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upstart writes:

New Utah law makes app stores responsible for age verification:

Meta, X, and Snap are celebrating a new Utah law that will require Apple and Google to take responsibility for verifying users' ages on their app stores and obtain parental consent for minors.

The tech giants have been battling to determine which party should be responsible for age verification on the app stores. Companies like Meta believe the app stores themselves should verify users' ages because these entities host and distribute the apps. The app stores, however, argue that companies making the apps should bear the responsibility as they're the ones offering the product to end users.

Utah isn't the only state considering some such legislation around age verification; it is the first to enact a law of this kind. The App Store Accountability Act, as the new law is called, was passed by Utah's legislature earlier this month, then headed to Gov. Spencer Cox's desk for a signature to make it official.

Ahead of the law's passing, Apple announced a new set of child safety initiatives for its App Store, which include an age-checking system for apps. Its implementation would allow app developers to use a new Declared Age Range API to access age range information provided by the parent. This information doesn't provide the app developer with the minor's exact age or birthdate, but allows them to customize their app experiences appropriately based on the age range provided.

Apple's system requires the app developers to do the work of requesting the age range before an app is used, rather than the App Store verifying the age at the time of download.

Not surprisingly, social media companies are thrilled the new Utah law would require app stores to verify users' ages before apps can be downloaded onto their devices.

In a joint statement, Meta, X and Snap praised Utah's move, saying:

"We applaud Governor Cox and the State of Utah for being the first in the nation to empower parents and users with greater control over teen app downloads, and urge other states to consider this groundbreaking approach. Parents want a one-stop-shop to oversee and approve the many apps their teens want to download, and Utah has led the way in centralizing it within a device's app store. This approach spares users from repeatedly submitting personal information to countless individual apps and online services. We are committed to safeguarding parents and teens, and look forward to seeing more states adopt this model."

In total, 16 U.S. states including California and Texas have introduced their own versions of app store legislation focused on age verification and youth safety.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

DragonOS is a Lubuntu-based desktop distribution which is focused on software defined radio (SDR). The distribution provides a pre-installed suite of the most powerful and accessible open source SDR software. DragonOS has verified support for a range of inexpensive and powerful SDR hardware, including RTL-SDR, HackRF One, LimeSDR, BladeRF, and others. - quote source

Some reviews, features, and tutorials are located here!

[ Ed's Note: How many in our community use or have experimented with SDR? I use it for tracking aircraft movements and I know others who live near me who download satellite imagery.]

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Developer Dave Grauer has a long blog post about the broligarchs of Silicon Valley where he asks how they became the face of "technology" and examines how that came to be and what can be done to correct the error.

To be sure, the big software companies were often stupid and greedy, but they seemed relatively harmless to me during that time because progress was so fast, everybody was racing just to keep up. Nobody could capture the market. It was too quick and too slippery to hold.

[...] It would be easy to wrap up in that nostalgia like a warm and comfortable blanket and say that nothing will ever be as good ever again.

So it might surprise you to learn that's not how I feel at all. In fact, if you ask me, right now is the most amazing time to be in computing.

I'm serious. RIGHT NOW is, in a number of ways, far better than when I got started.

Here's the facts:

He provides a lot of examples of both what has happened and ways, both big and small, out of the situation.

Previously:
(2018) FBI Whistleblower on Pierre Omidyar and His Campaign to Neuter Wikileaks
(2016) Where Are the Other 10 Million Panama Papers?
(2014) Inside the Mind of an Oligarch

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A protein found in tardigrades — tiny animals less than a millimeter long — can protect mice from radiation damage.

Most cancer patients undergo radiation therapy as part of their treatment, often leading to devastatingly painful side effects. But there may be hope for mitigating some of that damage. Mice with cells engineered to produce a protective protein unique to tardigrades experienced reduced radiation damage, researchers report February 26 in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Radiation attacks the DNA of tumor cells, preventing tumor growth and eventually killing it. But it also damages the DNA of healthy tissue near the tumors, destroying those cells, too. People undergoing treatment for head and neck cancer can develop damaged throats or mouths, making eating and drinking extremely painful. Prostate cancer patients may experience rectal bleeding.

“I treat cancer patients with radiation, and I see a lot of side effects from treatment itself — side effects that can be really debilitating and severe,” says James Byrne, a radiation oncologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

These unintended consequences can lead people to stop treatment before their tumors are under control. While at MIT, Byrne and biomedical researcher Giovanni Traverso had “started to explore possibilities of creating radiation protection,” Byrne says, when they realized they could use a little help from tardigrades. 

Tardigrades may be as tiny as dust mites, but they are tough little creatures — even capable of tolerating extreme conditions like outer space. Nicknamed “water bears,” they can survive radiation doses about 1,000 times the lethal dose to humans.

Tardigrades produce a key damage-suppressor protein known as Dsup, which binds to their DNA to protect them from radiation. Byrne and Traverso wanted to somehow arm mice with this protein so they would be better equipped to deal with radiation.

The duo and their colleagues used lipid nanoparticles — tiny particles composed of fat molecules that can carry chemicals — to deliver messenger RNA, or mRNA, with instructions for creating the Dsup protein directly into mouse cheek and rectum cells. Byrne and his colleagues discovered that when exposed to radiation, the DNA of mice producing Dsup proteins showed fewer signs of radiation-induced damage compared to the DNA of mice that couldn’t make Dsup.

“It highlights some of the value of research into areas where one might not immediately see a clinical outcome, like studies of DNA damage in tardigrades,” says Zachary Morris, an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the study. “You can take findings from more basic or fundamental science and pair them with new delivery mechanisms and suddenly be in a situation where you have a very impactful finding with immediate relevance to human health.”

The researchers now plan to carefully evaluate the safety of this system before testing it on humans. Since tardigrade mRNA is foreign to humans, they want to ensure that injecting it doesn’t lead to adverse reactions. Instead of directly injecting cells as they did with mice, they also want to develop patient-friendly ways to deliver the mRNA to human cells, such as using hydrogels.

“We were hoping to use what nature has really perfected as [this] optimized radiation protection, to potentially help patient care in the long term,” Byrne says.

A.R. Kirtane et al. Radioprotection of healthy tissue via nanoparticle-delivered mRNA encoding for a damage-suppressor protein found in tardigrades. Nature Biomedical Engineering. Published online February 26, 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41551-025-01360-5.

L. Li et al. Multi-omics landscape and molecular basis of radiation tolerance in a tardigrade. Science. Vol. 386, October 25, 2024, eadl0799. doi: 10.1126/science.adl0799.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A very pretty and detailed Tor Network Status (Onion link) page, listing node by node and type for each.

This is an unofficial current list.

For official lists and more info, visit:

https://consensus-health.torproject.org/
https://consensus-health.torproject.org/consensus-health.html

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-26/jpmorgan-says-quantum-experiment-generated-truly-random-numbers [Probably paywalled]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08737-1 [Accessible at time of editing--JR]

Over at JP Morgan they have now created certified randomness using a trapped-ion quantum processor. Compared to old-computer with algorithms and the usual "randomness" that we all know. Still somewhat unclear what they are going to use this genuine randomness for but some kind of financial or encryption application seems likely.

Abstract

Although quantum computers can perform a wide range of practically important tasks beyond the abilities of classical computers1,2, realizing this potential remains a challenge. An example is to use an untrusted remote device to generate random bits that can be certified to contain a certain amount of entropy3. Certified randomness has many applications but is impossible to achieve solely by classical computation. Here we demonstrate the generation of certifiably random bits using the 56-qubit Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer accessed over the Internet. Our protocol leverages the classical hardness of recent random circuit sampling demonstrations4,5: a client generates quantum 'challenge' circuits using a small randomness seed, sends them to an untrusted quantum server to execute and verifies the results of the server. We analyse the security of our protocol against a restricted class of realistic near-term adversaries. Using classical verification with measured combined sustained performance of 1.1 × 10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second across multiple supercomputers, we certify 71,313 bits of entropy under this restricted adversary and additional assumptions. Our results demonstrate a step towards the practical applicability of present-day quantum computers.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-nitisinone-human-blood-lethal-mosquitoes.html

In the fight against malaria, controlling the mosquito population is crucial. Several methods are currently used to reduce mosquito numbers and malaria risk. One of these includes the antiparasitic medication ivermectin. When mosquitoes ingest blood containing ivermectin, it shortens the insect's lifespan and helps decrease the spread of malaria.

However, ivermectin has its own issues. Not only is it environmentally toxic, but also, when it is overused to treat people and animals with worm and parasite infections, resistance to ivermectin becomes a concern.

Now a study in Science Translational Medicine has identified another medication with the potential to suppress mosquito populations to help control malaria. Researchers found when patients take the drug nitisinone, their blood becomes deadly to mosquitoes.

"One way to stop the spread of diseases transmitted by insects is to make the blood of animals and humans toxic to these blood-feeding insects," said Lee R. Haines, associate research professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, honorary fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and co-lead author of the study.

"Our findings suggest that using nitisinone could be a promising new complementary tool for controlling insect-borne diseases like malaria."

Typically, nitisinone is a medication for individuals with rare inherited diseases—such as alkaptonuria and tyrosinemia type 1—whose bodies struggle to metabolize the amino acid tyrosine. The medication works by blocking the enzyme 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase (HPPD), preventing the build-up of harmful disease byproducts in the human body.

When mosquitoes drink blood that contains nitisinone, the drug also blocks this crucial HPPD enzyme in their bodies. This prevents the mosquitoes from properly digesting the blood, causing them to quickly die.

The researchers analyzed the nitisinone dosing concentrations needed for killing mosquitoes, and how those results would stack up against ivermectin, the gold standard ectoparasitic drug (medication that specifically targets ectoparasites such as mosquitoes).

"We thought that if we wanted to go down this route, nitisinone had to perform better than ivermectin," said Álvaro Acosta Serrano, professor of biological sciences at Notre Dame and co-corresponding author of the study.

"Indeed, nitisinone performance was fantastic; it has a much longer half-life in human blood than ivermectin, which means its mosquitocidal activity remains circulating in the human body for much longer. This is critical when applied in the field for safety and economical reasons."

More information: Lee Haines et al, Nitisinone's mosquitocidal properties hold promise for malaria control, Science Translational Medicine (2025). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adr4827.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Record-breaking Explosion by Black Hole Spotted - NASA:

The biggest explosion seen in the universe has been found. This record-breaking, gargantuan eruption came from a black hole in a distant galaxy cluster hundreds of millions of light years away.

"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," said Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study. "A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

Astronomers made this discovery using X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.

The unrivaled outburst was detected in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is about 390 million light years from Earth. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, containing thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter, and hot gas.

In the center of the Ophiuchus cluster, there is a large galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole. Researchers think that the source of the gigantic eruption is this black hole.

Although black holes are famous for pulling material toward them, they often expel prodigious amounts of material and energy. This happens when matter falling toward the black hole is redirected into jets, or beams, that blast outward into space and slam into any surrounding material.

Chandra observations reported in 2016 first revealed hints of the giant explosion in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Norbert Werner and colleagues reported the discovery of an unusual curved edge in the Chandra image of the cluster. They considered whether this represented part of the wall of a cavity in the hot gas created by jets from the supermassive black hole. However, they discounted this possibility, in part because a huge amount of energy would have been required for the black hole to create a cavity this large.

upstart writes:

Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance:

AI web-crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many software developers believe. Some devs have started fighting back in ingenuous, often humorous ways.

While any website might be targeted by bad crawler behavior — sometimes taking down the site — open source developers are "disproportionately" impacted, writes Niccolò Venerandi, developer of a Linux desktop known as Plasma and owner of the blog LibreNews.

By their nature, sites hosting free and open source (FOSS) projects share more of their infrastructure publicly, and they also tend to have fewer resources than commercial products.

The issue is that many AI bots don't honor the Robots Exclusion Protocol robot.txt file, the tool that tells bots what not to crawl, originally created for search engine bots.

In a "cry for help" blog post in January, FOSS developer Xe Iaso described how AmazonBot relentlessly pounded on a Git server website to the point of causing DDoS outages. Git servers host FOSS projects so that anyone who wants can download the code or contribute to it.

But this bot ignored Iaso's robot.txt, hid behind other IP addresses, and pretended to be other users, Iaso said.

"It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso lamented.

"They will scrape your site until it falls over, and then they will scrape it some more. They will click every link on every link on every link, viewing the same pages over and over and over and over. Some of them will even click on the same link multiple times in the same second," the developer wrote in the post.

So Iaso fought back with cleverness, building a tool called Anubis.

Anubis is a reverse proxy proof-of-work check that must be passed before requests are allowed to hit a Git server. It blocks bots but lets through browsers operated by humans.

The funny part: Anubis is the name of a god in Egyptian mythology who leads the dead to judgment.

upstart writes:

Security Vulnerability fixed in Firefox 136.0.4, Firefox ESR 128.8.1, Firefox ESR 115.21.1:

Security Vulnerability fixed in Firefox 136.0.4, Firefox ESR 128.8.1, Firefox ESR 115.21.1 #CVE-2025-2857: Incorrect handle could lead to sandbox escapes Description

Following the recent Chrome sandbox escape (CVE-2025-2783), various Firefox developers identified a similar pattern in our IPC code. A compromised child process could cause the parent process to return an unintentionally powerful handle, leading to a sandbox escape.
The original vulnerability was being exploited in the wild.
This only affects Firefox on Windows. Other operating systems are unaffected.

References

• Bug 1956398
• CVE-2025-2783

See also:

• Firefox Says It's Vulnerable to Chrome's Zero-Day Used in Espionage Attacks
• CVE-2025-2783 in Operation ForumTroll APT

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The popular and original mainstream illegal music file-sharing platform that caused absolute mayhem for record labels in the early 2000s was sold to tech company Infinite Reality on Tuesday for a whopping $200+ million figure, as the startup said that it hopes of transform [sic] the streaming service into a music Metaverse of sorts:

What's wild about the whole thing is that Napster's website was shut down 24 years ago after being sued into oblivion by record labels and bands like Metallica due to copyright infringement, yet still went for such a substantial sum all these years later.

Make no mistake about it. The reason why Napster was just sold for such a high price was because of the brand's recognition. For a startup company like Infinite Reality to immediately have a known name like Napster seems like a gamble worth taking. They probably would have spent a good chunk of that anyway in marketing alone just to end up in the same spot where they are now with no further upside like Napster could bring - especially if they bring it back in a witty way and play on the fact that people are shocked the company even still exists.

From USA Today:

"By acquiring Napster, we're paving a path to a brighter future for artists, fans, and the music industry at large," John Acunto, co-founder and CEO of Infinite Reality, said on Tuesday. "This strategic move aligns with Infinite Reality's vision to lead an internet industry shift from a flat 2D clickable web to a 3D conversational one - giving all creators modern tools to better engage, monetize, and measure their audiences... We're creating the ultimate music platform where artists can thrive in the next wave of digital disruption."

[...] Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Napster faced several lawsuits from musical artists and record labels, including rock band Metallica, rapper and producer Dr. Dre, A&M Records and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The lawsuits were filed over leaked songs and copyright infringement claims.

In the RIAA's 1999 copyright lawsuit against Napster, the music recording company described the service as "a safe haven for piracy," as detailed in "All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster" by Joseph Menn. The RIAA's suit sought $100,000 for each copyright-protected song shared over the network, or around $100 million, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Also at Engagdet.

Related: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A self-learning memristor is our closest step yet to recreating synapses in the human brain.

Since researchers "discovered" memristors back in 2008, scientists and engineers around the world have been slowly improving their capabilities in the hopes of bringing about computers that are as efficient and powerful as human brains.

At the forefront of this research is the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST. In January of this year, KAIST president Kwang Hyung Lee announced that his institute had successfully developed a memristor that can correct errors and learn from mistakes, meaning it could solve problems that were previously difficult for neuromorphic systems. The researchers say, for example, that this chip could separate a moving image from a background during video processing, and actually improve its ability to do this task over time. The results were published in the Journal Nature Electronics.

[...] Of course, some scientists argue that such a capability means these machines could simply be "alien minds"—neural constructions unlike our own but undeniably intelligent in their own unique way. But for now, the human brain remains king in terms of hyper-efficient computing. With the help of improved memristors, however, AI could one day claim that neural crown for its own.

Popular Mechanics

[Also Covered By]: EurekAlert

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceX reportedly has a secret backdoor for Chinese investment:

Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX has allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore hubs, according to reporting from ProPublica.

SpaceX is a defense contractor for the Pentagon, one that handles sensitive work like building a classified spy satellite network. Investment from China raises national security concerns, as it could grant a foreign adversary access to sensitive military technology, intelligence, or supply chains.

The insight into SpaceX's investment approach surfaces new questions around Musk's own ties with China, particularly amid reports that the Pentagon briefed Musk on a potential war with China. The billionaire executive who is leading the charge to gut federal spending has regularly met with Communist Party officials in China to discuss his business interests. Tesla's Shanghai gigafactory builds about half of Tesla's cars, and the country makes up a significant (if shrinking) chunk of its sales.

The details of how SpaceX allows Chinese investors to buy into the company came to light through the testimony of its CFO, Bret Johnsen, and major investor Iqbaljit Kahlon during a recent corporate dispute in Delaware.

The dispute centered around an aborted 2021 deal with a Chinese firm that had planned to buy $50 million of the company's stock. When the news became public, SpaceX executives pulled out to avoid potential problems with national security regulators.

Kahlon testified in December that SpaceX finds it "acceptable" for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles, which are often used to keep investors anonymous.

Experts who spoke to ProPublica said this practice is troubling because it's a potential sign that the company is taking active steps to conceal foreign ownership interests. It's unclear exactly why SpaceX does this; the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While passive, non-controlling stakes from foreign investors are welcome, it is the Trump administration's position that adversaries like China use concealed investment strategies to obtain technologies, IP, and leverage in strategic industries. As a result, typically such investments would be vetted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

There's no public record of SpaceX undergoing a formal CFIUS review. TechCrunch has reached out to CFIUS and SpaceX to learn more.

ProPublica's reporting follows an investigation from The Financial Times that found that Chinese investors are using special-purpose vehicles to quietly funnel millions into Musk-controlled companies, including SpaceX, xAI, and Neuralink.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0415-released/

We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.15! This release offers Plug and Play fixes, audio fixes, memory management fixes, registry healing, improvements to accessories and system tools including Notepad, Paint, RAPPS, the Input Method Editor, and shell improvements.

We chose to release this version of ReactOS in honor of Eric Kohl's first commit to the ReactOS code base, which dates back to 1999.
[...]
0.4.15 was branched 6 months ago. Since then, many new and exciting features have been worked on in the master branch. UEFI support, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), a new graphical installer, a new NTFS filesystem driver, power management, and newer application support are just a few features being worked on. We are excited to share this journey with you as ReactOS improves and matures.

Previously on SoylentNews:
Watch: Mac OS X 10.4 Running in Windows Alternative ReactOS via PearPC Emulator - 20180510
Alternatives to Win32...Win32 of course! ReactOS still making progress.... - 20160828
Release of ReactOS 0.4 Brings Open Source Windows Closer to Reality - 20160217
Ask Soylent: Can We Turn ReactOS into a Viable Alternative to Windows 10? - 20151021
NTFS Now Supported in ReactOS LiveCD - 20141106

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/science/pedestrian-walking-math/

Have you ever wondered why walking from point A to B can be easy in some places, and incredibly frustrating in others? Well, scientists were curious about it too, and have now worked out the mathematical equation that underpins how we navigate sidewalks, and why, collectively, it descends into chaos so quickly.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have uncovered the scientific logic at the root of pedestrian traffic flow, and it's more fascinating than you might think. And it's not the number of people, but their individual behavior, that drives it.

In 2021, MIT instructor of applied mathematics Karol Bacik, who is also trained in fluid dynamics and granular flow, published research on crowd flow and social distancing. This gave him and his team the idea to study pedestrian behavior more acutely. Two years later, Bacik and researchers looked at "lane formation" – which is observed in particles, grains and ultimately people. Essentially, they found that if it looked like a lane was forming in a crowd, people would either join it or walk parallel to it.

Back then, they used the model of a crosswalk to develop a theory as to how much "angular spread" – pedestrians veering off these invisible lanes – it would take for order to descend into chaos. And they found that all it took was someone to veer off this lane by around 13 degrees to sow the seeds of collective disorder.

"Now we're asking, how robust is this mechanism?" Bacik said. "Does it only work in this very idealized situation, or can lane formation tolerate some imperfections, such as some people not going perfectly straight, as they might do in a crowd?"

In the new study, the team switched focus from what degree it takes to cause disorder, to instead looking at the moment this disorder is triggered.

"If you think about the whole crowd flowing, rather than individuals, you can use fluid-like descriptions," Bacik explained. "It's this art of averaging, where, even if some people may cross more assertively than others, these effects are likely to average out in a sufficiently large crowd. If you only care about the global characteristics like, are there lanes or not, then you can make predictions without detailed knowledge of everyone in the crowd."

Using fluid flow, the researchers altered the parameters to apply to the crosswalk and pedestrians, and simulated the foot traffic with a group of people crossing the floor of a gymnasium as they would a road.

Out of this, they found that pedestrians in a crosswalk are more likely to form lanes, when they walk relatively straight across, from opposite directions. This order largely holds until people start veering across at more extreme angles. Then, the equation predicts that the pedestrian flow is likely to be disordered, with few to no lanes forming.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420697122

Original Submission