"Google employees are receiving regular notifications from management of Covid-19 infections," CNBC report Friday — "causing some to question the company's return-to-office mandates." The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly.... The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth in 15 years. Google has offered full-time employees the option to request permanent remote work, but it's unclear how many workers have been approved. Google's Covid-19 outbreak in Los Angeles is currently the largest of any employer in LA., according to the city's public health dashboard. Deadline.com first reported that the tech giant's trendy Silicon Beach campus in Venice, Calif., recorded 145 infections while 135 cases were recorded at the company's large Playa Vista campus. Staffers have been filling Memegen, an internal company image-sharing site, with memes about the increased number of exposure notifications they're receiving. One meme, which was upvoted 2,840 times, showed a photo of an inbox with the email subject from a San Francisco-based facilities manager stating "We're so excited to see you back in the office!" and a subsequent email subject line stating "Notification of Confirmed COVID-19 Case...." Some employees said they received a spike in notifications from the Mountain View, Calif. headquarters and in San Francisco offices after the company held a return-to-office celebration, where Grammy award-winning artist Lizzo performed for thousands of employees at the Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google's main campus. Defending the safety of working on-site, a Google spokesperson told CNBC they hadn't been experiencing a sudden recent spike in their Covid cases, arguing that instead the hundreds of Covid cases had been occurring over "the last few months."

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United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur. So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket." Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series.... The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants. People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis. An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."

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"Debian currently doesn't load non-free firmware by default on its systems," reports Phoronix, "even when it means no working hardware support/acceleration without those binary elements. Not loading the non-free firmware can also mean missing out on security updates or for addressing usability issues." Now the Debian community is discussing three proposals on how non-free firmware should be handled going forward (before a vote in September). Proposal A and B both start with the same two paragraphs: We will include non-free firmware packages from the "non-free-firmware" section of the Debian archive on our official media (installer images and live images). The included firmware binaries will normally be enabled by default where the system determines that they are required, but where possible we will include ways for users to disable this at boot (boot menu option, kernel command line etc.). When the installer/live system is running we will provide information to the user about what firmware has been loaded (both free and non-free), and we will also store that information on the target system such that users will be able to find it later. The target system will also be configured to use the non-free-firmware component by default in the apt sources.list file. Our users should receive security updates and important fixes to firmware binaries just like any other installed software. But Proposal A adds that "We will publish these images as official Debian media, replacing the current media sets that do not include non-free firmware packages," while Proposal B says those images "will not replace the current media sets," but will instead be offered alongside them. And Proposal C? "The Debian project is permitted to make distribution media (installer images and live images) containing packages from the non-free section of the Debian archive available for download alongside with the free media in a way that the user is informed before downloading which media are the free ones.

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Every Friday Politico interviews someone about "The Future in Five Questions". This week they interviewed Neal Stephenson (who they describe as "the sci-fi author who coined the term 'metaverse' and now a Web3 entrepreneur in his own right.") Stephenson began by sharing his thoughts on a big idea that's underrated. Neal Stephenson: Desalination. It's an incredibly obvious, kind of simple process. Nothing is more basic than having water to drink, so it's kind of hiding in plain sight, but coupled with cheap energy from photovoltaics it's going to make big changes in the world. When you look at how much water, or a lack thereof, has shaped where people live and how people make food, the notion that we might be able to engineer ways to get fresh water in a new way could be revolutionary. What's a technology you think is overhyped? Stephenson: I'm going to go with an oldie: rockets. It's just a historical accident that chemical rockets became our only way of putting stuff into space, and if we had started at a different time we would have ended up doing something that works better. One alternative would be beaming energy from the ground to vehicles, using lasers or microwaves. That seems like a doable project right now. There's nuclear propulsion, which I think is probably never going to happen at scale, because it's politically impossible, but even something as simple as constructing a very tall building or a tall tower and using that as a launch platform, or as a way to accelerate things up upward, could really change the economics of spaceflight. Stephenson also says the book that most shaped his conception of the future was Robert Heinlein's 1958 novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. And the biggest surprise of 2022 was Ukraine's strong response after Russia's invasion. "Most people who are paying attention have understood that drones and other new technologies are going to change the way wars get fought, but we're seeing it unfold and mutate in real time in Ukraine. "These guys are taking old Cold War grenades and disassembling them, and putting on homemade fuses and attaching 3D printed fins and dropping them out of consumer-grade drones, to a significant effect on the battlefield...." In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

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Google is trying "to make it easier for developers to create Android apps that connect in some way across a range of devices," reports the Verge. Documentation for the software development kit says it will simplify development for "multi-device experiences." "The Cross device SDK is open-source and will be available for different Android surfaces and non-Android ecosystem devices (Chrome OS, Windows, iOS)," explains the documentation, though the current developer preview only works with Android phones and tablets, according to the Verge. But they report that Google's new SDK "contains the tools developers need to make their apps play nice across Android devices, and, eventually non-Android phones, tablets, TVs, cars, and more." The SDK is supposed to let developers do three key things with their apps: discover nearby devices, establish secure connections between devices, and host an app's experience across multiple devices. According to Google, its cross-device SDK uses Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ultra-wideband to deliver multi-device connectivity.... [I]t could let multiple users on separate devices choose items from a menu when creating a group food order, saving you from passing your phone around the room. It could also let you pick up where you left off in an article when swapping from your phone to a tablet, or even allow the passengers in a car to share a specific map location with the vehicle's navigation system. It almost sounds like an expansion of Nearby Share, which enables users on Android to transfer files to devices that use Chrome OS and other Androids. In April, Esper's Mishaal Rahman spotted an upcoming Nearby Share update that could let you quickly share files across the devices that you're signed into Google with. Google also said during a CES 2022 keynote that it will bring Nearby Share to Windows devices later this year. "This SDK abstracts away the intricacies involved with working with device discovery, authentication, and connection protocols," argues Google's blog post, "allowing you to focus on what matters most — building delightful user experiences and connecting these experiences across a variety of form factors and platforms."

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"Over the past year, nuclear fusion has inched closer to reality," the Washington Post reported Friday. "Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy." (One fusion company's CEO argues that "Once the technology is shown to work, it's less risky, and the next buyer of that technology could get a commercial loan.") But even with all this new excitement, challenges still remain, nuclear scientists warn: The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible. "We're at a very exciting place," said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "But we also have to be realistic in the sense that it's still very hard...." Phil Larochelle, a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said private money is flowing into fusion at such high levels because scientific advancements, such as better magnets, have made cheap nuclear fusion a likelier possibility. Going forward, Larochelle noted that getting nuclear fusion to market probably will require formal cost-sharing programs with the government, which he said could be similar to how NASA is partnering with SpaceX for space travel innovation. "In both the U.S. and the U.K., there's now kind of new government programs and support for trying to get to a [fusion] pilot," he said. "It's a good kind of risk-sharing between public and private [sectors]." Despite the growing government collaboration, Whyte said, a few challenges remain. The effects of climate change are increasingly irreversible, and the clock is ticking, he said, making fusion energy a crucial need. Companies will have to figure out how to deploy the technology widely. Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. "What I worry about is that we'll get to a system where we can't actually make it economically attractive fast enough," he added. Moreover, to create an electricity grid through which fusion technology provides large amounts of power, many things need to happen. Universities need to churn out scientists more capable of working on fusion technology. Fusion power companies need to build devices that create more energy than they consume. Scientific and manufacturing materials must be constructed in difficult ways if power plants want to scale. "Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there's no guarantee of that."

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"Facebook's corporate parent has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world's largest social network service allowed millions of its users' personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica," reports the Associated Press: Terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, weren't disclosed in court documents filed late Friday. The filing in San Francisco federal court requested a 60-day stay of the action while lawyers finalize the settlement. That timeline suggested further details could be disclosed by late October. The accord was reached just a few weeks before a Sept. 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his long-time chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to submit to depositions during the final phases of pre-trial evidence gathering, according to court documents... The lawsuit, which had been seeking to be certified as a class action representing Facebook users, had asserted the privacy breach proved Facebook is a "data broker and surveillance firm," as well as a social network. Some background from UPI: The Facebook users sued the platform in June 2018, accusing it of violating privacy rules when it shared personal data with Cambridge Analytica and other third parties.... In March 2018, whistleblower and Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wylie revealed the data mining company was holding onto Facebook user data without the users' consent even after Facebook told the company to delete it. Reuters describes Cambridge Analytica as "the now-defunct British political consultancy." Politico reports that now lawyers for both Facebook and the plaintiffs have "asked the judge to put the lawsuit on hold for 60 days to allow the parties to 'finalize a written settlement agreement' and present it for preliminary approval by the court."

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"Google launched a carbon emissions tool for its flight tracker last fall," remembers Gizmodo, "allowing consumers to see the individual emissions created by each flight they were browsing..." "But last month the tech giant quietly shifted the algorithm to exclude a crucial component of the overall greenhouse gas impact of air travel." The BBC reports: Flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before. "Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry's climate impacts from its pages" says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace. With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people's travel decisions. The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners". It affects the carbon calculator embedded in the company's "Google Flights" search tool.... [I]n July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2. Some experts say Google's calculations now represent just over half of the real impact on the climate of flights. "It now significantly understates the global impact of aviation on the climate", says Professor David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University, the author of the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the contribution of air travel to global warming. Flying affects the climate in lots of ways in addition to the CO2 produced by burning aviation fuel. These include the creation of long thin clouds high up in the atmosphere — known as contrails — which trap heat radiated by the Earth, leading to a net warming effect on our planet. These additional warming impacts mean that although aviation is only responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions, the sector is actually responsible for around 3.5% of the warming caused by human activity.

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"At the onset of the outbreak, scientists thought they knew when and how the monkeypox virus was spread, what the disease looked like and who was most vulnerable," remembers the New York Times. "The 47,000 cases identified worldwide have upended many of those expectations." Some had headaches or depression, confusion and seizures. Others had severe eye infections or inflammation of the heart muscle. At least three of the six deaths reported so far were linked to encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. "We really are seeing a very, very wide range of presentation," said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious disease physician at a clinic in Atlanta that serves people living with H.I.V. Scientists now know that the monkeypox virus lurks in saliva, semen and other bodily fluids, sometimes for weeks after recovery. The virus has always been known to spread through close contact, but many researchers suspect the infection may also be transmitted through sex itself.... "It's no longer correct to say it can't be transmitted asymptomatically," said Dr. Chloe Orkin, an infectious disease physician at Queen Mary University of London. "I think that it means that our working model of how it's spread is incorrect." Early in the outbreak, [America's Centers for Disease Control] said that "people who do not have monkeypox symptoms cannot spread the virus to others." The agency changed that phrasing on July 29 to say that "scientists are still researching" the possibility of asymptomatic transmission. In a statement to The New York Times, an agency spokeswoman acknowledged recent evidence that asymptomatic cases were possible but said that it was still uncertain whether people without symptoms could spread the virus and that more research was needed.

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"Since 2012 researchers in the Georgia Tech Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory have uncovered 47,337 malicious plugins across 24,931 unique WordPress websites through a web development tool they named YODA," warns an announcement released Friday: According to a newly released paper about the eight-year study, the researchers found that every compromised website in their dataset had two or more infected plugins. The findings also indicated that 94% of those plugins are still actively infected. "This is an under-explored space," said Ph.D. student Ranjita Pai Kasturi who was the lead researcher on the project. "Attackers do not try very hard to hide their tracks and often rightly assume that website owners will not find them." YODA is not only able to detect active malware in plugins, but it can also trace the malicious software back to its source. This allowed the researchers to determine that these malicious plugins were either sold on the open market or distributed from pirating sites, injected into the website by exploiting a vulnerability, or in most cases, infected after the plugin was added to a website. According to the paper written by Kasturi and her colleagues, over 40,000 plugins in their dataset were shown to have been infected after they were deployed. The team found that the malware would attack other plugins on the site to spread the infection. "These infections were a result of two scenarios. The first is cross-plugin infection, in which case a particular plugin developer cannot do much," said Kasturi. "Or it was infected by exploiting existing plugin vulnerabilities. To fix this, plugin developers can scan for vulnerabilities before releasing their plugins for public use." Although these malicious plugins can be damaging, Kasturi adds that it's not too late to save a website that has a compromised plugin. Website owners can purge malicious plugins entirely from their websites and reinstall a malware free version that has been scanned for vulnerabilities. To give web developers an edge over this problem, the Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory has made the YODA code available to the public on GitHub.

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Polygon reports that during a streaming event, the publisher of the Magic: the Gathering card game promised a new themed set of cards commemorating Doctor Who's 60th anniversary. But that's not their only new set: The Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle-earth is also releasing in Q3 of 2023, but it will be a fully draftable booster set and legal in modern format of competitive play.... Individual cards portray familiar heroes and villains including Frodo, Gandalf and the Balrog. In order to capture the scale of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy battles, the set will also feature new borderless scene cards. Each has a piece of art that can stand alone, but 18 of them will come together to produce a particularly epic scene from the trilogy — such as the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. The art from Tyler Jacobson, who's provided illustrations for more than 100 Magic cards and for Dungeons & Dragons books including The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, is full of small details including the Dark Tower Barad-dûr in the background. The article points out that the game publisher has previously published crossover decks for The Walking Dead and Fortnite. This story is for long-time Slashdot reader tezbobobo, who argued earlier this week that Slashdot's been remiss in its coverage of Magic: the Gathering news: For years I've seen Dungeons & Dragons, Sony Playstation and Nethack show up occassionally on the front page of Slashdot. So where are the rest of the nerd games? Magic: the Gathering has one of the most loyal and active fanbases, and the creators have been churning out new and interesting cards for decades. Even as it tops the trading card pile, it's made inroads into the digital sphere, with online version in Arena and Magic Online. It's available on PC, Mac, Ipad.

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Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a state-run firm with a monopoly on online booking of train tickets, has scrapped its plan to monetize customer data after its tender drew concerns from many. TechCrunch: The Indian firm informed the local stock exchange Friday that it was scrapping its proposal because the Indian government had withdrawn the personal data protection bill. In a tender earlier, the firm had proposed appointing a consultant for digital data monetization on rail passengers' data. The tender sought to explore studying customers' behavioral data, their frequency of journeys, as well as geography, the kind of ticket they purchase and mobile number and gender. The plan, had it been approved, would have helped the firm increase its revenue by more than $125 million, according to an estimation by the firm.

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Are there better ways to fight misinformation? "Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...." The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques. One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings." Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said. Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation.... The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."

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From the Washington Post earlier this week: On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Twitter's former head of security, Peiter Zatko, had filed a whistleblower complaint with federal regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing Twitter of "Lying about Bots to Elon Musk...." "Twitter executives have little or no personal incentive to accurately 'detect' or measure the prevalence of spam bots," the complaint alleges, adding "deliberate ignorance was the norm" among its executive team. The same article notes that three people familiar with Twitter's spam-detection, processes said Twitter's "internal bot prevalence numbers" were almost always less than 5%. (And the article reminds readers that Musk himself had waived his right to perform "due diligence" prior to striking the deal.) But here's that Tuesday article's most prescient sentence. "The judge has rejected Musk's requests for information from more than 20 company leaders — including Zatko — but the whistleblower claims could open the door for them to make further requests, legal experts said." Sure enough, Friday night CBS News reported that the judge "ordered both Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to turn over more information to opposing lawyers..." Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick on Thursday ordered Twitter to provide Musk's attorneys more data regarding the company's estimates that less than 5% of the accounts on its platform are fake. The judge also rejected Musk's attempts to shield details about analyses he used in his attempt to terminate the deal. That work was done by data scientists who examined live-feed information from Twitter about public user accounts to test the company's daily-user counts.... The judge rejected more comprehensive data requests from Musk's attorneys as "absurdly broad," noting that a literal reading of the request would require Twitter to produce "trillions upon trillions of data points" reflecting all data collected on roughly 200 million accounts over three years. But McCormick did order Twitter to produce information on 9,000 accounts that were reviewed in connection with company's fourth-quarter audit, a data subset that has been described as a "historical snapshot." McCormick also ordered Twitter to turn over documents regarding other metrics, regardless of whether they expressly address "monetizable daily active users," or mDAU. Musk's attorneys have suggested that a comparison of Twitter's mDAU with other metrics, such as "User Active Minutes," could support their theory that the company has fraudulently misled investors and securities regulators about the scope of activity on its platform.

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Over the past year, crypto companies like FTX, Coinbase and Crypto.com have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to attract new customers. "Fortune favors the brave," Matt Damon famously said in a Crypto.com TV spot as he tried to induce Americans to open their digital wallets. Now a core metric of how successful they were has been returned, and experts say it's an eye-opening one: not successful at all. From a report: The number of people who invested in crypto has not expanded since last September before the push began, according to a new study led by Pew Research Center. The results, released Tuesday, build off an initial survey in September. Back then, Pew researchers asked 10,371 Americans if they have "ever invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency." Some 16 percent said they had. Last month, the nonprofit asked another sample group -- slightly smaller, at 6,034 Americans -- the same question. The number hadn't grown, with the same 16 percent saying they had at some point invested or traded in the alternate currency. The results suggest that, despite numerous splashy campaigns by crypto interests, the great majority of Americans remain immune to their sales pitches. "It's pretty striking that for all the spectacular commotion around crypto in the last year, the number of people who invest or trade in crypto didn't budge," said Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center's director of internet and technology research, who spearheaded the study. "Attempts to bring in new buyers to the market didn't seem to move the needle at all."

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Thursday Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant was cut off from the country's electricity grid, causing "widespread power outages across southern Ukraine," according to the New York Times. Friday afternoon it was reconnected to Ukraine's national power grid, the Times adds — "but its time offline renewed concerns about the safe operation of the plant..." The Guardian notes it's the first such disconnection in nearly 40 years. Three other power lines connecting the reactors to the grid "had already been taken out during the war," though when the fourth and final line went out, "the plant still received supplies of electricity from one remaining backup line connected to the nearby conventional power plant." (Though two other lines to that power plant were already also down.) "Disconnecting the plant from the grid is dangerous because it raises the risk of catastrophic failure of the electricity-run cooling systems for its reactors and spent fuel rods.... If all external connections go down, it must rely on diesel-fuelled generators for power. If they break down, engineers only have 90 minutes to stave off dangerous overheating." (Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that during the break in power, back-up diesel generators did indeed immediately kick in to ensure continuous power supply, according to Reuters.) But is Russia executing a larger strategy here? Earlier, Russian engineers informed plant workers that the nuclear plant would be switched to Russia's power network in the event of an emergency, according to the head of Ukraine's atomic energy company. Speaking to the Guardian, he adds that the plant's workers were told that "The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system" — and he worries that Russia is now attempting to create those preconditions. He's not the only one thinking that. Voice of America interviewed a nuclear engineer at the plant who claims that Russian troops have several times "bombed places that cannot affect the safe operation of the power plant. I think that the Russians are trying to discredit the armed forces of Ukraine for the purpose of propaganda.... At the same time, the Russians deliberately damaged the high-voltage power lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant with the Ukrainian power system.... [T]he Russians want to arrange a small accident and stop Zaporizhzhia for a short time, then supply us with electricity from Crimea and automatically switch the nuclear power plant to the Russian energy system." He also claims to have seen Russian military equipment stored in the plant. For example, "Different types of Russian artillery and missile installations are located both inside the territory of the nuclear power plant and around it, on the perimeter, near the Kakhovka Reservoir." The last power line connecting the reactors to the grid was disconnected by fires "caused by shelling," the Guardian reported. The New York Times reports on the aftermath: Ukrainian engineers were able to restore damaged external power lines after repeated shelling on Thursday, ensuring the facility was able to meet its own power needs and continue to operate safely, according to Ukrainian and international officials, but efforts to reconnect it to the grid took longer. With fires raging around the plant, new shelling in and around the facility on a near daily basis and an exhausted and stressed team of Ukrainian engineers tasked with keeping the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant running safely, however, calls for international intervention grew louder. Negotiations with Ukraine and Russia to allow safety experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit and inspect the plant appeared to be making progress, as U.N. officials indicated they expected an agreement soon. "We are in active consultations for an imminent I.A.E.A. mission," a spokesman for the agency said. The stakes are high. "Nowhere in the history of this world has a nuclear power plant become a part of a combat zone, so this really has to stop immediately," Bonnie Denise Jenkins, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Russian actions, she said, "have created a serious risk of a nuclear incident — a dangerous radiation release — that could threaten not only the people and environment of Ukraine, but also affect neighboring countries and the entire international community." Here's the opinion of that nuclear engineer at the Ukrainian nuclear plant (interviewed by Voice of America). "The expectation is that after the [International Atomic Energy] agency's conclusion, international pressure on Moscow will intensify, and Russia will be required to withdraw heavy weapons and troops from the nuclear power plant. "I think this is unrealistic. The Russians will not leave here by their own will. Without a war, it is impossible."

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Crop of expensive fantasy adaptations from Amazon and HBO Max served up at subsidised prices. Financial Times: Since 2016, the veteran US television executive John Landgraf has been predicting the arrival of "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high. The streaming boom has proved him wrong every time but he gamely made the prediction again this month, telling guests at the Television Critics Association press tour that 2022 would mark "the peak of the peak TV era." Landgraf, chair of Disney's FX network, conceded that he could be wrong this time too. But there is little doubt that this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced. On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season -- almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over. HBO Max's House of the Dragon -- the prequel to Game of Thrones -- is reported to have cost $200mn for the season's 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise. These shows are being served up to consumers at subsidised prices by streaming platforms making record losses. The only profitable exception is Netflix, but the industry pioneer's market value has plunged almost $200bn over the past year because of slowing subscriber growth. Its share price is languishing at a four-year low. The forthcoming crop of new programming was given the green light during a headier time, when Wall Street cheered as streaming services committed lavish sums to compete. But faith in the streaming business model -- and investor tolerance for profligate spending -- has waned as Netflix's once-blistering subscription growth has gone into reverse. [...] On top of that, there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services. "Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things," said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman. "But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, 'Something's got to go -- I've got $140 worth of subscriptions here!'" Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. "People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: 'what's next?' From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it's clearly unsustainable."

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Microsoft has confirmed to Sky News that criminals are posting counterfeit packages designed to appear like Office products in order to defraud people. From the report: One such package seen by Sky News is manufactured to a convincing standard and contains an engraved USB drive, alongside a product key. But the USB does not install Microsoft Office when plugged in to a computer. Instead, it contains malicious software which encourages the victim to call a fake support line and hand over access to their PC to a remote attacker. Microsoft launched an internal investigation into the suspect package after being contacted by Sky News. The company spokesperson confirmed that the USB and the packaging were counterfeit and that they had seen a pattern of such products being used to scam victims before. They added that while Microsoft had seen this type of fraud, it is very infrequent. More often when fraudulent products are sold they tend to be product keys sent to customers via email, with a link to a site for downloading the malicious software.

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A small study on the therapeutic effects of using psychedelics to treat alcohol use disorder found that just two doses of psilocybin magic mushrooms paired with psychotherapy led to an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking among the participants. Those given a placebo reduced their alcohol intake by 51 percent. From a report: By the end of the eight-month trial, nearly half of those who received psilocybin had stopped drinking entirely compared with about a quarter of those given the placebo, according to the researchers. The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, is the latest in a cascade of new research exploring the benefits of mind-altering compounds to treat a range of mental health problems, from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder to the existential dread experienced by the terminally ill. Although most psychedelics remain illegal under federal law, the Food and Drug Administration is weighing potential therapeutic uses for compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA, the drug better known as Ecstasy. Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, director at NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the study's lead investigator, said the findings offered hope for the nearly 15 million Americans who struggle with excessive drinking -- roughly 5 percent of all adults. Excessive alcohol use kills an estimated 140,000 people each year.

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China is using two massive drones to seed rainclouds in Sichuan province to try to end a devastating drought that has choked power output and disrupted supply chains of global giants like Apple and Tesla. From a report: The China Meteorological Administration launched drones in northern and southeastern Sichuan on Thursday morning, and the aircraft will eventually cover an area of 6,000 square kilometers in operations lasting through Monday, state-owned CCTV reported. Seeding works by dropping an ice-forming agent like silver iodide into a cloud that already contains ample moisture. Rain droplets gather around the agent, gaining weight until they begin to fall. China has a long history of using the technology to water crop fields, cool blistering cities and make sure skies are clear for events like the Olympics.

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