The graduate unemployment rate exceeds 13%, nearly triple the national average.

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"These are the last days of social media as we know it," argues a humanities lecturer from University College Cork exploring where technology and culture intersect, warning they could be come lingering derelicts "haunted by bots and the echo of once-human chatter..." "Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half-coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement. And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as "mostly reliable" — down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s... Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize. Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed. Engagement is now about raw user attention — time spent, impressions, scroll velocity — and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to. "These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not merely tiring but absurd." Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in their place — like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters — where creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with 10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities. Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of what humans will tolerate.... The most radical redesign of social media might be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay. We need governance scaffolding, shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest. This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user autonomy and trust over sheer engagement. "Social media as we know it is dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces..." "The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones."

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"Engineers from Ohio State University are developing a new way to power rocket engines," reports Gizmodo, "using liquid uranium for a faster, more efficient form of nuclear propulsion that could deliver round trips to Mars within a single year..." Nuclear propulsion uses a nuclear reactor to heat a liquid propellant to extremely high temperatures, turning it into a gas that's expelled through a nozzle and used to generate thrust. The newly developed engine concept, called the centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR), uses liquid uranium to heat rocket propellant directly. In doing so, the engine promises more efficiency than traditional chemical rockets, as well as other nuclear propulsion engines, according to new research published in Acta Astronautica... Traditional chemical engines produce about 450 seconds of thrust from a given amount of propellant, a measure known as specific impulse. Nuclear propulsion engines can reach around 900 seconds, with the CNTR possibly pushing that number even higher. "You could have a safe one-way trip to Mars in six months, for example, as opposed to doing the same mission in a year," Spencer Christian, a PhD student at Ohio State and leader of CNTR's prototype construction, said in a statement. CNTR promises faster routes, but it could also use different types of propellant, like ammonia, methane, hydrazine, or propane, that can be found in asteroids or other objects in space. "Some potential hurdles include ensuring that the methods used for startup, operation and shutdown avoid instabilities," according to the researchers' announcement, as well as "envisioning ways to minimize the loss of uranium fuel and accommodate potential engine failures." But "This team's CNTR concept is expected to reach design readiness within the next five years..."

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The UK's data-protecting Information Commissioner's Office has issued a warning about what it calls a worrying trend, reports the BBC: "students hacking their own school and college IT systems for fun or as part of dares." Since 2022, the the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has investigated 215 hacks and breaches originating from inside education settings and says 57% were carried out by children. Other breaches are thought to come from staff, third party IT suppliers and other organisations with access. According to the new data, almost a third of the breaches involved students illegally logging into staff computer systems by guessing passwords or stealing details from teachers. In one incident, a seven-year-old was involved in a data breach and subsequently referred to the National Crime Agency's Cyber Choices programme to help them understand the seriousness of their actions... In another incident three Year 11 students aged 15 or 16 unlawfully accessed school databases containing the personal information of more than 1,400 students. The pupils used hacking tools downloaded from the internet to break passwords and security protocols. When questioned, they said they were interested in cyber security and wanted to test their skills and knowledge. Another example the ICO gave is of a student illegally logging into their college's databases with a teachers' details to change or delete personal information belonging to more than 9,000 staff, students and applicants. The system stored personal information such as name and home address, school records, health data, safeguarding and pastoral logs and emergency contacts. Schools are facing an increasing number of cyber attacks, with 44% of schools reporting an attack or breach in the last year according the government's most recent Cyber Security Breaches Survey. "Youth cyber crime culture is a growing threat linked to English-speaking teen gangs," the article argues, noting breaches at major companies to suggest it's a kind of "gateway" crime. The ICO's principal cyber specialist tells the BBC that "What starts out as a dare, a challenge, a bit of fun in a school setting can ultimately lead to children taking part in damaging attacks on organisations or critical infrastructure."

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RestOfWorld.org reports on "a global crisis nobody anticipated when governments started subsidizing electric vehicles..." "EVs can lose almost half their driving distance when temperatures drop, and the billions spent on improving technology have failed to fix this fundamental limitation." In January, Seattle-based Recurrent, a company that tests and analyzes EVs, found an average range loss of 20% in extreme cold... Lithium-ion batteries rely on chemical reactions that slow dramatically in cold weather. When temperatures plunge, the electrolyte thickens, ions move sluggishly, and charging becomes not just inefficient but potentially dangerous. Charging in cold weather has been identified as a primary cause of thermal acceleration, which can lead to fires... The failure pattern repeats globally wherever cold weather meets inadequate infrastructure. Manufacturers, too, have acknowledged the problem. Chinese EV maker BYD's user manual, for instance, advises drivers to charge indoors, with the heating on. That advice is useless for farmers parking in open courtyards. In fact, research across 293 Chinese cities "found that many drivers in colder regions buy EVs only as supplementary vehicles," according to the article, "while still relying on gasoline-powered cars during winter." The article also tells the story of an apple grower chilly Kashmir, India who discovered that his Chinese three-wheeler lost 60% of its 10-hour charge overnight. This made it impossible to begin the 56-kilometer (35-mile) trip on a route with no charging stations — and prevented him from selling his produce while it was fresh (to earn the highest prices). And the problem affects the entire region: Desperate drivers have formed WhatsApp groups, such as "EV Apple Transporters" and "Battery Help Kashmir," sharing increasingly absurd workarounds. Some have wrapped batteries in quilts; others have hauled power packs weighing 90 kilograms (over 200 pounds) into their homes for the night. One driver parked his battery in the living room. "The blankets caused overheating on the road; water bottles leaked into the circuits," [orchard owner] Sajad Ahmad said. "We became mechanics, engineers, and fools all at once." EVs are also not considered cost-efficient. "Diesel vans are expensive, but they can do four or five trips a day," Mohammad Yaseen, a driver based in Shopian, told Rest of World. "With EVs, one half-trip and you're stuck." Norway, where winter temperatures average minus 7 degrees Celsius (19 degrees Fahrenheit), achieved 89% EV market share with its comprehensive infrastructure. It offers more than 200 models for year-round usage. "The ability to preheat batteries upon fast charging in winter is by far the most important improvement we have seen in the past five years," Christina Bu, secretary-general of the Norwegian EV Association, told Rest of World. "These features are standard in Norway's mature market, but remain absent from basic models exported to developing countries."

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Last year Amazon's robotaxi service Zoox held a training session for 20 Las Vegas firefighters, police officers, and other first responders, reports the Washington Post, calling it "a new ritual for emergency workers across the country, as autonomous vehicles begin to spread beyond the handful of cities that served as initial testing grounds..." Questions that came up included: What can first responders do if the nearly 6,000-pound vehicle is blocking a roadway? (Better to pull, not push.) What happens if the vehicle loses its connectivity? (It's designed to pull over.) And can first responders manually shut off the vehicle? (Not yet, but Zoox is working on it....) The vehicles' operators claim they drive more safely than humans, but anything can happen on public roads, and first responders need to know how to intervene if a robotaxi is caught in a collision that traps passengers, catches fire or gets caught doing something that demands a traffic stop... Alphabet's Waymo, which has more than 2,000 vehicles completing hundreds of thousands of paid trips each week across San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, has trained more than 20,000 first responders in how to interact with its vehicles, the company said. Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment on how many first responders the company has trained, but a representative from the Austin Police Department confirmed that fire, police and transit workers were trained on the company's Robotaxi before the company launched commercial service in June. Tesla, Waymo and Zoox say their vehicles can detect the lights and sirens of emergency vehicles and automatically attempt to pull over. Waymo says its vehicles can interpret first responders' hand signals.... The first responders appeared excited about the potential of the company's artificial intelligence technology to ferry visitors up and down the Vegas Strip without concern that a driver might be inebriated. They were also wary of problems that might unfold: Autonomous vehicles are electric, and when electric vehicles catch fire, they're difficult to extinguish, the firefighters said. The first responders also worried that a secondary air bag deployment could injure an emergency responder, a common concern with conventional vehicles. And if a police officer wanted to view the footage a Zoox vehicle captured on the road, would the company be willing to share it? Turning over footage would require a subpoena, a Zoox official responded. But "those who've been through the trainings and have seen large-scale commercial rollouts say it's difficult to anticipate all the potential issues in a specific market," the article points out. Darius Luttropp, former deputy chief of operations for the San Francisco Fire Department, told the Post last year that Waymo vehicles had blocked city firefighters from leaving and entering firehouses, and also crashed into their equipment. Lt. William White of the Austin Police Department told the Post that more than once Waymo vehicles failed to recognize an officer on a motorcycle with their police lights activated.

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"There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone," notes Apple's security blog, pointing out that "The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware... historically associated with state actors and [using] exploit chains that cost millions of dollars..." But they're doing something about it — this week announcing a new always-on memory-safety protection in the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air (including the kernel and over 70 userland processes)... Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities, which are interchangeable, powerful, and exist throughout the industry... For Apple, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes developing with safe languages and deploying mitigations at scale... Our analysis found that, when employed as a real-time defensive measure, the original Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) release exhibited weaknesses that were unacceptable to us, and we worked with Arm to address these shortcomings in the new Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification, released in 2022. More importantly, our analysis showed that while EMTE had great potential as specified, a rigorous implementation with deep hardware and operating system support could be a breakthrough that produces an extraordinary new security mechanism.... Ultimately, we determined that to deliver truly best-in-class memory safety, we would carry out a massive engineering effort spanning all of Apple — including updates to Apple silicon, our operating systems, and our software frameworks. This effort, together with our highly successful secure memory allocator work, would transform MTE from a helpful debugging tool into a groundbreaking new security feature. Today we're introducing the culmination of this effort: Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), our comprehensive memory safety defense for Apple platforms. Memory Integrity Enforcement is built on the robust foundation provided by our secure memory allocators, coupled with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) in synchronous mode, and supported by extensive Tag Confidentiality Enforcement policies. MIE is built right into Apple hardware and software in all models of iPhone 17 and iPhone Air and offers unparalleled, always-on memory safety protection for our key attack surfaces including the kernel, while maintaining the power and performance that users expect. In addition, we're making EMTE available to all Apple developers in Xcode as part of the new Enhanced Security feature that we released earlier this year during WWDC... Based on our evaluations pitting Memory Integrity Enforcement against exceptionally sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks from the last three years, we believe MIE will make exploit chains significantly more expensive and difficult to develop and maintain, disrupt many of the most effective exploitation techniques from the last 25 years, and completely redefine the landscape of memory safety for Apple products. Because of how dramatically it reduces an attacker's ability to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities on our devices, we believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

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The oldest person living in Japan is 114 years old, reports the BBC. But "The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has risen to a record high of nearly 100,000, its government has announced." Setting a new record for the 55th year in a row, the number of centenarians in Japan was 99,763 as of September, the health ministry said on Friday. Of that total, women accounted for an overwhelming 88%... Health minister Takamaro Fukoka congratulated the 87,784 female and 11,979 male centenarians on their longevity and expressed his "gratitude for their many years of contributions to the development of society".... The higher life expectancy is mainly attributed to fewer deaths from heart disease and common forms of cancer, in particular breast and prostate cancer. Japan has low rates of obesity, a major contributing factor to both diseases, thanks to diets low in red meat and high in fish and vegetables. The obesity rate is particularly low for women, which could go some way to explaining why Japanese women have a much higher life expectancy than their male counterparts... But it's not just diet. Japanese people tend to stay active into later life, walking and using public transport more than elderly people in the US and Europe... However, several studies have cast doubt on the validity of global centenarian numbers, suggesting data errors, unreliable public records and missing birth certificates may account for elevated figures. A government audit of family registries in Japan in 2010 uncovered more than 230,000 people listed as being aged 100 or older who were unaccounted for, some having in fact died decades previously. The miscounting was attributed to patchy record-keeping and suspicions that some families may have tried to hide the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.

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"When residents of Equatorial Guinea's Annobón island wrote to the government in Malabo in July last year complaining about the dynamite explosions by a Moroccan construction company, they didn't expect the swift end to their internet access..." reports the Associated Press. "Residents and activists said the company's dynamite explosions in open quarries and construction activities have been polluting their farmlands and water supply..." Dozens of the signatories and residents were imprisoned for nearly a year, while internet access to the small island has been cut off since then, according to several residents and rights groups. Local residents interviewed by The Associated Press left the island in the past months, citing fear for their lives and the difficulty of life without internet. Banking services have shut down, hospital services for emergencies have been brought to a halt and residents say they rack up phone bills they can't afford because cellphone calls are the only way to communicate... The company's work on the island continues. Residents hoped to pressure authorities to improve the situation with their complaint in July last year. Instead, [the country's president] then deployed a repressive tactic now common in Africa to cut off access to internet to clamp down on protests and criticisms.

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America's Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Amazon and Google misled advertisers placing ads on their websites, reports Bloomberg, and specifically whether the two companies "properly disclosed the terms and pricing for ads." The FTC is seeking details about Amazon's auctions and whether it disclosed "reserve pricing" for some search ads — price floors that advertisers must meet before they can buy an ad, the people said. Separately, the FTC is examining practices by Google, including its internal pricing process and whether it increased the cost of ads in ways that weren't disclosed to advertisers, the people said... According to one of the people, the FTC's latest investigation emerged from its earlier antitrust case. In that complaint, the agency alleges that Amazon litters its marketplace with irrelevant results for search queries, making it harder for shoppers to find what they are looking for and more expensive for sellers to use the platform. The practice effectively forces sellers to buy ads to make their product appear in response to consumer searches.

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Many coral reefs "have now turned ghostly white," reports CBS News — and "a major culprit is climate change." SFGate adds that more than 50% of the world's coral reefs have been lost, mostly over the past 10 years, according to coral reef scientist Rebecca Albright at the California Academy of Sciences. "If changes aren't made soon, 90% to 99% of the coral reefs that are remaining could be deteriorated by 2050, Albright said..." But CBS News notes that Albright's lab is the first in America to successfully spawn coral to regenerate the reefs: The lab is mastering the art and science of creating baby corals, and the scientists have brought their expertise into the wild. The location: the second-largest reef in the world, known as the Mesoamerican Reef, stretching some 700 miles along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras... Armed with test tubes, the scientists quickly dove into the water and collected the tiny packets of gametes. Back on land, the eggs were fertilized, incubated, and then brought back into the wild. "Then we planted over 3,000 baby corals back to the reef," explained Albright. The baby corals are now two months old. The Roatan staff will dive in a few months to see how many survived. Scientists are worried because bleaching events "are becoming more common," notes SFGate, "happening more frequently and affecting more parts of the world... The most current event was confirmed on April 15, 2024, and is still ongoing, impacting approximately 84% of the world's coral reefs as of August 31. "It has been documented in at least 83 countries and territories."

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TechCrunch reports: Thanks to a pledge to unbundle its corporate messaging app Teams from its productivity suites, Microsoft has managed to slip unscathed through a major antitrust investigation by the European Commission that could have resulted in massive fines for the tech giant. The Commission on Friday okayed Microsoft's concessions to address the EU's competition concerns over the company including Teams along with the rest of its Office productivity suite for free, concluding a multi-year investigation that was sparked by complaints from rival office messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft has promised that for the next seven years, it will provide Microsoft 365 and Office 365 without Teams at a lower price and will let customers choose whether they want to pay more to add the collaboration app to the suites... Microsoft is voluntarily offering some versions of both its productivity suites without Teams at a 50% lower price compared to versions that bundle the app, worldwide. And Microsoft dodged punitive measures and a big fine, as the Commission's penalties for breaching competition rules can reach up to 10% of annual global revenue — which, considering the tech giant last year recorded $245 billion in revenue, would have been truckloads of money. The article adds one more interesting detail. "The Commission has also managed to get Microsoft to agree to open up its APIs to enable interoperability for key features between its suite and third-party messaging and collaboration tools, as well as let them export their data out of teams for the next five years..." The Commission's official announcement says this will "open up the market for other providers of communication and collaboration tools in Europe." And Microsoft will also allow customers with long-term licenses the option of switching to a suite switch without Teams...

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One of the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a mere 40 light-years away, just might be clad in a life-supporting atmosphere," reports ScienceAlert. "In exciting new JWST observations, the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e shows hints of a gaseous envelope similar to our own, one that could facilitate liquid water on the surface." Although the detection is ambiguous and needs extensive follow-up to find out what the deal is, it's the closest astronomers have come yet in their quest to find a second Earth... [T]he first step is finding exoplanets that are the right distance from their host star, occupying a zone where water neither freezes under extreme cold nor evaporates under extreme heat. Announced in 2016, the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system was immediately exciting for this reason. The red dwarf star hosts seven exoplanets that have a rocky composition (as opposed to gas or ice giants), several of which are bang in the star's habitable, liquid water zone... Red dwarf stars are also much more active than Sun-like stars, rampant with flare activity that, scientists have speculated, may have stripped any planetary atmospheres in the vicinity. Closer inspections of TRAPPIST-1d, one of the other worlds in the star's habitable zone, have turned up no trace of an atmosphere. But TRAPPIST-1e is a little more comfortably located, at a slightly greater distance from the star... [T]he spectrum is consistent with an atmosphere rich in molecular nitrogen, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. This is pretty tantalizing. Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78 percent molecular nitrogen. If the results can be validated, TRAPPIST-1e might just be the most Earth-like exoplanet discovered to date. That is not a small if, though. Luckily, more JWST observations are in the pipeline, and the researchers should be able to validate or rule out an atmosphere very soon. After analyzing four transits of TRAPPIST-1e across TRAPPIST-1, "We are seeing two possible explanations," says astrophysicist Ryan MacDonald of the University of St Andrews in the UK. "The most exciting possibility is that TRAPPIST-1e could have a so-called secondary atmosphere containing heavy gases like nitrogen. "But our initial observations cannot yet rule out a bare rock with no atmosphere..." Astrophysicist Ana Glidden of MIT led the second team interpreting the results, and says "We are really still in the early stages of learning what kind of amazing science we can do with Webb. It's incredible to measure the details of starlight around Earth-sized planets 40 light-years away and learn what it might be like there, if life could be possible there." "We're in a new age of exploration that's very exciting to be a part of."

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"Facebook users who filed a claim in parent company Meta's $725 million settlement related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal may soon get a payment," reports CNN, since "on August 27, the court ordered that settlement benefits be distributed." It's been over two years since Facebook users were able to file claims in Meta's December 2022 settlement. The class-action lawsuit began after the social media giant said in 2018 that as many as 87 million Facebook users' private information was obtained by data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica... Meta was accused of allowing Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, including developers, advertisers and data brokers, to access private information about Facebook users. The social media giant was also accused of insufficiently managing third-party access to and use of user data. Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. Following the Cambridge Analytica incident, Facebook restricted third-party access to user data and "developed more robust tools" to inform users about how data is collected and shared, according to court documents... Any US Facebook user who had an active account between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, was eligible to file a claim, even if they have deleted the account. The deadline to file was August 25, 2023. Almost 29 million claims were filed and about 18 million were validated as of September 2023, according to Meta's response in a 2024 legal document... Payments will either be sent directly to the bank account provided on the claim form, or via PayPal, a virtual prepaid Mastercard, Venmo or Zelle. Unsuccessful or expired payments will receive a "second chance email" to update the payment method.

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They stole a woman's phone in Barcelona. Unfortunately, her husband was security consultant/penetration tester Martin Vigo, reports Spain's newspaper El Pais. "His weeks-long investigation coincided with a massive two-year police operation between 2022 and 2024 in six countries where 17 people were arrested: Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru...." In Vigo's case, the phone was locked and the "Find my iPhone" feature was activated... Once stolen, the phones are likely wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent the GPS from tracking their movements. "Then they go to a safe house where they are gathered together and shipped on pallets outside of Spain, to Morocco or China." This international step is vital to prevent the phone from being blocked if the thieves try to use it again. Carriers in several European countries share lists of the IMEIs (unique numbers for each device) of stolen devices so they can't be used. But Morocco, for example, doesn't share these lists. There, the phone can be reconnected... With hundreds or thousands of stored phones, another path begins: "They try to get the PIN," says Vigo. Why the PIN? Because with the PIN, you can change the Apple password and access the device's content. The gang had created a system to send thousands of text messages like the one Vigo received. To know who to target with the bait message, the police say, "the organization performed social profiling of the victims, since, in many cases, in addition to the phone, they also had the victim's personal belongings, such as their ID." This is how they obtained the phone numbers to send the malicious SMS... Each victim received a unique link, and the server knew which victim clicked it... With the first click, the attackers would redirect the user to a website they believed was credible, such as Apple's real iCloud site... [T]he next day you receive another text message, and you click on it, more confidently. However, that link no longer redirects you to the real Apple website, but to a flawless copy created by the criminals: that's where they ask for your PIN, and without thinking, full of hope, you enter it... "The PIN is more powerful than your fingerprint or face. With it, you can delete the victim's biometric information and add your own to access banking apps that are validated this way," says Vigo. Apple Wallet asks you to re-authenticate, and then everything is accessible... In the press release on the case, the police explained that the gang allegedly used a total of 5,300 fake websites and illegally unlocked around 1.3 million high-end devices, about 30,000 of them in Spain. Vigo tells El Pais that if the PIN doesn't unlock the device, the criminal gang then sends it to China to be "dismantled and then sent back to Europe for resale. The devices are increasingly valuable because they have more advanced chips, better cameras, and more expensive materials." To render the phone untraceable in China, "they change certain components and the IMEI. It requires a certain level of sophistication: opening the phone, changing the chip..."

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TIOBE attempts to calculate programming language popularity using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And the eight most popular languages in September's rankings haven't changed since last month: 1. Python 2. C++ 3. C 4. Java 5. C# 6. JavaScript 7. Visual Basic 8. Go But by TIOBE's ranking, Perl is still the #10 most-popular programming in September (dropping from #9 in August). "One year ago Perl was at position 27 and now it suddenly pops up at position 10 again," marvels TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. The technical reason why Perl is rated this high is because of its huge number of books on Amazon. It has 4 times more books listed than for instance PHP, or 7 times more books than Rust. The underlying "real" reason for Perl's increase of popularity is unknown to me. The only possibility I can think of is that Perl 5 is now gradually considered to become the real Perl... Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing more often recently, thus gaining attention. An article at the i-Programmer blog thinks Perl's resurgence could be from its text processing capabilities: Even in this era of AI, everything is still governed by text formats; text is still the King. XML, JSON calling APIs, YAML, Markdown, Log files..That means that there's still need to process it, transform it, clean it, extract from it. Perl with its first-class-citizen regular expressions, the wealth of text manipulation libraries up on CPAN and its full Unicode support of all the latest standards, was and is still the best. Simply there's no other that can match Perl's text processing capabilities. They also cite Perl's backing by the open source community, and its "getting a 'proper' OOP model in the last couple of years... People just don't know what Perl is capable of and instead prefer to be victims of FOMO ephemeral trends, chasing behind the new and shiny." Perl creator Larry Wall answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2016. So I'd be curious from Slashdot's readers about Perl today. (Share your experiences in the comments if you're still using Perl -- or Raku...) Perl's drop to #9 means Delphi/Object Pascal rises up one rank, growing from 1.82% in August to 2.26% in September to claim September's #9 spot. "At number 11 and 1.86%, SQL is quite close to entering the top 10 again," notes TechRepublic. (SQL fell to #12 in June, which the site speculated was due to "the increased use of NoSQL databases for AI applications.") But TechRepublic adds that the #1 most popular programming language (according to TIOBE) is still Python: Perl sits at 2.03% in TIOBE's proprietary ranking system in September, up from 0.64% in January. Last year, Perl held the 27th position... Python's unstoppable rise dipped slightly from 26.14% in August to 25.98% in September. Python is still well ahead of every other language on the index.

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After its six-year journey to Saturn's moon Titan, Dragonfly's rotorcraft lander "will fly like a large drone," explains its web page, spending three years sampling multiple landing sites to characterize Titan's habitability and look for "precursors of the origin of life." "However, the project has undergone multiple replans impacting cost and schedule, resulting in a life-cycle cost increase of nearly $1 billion and over 2 years of delays," according to an announcement from NASA's Inspector General. From the Inspector General's report: The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing [Johns Hopkins University] Applied Physics Laboratory to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in Dragonfly's development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation." But its higher-than-expected life-cycle cost over $3 billion "will continue to absorb an increasing proportion of the Planetary Science Division's total budget," meaning Dragonfly's increased cost (and "additional budget constraints") have "contributed to a gap of at least 12 years in New Frontiers [planetary science] mission launches, and will jeopardize future priorities outlined in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's (National Academies) decadal surveys." Yet a NASA press release notes the mission "has cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on track toward launch in July 2028." Its software-defined radio has been completed, and the part of the spectrometer which analyzes Titan's chemical components for "potentially biologically relevant" compounds (as well as structural and thermal testing of the lander's insulation). "The mission is scheduled to launch in July 2028 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for spotting this news on the space/science blog "Behind the Black".

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Paramount and Comcast's NBCUniversal are joining Microsoft in telling employees "they could face consequences if they don't return to the office more frequently," reports the Washington Post: NBCUniversal sent a memo to its employees telling them to return to the office four days a week starting in January [with the option to work remotely on Fridays]. Last week, Paramount told employees to return five days a week, with the first group starting in January. Both Paramount and NBCUniversal said they would offer severance packages to eligible employees who are unwilling or unable to make the switch... Companies have been cracking down on flexible work for the past several years, with Goldman Sachs being one of the first to implement a five-day office policy. Since then, others have joined in including Amazon, AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and the federal government... Overall, the number of people working full time in office hasn't changed much over the past couple of years. About 61.7 percent of salaried employees worked from an office full time in August, according to data from university researchers Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis, who are studying the matter. That is down one percentage point from August 2024, their research shows. During the same period, the amount of people working remotely dropped two percentage points and those working hybrid schedules increased three points. While most of the big office pushes are coming from some of the largest employers in the nation, the majority of companies in the United States aren't requiring full-time office work, said Brian Elliott [publisher of the Flex Index, which tracks flexible policies, and CEO]. And about half of U.S. workers are employed by smaller companies, he added. Some companies are capitalizing on the mandates, using flexible policies as a way to poach talent from their competitors, he said.... Some employers are using office mandates to purposely shed workers. An August report from the Federal Reserve Bank shows that "multiple districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition — encouraged, at times, by return-to-office policies and facilitated, at times, by greater automation, including new AI tools." Still, with fewer job openings in the market, some employees will have to comply with office mandates. Announcing their return-to-office mandates, employers gave the following reasons: "In-person collaboration is absolutely vital to building and strengthening our culture and driving the success of our business. Being together helps us innovate, solve problems, share ideas, create, challenge one another, and build the relationships that will make this company great." -- Paramount CEO David Ellison (in a memo to staff) "It has become increasingly clear that we are better when we are together. As we have all experienced, in-person work and collaboration spark innovation, promote creativity, and build stronger connections." -- Adam Miller, NBCUniversal chief operating officer (in a memo to staff)

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Last week Steam and other major storefronts crashed, reports the Guardian, including Nintendo's eShop, PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store. They were all "unable to cope with the demand for Hollow Knight: Silksong, the long-awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed 2017 indie hit Hollow Knight." (which had sold 15 million copies): SilkSong's release triggered widespread outages, with thousands of users reporting issues trying to buy the game in the first few hours of its release. Many were unable to complete purchases, with error messages persisting for almost three hours after the launch... Despite the technical hiccups, within 30 minutes of going live Steam reported more than 100,000 active players, suggesting many had managed to secure their copies. Aftermath says the "bug-tastic" phenomenon displaced everything except Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 on Steam's list of most-played games. The Guardian notes that "At least seven other new games have delayed their launch in the past two weeks to avoid a clash..." "People have been spamming the chat and the comments of every single game showcase or news event with the words 'Where's Silksong?' for years," writes the Guardian's video games editor: I've never seen another indie game achieve this level of notoriety before it was even released... As VGC points out, Atari released a similar game on the same day as Silksong (Adventure of Samsara) and it had only 12 concurrent players on Steam. They add that "the hype is justified". Eurogame called Silksong "beautiful, thrilling and cruel." PC Game said Silksong "glows with a level of precision and imagination that's hard to find anywhere else" and "will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world." But at least some of the demand also came from the game's low price of $20 in the U.S., suggests Slashdot reader UnknowingFool (with variable regional pricing). "At 5.2M wishes, it was the most wish listed game on Steam. In Brazil, the local price was 74.95 Brazil Real or 13.94 USD." In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less. From ScreenRant: Hollow Knight: Silksong's unbelievably low price point of just $19.99 is exceptionally good value for the consumer. It is an incredibly lengthy game that is only marginally more expensive than its predecessor... it is proving to be a source of controversy for other indie developers who believe it will distort players' expectations.

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