SoylentNews

Facebook's new whistleblower is renewing scrutiny of the social media giant

takyon writes:

The leaker came forward:

Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen: The 60 Minutes Interview (13m36s video)

Facebook's new whistleblower is renewing scrutiny of the social media giant

A data scientist named Frances Haugen has revealed herself to be the whistleblower behind a massive exposure of the inner workings at Facebook.

Prior to appearing on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Haugen, a former employee at the social media giant, kept her identity a secret after sharing thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to the media and federal law enforcement.

[...] Haugen's document dump, her testimony scheduled in front of Congress this week, and an ongoing investigative reporting series into the company are potentially pushing Facebook into its biggest crisis yet. The negative spotlight also comes as Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly scrutinizing Facebook's actions.

The Facebook Files

takyon writes:

The Facebook Files

upstart writes:

What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?:

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don't yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That's because Facebook's email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

[...] This is a developing story and will likely be updated throughout the day.

Also at: C|Net and Ars Technica.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Lens is coming to desktop Chrome, will soon handle text+image search

Google Lens, Google's computer vision search engine, is coming to desktop Chrome. Google didn't exactly share a timeline, but a teaser tweet showed what the feature will look like.

On desktop Chrome, you'll soon be able to right-click an image and pick "Search with Google Lens," which will dim the page and bring up a clipping tool so you can throw a certain image to Google's photo AI. After a round-trip to the Internet, a sidebar will pop up showing several results.

While Google.com's image search just tries to find similar pictures, Lens can actually identify things in a picture, like people, text, math equations, animals, landmarks, products, and more. It can translate text through the camera and even copy text from the real world (with OCR) and paste it into an app. The feature has existed on Android and iOS for a while, first as a camera-driven search that brought up a live viewfinder, then in Google Photos, and more recently as a long-press option for web pictures in Chrome for Android.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists Find Protein That Indicates Whether Emotional Memories Can Be Changed or Forgotten:

Researchers have discovered that a particular protein can be used as a brain marker to indicate whether emotional memories can be changed or forgotten. This is a study in animals, but the researchers hope that the findings will eventually allow people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to return to leading a more balanced life. This work is presented at the ECNP Conference in Lisbon.

Scientists know that long-term memories can broadly be divided into two types: fact-based memory, where we can recall such things as names, places, events, etc., and a sort of instinctive memory where we remember such things as emotions and skills. Scientists have come to believe that these emotional memories can be modified, so perhaps allowing the trauma underlying PTSD to be treated. In 2004 some ground-breaking work by scientists in New York[1] showed that if animals were treated with the beta-blocker propranolol, this allowed them to forget a learned trauma. However, the results have sometimes been difficult to reproduce, leading to doubts about whether the memories were modifiable at all.

Now scientists at Cambridge University have shown that the presence of a particular protein – the "shank" protein, which acts as a scaffold for the receptors that determine the strength of connections between neurons – determines whether the memories can be modified in animals treated with propranolol. If this protein is degraded, then memories become modifiable.[2] However, if this protein is found to be present, then this shows that the memories were not degradable, so explaining why propranolol does not always produce amnesia.

Journal Reference:
Synaptic Protein Degradation Underlies Destabilization of Retrieved Fear Memory, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1150541)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Apple’s fortress of secrecy is crumbling from the inside:

Apple’s remote work struggle is emblematic of a deeper shift taking place inside the company. Since 1976, the tech giant has operated in largely the same way: executives make decisions about how the company will function, and employees either fall in line or leave. What choice do they have? Apple is currently worth $2 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world, as well as one of the most powerful.

Over the past few months, however, that culture has started to erode. As workers across the tech industry advocate for more power, Apple’s top-down management seems more out of touch than ever before. Now, a growing number of employees are organizing internally for change and speaking out about working conditions on Twitter.

“There’s a shift in the balance of power going on here,” says Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, who’s been covering Apple since the 1990s. “Not everyone is afraid that their boss at Apple is going to fire them. They’re saying, ‘I’m going to say some bad things about Apple, and if you move against me, it’s going to look bad for you.’”

The shift is due in part to the fact that the tech giant is two years into a radical new experiment: using Slack. Where Apple employees previously worked in ultra-siloed teams with little opportunity to meet people outside their current project or department, they now have a way to communicate with anyone across the company. Employees have discovered that individual work grievances are shared by people in entirely different parts of Apple.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Amateur Astronomy Is Thriving on Social Media:

Schricker is one of many amateur astronomers to embrace the dazzling hobby in the past two years, as home-bound stargazers sought to put their free time to use peering deep into the universe. Access has gotten easier, as the cost of the (still quite expensive) equipment has become more reasonable, and the technology has made the complex process of capturing images of the stars easier.

[...] Schricker acknowledges that all these hours spent aiming his equipment at unfathomably large and distant clusters of stars has a way of making a person feel pretty small, even insignificant. He is not the first and won’t be the last astronomer to experience this sensation. But he embraces it. Deep space has a way of putting all our earthly problems—like, say, the global pandemic that pushed him toward this hobby in the first place—in perspective.

“I get a lot of people telling me they look at my pictures and it gives them like an existential crisis. But for me, it’s actually helpful to remember that I’m just not that important, that you’re just this blip on a speck of dust,” he says, channeling Carl Sagan, who famously called the Earth “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” He continues “We get so worried about all these things, that we have all these anxieties, and it’s like, you need to stop and remember that you’re really small, and really precious.”

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Metals Supercharge Method To Bury Billions of Tons of Harmful Carbon Dioxide Under the Sea for Centuries:

There’s a global race to reduce the amount of harmful gases in our atmosphere to slow down the pace of climate change, and one way to do that is through carbon capture and sequestration — sucking carbon out of the air and burying it. At this point, however, we’re capturing only a fraction of the carbon needed to make any kind of dent in climate change.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with ExxonMobil, have made a new discovery that may go a long way in changing that. They have found a way to supercharge the formation of carbon dioxide-based crystal structures that could someday store billions of tons of carbon under the ocean floor for centuries, if not forever.

“I consider carbon capture as insurance for the planet,” said Vaibhav Bahadur (VB), an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and the lead author of a new paper on the research in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. “It’s not enough anymore to be carbon neutral, we need to be carbon negative to undo damage that has been done to the environment over the past several decades.”

Journal Reference:
Aritra Kar, Palash Vadiraj Acharya, Awan Bhati, et al. Magnesium-Promoted Rapid Nucleation of Carbon Dioxide Hydrates, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering (DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c03041)

Original Submission

owl writes:

Families told to freeze Christmas dinner as festive shortages loom:

Shoppers should buy their Christmas dinner in advance and stash it in the freezer amid warnings shops could run out of some items in the run up to the festive season.

Retail experts have sounded the alarm over the shortage of HGV drivers to deliver stock to supermarkets.

Meanwhile problems in recruiting meat processing staff has also added to the difficulties with producers warning pigs in blankets may be off the menu.

In response, the government has announced plans to allow 5,500 poultry workers and 5,000 lorry drivers to enter the UK on three-month work visas that are due to expire on 24 December.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Offshore havens and hidden riches of world leaders and billionaires exposed in unprecedented leak:

In a report published on 03/Oct/2021, The Pandora Papers reveal the inner workings of a shadow economy that benefits the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of leaked documents and the biggest journalism partnership in history have uncovered financial secrets of 35 current and former world leaders, more than 330 politicians and public officials in 91 countries and territories, and a global lineup of fugitives, con artists and murderers.

The secret documents expose offshore dealings of the King of Jordan, the presidents of Ukraine, Kenya and Ecuador, the prime minister of the Czech Republic and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The files also detail financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin's "unofficial minister of propaganda" and more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey and other nations.

The leaked records reveal that many of the power players who could help bring an end to the offshore system instead benefit from it – stashing assets in covert companies and trusts while their governments do little to slow a global stream of illicit money that enriches criminals and impoverishes nations.

See also: Pandora Papers: A simple guide to the Pandora Papers leak

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Over at Techdirt, Glyn Moody writes briefly about how to stop the large academic publishing houses from completing their attempts at gaining control over the entire publishing process from end-to-end.

Techdirt's coverage of open access -- the idea that the fruits of publicly-funded scholarship should be freely available to all -- shows that the results so far have been mixed. On the one hand, many journals have moved to an open access model. On the other, the overall subscription costs for academic institutions have not gone down, and neither have the excessive profit margins of academic publishers. Despite that success in fending off this attempt to re-invent the way academic work is disseminated, publishers want more. In particular, they want more money and more power. In an important new paper, a group of researchers warn that companies now aim to own the entire academic publishing stack: [...]

As it stands, universities stand for the salaries of the faculty members who research, write, and edit the journal articles at no cost to the publishers which then charge exorbitant prices for access to the results.

Journal Reference:
Björn Brembs, Philippe Huneman, Felix Schönbrodt, et al. Replacing academic journals, (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5526635)

Previously:
(2020) Open Access Journals Get A Boost From Librarians—Much To Elsevier's Dismay
(2019) University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access
(2019) German Institutions Reach Open Access Deal with Scientific Publisher Wiley
(2018) Elsevier's Demands are Unacceptable to Germany's Academic Community
(2017) List of "Predatory Publishers" Disappears

Original Submission

upstart writes:

See Mercury up close as BepiColombo space mission beams back sweet image:

[...] A new image of the planet, beamed back by the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission, lets you fantasize about listening to some sweet tunes while strolling across Mercury's Rudaki Plains or kicking back with a good book while chilling on the rim of the Lermontov crater.

"The region shown is part of Mercury's northern hemisphere including Sihtu Planitia that has been flooded by lavas," the European Space Agency said Saturday on its site. "A round area smoother and brighter than its surroundings characterizes the plains around the Calvino crater, which are called the Rudaki Plains. The 166 km-wide Lermontov crater is also seen, which looks bright because it contains features unique to Mercury called 'hollows' where volatile elements are escaping to space. It also contains a vent where volcanic explosions have occurred."

A joint project of the ESA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, the BepiColombo mission is looking to learn more about how the closest planet to the sun formed, what it's made of and what it tells us about the birth of our solar system.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dutch legend has been running his campsite since 1986 using an Atari ST:

If there's one thing YouTuber Viktor Bart likes, it's retro computers: his channel is dedicated to videos about building old machines, their functions, cool oddities, and just generally the joy of these beige things. Even Mr. Bart, however, was surprised by what he found in Koningsbosch, in the Dutch province of Limburg: a campsite that's been run since 1986 on an Atari ST.

[Ed note: Is there anybody here who has an Atari ST? Please share your experience in the comments.

I bought its predecessor, an Atari 800, in 1980. Even got an expansion cartridge to boost memory from the on-board 8 KB RAM. Yes, I spent countless hours playing Star Raiders. It was not as capable as the Atari ST, but it was a fun system that booted up instantly!]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On October 1st, 2021, HexChat version 2.16.0 was released along with a, "help wanted" plea from the developer.

This release also comes with some bad news; The HexChat project has been undermaintained for quite a while now. I've been involved with this project since I was a high school student but that is long past and I simply don't have the time to dedicate to it any longer. The Windows builds in particular are very draining and in a poor state which has kept smaller releases from happening more frequently. If anybody out there doesn't mind building things on Windows or wants to help with maintainance contact @TingPing on Libera.Chat.

- 2.16.0 Changelog

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/the-rise-of-one-time-password-interception-bots/

In February, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about a novel cybercrime service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passwords (OTPs) that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords. That service quickly went offline, but new research reveals a number of competitors have since launched bot-based services that make it relatively easy for crooks to phish OTPs from targets.

Many websites now require users to supply both a password and a numeric code/OTP token sent via text message, or one generated by mobile apps like Authy and Google Authenticator. The idea is that even if the user's password gets stolen, the attacker still can't access the user's account without that second factor — i.e. without access to the victim's mobile device or phone number.

[...] I hope these OTP interception services make clear that you should never provide any information in response to an unsolicited phone call. It doesn't matter who claims to be calling: If you didn't initiate the contact, hang up. Don't put them on hold while you call your bank; the scammers can get around that, too. Just hang up. Then you can call your bank or whoever else you need.

[...] When was the last time you reviewed your multi-factor settings and options at the various websites entrusted with your most precious personal and financial information? It might be worth paying a visit to 2fa.directory (formerly twofactorauth[.]org) for a checkup.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Understanding just how big solar flares can get:

Flares that are powerful enough to disrupt our power grid probably occur, on average, a few times a century, Love says. "Looking at 1859 kind of helps put it in perspective, because what's happened in the space-age era, since 1957, has been more modest." The Sun hasn't aimed a Carrington-like flare at us in quite a while. A repeat of 1859 in the 21st century could be disastrous.

Humanity is far more technologically dependent than it was in 1859. A Carrington-like event today could wreak havoc on power grids, satellites and wireless communication. In 1972, a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone lines in Illinois, for example. In 1989, a flare blacked out most of Quebec province, cutting power to roughly 6 million people for up to nine hours. In 2005, a solar storm disrupted GPS satellites for 10 minutes.

The best prevention is prediction. Knowing that a coronal mass ejection is on its way could give operators time to safely reconfigure or shut down equipment to prevent it from being destroyed.