Toshiba said it would divide into two companies and sell non-core assets, scrapping an initial three-way split that faced fierce criticism from activist shareholders. From a report: The Japanese tech giant plans to spin off the devices business, which includes semiconductors, and list it, Toshiba said in a statement Monday in Tokyo. It scrapped an earlier plan to separate out its infrastructure operations, which will instead continue to come under Toshiba. Splitting into two companies would be cheaper and smoother than the original plan, it said. Toshiba also designated Toshiba Tec, its listed electronic equipment business, as a non-core business, it said, though it stopped short of saying it would sell the unit. The company will also use 300 billion yen ($2.6 billion) of excess capital for shareholder returns over two years, it said. Shares of memory-chip business Kioxia Holdings will continue to be held by Toshiba, it said, but the firm will seek to monetize the shares "immediately" and return proceeds to shareholders. Kioxia has been pursuing an initial public offering, but has also been reported to be in talks to merge with Western Digital.

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CNBC interviewed six adult entertainers about cryptocurrency use, including webcam performer Allie Eve Knox, who became interested in cryptocurrencies after "several vendors, including PayPal, Square Cash, and Venmo, shut down her accounts because of red flags related to sex work." [T]he biggest attraction was having total and irreversible ownership over the money she had earned. "I could cash it out. I could hold it. I could watch it go up and down," said Knox. "It was mine." Knox is one of many adult workers who say that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin give them a sense of security and independence as banks, credit card companies, and payment processors tighten regulations around adult content. With crypto, there is no middleman making a judgment call on which transactions are acceptable.... "The majority of sex work in the U.S. is legal. It's not dealt with fairly, but it's still legal," explained Kristen DiAngelo, an activist and Sacramento-based sex worker who has spent over four decades in the industry.... Some escorts — who charge anywhere from $1,700 an hour to $11,000 for a full 24 hours — now explicitly say in their ads that they prefer to be paid in bitcoin or ethereum.... DiAngelo tells CNBC she will never forget the first time her bank account was closed without warning.... DiAngelo called Citibank and learned that her account had been frozen and she should tear up her credit card. DiAngelo says the customer service rep told her that they weren't "at liberty" to tell her why it had happened, and she would have to write a formal letter to request additional details. They did, however, say that she was still responsible for any money owed.... There was particular irony in her situation, as DiAngelo did a stint as a stockbroker at Citibank in the 1980âs, always pays her taxes, and has a credit score over 800.... [S]he brought her money to another bank. When they also flagged and closed her account, she moved on to the next. After being shut out of a third bank, DiAngelo says she turned exclusively to bitcoin for her online banking needs. Nearly every sex worker interviewed for this story mentioned platform hopping.... Nowadays, it's par for the course to see adult websites accept cryptocurrency, and some deal in it exclusively... Some adult media companies have even turned to blockchain technology to develop their own digital currencies and platforms.... Sex workers who do accept crypto also have to contend with volatile prices, which can cut into their earnings. For instance, bitcoin is down more than 40% from its November all-time high. Knox also tells CNBC she's sold photos of herself as NFTs on sites like OpenSea. "Thus far, the most she's gotten from a single sale is $1,200 worth of ethereum."

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"Subaru and Kia dealers in Massachusetts have disabled systems that allow remote starts and send maintenance alerts..." reports Wired. Subaru buyers in Massachusetts also lose access to the telematics system's app, so "no emergency assistance; no automated messages when the tire pressure was low or the oil needed changing." Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state's voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car's internal systems. But the "open data platform" envisioned by the law doesn't exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts.... "This was not to comply with the law — compliance with the law at this time is impossible — but rather to avoid violating it," Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment. The dispute is the latest chapter in long-running disagreements between the state and automakers over the right to repair, or consumers' ability to fix their own cars or control who does it for them.... [N]ew vehicles are now computers on wheels, gathering an estimated 25 gigabytes per hour of driving data — the equivalent of five HD movies. Automakers say that lots of this information isn't useful to them and is discarded. But some — a vehicle's location, how specific components are operating at a given moment — is anonymized and sent to the manufacturers.... These days, much of the data is transmitted wirelessly. So independent mechanics and right-to-repair proponents worry that automakers will stop sending vital repair information to the diagnostic ports. That would hamper the independents and lock customers into relationships with dealerships.... Automakers say opening the car's mechanical data to anyone would be dangerous — and a violation of federal law. In November 2020, just after voters approved the ballot measure, a trade group that represents most major automakers sued Massachusetts in federal court. The group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, argued that the federal government, not states, should control who gets access to cars' telematics systems. The group also said that it would be irresponsible and dangerous to create the open data platform that the law required, especially by 2022.... Dealerships are caught in the middle. It's an especially unfortunate time to be there, given the chip shortage that has curtailed vehicle production — and sales. One dealer reportedly even asked a potential car buyer, "Don't you have any friends in Rhode Island whose address you can use?"

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Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....." But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made." Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China... News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters. Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo: - "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this." - "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions." And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap: Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event. Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..." Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end." And another example from the Hollywood Reporter: After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film. But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club. "Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."

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"Scientists have made the first steps to develop an atlas of world cancer, hoping it will bring us closer to a cure," reports the Telegraph. "A map showing stark differences in the incidence of 10 types of cancer between Spain and Portugal has sparked a race to pinpoint causes and risk factors people should avoid." It shows huge differences for people living only a short distance apart, sometimes across the border between Spain and Portugal, and others occurring within the same country. Scientists say it will take years to solve the puzzle completely but are confident that the map provides the pieces. There are easier questions and more complex riddles. But it all points to environmental factors — as opposed to genetics — playing a major role in causing cancers. The lung cancer map tells a clear story of far higher levels of smoking tobacco in Spain than in Portugal, with the latter country showing a consistent hue of dark blue for a lower risk of mortality, while Spain has large areas lit up in red, at least on the map representing men. Twenty per cent of Spanish adults are daily smokers, compared with just over 11 per cent in Portugal. But the data from cancer of the larynx, also linked to smoking, tells a vastly different story, with a high mortality risk for men shown straddling the border in southern Portugal and south western Spain, as well as patches in the north of both countries. "The lung cancer and smoking connection is very clear, so why in other cancers that have a strong link with tobacco are we seeing such surprising differences?" asks Pablo Fernández-Navarro, the lead co-ordinator of the atlas from the Spanish side. "This is what is so fantastic. If whole countries had uniform levels of mortality, the maps would be in plain colours. Given that it is not the case, now we have to investigate and explain these differences, eliminating one factor after another," Fernández-Navarro told The Telegraph. In the case of larynx cancer, the Spanish epidemiologist says the map confirms that smoking is by no means the only risk factor, and that other elements must also be at work, from alcohol intake to levels of pollutants such as asbestos or petrochemicals in the environment. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the link.

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North Korea funded its missile programs with millions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency, reports the BBC, citing a new UN report: Between 2020 and mid-2021 cyber-attackers stole more than $50m (£37m) of digital assets, investigators found. Such attacks are an "important revenue source" for Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programme, they said. The findings were reportedly handed to the UN's sanctions committee on Friday. The cyber-attacks targeted at least three cryptocurrency exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia. The report also referenced a study published last month by the security firm Chainalysis that suggested North Korean cyberattacks could have netted as much as $400m worth of digital assets last year. And in 2019, the UN reported that North Korea had accumulated an estimated $2bn for its weapons of mass destruction programmes by using sophisticated cyber-attacks.... The US said on Friday that North Korea — formally known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) — carried out nine missile tests last month alone.

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"Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether if it is no longer able to share data about European users with its U.S. operations, applications, and data centres," reports ITWire. It's customary for regulatory filings to preemptively declare a wide variety of possible future hazards, and in that spirit a recently-filed Meta financial statement cites a ruling by the EU's Court of Justice (in July of 2020) voiding a U.S. law called the Privacy Shield (which Meta calls one legal basis for its current dara-transferring practices). Though courts are now determining the ruling's ramifications, ITWire notes that "with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) well in force, the U.S. Privacy Shield principles were found non-compliant and consequently invalid." So while that ruling affects every American company, including cloud companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, it's Facebook/Meta that "says stopping transatlantic data transfers will have a devastating impact on its targeted online advertisements capabilities." Read it yourself, in Meta's own words: "If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on Standard Contractual Clauses [now also subject to new judical scrutiny] or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations." Of course, the filing also cites other hazards like the possibility of new legislation restricting Facebook's ability to collect data about minors, complaining that such legislation "may also result in limitations on our advertising services or our ability to offer products and services to minors in certain jurisdictions." And in addition, "We are, and expect to continue to be, the subject of investigations, inquiries, data requests, requests for information, actions, and audits by government authorities and regulators in the United States, Europe, and around the world, particularly in the areas of privacy, data protection, law enforcement, consumer protection, civil rights, content moderation, and competition..." "Orders issued by, or inquiries or enforcement actions initiated by, government or regulatory authorities could cause us to incur substantial costs, expose us to unanticipated civil and criminal liability or penalties (including substantial monetary remedies), interrupt or require us to change our business practices in a manner materially adverse to our business, result in negative publicity and reputational harm, divert resources and the time and attention of management from our business, or subject us to other structural or behavioral remedies that adversely affect our business." (Thanks to Slashdot reader juul_advocate for sharing the story!)

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NBC News tells the story of Rich, a Coca-Cola delivery driver who didn't get a paycheck at Christmas because of a ransomware attack on the payroll company serving Coke's largest distributor. But then "more than a month after hackers crippled Kronos," paychecks to its employees in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia "have been sporadic, according to union representatives." Rich, who asked not to be identified by his last name for fear of retaliation from his employer, is among hundreds of workers who deliver Coke products in at least three states who say they're still owed wages — fallout from one of the many ransomware attacks that hit U.S. companies practically every day. Rich, a father of three, said he's had to dip into his savings, which have dwindled down in recent weeks. "They went from $1,100, $1,200 a week to $300, $600," he said of his paychecks. "I got one $300 paycheck, and I called and told them exactly what I needed paid, and they sent me a $46 check...." "We've got 130 people and they've all got problems," said Max Zemla, the president of the Cleveland-area Teamsters Local 293. "Some are telling me they're not as bad off. I have a guy who's off a thousand dollars. Uses his money for his kid's tuition for school, and he's not able to pay it...." "The timekeeping vendor Kronos that suffered the attack is in the process of coming back online," [said Josh Gelinas, Coca-Cola Consolidated's vice president of communications February 1st] in an emailed statement. "But, until these digital systems are fully restored, we must continue manually recording work hours for thousands of our teammates. This process is taking longer than we would like and may have resulted in some inconsistencies, but our teammates will be paid for every hour they've worked...." [NBC reports that a spokesperson for Kronos "noted that the company announced on Jan. 22 that it had finally restored all its services."] Jeff Combs, the secretary treasurer of Teamsters Local 135 in Indianapolis, said the vast majority of the roughly 200 Coca-Cola Consolidated employees he represents are still owed pay. "Some are still owed as high as $4,700," Combs said. Rich complains to NBC News that "now my savings have dwindled down because a billion-dollar company can't give you an average paycheck." But it shows ransomware's effects ultimately reach farther than we realize. "It's often assumed that ransomware mainly affects governments and major corporations because it's those incidents that make the news," a ransomware analyst at Emsisoft tells NBC News. "The reality, however, is that more than half of all ransomware victims are small businesses and individuals. And, unfortunately, they are usually not as well prepared to deal with the problem as larger organizations and probably feel more pain as a result."

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The Washington Post's editorial board announces its position in "The Post's view," a section of its site which officially "represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board." Its newest position? America's Internal Revenue Service "should not make you scan your face to see your tax returns." The Internal Revenue Service might soon force every American who wants to access their taxes online to record a selfie of themselves and submit to facial recognition to verify their identity. The IRS wants to start this extra verification procedure this summer. That would be a mistake. This cannot be the only way to access an account online, as 90 percent of tax filers currently do. Requiring facial recognition could prevent a substantial number of people from accessing their accounts. Low-income Americans often lack the necessary technology, and research shows people of color are more likely to be misidentified. There are equally serious concerns about privacy and what will happen to the potentially more than 100 million selfies the IRS will collect. Cutting down on fraud is a worthy goal, but facial recognition should not be introduced so swiftly without clear guardrails around the data.... [T]here is no federal law regulating how this sensitive information can be used. And let's not forget that hackers exposed the personal information of more than 140 million Americans when they broke into Equifax — itself once an IRS verification company.... There have been encouraging reports that the IRS is reconsidering its sole reliance on ID.me for online verification for website access. At a minimum, the IRS must offer other verification options and clearly articulate guidelines on what happens to all facial data.

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Rockstar Games recently acknowledged the "unprecedented longevity" of Grand Theft Auto V (and its online component Grand Theft Auto Online) — and confirmed their working on the next new game for the series. But Forbes argues "The success of GTA Online itself may end up fundamentally changing the way Rockstar makes this series going forward..." The success of Grand Theft Auto 5 has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for Rockstar, making zillions from the success of GTA Online, and for those deeply invested in that world which has continually gotten new expansions and additions. But a curse for those waiting for GTA 6, as Rockstar is now about to release GTA 5 across three different generations, cementing its massive lead as the best-selling game in history, endlessly delaying a true sequel. Now, however, Rockstar has finally stated the obvious, they are working on the next GTA game, which we're all calling GTA 6, but Rockstar stops short of saying number that outright.... I don't know if we can say for sure if this is going to be GTA 6 specifically, either the name or the concept.... I can imagine a "new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series" being a massive game that is perhaps online from the start, including for its base campaign. And not to use the "m" word, but there are less compelling metaverses than what GTA Online has become, and Rockstar may want to lean into that even further to try to get ahead of competition trying to make their own virtual worlds. As such, I could see a future that blends a traditional numbered GTA sequel and GTA Online, and who knows what that would be called ("GTA World?" "GTA Infinite?"). Just saying, it may not be "GTA 6," exactly.

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Apple's privacy push could cost Meta $10 billion in lost 2022 advertising revenue — and that news alone erased $250 billion in Meta's value, notes long-time Slashdot reader theodp. But this leads them to a thought experiment: What would happen to Meta's and Google's business models if the privacy invasion behind the companies' lucrative advertising model were actually criminalized? While there would likely still be the same massive demand for the free services provided by Meta and Google, being unable to target customers of interest to advertisers based on snooped behaviors and demographics seems likely to throw the duopoly's lucrative cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) advertising model that powers these free services into disarray. So what might the end game look like for Facebook and Google in a Web world where privacy was enforced by law? One imagines the pair could try to incur the additional cost of delivering many times more untargeted impressions in an effort to reach the same number of behavior and demographic-targeted impressions desired by advertisers, assuming they could get that to work and gain advertisers' trust in the new model. But one wonders if advertisers might start diverting more ad dollars away from Meta and Google to other sources such as media providers, whose varied content naturally segments audiences and could deliver greater assurance to advertisers that more relevant viewers are being reached. Might Meta and Google pivot to become syndicators of media content and be forced to share more of the advertising loot? And what about the Metaverse — could Meta-sponsored events and interest groups hosted there provide Meta with opportunities to naturally segment its massive user base into areas that could facilitate targeting audiences relevant to advertisers even without privacy invasion? Finally — if worse comes to worst — would users actually pay to use Meta's and Google's services if the new advertising model failed to deliver sufficient revenue to keep services free?

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"Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm." So writes Ted Gioia, author of the Substack music/pop culture newsletter "The Honest Broker". But it gets worse: "The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago....." The signs are everywhere — including the fact that viewership for the music industry's Grammy awards plummeted 53% this year to just 8.8 million. "More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors)." And even then, "When a new song overcomes these obstacles and actually becomes a hit, the risk of copyright lawsuits is greater than ever before.... Adding to the nightmare, dead musicians are now coming back to life in virtual form — via holograms and 'deepfake' music — making it all the harder for young, living artists to compete in the marketplace." But in the end the real problem may ultimately be that "nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music." Who can blame them for feeling this way? The radio stations will play only songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven't changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That's actually how the current system has been designed to work. Even the music genres famous for shaking up the world — rock or jazz or hip-hop — face this same deadening industry mindset. I love jazz, but many of the radio stations focused on that genre play songs that sound almost the same as what they featured 10 or 20 years ago. In many instances, they actually are the same songs. This state of affairs is not inevitable. A lot of musicians around the world — especially in Los Angeles and London — are conducting a bold dialogue between jazz and other contemporary styles. They are even bringing jazz back as dance music. But the songs they release sound dangerously different from older jazz, and are thus excluded from many radio stations for that same reason. The very boldness with which they embrace the future becomes the reason they get rejected by the gatekeepers. A country record needs to sound a certain way to get played on most country radio stations or playlists, and the sound those DJs and algorithms are looking for dates back to the prior century. And don't even get me started on the classical-music industry, which works hard to avoid showcasing the creativity of the current generation. We are living in an amazing era of classical composition, with one tiny problem: The institutions controlling the genre don't want you to hear it. The problem isn't a lack of good new music. It's an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. So while the author acknowledges that "The fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings," far deeper than that is the problem that, "The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music." Yet if there's any hope, the author argues, it's that people "crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different.... Songs can go viral nowadays without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has already happened. That will be how this story ends: not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place...." "The CEOs are the last to know. That's what gives me solace.... The decision makers controlling our music institutions have lost the thread. We're lucky that the music is too powerful for them to kill."

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A California newspaper covers "pleas" to the state's governor to delay the closure of a nuclear power plant: On Thursday, Dr. Steven Chu, former U.S. Secretary of Energy under the Obama administration and a Nobel laureate, and more than 79 scientists, academics and entrepreneurs sent a letter to [California governor] Newsom urging him to find a way to keep the plant open because of the necessary carbon-free, clean electricity it provides to the state's electricity grid. Diablo Canyon currently provides about 18,000 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity annually, comprising of about 10% of the state's electricity portfolio.... The letter was sent by the nonprofit foundation Save Clean Energy, which was organized primarily to protest the closure of the nuclear power plant.... The letter details how Diablo Canyon is critical to the state's clean energy goals, which the state is legally mandated to meet, and how it seems unlikely the state will be able to meet those goals with the plant's current scheduled decommissioning beginning in November 2024, when the first of its two Nuclear Regulatory Licenses expires.... The movement to keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open has recently gained new traction after a Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology report released in November claimed operating the plant for 10 years beyond its expected closure would significantly help the state meet its clean energy goals. In a statement sent to The Tribune in December, a spokesperson for Newsom indicated the governor has no intention of delaying the closure of Diablo Canyon. "California has the technology to achieve California's clean energy goals without compromising our energy needs. The pathway is through diverse renewable energy sources, expanded energy storage and grid climate resiliency," Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon wrote in an email to The Tribune. "Our retail energy providers are already in the process of procuring new energy projects to replace the energy produced by Diablo Canyon." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader gordm for sharing the link

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"Proponents of AI audiobook narration tout its much lower production costs (compared to a traditional recording of a human narrator) as a way to improve profitability of audiobooks," reports Publisher's Weekly, "as well as allowing publishers to publish more audiobooks that have limited audiences. "But according to actor and narrator Emily Lawrence, cofounder of the Professional Audiobook Narrators Association and president of its board of directors, 'It's very easy to reduce this issue to dollars and cents, but it's very complicated and nuanced.'" If AI narration proliferates, "it's not just narrators who will lose their jobs," Lawrence said. "There's an entire ecosystem of people who rely on audiobooks for their livelihood. People who direct audiobooks, people who edit audiobooks, people who check audiobook narration for word-for-word perfection against the manuscript.... Similarly, in audiobook narrator Hillary Huber's view, the negatives of AI outweigh any positives. She places "loss of livelihoods, loss of integrity in storytelling, and loss of personal connection" high on her list of concerns. "The only pros I see are financial," she said. "And it's the other team that benefits, not the narrators nor the listeners. Do you really think [AI company] Speechki is going to pass their savings on to the listener? No. Listeners make choices about what to spend money on, and they have a right to demand clear labeling of robot voices, as do authors.... [Anthony Goff, who until this month was senior v-p and publisher of Hachette Audio] noted at Hachette... his team is looking at using AI for some titles that have never been produced in audio before — a move that would help ensure that "the largest possible number of Hachette's titles are always accessible in audio format," he said. "Interest in previously unrecorded content would help us make decisions about what would make sense to bring to market as fully produced audiobook editions moving forward, created by a professional narrator and our dedicated production staff." Goff's experimentation lines up with the key point that those who champion AI narration raise: AI can provide publishers with a cost-effective way to produce more audiobooks to help meet burgeoning consumer demand. Industry statistics illustrate the gulf between the number of audiobooks that get to market and the number that could potentially be recorded. According to the most recent data from the Audio Publishers Association, more than 71,000 audiobooks were published in 2020. Though that number marks an industry high, it's still only a fraction of the number of print books published in 2020.... Despite AI narration's potential to help grow the audiobook sector, its emergence is "creating an existential crisis for our narrator community," Lawrence said. "It is not only threatening to take away our jobs and completely remove us from the equation but — and this is my main concern — it's threatening the art that we love. And as a community, we fully believe that what we do is art. Whether I'm out of a job or not, I would be devastated that the art that I care so deeply about is so horribly compromised."

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"A pre-pandemic policy on airport usage is pressuring airlines to keep 'ghost flights' in the air," Wired reported this week — adding "The climate impact is massive." Lufthansa, Germany's national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots. Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don't publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures.... Lufthansa's own chief executive, Carsten Spohr [said] the journeys were "empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights." But the company argues that it can't change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports. A Greenpeace analysis indicates that if Lufthansa's practice of operating no-passenger flights were replicated equally across the European aviation sector, it would mean that more than 100,000 "ghost flights" were operating in Europe this year, spitting out carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 1.4 million gas-guzzling cars. "We're in a climate crisis, and the transport sector has the fastest-growing emissions in the EU," says Greenpeace spokesperson Herwig Schuster. "Pointless, polluting 'ghost flights' are just the tip of the iceberg." Aviation analysts are split on the scale of the ghost flight problem. Some believe the issue has been overhyped and is likely not more prevalent than the few airlines that have admitted to operating them. Others say there are likely tens of thousands of such flights operating — with their carriers declining to say anything because of the PR blowback.

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Long-time Slashdot reader olddoc and his wife have three frequently-used credit cards, stored and many online businesses for easy checkout. "In the past 6 months we have received fraud notices from the card companies three times." Typically there is a $1 charge in a far away location. Once there was a charge for thousands of dollars at a bar. The card companies seem to pick up the fact that they are fraudulent even though once it was described as "chip present". What can we do to cut down the number of times we have to update all our ongoing bills with a new card number? The original submission acknowledges that "We have never lost money to fraud, just time." But is the problem storing the card numbers with online businesses? Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K argues "Never ever do this. Never ever have your card stored at an online business even if it's more inconvenient to enter it every time. You NEVER know how your number is stored, it can be stored in a database that's not secure enough or it can be stored in an encrypted cookie on your computer in which case that cookie might be read and decrypted by just about any web site out there if they have figured out how to access cookies for another site. There are a lot of ways that your card details can leak." That comment also concedes it's possible someone's using a card-number generator to target the same range of credit card numbers. But is there a better solution? Share your own thoughts in the comments. How can you keep your credit card numbers from being stolen?

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"People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference. In 2021," notes The Drift magazine, noting last year's event was held in Monterey, California. "Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was 'the case for optimism.'" The magazine makes the case that over the last decade TED talks have been "endlessly re-articulating tech's promises without any serious critical reflection." And they start with how Bill Gates told an audience in 2015 that "we can be ready for the next epidemic." Gates's popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn't alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other "ideas worth spreading" (the organization's tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky's massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer's talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year..... At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates's 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn't so sure. It seems to me that Gates's prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don't mean to suggest that Gates's TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid. But it embodies a certain story about "the future" that TED talks have been telling for the past two decades — one that has contributed to our unending present crisis. The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories.... In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn't to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED's longtime curator, puts it, "We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world... may be simply to stand up and say something." And yet, TED's archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned. But the article also notes that TED's philosophy became "a magnet for narcissistic, recognition-seeking characters and their Theranos-like projects." (In 2014 Elizabeth Holmes herself spoke at a medical-themed TED conference.) And since 2009 the TEDx franchise lets licensees use the brand platform to stage independent events — which is how at a 2010 TEDx event, Randy Powell gave his infamous talk about vortex-based mathematics which he said would "create inexhaustible free energy, end all diseases, produce all food, travel anywhere in the universe, build the ultimate supercomputer and artificial intelligence, and make obsolete all existing technology." Yet these are all just symptoms of a larger problem, the article ultimately argues. "As the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy.

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The region around this Winter's Olympic venues "is in an extreme drought," reports CNN, though "even in normal years, it isn't particularly suitable for snow sports." In fact, it's the first year all the snow for the Winter Games has been created by a single company: It is almost beautiful — except that the venues are surrounded by an endless brown, dry landscape completely devoid of snow. In an Olympic first, though not an achievement to boast about, climate variability has forced the Winter Games to be virtually 100% reliant on artificial snow — part of a trend that is taking place across winter sports venues around the world. Just one of the 21 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics in the past 50 years will have a climate suitable for winter sports by the end of the century, a recent study found, if fossil fuel emissions remain unchecked. As the planet warms and the weather becomes increasingly more erratic, natural snow is becoming less reliable for winter sports, which forces venues to lean more on artificial snow. But it comes at a cost: human-made snow is incredibly resource-intensive, requiring massive amounts of energy and water to produce in a climate that's getting warmer and warmer. Elite athletes also say that the sports themselves become trickier and less safe when human-made snow is involved.... "There have been recent technological advances that allow for the generation of snow when it is above freezing," explained Jordy Hendrikx, the director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University. "This is not your 'light fluffy' snow that you might think of — it is much denser and not very soft...." Making snow demands significant resources, namely energy and water.... And with 1.2 million cubic meters of snow needed to cover roughly 800,000 square meters of competition area... the water demand at this year's Winter Olympics is massive. [According to a "Slippery Slopes" report led by Loughborough University in London on how the climate crisis is affecting the Winter Olympics.] The International Olympic Committee estimated that 49 million gallons of water will be needed to produce snow for The Games, which is a lot when you consider how rapidly the world is running out of freshwater. It's enough to fill 3,600 average-sized backyard swimming pools, or — more to the point — it's a day's worth of drinking water for nearly 100 million people.... The IOC does not face these challenges alone. Artificial snow is being used as a tool to extend ski seasons in competitions and at resorts across the globe, many of which are threatened by the warming temperatures of the climate crisis. These challenges will continue to drive the snow sports industry toward artificial snow when Mother Nature doesn't produce it. But the question remains — just because we can, does that mean we should?

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ZDNet reporter Steven Vaughan-Nichols has solved the mystery of whether Linus Torvalds is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto: no. But what's interesting is why the reporter had to ask in the first place: In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: 'Name = I am Satoshi....' Torvalds himself has been suspected of being Nakamoto several times over the years. But no one who knows him well, and I consider myself one of those, have ever thought he was the Bitcoin mastermind. It's just so, so not Linus. So, while many people were discussing the "evidence," I decided just to ask Linus. Here's what he had to say. "I'm afraid that is just a jokester taking advantage of how GitHub works — it shares git objects between different repositories, so you can use the SHA1 'name' of an object to specify something you did in your own tree, and then use my repository as the web name, and make it look like your object is in my tree...." Torvalds went on, "So the "torvalds/linux" part of that URL is basically just empty noise, designed to fool people into thinking it's in my tree. You could replace it with [another] GitHub repository name — the actual relevant part is just the SHA1 hash part...." "So no," Torvalds concluded, "I'm sadly not the owner of a huge stash of original bitcoins." And, there you have it, folks. Nakamoto's real identity remains a secret. Late last year Vaughan-Nichols also reported on what happened when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world . "An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"

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"The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Currency Initiative have come up with an initial design for a central bank digital currency," reports Yahoo Finance. Reuters cautions that the newly-released research does not suggest that the U.S. central bank will move toward launching a CBDC, a step it has said it would not take without clear support from the White House and Congress...." Instead the team "developed technology that can be adjusted as more policy questions regarding the structure and purpose of a CBDC are addressed." The Washington Post describes it as "a system that can settle the vast majority of payments in less than two seconds, handles more than 1.7 million transactions per second and operates around-the-clock with no service outages in the case of a disruption in its network." The Boston Globe adds that "The team noted there's a lot more work to do in the next phase, including researching various privacy features, and stressed the digital dollar remains hypothetical until the Fed decides whether to move forward with government-backed electronic cash." Some context from the Washington Post: The ultimate product could help extend financial services to people who lack a bank account and make cross-border payments such as remittances safer and easier, said Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Narula, in a conference call with reporters, noted that the Boston researchers "aren't the ones making policy decision on how such a system might operate," so they have aimed to "create a flexible system that can work with a variety of models." Along with a paper describing the team's work to date, researchers on Thursday published open-source code for the platform that would support the digital currency. Jim Cunha, executive vice president of the Boston Fed, called that a first for the central bank, intended to encourage public input that improves the technology.

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