Security certification body (ISC)Â — the International Information System Security Certification Consortium — "is a non-profit organization providing training and certification for cybersecurity professionals," writes PortSwigger "Daily Swig" blog for cybersecurity news. "Over the last two years, it has been carrying out a review of its practices around committees, nominations, and governance." But some of the proposed bylaw amendments (announced earlier this month) drew criticism: According to Wim Remes, a former board member who spent three years as (ISC)Â chair, the organization currently has a poor record on member engagement, with election turnout averaging only around 4%. As things stand, 500 endorsements are required for members to raise a petition. However, the new proposals would see this figure raised to 1% of the 170,000-odd members. "This effectively shuts down an important relief valve in corporate governance, in my opinion, and is not in the interest of the membership," Remes told The Daily Swig. "It's already impossible to get up to 500. It's unthinkable anybody would make it to 1,600, [or] to 2,000." Also in the pipeline is a significant change to the process for electing the board of directors. If approved, this would remove the option for a write-in candidate and witness the board submitting a slate of qualified candidates to the membership that would be equal to the number of open seats. "Combined with making the petition process harder — if not impossible — this is as close to a coup by governance as one could get," Remes argued. "They still call it an election, but it is officially a coronation." Meanwhile, the Ethics Committee is to be eliminated as a standing committee of the board. Clar Rosso, CEO of (ISC)2, tells the site that the bylaw changes will be voted on by members, and will move the ethics process "from one that is majority board-run to a process that is adjudicated by a broader cross-section of members." "Additionally, many of these bylaw changes are reflective of best practices of other similarly-sized associations, and some simply provide clarity and ensure legal compliance with applicable state and federal laws. The (ISC)Â board of directors, comprised entirely of member volunteers, supports the proposed changes." Long-time Slashdot reader mencik shares a page offering nine alternate proposals to increase transparency — along with a petition for including them on the agenda of the group's next annual meeting. (Reminder: only ISC2 members can vote.)

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Fierce Electronics reports on "a complex legal battle in U.S. district court" between Qualcomm and Arm "over licensing of intellectual property with potentially far-reaching impact..." Normally, Arm licenses its architectural designs and related IP to chipmakers such as Nvidia or Qualcomm, which in turn produce chips that are then sold to OEMs that use those chips to make servers and other computers and devices. In an updated Qualcomm counterclaim made public Oct. 26, Qualcomm argues that Arm is no longer going to license its CPU designs after 2024 to Qualcomm and other chip companies under technology license agreements. Instead, Qualcomm asserts, Arm will only license to a broad array of device makers.... Arm has not yet formally responded to Qualcomm's latest counterclaim but told Fierce Electronics via email on Friday that Qualcomm's complaint is "riddled with inaccuracies" that Arm will address in a formal legal response in coming weeks.... [Analyst] Dylan Patel in SemiAnalysis also said the counterclaim shows Arm is not planning to allow external GPUs, NPUs or ISPs in Arm-based SoCs. "It seems that Arm is effectively bundling its other IP with the CPU IP in a take-it-or-leave-it model," Patel said. "That would mean Samsung's licensing deal with AMD for GPU or Mediatek with Imagination GPU is not longer allowed after 2024...." Qualcomm argues Arm is making it clear to the marketplace that "it will act recklessly and opportunistically, threatening the development of new and innovative products as a negotiating tactic, not because it has valid license and trademark claims." Again, Arm has called Qualcomm's complaint "riddled with inaccuracies." Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, tells Fierce Wireless that If Qualcomm's counterclaim is accurate, "this is a troubling step for the industry." If Arm were to get rid of tech licensing as described by Qualcomm, it would give rise to RISC-V use, something Arm "should be worried about," Gold said.... [Analyst] Patel has also questioned if Arm's original lawsuit is more than just about money and might be because Softbank (owner of Arm) and Arm remain angry that Qualcomm, as Patel puts it, worked with regulators to block Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm. After working for more than a year to seal the deal, Nvidia and SoftBank announced the termination of the proposed deal on Feb. 7, 2022, due to "significant regulatory challenges." Arm was expected to go public within a year, but an IPO has not occurred as of late October.

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Today ProPublica published "the largest-ever analysis of Google's ad practices on non-English-language websites," saying their report shows Google "is funneling revenue to some of the web's most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa," and "reveals how the tech giant makes disinformation profitable...." The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google's sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.... The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google. Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn't faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public. Google's publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy. ProPublica's examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails. A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets.... The former Google leader suggests Google focuses on English-language problems partly because they're sensitive to bad PR and the posibility of regulatory scrutiny (and because English-language markets have the biggest impact). Google is spending more money to patrol non-English content, a spokesperson told ProPublica, touting the company's "extensive measures to tackle misinformation... In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world." But in some cases Google's ads appeared on false online article published years ago, the article points out, "suggesting that the company's failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem... [T]he investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable."

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Noting that Elon Musk once called Dogecoin "the people's crypto," Reuters reports that on Saturday the price of Dogecoin surged more than 70%, "extending this week's gains after Elon Musk sealed a $44-billion deal to take over Twitter..." Cryptocurrency exchange Binance which has invested $500 million into Musk's buyout of Twitter, said it is brainstorming strategies on how blockchain and crypto could be helpful to Twitter.... Musk tweeted this month that he is buying Twitter to create an "everything app". The idea of an everything app originated in Asia with companies like WeChat, which lets users not only send messages but also make payments, shop online or hail a taxi.

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"Kathleen Booth, who has died aged 100, co-designed of one of the world's first operational computers and wrote two of the earliest books on computer design and programming," the Telegraph wrote this week. "She was also credited with the invention of the first assembly language, a programming language designed to be readable by users." In 1946 she joined a team of mathematicians under Andrew Booth at Birkbeck College undertaking calculations for the scientists working on the X-ray crystallography images which contributed to the discovery of the double helix shape of DNA.... To help the number-crunching involved Booth had embarked on building a computing machine called the Automatic Relay Calculator or ARC, and in 1947 Kathleen accompanied him on a six-month visit to Princeton University, where they consulted John von Neumann, who had developed the idea of storing programs in a computer. On their return to England they co-wrote General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer, and went on to make modifications to the original ARC to incorporate the lessons learnt. Kathleen devised the ARC assembly language for the computer and designed the assembler. In 1950 Kathleen took a PhD in applied mathematics and the same year she and Andrew Booth were married. In 1953 they cowrote Automatic Digital Calculators, which included the general principles involved in the new "Planning and Coding"programming style. The Booths remained at Birkbeck until 1962 working on other computer designs including the All Purpose Electronic (X) Computer (Apexc, the forerunner of the ICT 1200 computer which became a bestseller in the 1960s), for which Kathleen published the seminal Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator in 1958. The previous year she and her husband had co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck. "The APE(X)C design was commercialized and sold as the HEC by the British Tabulating Machine Co Ltd, which eventually became ICL," remembers the Register, sharing a 2010 video about the machine (along with several links for "Further Reading.")

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While listening to a podcast about the Go programming language, backend architect Aviv Carmi heard some loose talk about forking the language to keep its original design while also allowing the evolution of an "extended flavor." If such a fork takes place, Carmi writes on Medium, he hopes the two languages could interact and share the same runtime environment, libraries, and ecosystem — citing lessons learned from the popularity of other language forks: There are well-known, hugely successful precedents for such a move. Unarguably, the JVM ecosystem will last longer and keep on gaining popularity thanks to Scala and Kotlin (a decrease in Java's popularity is overtaken by an increase in Scala's, during the previous decade, and in Kotlin's, during this one). All three languages contribute to a stronger, single community and gain stronger libraries and integrations. JavaScript has undoubtedly become stronger thanks to Typescript, which quickly became one of the world's most popular languages itself. I also believe this is the right move for us Gophers... Carmi applauds Go's readability-over-writability culture, its consistent concurrency model (with lightweight threading), and its broad ecosystem of tools. But in a second essay Carmi lists his complaints — about Go's lack of keyword-based visibility modifiers (like "public" and "private"), how any symbol declared in a file "is automatically visible to the entire package," and Go's abundance of global built-in symbols (which complicate the choice of possible variable names, but which can still be overriden, since they aren't actually keywords). After a longer wishlist — including null-pointer safety features and improvements to error handling — Carmi introduces a third article with "A Proposition for a Better Future." I would have loved to see a compile time environment that mostly looks like Go, but allows developers to be a bit more expressive to gain maintainability and runtime safety. But at the same time, allow the Go language itself to largely remain the same and not evolve into something new, as a lot of us Gophers fear. As Gophers, why not have two tools in our tool set? The essay proposes a new extended flavor of Go called Goat — a "new compile-time environment that will produce standard, compatible, and performant Go files that are fully compatible with any other Go project. This means they can import regular Go files but also be safely imported from any other Go file." "Goat implementation will most likely be delivered as a code generation tool or as a transpiler producing regular go files," explains a page created for the project on GitHub. "However, full implementation details should be designed once the specification provided in this document is finalized." Carmi's essay concludes, "I want to ignite a thorough discussion around the design and specification of Goat.... This project will allow Go to remain simple and efficient while allowing the community to experiment with an extended flavor. Goat spec should be driven by the community and so it needs the opinion and contribution of any Gopher and non-Gopher out there." "Come join the discussion, we need your input." Related link: Go principal engineer Russ Cox gave a talk at GopherCon 2022 that was all about compatibility and "the strategies Go uses to continue to evolve without breaking your programs."

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The mission of NASA's robotic lander InSight "is nearing an end as dust obscures its solar panels," reports CNN. "In a matter of weeks, the lander won't be able to send a beep to show it's OK anymore." "Before it bids farewell, though, the spacecraft still has some surprises in store." When Mars rumbled beneath InSight's feet on December 24, NASA scientists thought it was just another marsquake. The magnitude 4 quake was actually caused by a space rock slamming into the Martian surface a couple thousand miles away. The meteoroid left quite a crater on the red planet, and it revealed glimmering chunks of ice in an entirely unexpected place — near the warm Martian equator. The chunks of ice — the size of boulders — "were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet," CNN explained earlier this week. The article also adds that ice below the surface of Mars "could be used for drinking water, rocket propellant and even growing crops and plants by future astronauts. And the fact that the ice was found so near the equator, the warmest region on Mars, might make it an ideal place to land crewed missions to the red planet." Interestingly, they note that scientists only realized it was a meteoroid strike (and not an earthquake) when "Before and after photos captured from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since 2006, spotted a new crater this past February." A crater that was 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep... When scientists connected the dots from both missions, they realized it was one of the largest meteoroid strikes on Mars since NASA began studying the red planet.... The journal Science published two new studies describing the impact and its effects on Thursday.... "The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust," said Liliya Posiolova, orbital science operations lead for the orbiter at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, in a statement.... Researchers estimated the meteoroid, the name for a space rock before it hits the ground, was about 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters). While this would have been small enough to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, the same can't be said for Mars, which has a thin atmosphere only 1% as dense as Earth's.... Some of the material blasted out of the crater landed as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away. Teams at NASA also captured sound from the impact, so you can listen to what it sounds like when a space rock hits Mars. The images captured by the orbiter, along with seismic data recorded by InSight, make the impact one of the largest craters in our solar system ever observed as it was created.

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Slashdot reader Soul_Predator writes: Vanilla OS is Ubuntu on stock GNOME, with on-demand immutability and package selection freedom. It is currently a beta project, with a stable release planned for the next month. "The first-time setup process is a breeze to experience," writes It's FOSS News, applauding how it lets uses choose and enable Flatpak/Snap/AppImage. Overall, a package manager that installs applications utilizing a container, getting the ability to choose your package managers, on-demand immutability, and vanilla GNOME make it seem like a good deal to keep an eye on... I'd say it is a project that I believe a lot of users will appreciate. You can download the ISO by joining its Discord channel for now. The ISO is not yet publicly available to all. Take a look at its documentation if you are curious. However, as per the roadmap, they plan to have a release candidate soon enough.

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The animated series "Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi" premiered this week on Disney+, witih all six 15-minute episodes released on Wednesday. CNN calls it a slick and well-produced "kind of super-service for the Star Wars faithful, rekindling old flames, and comfortably submerging them in the past." But they also add that animation "has also become a vehicle for greater experimentation, as witnessed in the Star Wars: Visions anime shorts that premiered last year." It's hardly a surprise that this latest addition to the mythology comes courtesy of producer Dave Filoni, who oversaw such series as The Clone Wars and Rebels before throwing his fertile mind for all things Star Wars into The Mandalorian and other live-action fare. Filoni wrote five of the six shorts, which are split between Ahsoka Tano (again voiced by Ashley Eckstein), soon to be featured in her own live-action spinoff; and Count Dooku (played in the movies by Christopher Lee, and voiced by Corey Burton). Beyond a glimpse of a baby Ahsoka (just in time for holiday gift-giving, kids), in an episode that illustrates her home planet and its warrior streak, the episodes leap around in time. That includes additional insights into Dooku and his abandonment of the Jedi order to embrace the dark side and Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid). The anthology format creates the opportunity to drop in at different inflection points scattered across the "Star Wars" timeline. "Fans will likely be particularly intrigued by some of the gradations surrounding Ahsoka, her relationship to Anakin Skywalker and the aftermath of the Clone Wars," the article teases...

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Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: IoT devices are often stitched together from various odd libraries and features. The SANS Internet Storm Center has a story about a cat feeder that not only appears to reach out to Baidu.com every five minutes but also uses a vulnerable DNS library that uses repeating query ids allowing for simple spoofing not seen since the early dark years of DNS The article, by a SANS.edu dean of research, concludes that "Some networking libraries use 'baidu.com' for internet connectivity checks. Even if the DNS lookup succeeds, there is no actual outbound connection in this case. The device is happy as long as an IP address is returned."

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CNN reports: Knowing you have higher than normal blood pressure — and taking medications daily to treat it — may be one key to avoiding dementia in later life, a new study found. Scientists already know that having high blood pressure, particularly between ages 40 and 65, increases the risk of developing dementia in later life, said study coauthor Ruth Peters, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, via email. But she added that research has been less clear on whether lowering blood pressure in older adults would reduce that risk. "What is so exciting about our study is that the data shows that those people who were taking the blood pressure lowering medication had a lower risk of a dementia diagnosis than those taking a matching placebo," said Peters, who is also a senior research scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia, a nonprofit research organization.... The study, published this week in the European Heart Journal, combined data from five large randomized, double-blinded clinical trials of more than 28,000 older adults with an average age of 69 from 20 countries. All had a history of hypertension. Each of the clinical trials compared people taking blood pressure medications with people taking a matching placebo pill and followed them for an average of 4.3 years. Pooling the data, Peters and her team found that a drop of about 10 mm/Hg on the systolic and 4 mm/Hg on the diastolic blood pressure readings at 12 months significantly lowered the risk of a dementia diagnosis. In addition, there was a broad linear relationship: As blood pressure dropped, so did cognitive risk, which held true until at least 100 mm/Hg systolic and 70 mm/Hg diastolic, the study said. There was also no sign that blood pressure medications may harm blood flow into the brain at later ages.

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Slashdot reader storagedude writes: Ransomware groups have been busy improving their data exfiltration tools, and with good reason: As ransomware decryption fails to work most of the time, victims are more likely to pay a ransom to keep their stolen data from being publicly leaked. But some security researchers think the trend suggests that ransomware groups may change their tactics entirely and abandon ransomware in favor of a combined approach of data destruction and exfiltration, stealing the data before destroying it and any backups, thus leaving the stolen copy of the data as the only hope for victims to recover their data. After all, if ransomware just destroys data anyway, why waste resources developing it? "With data exfiltration now the norm among threat actors, developing stable, secure, and fast ransomware to encrypt files is a redundant and costly endeavor compared to corrupting files and using the exfiltrated copies as the means of data recovery," Cyderes researchers wrote after analyzing an attack last month. "Eliminating the step of encrypting the data makes the process faster and eliminates the risk of not getting the full payout, or that the victim will find other ways to decrypt the data," they added. "Data destruction is rumored to be where ransomware is going to go, but we haven't actually seen it in the wild. During a recent incident response, however, Cyderes and Stairwell discovered signs that threat actors are actively in the process of staging and developing this capability." That incident – involving BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware – turned up an exfiltration tool with hardcoded sftp credentials that was analyzed by Stairwell's Threat Research Team, which found partially-implemented data destruction functionality. "The use of data destruction by affiliate-level actors in lieu of RaaS deployment would mark a large shift in the data extortion landscape and would signal the balkanization of financially-motivated intrusion actors currently working under the banners of RaaS affiliate programs," the Stairwell researchers wrote.

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This week the United Nations chastised "woefully inadequate" plans to cut carbon from world governments, reported the BBC, announcing the UN's findings that current carbon-cutting efforts "would see global emissions fall by less than 1% by 2030, when according to scientists, reductions of 45% are needed" to keep global warming below a key threshhold of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The Washington Post notes that our current trajectory would lead to "a dangerous future of extreme weather, rising sea levels and 'endless suffering,' as the United Nations put it itself." But then they bring more bad news: Two other reports this week from U.N. agencies compounded these woes. An analysis by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change found that few countries had adjusted their climate pledges since a major U.N. climate conference last year held in Glasgow, Scotland. This year's conference is set to be hosted in Egypt next month. Another study by the World Meteorological Organization found that methane emissions are rising faster than ever. The evidence raises "questions about humanity's ability to limit the greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the near term," my colleagues reported. Advances have been made — the world is weaning itself off coal, while the governments of major emitters Australia and United States have recently enacted significant legislation to reduce emissions. But it's not happening fast enough. "Global and national climate commitments are falling pitifully short," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a video message this week. "We must close the emissions gap before climate catastrophe closes in on us all." No matter Guterres's constant entreaties, the necessary political urgency is not on show in much of the world.... And so, my colleagues wrote, "the world is barreling toward a future of unbearable heat, escalating weather disasters, collapsing ecosystems and widespread hunger and disease." In some places, that future is now. The Horn of Africa and many parts of East Africa are in the midst of a devastating drought. A fifth consecutive rainy season has failed and analysts expect the sixth — starting next March — to also be a dud. As fields go fallow and millions of livestock die of thirst, there is a staggering crisis of hunger in countries throughout the region. According to the U.N.'s World Food Program, some 22 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya are at risk of starvation.... Close to 8 million people — roughly half [Somalia's] population — have been impacted by drought. Up to 6.7 million people across the country may face food insecurity by the end of the year. "It's not about the climate changing — the climate has changed," the East Africa regional director for the UN's World Food Program told the Washington Post. "And we are not going back even once the rains start. This is a crisis that we are well and truly in the middle of and I don't know where the bottom is." The Post notes what it calls "the further tragedy of the situation": that the regions most imperiled "played little to no role in creating the conditions stoking global warming now."

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"A pair of pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees tricked multiple media outlets Friday as the public anxiously awaited news on whether Elon Musk had begun axing staffers," reports the New York Post: CNBC's Deirdre Bosa interviewed two people who identified themselves as Twitter employees and were seen near the company's San Francisco headquarters carrying cardboard boxes. Skepticism immediately emerged on social media. One of the pranksters said his name was "Rahul Ligma" — a reference to a popular internet meme — and held a copy of Michelle Obama's book "Becoming" aloft while speaking to reporters. The other said his name was "Daniel Johnson." CNBC, Bloomberg, the Daily Mail and NBC were among the outlets that reported layoffs were underway after the duo spoke to the media.... "It's happening," CNBC's Bosa tweeted. Entire team of data engineers let go. These are two of them." "They are visibly shaken," Bosa added. "Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn't know how he's going to make payments...." Twitter employees have feared for months that Musk would enact sweeping layoffs at the company once his $44 billion takeover was complete. Those fears escalated last week after the Washington Post reported Musk was planning to cut 75% of Twitter's 7,500-employee workforce. Musk immediately fired several executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, but it's still unclear how many employees will be ousted. He denied the 75% figure was accurate while meeting with Twitter employees earlier this week. A source familiar with the situation told the Post that Twitter employees feel as though they're "in limbo," with no one having a clear idea of how many layoffs are coming. "People are just keeping their heads down until they see what happens," the source said. The source added that remaining employees are fearful about speaking to the media now that Musk has assumed control of the company. "Folks don't want to get fired for leaking," the source said. You can still watch video footage of the pranksters' interview on Reuters' official feed on YouTube (headlined "LIVE: Outside Twitter's San Francisco HQ after Elon Musk takes over") The Verge spotted the footage — and then added that "Since we're doing this, here are some other ridiculous things said by Ligma and his box-bearing associate." "It makes me worry about the future of our democracy... the future of celebrity conservatorship. I mean, when Britney [Spears] happened...." "I even own a Tesla, man. I'm a big fan of clean energy, climate change, even free speech too." Elon Musk — who has changed the title on his Twitter profile to "chief Twit" — responded Friday afternoon to the brouhaha, tweeting "Ligma Johnson had it coming." Earlier in the day, Musk had tweeted "Let the good times roll" and "Comedy is now legal on Twitter." On a more serious note, Musk also tweeted Friday that Twitter "will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: AMD turned to advanced packaging to create chiplet designs and become a formidable CPU player again. Apple used the tech to beef up the power of its M1 Ultra chip. And Intel is pinning its future success on 2D and 3D multi-die packaging technologies as part of its ambitious comeback plan. Now TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, wants to make chiplet-based products easier and faster to manufacture using its growing toolbox of advanced packaging tech that has already benefited the likes of AMD, Apple, and others. The Taiwanese foundry giant plans to do this through the formation of the 3DFabric Alliance, announced Thursday, which aims to help chip designers implement advanced packaging tech into their plans faster by collaborating with partner companies that are key to the development process. TSMC's partners cover several important elements of chip development, from electronic design automation and memory to substrates and testing. As part of the new alliance, they will have early access to TSMC's 3DFabric portfolio of 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technologies. The goal is to allow these partners to build new solutions in parallel with the development of TSMC's 3DFabric tech so that chip designers can get their hands on the tools, technologies, materials, and other resources necessary to make multi-die chip packages faster. TSMC's 3DFabric portfolio includes brand-new technology, like system-on-integrated-chips (SoIC), which underpins the 3D V-Cache tech in AMD's Milan-X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D processors that came out this year. The portfolio also includes older technologies: integrated-fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), which have received new iterations over the past several years. Those using CoWoS include Nvidia and Amazon Web Services. Representatives from AMD, Nvidia, and AWS gave support for the new alliance, which is one of several set up by TSMC as part of its Open Innovation Platform initiative. TSMC veep of R&D, LC Lu, said while advanced packaging technologies can "open the door to a new era of chip-level and system-level innovation," "extensive ecosystem collaboration" is required to "help designers navigate the best path through the myriad options and approaches available to them." "Through the collective leadership of TSMC and our ecosystem partners, our 3DFabric Alliance offers customers an easy and flexible way to unlocking the power of 3D [integrated circuits] in their designs," he added.

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China plans to break its own record for the world's largest wind farm by constructing a new one before 2025 that could power more than 13 million homes. Interesting Engineering reports: The 14th five-year plan for Chaozhou, China's Guangdong province, was released last week, outlining the city's ambitious plans for a 43.3 gigawatt (GW) project in the Taiwan Strait. Work on the project will begin "before 2025." It will surpass the largest wind farm in the world once it is finished, according to Guangdong province officials. The 10-kilometer-long farm, which will have thousands of strong wind turbines, will operate between 75 and 185 kilometers (47 and 115 miles) offshore. And because of the region's distinctive topographical features and windy location, these turbines will be able to run between 43 percent to 49 percent of the time, meaning 3,800 to 4,300 hours each year. A gigawatt is one billion watts, and 3 million solar panels are required to produce one gigawatt of power. 100 million LEDs or 300,000 typical European homes may each be powered by one gigawatt. The facility's 43.3 GW of power-generating capacity could supply electricity to 13 million households, which is equal to 4.3 billion LED lights, as per Euronews. The Jiuquan Wind Power base in China, a huge facility with a 20 gigawatt capacity, presently holds the distinction of being the world's largest wind farm.

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Amazon is on a tight schedule to launch its internet satellites to orbit, so the company may have to turn to its competitor SpaceX for rides. Gizmodo reports: During a live interview with the Washington Post, Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp expressed the company's openness to use SpaceX's heavy lift rockets to deploy its Project Kuiper internet satellites. "We are open to talking to SpaceX, you'd be crazy not given their track record here," Limp said. However, Amazon is not interested in SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets that are currently lofting the company's Starlink satellites. Amazon's internet satellites are larger than those being deployed by SpaceX, which explains why the company is eyeing SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket and its upcoming Starship rocket, the latter of which is still in development. Limp's statement come as a surprise considering that Amazon signed deals earlier this year with Arianespace, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance to lift its satellites into orbit, while leaving out SpaceX from the mix. Both companies are aiming to bring high-speed internet to remote areas across the world by beaming down data signals from low Earth orbit. [...] Amazon is seemingly running out of options for rockets, while SpaceX has rockets-a-plenty, so a future deal between the industry rivals does make sense. A 2020 authorization order from the Federal Communications Commission stipulates that Amazon launch 50% of its 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites by 2026, and the remainder by 2029, or the company will lose its license.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Bumble bees play, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London published in Animal Behavior. It is the first time that object play behavior has been shown in an insect, adding to mounting evidence that bees may experience positive "feelings." The team of researchers set up numerous experiments to test their hypothesis, which showed that bumble bees went out of their way to roll wooden balls repeatedly despite there being no apparent incentive for doing so. The study also found that younger bees rolled more balls than older bees, mirroring human behavior of young children and other juvenile mammals and birds being the most playful, and that male bees rolled them for longer than their female counterparts. The study followed 45 bumble bees in an arena and gave them the options of walking through an unobstructed path to reach a feeding area or deviating from this path into the areas with wooden balls. Individual bees rolled balls between 1 and, impressively, 117 times over the experiment. The repeated behavior suggested that ball-rolling was rewarding. This was supported by a further experiment where another 42 bees were given access to two colored chambers, one always containing movable balls and one without any objects. When tested and given a choice between the two chambers, neither containing balls, bees showed a preference for the color of the chamber previously associated with the wooden balls. The set-up of the experiments removed any notion that the bees were moving the balls for any greater purpose other than play. Rolling balls did not contribute to survival strategies, such as gaining food, clearing clutter, or mating and was done under stress-free conditions. [...] The new research showed the bees rolling balls repeatedly without being trained and without receiving any food for doing so -- it was voluntary and spontaneous -- therefore akin to play behavior as seen in other animals. Study first-author, Samadi Galpayage, Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University of London says that "it is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play. They approach and manipulate these 'toys' again and again. It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings." "They may actually experience some kind of positive emotional states, even if rudimentary, like other larger fluffy, or not so fluffy, animals do. This sort of finding has implications to our understanding of sentience and welfare of insects and will, hopefully, encourage us to respect and protect life on Earth ever more."

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Nearly six years after the Pebble smartwatch was purchased by Fitbit and discontinued, a new Pebble app for Android has been released by the Rebble Alliance, a group that has kept Pebble viable for its users since Fitbit shut down Pebble's servers in mid-2018," writes Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "Pebble version 4.4.3 makes the app 64-bit so it can work on the mostly 64-bit Pixel 7 and similar Android phones into the future. It also restores a caller ID function that was hampered on recent Android versions." From the report: Most notably, the app is "signed using the official Pebble keys," with Google Fit integration maintained, but isn't available through Google's Play Store. Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, making it the steward of Pebble's remaining IP and software pieces. Katharine Berry, a key Rebble coder and leader, works on Wear OS at Google and was one of the first to tweet news of the new update, "four years after 4.4.2." That was the last Play Store update to the Pebble app from Pebble developers, one that freed up many of the app's functions to be replaced by independent servers. That's exactly where Rebble picked up, providing web services to Pebble watches, including (for paying subscribers) voice dictation. But those services still relied on the core Pebble app to connect the watch and smartphone. If Android did make the leap to a 64-bit-only OS, it could have left Pebble/Rebble users in the lurch. Berry's post on r/pebble offers "thanks to Google for providing us with one last update!" This is, to be sure, not the typical outcome of products that have been acquired by Google, even if second-hand.

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The Decentralized Engineering Corporation (DEC) has raised $9 million in seed funding to create a decentralized ridesharing service on Solana -- a concept that's been theorized by Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin and attempted by various startups over the years. Decrypt reports: DEC announced today that it has raised $9 million in seed funding to build out The Rideshare Protocol, or TRIP, which is designed to power ridesharing apps from a variety of future companies. They'll all share the same core technology to connect drivers with riders, and DEC is building Teleport as the first application to prove out the framework. The seed round was co-led by Foundation Capital and Road Capital, with participation from Thursday Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, 305 Ventures, and Common Metal. Individual strategic investors include Uber's third-ever employee, engineer Ryan McKillen, as well as social media influencer Jake Paul, Flexport founder Ryan Petersen, and Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero. Paul Bohm, CEO of DEC and founder of Teleport, told Decrypt that ridesharing giant Uber "essentially runs a monopoly -- it's very centralized." Uber provides the platform that connects drivers to riders and takes a significant cut of the fee, commanding an estimated 72% of the U.S. ride-sharing market as of June, per data from Bloomberg. TRIP is designed as a decentralized protocol that various app makers can plug into as a marketplace that connects drivers and passengers, all without a centralized force at the heart. Bohm believes this will spur both cooperation and competition, encouraging participants to buck the model of giants like Uber and Lyft while also pushing companies to innovate to create the best app around a shared marketplace. A token will be used for decentralized governance of the protocol too, Bohm said. Teleport is designed to look and act much like an Uber or Lyft app for seamless onboarding of riders and drivers alike with no crypto required. Riders can pay with either a credit card or the USDC stablecoin, while drivers are paid via USDC or a direct payment to a standard bank account. "We keep it very, very close," Bohm said of the app experience. "We don't want any extra steps on either the driver or rider side. But the difference is, you're no longer part of a monopoly." DEC will use the seed funding to fuel its rollout in the months ahead, with Teleport and TRIP holding demonstrations during Solana's Breakpoint conference in Lisbon in November and Art Basel Miami in December.

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