TikTok has completed migrating its U.S. users' information to servers at Oracle, in a move that could address U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular video app, the company confirmed to Reuters. From a report: The move comes nearly two years after a U.S. national security panel ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China's government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having bright colours and greenery in our cities can make people happier and calmer, according to an unusual experiment involving virtual reality headsets. From a report: A team of researchers at the University of Lille, in France, used VR to test how volunteers reacted to variations of a minimalist concrete, glass and metal urban landscape. The 36 participants walked on the spot in a laboratory wearing a VR headset with eye trackers, and researchers tweaked their surroundings, adding combinations of vegetation, as well as bright yellow and pink colours, and contrasting, angular patterns on the path. By tracking their blink rate, the researchers learned about what the volunteers were most interested in. The participants then filled out a questionnaire about their experience. The researchers found that the volunteers walked more slowly and their heart rate increased when they saw green vegetation in their urban setting. They also kept their heads higher, looking forward and around, instead of towards the ground. While adding and taking away colour didn't make quite as much of a difference for the participants, they were more curious and alert when colourful patterns were added to the ground they were virtually stepping on, according to the study. According to Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell, a professor of cognitive psychology at the university and the lead author on this study, the results demonstrated that the urban experience had been made more pleasurable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Babel Finance, the Asia-based crypto financial services firm, suspended client withdrawals five days after a similar move by Celsius triggered a fresh bout of turbulence in crypto markets. From a report: "Due to the current situation, Babel Finance is facing unusual liquidity pressures," Babel said in a notice on its website on Friday. "During this period, redemptions and withdrawals from Babel Finance products will be temporarily suspended." A spokesperson for Babel said it's taking action to best protect the interests of clients. The firm promised a follow-up announcement once normal service has resumed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of Senate Democrats is calling on the US Commerce Department to follow Europe's lead in forcing all smartphone manufacturers to build devices that adhere to a universal charging standard. From a report: In a Thursday letter addressed to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) -- along with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) -- demanded that the department develop a strategy to require a common charging port across all mobile devices. The letter comes a week after European Union lawmakers reached a deal on new legislation forcing all smartphones and tablets to be equipped with USB-C ports by fall 2024. "The EU has wisely acted in the public interest by taking on powerful technology companies over this consumer and environmental issue," the senators wrote. "The United States should do the same."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With crypto prices tumbling precipitously, traders have begun increasingly turning against one another to eke out ever-elusive profits. From a report: Many shark traders scour blockchains -- digital ledgers for recording transactions -- seeking information on other traders, particularly those with highly leveraged positions, an anonymous user known as Omakase, a contributor to the Sushi decentralized exchange, said in an interview. The sharks then attack the positions by trying to push them into liquidation, and earning liquidation bonuses that are common in decentralized finance (DeFi), where people trade, lend and borrow from each other without intermediaries like banks. Related strategies may have contributed to the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin, with shark traders making money off price arbitrage between the Curve decentralized exchange and centralized exchanges, according to Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm. Recent troubles at crypto lender Celsius Network were exacerbated by arbitragers as well. The price of stETh token that Celsius has a large position in started trading at a large discount from Ether, to which it's tied. "As stETH goes down, arbitragers buy stETH and short ETH against it, sending ETH lower, which again lowers collateral values across DeFi," effectively worsening Celsius's position, according to a recent Arca note. As Omakase put it, "In a downtrend environment, where yields are harder to access, what we are going to see is some actors utilize some more aggressive strategies, and that may not be necessarily good for the community." Omakase added: "The environment has become more player vs player."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India has lifted business restrictions on Mastercard, nearly a year after imposing the ban, once again allowing the cards giant to add new customers in the South Asian market after it demonstrated "satisfactory compliance" with the local data storage rules, the central bank said on Thursday. From a report: In a series of moves last year, the Reserve Bank of India indefinitely barred Mastercard, American Express and Diners Club from issuing new debit, credit or prepaid cards to customers over noncompliance with local data storage rules. The business restrictions on American Express and Diners Club remain in place in the country, though they are permitted to continue to serve their existing customer base. The report adds: Unveiled in 2018, the local data-storage rules require payments firms to store all Indian transaction data within servers in the country. Visa, Mastercard and several other firms, as well as the U.S. government, previously requested New Delhi to reconsider its rules, which they argued were designed to allow the regulator "unfettered supervisory access."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The member countries of the World Trade Organization agreed Friday on a narrow measure aimed at boosting the supplies of Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries, wrapping up a bitter fight over corporate patent rights governing critical medical products during a pandemic. WSJ: The compromise measure on intellectual property rights will make it easier for companies in developing nations such as South Africa to manufacture and export a patented Covid-19 vaccine -- under limited circumstances -- without a consent from the patent holder if they have the approval of their own governments. Meeting for the first time in nearly five years, trade ministers from more than 100 countries also agreed on measures to reduce fisheries subsidies to protect fish stocks and pledged to minimize export restrictions on food items amid shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine. An existing ban on the collection of customs duty on digitally-transmitted products like music and movies was continued, to the relief of U.S. officials who had feared a possible change in the status quo would harm U.S. businesses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. today officially introduced its N2 (2nm class) manufacturing technology, its first node that will use gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFETs), at its 2022 TSMC Technology Symposium. From a report: The new fabrication process will offer a full-now performance and power benefits, but when it comes to transistor density, it will barely impress in 2025 when it comes online. Being an all-new process technology platform, TSMC's N2 brings in two essential innovations: nanosheet transistors (which is what TSMC calls its GAAFETs) and backside power rail that both serve the same goal of increasing performance-per-watt characteristics of the node. GAA nanosheet transistors feature channels surrounded by gates on all four sides, which reduces leakage; furthermore, their channels can be widened to increase drive current and boost performance or shrunken to minimize power consumption and cost. To feed these nanosheet transistors with enough power and now waste any of it, TSMC's N2 uses backside power delivery, which the foundry considers to be among the best solutions to fight resistances in the back-end-of-line (BEOL). Indeed, when it comes to performance and power consumption, TSMC's nanosheet-based N2 node can boast of a 10% to 15% higher performance at the same power and complexity as well as a 25% to 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency and transistor count when compared to TSMC's N3E. However, the new node increases chip density by only around 1.1X compared to N3E. In general, TSMC's N3 does offer full-node performance increases and power consumption reductions. But density-wise, the new technology can hardly impress. For example, TSMC's N3E node offers a 1.3X chip density increase over N5, which is a substantial increase.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

State securities regulators in Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey, Texas and Washington are investigating crypto lender Celsius Network's decision this week to suspend customer redemptions, Joseph Rotunda, enforcement director at the Texas State Securities Board told Reuters on Thursday. From a report: Officials met and began investigating the matter first thing Monday morning, Rotunda said, adding he considered the probe to be a "priority." Celsius said that due to extreme market conditions, it was pausing withdrawals, swaps and transfers between accounts. The company said that doing so would put it "in a better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations." "I am very concerned that clients -- including many retail investors -- may need to immediately access their assets yet are unable to withdraw from their accounts. The inability to access their investment may result in significant financial consequences," he said. Alabama Securities Commission Director Joseph Borg also told Reuters that Alabama, Texas, New Jersey and Kentucky securities regulators were probing the matter. Celsius has been responsive to questions from the regulators, but that the investigation is in the initial stages, he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A video producer claims he was fired after he complained that an obscure group based in the Sierra foothills dominated a business unit at Google. From a report: In a tiny town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a religious organization called the Fellowship of Friends has established an elaborate, 1,200-acre compound full of art and ornate architecture. More than 200 miles away from the Fellowship's base in Oregon House, Calif., the religious sect, which believes a higher consciousness can be achieved by embracing fine arts and culture, has also gained a foothold inside a business unit at Google. Even in Google's freewheeling office culture, which encourages employees to speak their own minds and pursue their own projects, the Fellowship's presence in the business unit was unusual. As many as 12 Fellowship members and close relatives worked for the Google Developer Studio, or GDS, which produces videos showcasing the company's technologies, according to a lawsuit filed by Kevin Lloyd, a 34-year-old former Google video producer. Many others staffed company events, working registration desks, taking photographs, playing music, providing massages and serving wine. For these events, Google regularly bought wine from an Oregon House winery owned by a member of the Fellowship, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Lloyd claimed he was fired last year because he complained about the influence of the religious sect. His suit also names Advanced Systems Group, or ASG, the company that sent Mr. Lloyd to Google as a contractor. Most of the Google Developer Studio joined the team through ASG as contractors, including many members of the Fellowship. The suit, which Mr. Lloyd filed in August in California Superior Court, accuses Google and ASG of violating a California employment law that protects workers against discrimination. It is in the discovery stage. The New York Times corroborated many of the lawsuit's claims through interviews with eight current and former employees of the Google business unit and examinations of publicly available information and other documents. These included a membership roster for the Fellowship of Friends, Google spreadsheets detailing event budgets and photos taken at these events.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A retracted paper highlights chemistry's history of trying to avoid the expensive, toxic -- but necessary -- catalyst. From a report: It's hard to find a place on Earth untouched by palladium. The silvery-white metal is a key part of catalytic converters in the world's 1.4 billion cars, which spew specks of palladium into the atmosphere. Mining and other sources add to this pollution. As a result, traces of palladium show up in some of the most remote spots on Earth, from Antarctica to the top of the Greenland ice sheet. Palladium is also practically indispensable for making drugs. That's because catalysts with palladium atoms at their core have an unmatched ability to help stitch together carbon --carbon bonds. This kind of chemical reaction is key to building organic molecules, especially those used in medications. "Every pharmaceutical we produce at some point or another has a palladium-catalysed step in it," says Per-Ola Norrby, a pharmaceutical researcher at drug giant AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. Palladium-catalysed reactions are so valuable that, in 2010, their discoverers shared a Nobel prize. But despite its versatility, chemists are trying to move away from palladium. The metal is more expensive than gold, and molecules that contain palladium can also be extremely toxic to humans and wildlife. Chemical manufacturers have to separate out all traces of palladium from their products and carefully dispose of the hazardous waste, which adds extra expense. Thomas Fuchb, a medicinal chemist at the life-sciences company Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, gives the example of a reaction to make 3 kilograms of a drug molecule for which the ingredients cost US$250,000. The palladium catalyst alone adds $100,000; purifying it out of the product another $30,000. Finding less-toxic alternatives to the metal could help to reduce environmental harm from palladium waste and move the chemicals industry towards 'greener' reactions, says Tianning Diao, an organometallic chemist at New York University. Researchers hope to swap palladium for more common metals, such as iron and nickel, or invent metal-free catalysts that sidestep the issue altogether. Several times in the past two decades, researchers have reported finding palladium-free catalysts. But in what has become a recurring pattern for the field, each heralded discovery turned out to be a mistake.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nolan Lawson, writing in a blogpost: Anyone who's worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. A legacy system exists: it's big, it's complex, and no one fully understands how it works. Architects are brought in to "fix" the system. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is... to add more boxes and arrows. Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds. This might go on for several years. At some point, though, an organizational shakeup probably occurs -- a merger, a reorg, the polite release of some senior executive to go focus on their painting hobby for a while. A new band of architects is brought in, and their solution to the "big diagram of boxes and arrows" problem is much simpler: draw a big red X through the whole thing. The old system is sunset or deprecated, the haggard veterans who worked on it either leave or are reshuffled to other projects, and a fresh-faced team is brought in to, blessedly, design a new system from scratch. As disappointing as it may be for those of us who might aspire to write the kind of software that is timeless and enduring, you have to admit that this system works. For all its wastefulness, inefficiency, and pure mendacity ("The old code works fine!" "No wait, the old code is terrible!"), this is the model that has sustained a lot of software companies over the past few decades. Will this cycle go on forever, though? I'm not so sure. Right now, the software industry has been in a nearly two-decade economic boom (with some fits and starts), but the one sure thing in economics is that booms eventually turn to busts. During the boom, software companies can keep hiring new headcount to manage their existing software (i.e. more engineers to understand more boxes and arrows), but if their labor force is forced to contract, then that same system may become unmaintainable. A rapid and permanent reduction in complexity may be the only long-term solution. One thing working in complexity's favor, though, is that engineers like complexity. Admit it: as much as we complain about other people's complexity, we love our own. We love sitting around and dreaming up new architectural diagrams that can comfortably sit inside our own heads -- it's only when these diagrams leave our heads, take shape in the real world, and outgrow the size of any one person's head that the problems begin. It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say "no" to new boxes and arrows. To say, "No, we won't solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven't imagined yet." Or to say, "Let's go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it." Or to just say, "Let's do less instead of more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on several rounds of programs to upgrade internet speeds in rural areas over the past decade. Despite those efforts, many residents are still stuck with service that isn't fast enough to do video calls or stream movies -- speeds that most take for granted. From a report: Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs' design have left residents wanting. The Wall Street Journal analyzed 1.4 million largely rural census blocks that were included in a series of nationwide Federal Communications Commission broadband programs over the past decade. In the latest program, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, rolled out in 2020, internet service providers won rights to public funding in about 750,000 census blocks, covering every state except Alaska. The Journal's analysis found that more than half of those census blocks -- areas with a combined population of 5.3 million people -- had been fully or partially covered by at least one previous federal broadband program. Most U.S. households today have access to internet download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10 Mbps, according to government data. Although the FCC's programs have made progress, some rural Americans still can't get 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds -- the level of service that was the federal standard in 2011. The broadband saga around Heavener, Okla., illustrates some of the problems. Heavener, with a population of around 3,000, is surrounded by cattle pastures and forested hills. Today some buildings on the main streets have good broadband service, but the internet deteriorates outside town, residents say. Much of the area, in Le Flore County, was slated for upgrades under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in 2020 -- and some of those areas had already been part of prior programs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three Arrows Capital failed to meet demands from lenders to stump up extra funds after its digital currency bets turned sour, tipping the prominent crypto hedge fund into a crisis that comes as a credit crunch grips the industry. Financial Times reports: The group's failure to meet margin calls this past weekend makes the group the latest victim of an acute fall in the prices of many tokens like bitcoin and ether that is rippling across the market. Singapore-based Three Arrows is among the biggest and most active players in the crypto industry with investments across lending and trading platforms. Lenders have sharply tightened up how much credit is on offer following tremors over the past month. Celsius, a major crypto financial services company, blocked withdrawals last week, while a pair of major tokens collapsed in May. US-based crypto lender BlockFi was among the groups that liquidated at least some of Three Arrows's positions, meaning it reduced its exposure by taking collateral the fund had put down to back its borrowing, according to people familiar with the matter. Three Arrows, which made a "strategic" investment in BlockFi in 2020, had borrowed bitcoin from the lender, the people said, but had been unable to meet a margin call. One of the people said the liquidation had occurred by mutual consent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European telecom regulator BEREC has updated its net neutrality guidelines to include a strict ban on zero-rating practices that exempt specific apps or categories of apps from data caps imposed by Internet service providers. From a report: The document published Tuesday provides guidance to national regulatory authorities on their "obligations to closely monitor and ensure compliance with the rules to safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic in the provision of Internet access services and related end-users' rights." BEREC stands for Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications. "Despite intense lobbying from big carriers and giant platforms, BEREC voted to clearly ban zero-rating offers that benefit select apps or categories of apps by exempting them from people's monthly data caps," Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick wrote. "The ban applies whether the app pays to be included or not, closing a loophole in the draft guidelines." While Europe strengthens its net neutrality regime, the US hasn't had any federal net neutrality rules since they were removed under former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. The FCC won't be re-imposing net neutrality rules any time soon because it still has a 2-2 partisan deadlock, and President Biden's nomination of Gigi Sohn has languished in the Senate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto staking and yield generation platform Finblox has imposed a $1,500 monthly withdrawal limit and paused rewards in light of uncertainty surrounding crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which made a $3.6 million investment in the Hong Kong-based platform last December. From a report: According to a statement shared on Twitter, Finblox has made the changes as it evaluates the impact of Three Arrow Capital's reported issues. It was reported on Wednesday that Three Arrows Capital is facing possible insolvency after incurring at least $400 million in liquidations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police forces around the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents' secrets, and turn activists' computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step further: planting false incriminating files on targets' computers that the same police then used as grounds to arrest and jail them. Wired: More than a year ago, forensic analysts revealed that unidentified hackers fabricated evidence on the computers of at least two activists arrested in Pune, India, in 2018, both of whom have languished in jail and, along with 13 others, face terrorism charges. Researchers at security firm SentinelOne and nonprofits Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have since linked that evidence fabrication to a broader hacking operation that targeted hundreds of individuals over nearly a decade, using phishing emails to infect targeted computers with spyware, as well as smartphone hacking tools sold by the Israeli hacking contractor NSO Group. But only now have SentinelOne's researchers revealed ties between the hackers and a government entity: none other than the very same Indian police agency in the city of Pune that arrested multiple activists based on the fabricated evidence. "There's a provable connection between the individuals who arrested these folks and the individuals who planted the evidence," says Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at SentinelOne who, along with fellow researcher Tom Hegel, will present findings at the Black Hat security conference in August. "This is beyond ethically compromised. It is beyond callous. So we're trying to put as much data forward as we can in the hopes of helping these victims." SentinelOne's new findings that link the Pune City Police to the long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant, center on two particular targets of the campaign: Rona Wilson and Varvara Rao. Both men are activists and human rights defenders who were jailed in 2018 as part of a group called the Bhima Koregaon 16, named for the village where violence between Hindus and Dalits -- the group once known as "untouchables" -- broke out earlier that year. (One of those 16 defendants, 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, died in jail last year after contracting Covid-19. Rao, who is 81 years old and in poor health, has been released on medical bail, which expires next month. Of the other 14, only one has been granted bail.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has failed to convince a California federal judge to dismiss a privacy lawsuit that alleges the Alphabet Inc unit sells or gives personal information to third parties through its digital advertising system, without informing users. From a report: In a Monday opinion, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said Google account holders have sufficiently alleged most of their claims in the lawsuit over the company's "real-time bidding" process. A Google spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that privacy and transparency are "core" to its ad services. "We never sell people's personal information, we have strict policies specifically prohibiting personalized ads based on sensitive categories of information, and sensitive user data like health, race, or religion is not shared with our partners," the spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A tracking tool installed on many hospitals' websites has been collecting patients' sensitive health information -- including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor's appointments -- and sending it to Facebook. From a report: The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor's appointment. The data is connected to an IP address -- an identifier that's like a computer's mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household -- "creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook. The Markup found 33 of Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in the country sending sensitive data to Facebook via the pixel. Data accurate as of June 15, 2022. On the website of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, for example, clicking the "Schedule Online" button on a doctor's page prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor's name, and the search term we used to find her: "pregnancy termination." Clicking the "Schedule Online Now" button for a doctor on the website of Froedtert Hospital, in Wisconsin, prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor's name, and the condition we selected from a dropdown menu: "Alzheimer's."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians sidestep censors and access Western media, Reuters is reporting, citing five people familiar with the situation. From a report: The financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) -- nthLink, Psiphon and Lantern -- and is designed to support a recent surge in their Russian users, the sources said. VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology. Reuters spoke to executives at all three U.S. government-backed VPNs and two officials at a U.S. government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with financing -- the Open Technology Fund (OTF) -- who said the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24. Between 2015 and 2021, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in U.S. funding, according to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by almost half in order to cope with the rise in demand in Russia, the five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.