Indonesia's parliament passed into law on Tuesday a personal data protection bill that includes corporate fines and up to six years imprisonment for those found to have mishandled data in the world's fourth most populous country. From a report: The bill's passage comes after a series of data leaks and probes into alleged breaches at government firms and institutions in Indonesia, from a state insurer, telecoms company and public utility to a contact-tracing COVID-19 app that revealed President Joko Widodo's vaccine records. Lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the bill, which authorises the president to form an oversight body to fine data handlers for breaching rules on distributing or gathering personal data. The biggest fine is 2% of a corporation's annual revenue and could see their assets confiscated or auctioned off. The law includes a two-year "adjustment" period, but does not specify how violations would be addressed during that phase. The legislation stipulates individuals can be jailed for up to six years for falsifying personal data for personal gain or up to five years for gathering personal data illegally.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After initially disabling the capability, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people's faces to edit them using the AI-powered image-generating system. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and banned the uploading of any photo that might depict a real person, including photos of prominent celebrities and public figures. OpenAI claims that improvements to its safety system made the face-editing feature possible by "minimizing the potential of harm" from deepfakes as well as attempts to create sexual, political and violent content. In an email to customers, the company wrote: "Many of you have told us that you miss using DALL-E to dream up outfits and hairstyles on yourselves and edit the backgrounds of family photos. A reconstructive surgeon told us that he'd been using DALL-E to help his patients visualize results. And filmmakers have told us that they want to be able to edit images of scenes with people to help speed up their creative processes [We] built new detection and response techniques to stop misuse." The change in policy isn't opening the floodgates necessarily. OpenAI's terms of service will continue to prohibit uploading pictures of people without their consent or images that users don't have the rights to -- although it's not clear how consistent the company's historically been about enforcing those policies. In any case, it'll be a true test of OpenAI's filtering technology, which some customers in the past have complained about being overzealous and somewhat inaccurate. Deepfakes come in many flavors, from fake vacation photos to presidents of war-torn countries. Accounting for every emerging form of abuse will be a never-ending battle, in some cases with very high stakes.

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joshuark writes: A Las Vegas surgeon reports tech workers are paying $70,000 to $150,000 to get surgery to increase their height by 3-inches. The doctor is paid to break their legs (both femurs) and then inserts adjustable metal nails that are slowly tweaked over time. "I joke that I could open a tech company," Dr. Kevin Debiparshad told GQ. "I got, like, 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in Vegas. There was a girl" -- because girls can be tech bros too. -- "yesterday from PayPal. I've got patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I've had multiple patients from Microsoft." A new twist, borrow $70K to $150K from a loan shark in Las Vegas, and they'll break your legs later... "Since the onset of the pandemic's work-from-home era, the LimbplastX Institute (where Dr. D performs his procedures) has been seeing twice its normal number of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month," reports GQ. "That claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year." "According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases)," adds the report. "The promise of Dr. D's institute is that, for a price, you too can increase your odds of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO. And people are willing to pay..."

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Tom Persky, the founder of floppydisk.com who claims to be the "last man standing in the floppy disk business," said that the airline industry is one of his biggest customers. He talked about this in the new book "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium" by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar. Insider reports: "My biggest customers -- and the place where most of the money comes from -- are the industrial users," Persky said, in an interview from the book published online in Eye On Design last week. "These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it's 1990, and you're building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you'd want to use the best technology available." Persky added: "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer." He also said that the medical sector still uses floppy disks. And then there's "hobbyists," who want to "buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum -- 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion -- reveals ants' astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientists from the University of Hong Kong analyzed 489 studies and concluded that the total mass of ants on Earth weighs in at about 12 megatons of dry carbon. Put another way: If all the ants were plucked from the ground and put on a scale, they would outweigh all the wild birds and mammals put together. "It's unimaginable," said Patrick Schultheiss, a lead author on the study who is now a researcher at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, in a Zoom interview. "We simply cannot imagine 20 quadrillion ants in one pile, for example. It just doesn't work." Counting all those insects -- or at least enough of them to come up with a sound estimate -- involved combining data from "thousands of authors in many different countries" over the span of a century, Schultheiss added. To tally insects as abundant as ants, there are two ways to do it: Get down on the ground to sample leaf litter -- or set tiny pitfall traps (often just a plastic cup) and wait for the ants to slip in. Researchers have gotten their boots dirty with surveys in nearly every corner of the world, though some spots in Africa and Asia lack data. "It's a truly global effort that goes into these numbers," Schultheiss said.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh -- and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI's accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design programs that do everything from diagnose disease to direct robots or other devices around homes on their own. It's important to think about how AI presents itself, says Kurt Gray, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied human-AI interaction but was not involved in the work. "In this case, you want it to be kind of like a kid, right?" he says. Otherwise, people might think you're a troll for asking seemingly ridiculous questions. The team "rewarded" its AI for writing intelligible questions: When people actually responded to a query, the system received feedback telling it to adjust its inner workings so as to behave similarly in the future. Over time, the AI implicitly picked up lessons in language and social norms, honing its ability to ask questions that were sensical and easily answerable. The new AI has several components, some of them neural networks, complex mathematical functions inspired by the brain's architecture. "There are many moving pieces [...] that all need to play together," Krishna says. One component selected an image on Instagram -- say a sunset -- and a second asked a question about that image -- for example, "Is this photo taken at night?" Additional components extracted facts from reader responses and learned about images from them. Across 8 months and more than 200,000 questions on Instagram, the system's accuracy at answering questions similar to those it had posed increased 118%, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A comparison system that posted questions on Instagram but was not explicitly trained to maximize response rates improved its accuracy only 72%, in part because people more frequently ignored it. The main innovation, Jaques says, was rewarding the system for getting humans to respond, "which is not that crazy from a technical perspective, but very important from a research-direction perspective." She's also impressed by the large-scale, real-world deployment on Instagram.

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Children under 12 may be losing the equivalent of one night's sleep every week due to excessive social media use, a new study suggests. Insider reports: Almost 70% of the 60 children under 12 surveyed by De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, said they used social media for four hours a day or more. Two thirds said they used social media apps in the two hours before going to bed. The study also found that 12.5% of the children surveyed were waking up in the night to check their notifications. Psychology lecturer John Shaw, who headed up the study, said children were supposed to sleep for between nine to 11 hours a night, per NHS guidelines, but those surveyed reported sleeping an average of 8.7 hours nightly. He said: "The fear of missing out, which is driven by social media, is directly affecting their sleep. They want to know what their friends are doing, and if you're not online when something is happening, it means you're not taking part in it. "And it can be a feedback loop. If you are anxious you are more likely to be on social media, you are more anxious as a result of that. And you're looking at something, that's stimulating and delaying sleep." "TikTok had the most engagement from the children, with 90% of those surveyed saying they used the app," notes Insider. "Snapchat was used by 84%, while just over half those surveyed said they used Instagram."

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New York City is partnering with Charter and Altice to provide free high-speed internet and basic cable TV service to about 300,000 residents of public housing. Bloomberg reports: Called "Big Apple Connect," the program aims to bridge the digital divide between wealthier residents and lower-income people who lack the tools necessary for remote learning, access to health care and job opportunities, city officials said. An estimated 30% to 40% of people who live in buildings run by the New York City Housing Authority lack broadband, according to the cable providers. The city plans to have the service available in more than 200 NYCHA buildings by the end of 2023. The program differs from a previous short-term promotion by Altice's Optimum and Charter's Spectrum that gave New York City students free internet service after the pandemic hit. Some parents said they were duped into signing up for paid subscriptions after the promotion ended. Under a three-year agreement with the providers, New York will pick up the cost at about $30 per household. The city is in talks with a third major cable TV carrier in the city, Verizon, to join the program. NYCHA residents enrolled in Big Apple Connect will still be able to use the federal Affordable Connectivity Program benefit to save money on their cell phone bills and provide discount of up to $30 per month toward internet and cellular data service, city officials said.

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Recent research from the otto-js Research Team has uncovered that data that is being checked by both Microsoft Editor and the enhanced spellcheck setting within Google Chrome is being sent to Microsoft and Google respectively. This data can include usernames, emails, DOB, SSN, and basically anything that is typed into a text box that is checked by these features. Neowin reports: As an additional note, even passwords can be sent by these features, but only when a 'Show Password' button is pressed, which converts the password into visible text, which is then checked. The key issue resolves around sensitive user personally identifiable information (PII), and this is a key concern for enterprise credentials when accessing internal databases and cloud infrastructure. Some companies are already taking action to prevent this, with both AWS and LastPass security teams confirming that they have mitigated this with an update. The issue has already been dubbed 'spell-jacking'. What's most concerning is that these settings are so easy to enable by users, and could result in data exposure without anyone ever realising it. The team at otto-js ran a test of 30 websites, across a range of sectors, and found that 96.7% of them sent data with PII back to Google and Microsoft. At present, the otto-js Research Team recommends that these extensions and settings are not used until this issue is resolved.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Some users of Figma's design software reacted with dismay on Thursday when they found out the company was going to be acquired by Adobe, the unloved giant in the space. Other observers immediately concluded that the acquisition looks downright illegal under antitrust laws. Why it matters: The Biden administration is on the record as wanting to beef up antitrust enforcement. The Figma deal, at $20 billion, is certainly large enough to grab the attention of regulators. The big question is whether they'll conclude that suing to block it is a case they can win. Either the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission could review the merger; both have taken a renewed interest in software and digital mergers. Between the lines: The Clayton Antitrust Act says any acquisition that would reduce competition in an industry is illegal. Figma was founded as an Adobe competitor and has grown impressively by doing exactly that -- implying there's a case to be made that this acquisition is anti-competitive. Insofar as Adobe is already the dominant player in the space, any acquisition, let alone a $20 billion one, will be looked at carefully. "The fact that Adobe is not typically identified as a Big Tech platform should provide [Adobe and Figma] with little if any comfort," Charles Rule, a partner at the Rule Garza Howley law firm and former DOJ antitrust official, tells Axios. "This deal appears to raise straightforward, traditional antitrust issues," he says. "There's enough here to get a close look, and maybe a complaint," adds a former FTC antitrust official. Another former FTC attorney tells Axios to expect a thorough initial investigation into possible overlaps.

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slack_justyb writes: As previously indicated on Slashdot, Rust was slated to be coming to the Linux Kernel sometime in the 6.x version. Well wonder no longer on which version of kernel 6.x will have the first bits of Rust officially in the kernel, as Linus has confirmed that 6.1 will be the first with the new NVMe kernel drivers being in Rust. The first version non-production ready code for the NVMe Rust based kernel drivers were already producing performance comparable to C code. So the final drivers to hit 6.1 are already looking promising. It also helped Rust's case that, thanks to the ground-breaking work of Linux kernel and Rust developer Miguel Ojeda, Rust on Linux has gotten much more mature. Kernel maintainers were convinced it is time to move forward with Rust in Linux. In short, they agreed that Rust on Linux was ready for work.

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Google is launching a pilot program to keep emails from political campaigns from going to users' spam folders this week, the company told Axios. From the report: Google asked the Federal Election Commission in June if a program that would let campaigns emails bypass spam filters, instead giving users the option to move them to spam first, would be legal under campaign finance laws. Despite hundreds of negative comments submitted to the FEC arguing against it, the FEC approved the program in August. Eligible committees, abiding by security requirements and best practices as outlined by Google, can now register to participate. Google has come under fire that its algorithms unfairly target conservative content across its services, and that its Gmail service filters more Republican fundraising and campaign emails to spam. This is partly based on a study from North Carolina State University, though its authors say it has been misconstrued. "We expect to begin the pilot with a small number of campaigns from both parties and will test whether these changes improve the user experience, and provide more certainty for senders during this election period," Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, told Axios. "We will continue to listen and respond to feedback as the pilot progresses." He added: "During the pilot, users will be in control through a more prominent unsubscribe button."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Mark Zuckerberg's pivot into the metaverse has cost him dearly in the real world. Even in a rough year for just about every US tech titan, the wealth erased from the chief executive officer of Meta stands out. His fortune has been cut in half and then some, dropping by $71 billion so far this year, the most among the ultra-rich tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At $55.9 billion, his net worth ranks 20th among global billionaires, his lowest spot since 2014 and behind three Waltons and two members of the Koch family. It was less than two years ago when Zuckerberg, 38, was worth $106 billion and among an elite group of global billionaires, with only Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates commanding bigger fortunes. His wealth swelled to a peak of $142 billion in September 2021, when the company's shares reached as high as $382. The following month, Zuckerberg introduced Meta and changed the company's name from Facebook And it's been largely downhill from there as it struggles to find its footing in the tech universe. Its recent earnings reports have been dismal. It started in February, when the company revealed no growth in monthly Facebook users, triggering a historic collapse in its stock price and slashing Zuckerberg's fortune by $31 billion, among the biggest one-day declines in wealth ever. Other issues include Instagram's bet on Reels -- its answer to TikTok's short-form video platform -- even though it's worth less in advertising revenue, while the industry overall has been affected by lower marketing spending due to concerns over an economic slowdown. The stock is also being dragged down by the company's investments in the metaverse, said Laura Martin, senior internet analyst at Needham & Co. Zuckerberg has said he expects the project will lose "significant" amounts of money in the next three to five years. In the meantime, Meta "has to get these users back from TikTok," said Martin. It's also hampered by "excessive regulatory scrutiny and intervention," she said. Meta is "down about 57% this year, far more than the declines of 14% for Apple, 26% for Amazon and 29% for Google parent Alphabet," adds Bloomberg. "Meta is even narrowing the gap in 2022 losses with Netflix, which is down about 60%."

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A Maryland judge has overturned the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, in the latest twist to the case at the center of the hit podcast series Serial. From a report: Baltimore City Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn vacated the 41-year-old's conviction and granted him a new trial on Monday, ordering his release after more than 23 years behind bars. The move came after prosecutors made a request for his release on Wednesday saying that "the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction." Prosecutors said that an almost year-long investigation had cast doubts about the validity of cellphone tower data and uncovered new information about the possible involvement of two alternate unnamed suspects. Syed was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder, robbery, kidnapping and imprisonment of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Lee, 18, vanished after leaving her high school on 13 January 1999. Her strangled body was found in a shallow grave in a Baltimore park around a month later. Syed has always maintained his innocence. In a tweet shortly after the ruling was made, Serial tweeted: "Sarah was at the courthouse when Adnan was released, a new episode is coming tomorrow morning."

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In a rematch today against 19-year-old Hans Niemann, World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen resigned his game in the second move and quickly went offline. Susan Polgar commented on Carlsen's resignation against Niemann saying it's: "Definitely a protest move!", while GM Jon Ludvig Hammer said Carlsen should be sanctioned during the live Norwegian TV program. The chess world has been in chaos ever since Carlsen dropped out from a prestigious tournament following a stunning loss, which ignited suspicions of foul play. Chessdom has included a "timetable of happenings" related to Niemann in their report.

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President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over in the US, even as the number of Americans who have died from Covid continues to rise. From a report: Mr Biden said that while "we still have a problem", the situation is rapidly improving. Statistics show that over 400 Americans on average are dying from the virus each day. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that the end of the pandemic is "in sight". In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, Mr Biden said that the US is still doing "a lot of work" to control the virus. The interview - aired over the weekend - was partly filmed on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show, where the president gestured towards the crowds. "If you notice, no one's wearing masks," he said. "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape...I think it's changing." In August, US officials extended the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020, through 13 October. To date, more than one million Americans have died from the pandemic. Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the seven-day average of deaths currently stands at over 400, with more than 3,000 dead in the last week. In January 2021, by comparison, more than 23,000 people were reported dead from the virus over a single week-long span. About 65% of the total US population is considered fully vaccinated. Some federal vaccine mandates remain in place in the US - including on healthcare workers, military personnel and any non-US citizen entering the country by airplane.

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Uber said on Monday a hacker affiliated with the Lapsus$ hacking group was responsible for a cyber attack that forced the ride-hailing company to shut several internal communications temporarily last week. From a report: Uber said the attacker had not accessed any user accounts and the databases that store sensitive user information such as credit card numbers, bank account or trip details. "The attacker accessed several internal systems, and our investigation has focused on determining whether there was any material impact," Uber said, adding that investigation was still ongoing. The company said it was in close coordination with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice on the matter. Friday's cybersecurity incident had brought down Uber's internal communication system for a while and employees were restricted to use Salesforce-owned office messaging app Slack. Uber said the attacker logged in to a contractor's Uber account after they accepted a two-factor login approval request following multiple requests, giving the hacker access to several employee accounts and tools such as G-Suite and Slack.

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ArsTechnica reports: The head of Kiwi Farms said the site experienced a breach that allowed hackers to access his administrator account and possibly the accounts of all other users. On the site, creator Joshua Moon wrote: "The forum was hacked. You should assume the following. Assume your password for the Kiwi Farms has been stolen. Assume your email has been leaked. Assume any IP you've used on your Kiwi Farms account in the last month has been leaked." Moon said that the unknown individual or individuals behind the hack gained access to his admin account by using a technique known as session hijacking, in which an attacker obtains the authentication cookies a site sets after an account holder enters valid credentials and successfully completes any two-factor authentication requirements. The session hijacking was made possible after uploading malicious content to XenForo, a site Kiwi Farms uses to power its user forums.

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After a Florida man was accused of vehicular homicide, his lawyer used Clearview AI's facial recognition software to prove his innocence. But other defense lawyers say Clearview's offer rings hollow. From a report: It was the scariest night of Andrew Grantt Conlyn's life. He sat in the passenger seat of a two-door 1997 Ford Mustang, clutching his seatbelt, as his friend drove approximately 100 miles per hour down a palm tree-lined avenue in Fort Myers, Fla. His friend, inebriated and distraught, occasionally swerved onto the wrong side of the road to pass cars that were complying with the 35 mile-an-hour speed limit. "Someone is going to die tonight," Mr. Conlyn thought. And then his friend hit a curb and lost control of the car. The Mustang began spinning wildly, hitting a light pole and three palm trees before coming to a stop, the passenger's side against a tree. At some point, Mr. Conlyn blacked out. When he came to, his friend was gone, the car was on fire and his seatbelt buckle was jammed. Luckily, a good Samaritan intervened, prying open the driver's side door and pulling Mr. Conlyn out of the burning vehicle. Mr. Conlyn didn't learn his savior's name that Wednesday night in March 2017, nor did the police, who came to the scene and found the body of his friend, Colton Hassut, in the bushes near the crash; he'd been ejected from the car and had died. In the years that followed, the inability to track down that good Samaritan derailed Mr. Conlyn's life. If Clearview AI, which is based in New York, hadn't granted his lawyer special access to a facial recognition database of 20 billion faces, Mr. Conlyn might have spent up to 15 years in prison because the police believed he had been the one driving the car. For the last few years, Clearview AI's tool has been largely restricted to law enforcement, but the company now plans to offer access to public defenders. Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive, said this would help "balance the scales of justice," but critics of the company are skeptical given the legal and ethical concerns that swirl around Clearview AI's groundbreaking technology. The company scraped billions of faces from social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and other parts of the web in order to build an app that seeks to unearth every public photo of a person that exists online.

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The App Association brands itself as the leading voice for thousands of app developers around the world. In reality, the vast majority of its funding comes from Apple. From a report: The tech giant isn't a member of the association. But it plays a dominant behind-the-scenes role shaping the group's policy positions, according to four former App Association employees who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. In fact, critics note, the association's lobbying agenda tracks closely with Apple's -- even when it's at odds with app developers, the companies that make the individual games and programs that run on Apple's iPhone and other devices. The group, known as ACT, says it's not beholden to Apple, but confirmed that it derives more than half its funding from the company. The former employees say the actual percentage is much higher. The relationship between Apple and ACT illustrates how big companies quietly pour money into outside groups that promote their agenda in Washington. ACT representatives regularly testify in Congress, file court briefs in defense of Apple's positions and host annual "fly-in" meetings for developers with lawmakers. Rick VanMeter, a former congressional aide who is the head of rival developer group Coalition for App Fairness, said ACT's purported representation of app developers is deceptive, given its relationship with Apple.

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