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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Activison Blizzard Employees Walk Out In Protest Over Sexism, Harassment:

Activision Blizzard employees will stop work on Wednesday in protest of an "abhorrent and insulting" response from company leadership to a lawsuit that exposed serious allegations of sexism and harassment at the game publisher.

The lawsuit, filed July 22 by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), described a company culture that allowed for gender-based discrimination and "constant sexual harassment." A two-year investigation into the company alleged that women were held back from promotions for various reasons, including the possibility that they may eventually take maternity leave, and that female employees were subject to "derogatory comments about rape" and other demeaning behaviors.

An official response from Activision Blizzard said the lawsuit "includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past."

More than 2,600 current and former Activision Blizzard employees have since signed an open letter in support of the DFEH lawsuit. (Sources told Polygon that includes at least 1,600 current employees and 400 former employees, by the last available count.) In it, the employees said they don't trust leadership to "hold abusers accountable for their actions," and that the official statements "damaged our ongoing quest for equality inside and outside of our industry." Now, employees will walk out of work — both virtually and at the Blizzard campus in Irvine, California — to protest executive response.

upstart writes:

An AI-Based Lie Detector for Call Center Conversations:

Researchers in Germany have used machine learning to create an audio analysis system intended primarily to act as an AI-based lie detector for customers in audio communications with call center and support staff.

The system uses a specially-created dataset of audio recordings by 40 students and teachers during debates on contentious subjects, including the morality of the death penalty and tuition fees. The model was trained on an architecture that uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and achieved a reported accuracy rate of 98%.

Though the stated intent of the work cites customer communications, the researchers concede that it effectively operates as a general purpose lie-detector:

[...] In the absence of a suitable publicly available dataset in the German language, the researchers – from Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences (HNU) – created their own source material. Fliers were posted at the university and at local schools, with 40 volunteers selected with a minimum age of 16. Volunteers were paid with a 10 euro Amazon voucher.

The sessions were conducted on a debate club model designed to polarize opinion and arouse strong responses around incendiary topics, effectively modeling the stress that can occur in problematic customer conversations on the phone.

Journal Reference:
Fabian Thaler, Stefan Faußer, Heiko Gewald. Put your money where your mouth is: Using AI voice analysis to detect whether spoken arguments reflect the speaker's true convictions, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.11175)^[pdf]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hubble Finds First Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede:

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

[...] Scientists used new and archival datasets from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make the discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Previous research has offered circumstantial evidence that Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, contains more water than all of Earth's oceans. However, temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface is frozen solid. Ganymede's ocean would reside roughly 100 miles below the crust; therefore, the water vapor would not represent the evaporation of this ocean.

Astronomers re-examined Hubble observations from the last two decades to find this evidence of water vapor.

Journal Reference:
Lorenz Roth, Nickolay Ivchenko, G. Randall Gladstone, et al. A sublimated water atmosphere on Ganymede detected from Hubble Space Telescope observations, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01426-9)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Apple patches zero-day vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS under active attack:

Apple on Monday patched a zero-day vulnerability in its iOS, iPadOS, and macOS operating systems, only a week after issuing a set of OS updates addressing about three dozen other flaws.

The bug, CVE-2021-30807, was found in the iGiant's IOMobileFrameBuffer code, a kernel extension for managing the screen frame buffer that could be abused to run malicious code on the affected device.

CVE-2021-30807, credited to an anonymous researcher, has been addressed by undisclosed but purportedly improved memory handling code.

"An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges," the iDevice maker said in one of its duplicative advisories. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited."

Apple did not, however, say who might be involved in the exploitation of this bug. Nor did the company respond to a query about whether the bug has been exploited by NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance software.

[...] Shortly after Apple's advisory was published, PoC exploit code was posted via Twitter

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

America's largest retailer will cover 100% of college tuition for its workers:

New York (CNN Business) Walmart will pay for full college tuition and book costs at some schools for its US workers, the latest effort by the largest private employer in the country to sweeten its benefits as it seeks to attract and retain talent in a tight job market.

The program includes 10 academic partners ranging from the University of Arizona to Southern New Hampshire University. Participants must remain part-time or full-time employees at Walmart to be eligible.

The company said Tuesday that it will drop a previous $1 a day fee paid by Walmart and Sam's Club workers who want to earn a degree and also begin covering the costs of their books. Around 28,000 workers participate in the program, which Walmart began in 2018. Walmart has around 1.5 million workers.

Well, blow me down, knock me over with a feather.

"We feel that eliminating the dollar a day investment removes the financial barriers to enrollment, and it will increase access," Lorraine Stomski, senior vice president of learning and leadership at Walmart (WMT), said on a call with reporters Tuesday.

Walmart also said it was adding four new academic partners, bringing the total to 10, and offering more degree and certificate options in areas like business administration, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Walmart has incentive to expand the program. Employees who have participated in the program are twice as likely to get promoted and are retained at a "significantly higher rate" than other workers, Stomski said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study Shows Why Beer Mats Do Not Fly In A Straight Line — University Of Bonn:

Anyone who has ever failed to throw a [circular] beer mat into a hat should take note: physicists at the University of Bonn have discovered why this task is so difficult. However, their study also suggests how to significantly increase accuracy and range.

[...] Physicists at the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics and the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn have now investigated this question. According to them, the behavior of the beer mat is inevitable, at least when employing the usual throwing technique: it unavoidably begins to drift off after 0.45 seconds at most. Playing cards go awry after just 0.24 seconds, CDs after 0.8 seconds.

The reason for this is the interaction between gravity, lift, and the conservation of angular momentum: the mat tips backwards shortly after being thrown due to gravity. This gives it an angle of attack, similar to a landing aircraft. This angle creates lift in the airflow. “However, the lifting force is not applied in the center of the mat, but rather in the front third,” explains PhD student Johann Ostmeyer, who came up with the idea for the study.

upstart writes:

Facebook pauses sales of the Oculus Quest 2 due to face irritation concerns:

Facebook said on Tuesday that it's temporarily halting sales of the Oculus Quest 2, a month before a planned update to a new entry-level model with more onboard storage. The move comes after several reported cases of skin reactions to the headset's included foam faceplate, the social media giant confirmed.

Facebook recalls 4 million Quest 2 VR face liners over “rashes and hives”:

Consumer complaints began piling up shortly after the system's October 2020 launch regarding rashes, burning sensations, red facial marks, and hives experienced while wearing the VR headset. These complaints often said that the users hadn't felt particularly warm temperature-wise, so they were not building up sweat within the VR headset's goggle portion. (My own review of Quest 2 mentioned so many complaints that I barely touched on my disdain for the cheap-feeling foam face liner, which felt like a serious downgrade from the Quest 1's fabric. Quest 2 is marked by a number of downgrades from its predecessor, arguably to scrape back savings to make room for its spec upgrades.) By early 2021, Facebook posted a minor acknowledgment of the issue and described the problem as affecting "about 0.01 percent" of system owners.

That Facebook post was updated in April to confirm that the company had detected in the liners "trace substances" that "were already at levels below the industry standard," without clarifying what those substances were or what industry standard it was referencing. Did Facebook mean "as compared to commonplace facial gear like ski goggles," or did the company mean "with regard to virtual reality masks," an industry that has yet to receive decades of product-review scrutiny?

In either case, Facebook pledged to "change our process to reduce [trace substances] further," but the company didn't remove the material entirely from the liner that makes constant contact with users' faces. That action may have still run afoul of the CPSC's rules about appropriately labeling anything that counts as an "irritant," which the US agency defines as something that "causes a substantial injury to the area of the body that it comes in contact with. Irritation can occur after immediate, prolonged, or repeated contact." Facebook has yet to clarify the exact source of the existing face mask's irritation—including whether the culprit was the foam itself or any chemical treatment sprayed onto the foam ahead of being shipped to customers.

[*] US CPSC: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Eating for hunger or pleasure involves regulating different brain circuits:

Many times we eat, not because we are hungry, but because of social pressures or because the food is so appetizing, that, even though we are full, we just want another bite.

[...] [Dr. Yong] Xu and his colleagues [...] “discovered that the circuit that projects to the hypothalamus primarily regulates hunger-driven feeding, but does not influence the non-hunger driven feeding behavior,” Xu said. “The other circuit that projects into the midbrain regulates primarily the non-hunger driven feeding, but not the feeding behavior triggered by hunger. This indicates that, at the circuit level, the brain wires the two types of feeding behavior differently.”

[...] “One potential [molecular] target is serotonin receptors, which are molecules that mediate the functions of the neurotransmitter serotonin produced by the neurons,” Xu explained. “We found that two receptors, serotonin 2C receptor and serotonin 1B receptor, are involved in both types of feeding behavior. Our data suggests that combining compounds directed at both receptors might produce a synergistic benefit by suppressing feeding.”

In addition, the team identified ion channels associated with the circuits that also might offer an opportunity to regulate the feeding behaviors. “One is the GABA A receptor, a chloride channel, found to be important in regulating serotonin circuits during hunger-driven feeding, but not during non-hunger driven feeding,” Xu said.

The other is a potassium channel that influences feeding triggered by hunger-independent cues, but not hunger-driven feeding. “There is a clear segregation of these two ion channels,” Xu said. “They have distinct functions in feeding behavior, which suggests they also could be target candidates to regulate overeating.”

Journal Reference:
Yanlin He, Xing Cai, Hailan Liu, et al. 5-HT recruits distinct neurocircuits to inhibit hunger-driven and non-hunger-driven feeding [open], Molecular Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1038/s41380-021-01220-z)

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

This comes straight from The United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

United States Sells Unique Wu-Tang Clan Album Forfeited by Convicted Hedge Fund Manager Martin Shkreli

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

United States Sells Unique Wu-Tang Clan Album Forfeited by Convicted Hedge Fund Manager Martin Shkreli

Defendant Forfeited His Interest in the Album, "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin," Following Conviction for Engaging in Securities Fraud Schemes

Proceeds from the Sale Will be Applied to Forfeiture Money Judgment Against Shkreli

United States Sells Unique Wu-Tang Clan Album Forfeited by Convicted Hedge Fund Manager Martin Shkreli

Earlier today, the United States sold the sole copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" (the "Album") which had previously been ordered to be forfeited as a substitute asset in connection with the approximately $7.4 million forfeiture money judgment (Forfeiture Money Judgment) entered against Shkreli at his March 2018 sentencing. Proceeds from the sale of the Album will be applied to satisfy the outstanding balance owed on the Forfeiture Money Judgment. The contract of sale contains a confidentiality provision that protects information relating to the buyer and price.

I'm sure after this, Martin Shkreli will have learned his lesson.

"Through the diligent and persistent efforts of this Office and its law enforcement partners, Shkreli has been held accountable and paid the price for lying and stealing from investors to enrich himself. With today's sale of this one-of-a-kind album, his payment of the forfeiture is now complete," stated Acting U.S. Attorney Kasulis.

I'm sure they can let Martin Shkreli go free now.

See also:
More about Martin Shkreli

Previous coverage on SoylentNews.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Giant goldfish problem in US lake prompts warning to pet owners:

A city in the US state of Minnesota has urged residents not to release their unwanted pet fish into the wild after finding huge goldfish in a lake.

[...] A goldfish kept in a home aquarium typically grows to about 2in (5.1cm) in length.

But once they are established in public waters, wildlife officials say, goldfish can grow far larger and be difficult to remove - reproducing rapidly and dominating native species.

In its warning, the city of Burnsville advised pet owners to "please consider other options for finding them a new home".

Wildlife officials have been dealing with a similar problem in nearby Carver County, where 50,000 goldfish were removed from a creek in October last year.

The removal was part of a three-year plan to study and manage the species, which have caused problems across the US.

[...] Large goldfish have been found in the UK's wild waters as well. In 2010, a British teenager pulled a 5lb (2.2kg), 16in fish from a lake in Dorset.

Wikipedia entry for goldfish.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

VPN servers seized by Ukrainian authorities weren’t encrypted:

Privacy-tools-seller Windscribe said it failed to encrypt company VPN servers that were recently confiscated by authorities in Ukraine, a lapse that made it possible for the authorities to impersonate Windscribe servers and capture and decrypt traffic passing through them.

The Ontario, Canada-based company said earlier this month that two servers hosted in Ukraine were seized as part of an investigation into activity that had occurred a year earlier. The servers, which ran the OpenVPN virtual private network software, were also configured to use a setting that was deprecated in 2018 after security research revealed vulnerabilities that could allow adversaries to decrypt data.

“On the disk of those two servers was an OpenVPN server certificate and its private key,” a Windscribe representative wrote in the July 8 post. “Although we have encrypted servers in high-sensitivity regions, the servers in question were running a legacy stack and were not encrypted. We are currently enacting our plan to address this.”

[...] By failing to follow standard industry practices, Windscribe largely negated [...] security guarantees. While the company attempted to play down the impact by laying out the requirements an attacker would have to satisfy to be successful, those conditions are precisely the ones VPNs are designed to protect against.

[...] It’s not clear how many active users the service has. The company’s Android app, however, lists more than 5 million installs, an indication that the user base is likely large.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla tops $1 billion in profit, delays Semi launch:

Tesla TSLA, +2.21% said it earned $1.14 billion, or $1.02 a share, in the second quarter, compared with $104 million, or 10 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted for one-time items, the company earned $1.45 a share.

Revenue rose 98% to $11.96 billion, from $6.04 billion a year ago, which the company pinned in part on “substantial growth” in vehicle sales.

[...] The chip shortage “remains quite serious,” Chief Executive Elon Musk said in a call after the results. “The chip supply is fundamentally the governing factor on our output,” and it’s hard to say how long it will last because it’s out of Tesla’s control, he said.

Tesla has used alternative chips, but that’s not just a matter of doing a swap, as new software then has to be rewritten, Musk said.

Besides the delay of the Semi launch to 2022, Musk and Tesla executives left vague the start of production of the Cybertruck, its much-awaited pickup, at the under-construction Austin, Texas, plant, saying only it would be later this year.

Production of the vehicle was expected for early 2021, and the Tesla Semi, revealed in 2017, has been delayed by a couple of years.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

United Arab Emirates is making its own fake rain to beat 44C heat:

The United Arab Emirates, parched from heatwaves and an arid climate, is testing new technology to zap clouds with electricity to artificially create rain.

Similar forms of cloud seeding have existing for decades. But the process has typically used salt flairs and has come with concerns about the environment, expenses and effectiveness, according to the Desert Research Institute and CNN.

So the UAE is now testing a new method that has drones fly into clouds to give them an electric shock to trigger rain production, the BBC and CNN have previously reported.

The project is getting renewed interest after the UAE's National Center of Meteorology recently published a series of videos on Instagram of heavy rain in parts of the country. Water gushed past trees, and cars drove on rain-soaked roads. The videos were accompanied by radar images of clouds tagged "#cloudseeding."

The Independent reports recent rain is part of the drone cloud seeding project.

[...] Water security remains one of the UAE's "main future challenges" as the country relies on groundwater for two-thirds of its water needs, according to the National Center of Meteorology website. The arid nation faces low rainfall level, high temperatures and high evaporation rates of surface water, the center says. Paired with increased demand due to high population growth, this puts the UAE in a precarious water security situation, according to the center.

But rain enhancement may "offer a viable, cost-effective supplement to existing water supplies," especially amid diminishing water resources across the globe, the center said.

"While most of us take free water for granted, we must remember that it is a precious and finite resource," according to the center.

[...] So far, rain enhancement projects have centered on the country's mountainous north-east regions, where cumulus clouds gather in the summer, according to the National Center of Meteorology website.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Outbreak of Untreatable, Drug-Resistant Superbug Fungus Unnerves Experts in 2 US Cities:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) discovered multiple instances of Candida Auris that were resistant to all medicines in two health institutions in Texas and a long-term care facility in Washington, D.C. for the first time.

According to researchers, a deadly, difficult-to-treat fungal infection spreading through nursing homes and hospitals across the United States is becoming even more dangerous. For the first time, the fungus, Candida Auris, was utterly impervious to all existing medication in several cases.

[...] The discovery, announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday, is a concerning step in the evolution of C. Auris, a hardy yeast infection first found in Japan in 2009 and spreading rapidly throughout the globe.

During the coronavirus pandemic, federal health officials believe the disease has expanded even farther, with overburdened hospitals and nursing homes unable to keep up with the surveillance and control procedures needed to manage local outbreaks.

According to the C.D.C.'s recent study, five out of over 120 cases of C. Auris were resistant to therapy.

[...] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not name the facilities where the novel infections occurred. Still, health officials said there was no apparent link between the outbreaks in Texas at a hospital and a long-term care facility that shared patients and in Washington, D.C. at a single long-term care center. Between January and April, epidemics occurred.

According to the C.D.C., about a third of infected patients died within 30 days, although officials said it was unclear if their deaths were caused by the fungus because they were already critically ill.

Original Submission

Will Approximation Drive Post-Moore's Law HPC Gains?:

“Hardware-based improvements are going to get more and more difficult,” said Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). [...] Thompson, speaking at Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2021, likely wasn’t wrong: the proximate death of Moore’s law has been a hot topic in the HPC community for a long time.

[...] Thompson opened with a graph of computing power utilized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over time. “Since the 1950s, there has been about a one trillion-fold increase in the amount of computing power being used in these models,” he said. But there was a problem: tracking a weather forecasting metric called mean absolute error (“When you make a prediction, how far off are you on that prediction?”), Thompson pointed out that “you actually need exponentially more computing power to get that [improved] performance.” Without those exponential gains in computing power, the steady gains in accuracy would slow, as well.

Enter, of course, Moore’s law, and the flattening of CPU clock frequencies in the mid-2000s. “But then we have this division, right?” Thompson said. “We start getting into multicore chips, and we’re starting to get computing power in that very specific way, which is not as useful unless you have that amount of parallelism.” Separating out parallelism, he explained, progress had dramatically slowed. “This might worry us if we want to, say, improve weather prediction at the same speed going forward,” he said.

So in 2020, Thompson and others wrote a paper examining ways to improve performance over time in a post-Moore’s law world. The authors landed on three main categories of promise: software-level improvements; algorithmic improvements; and new hardware architectures.