176571241
submission
quonset writes:
Microsoft has announced Skype will shut down in May 2025. This will leave users of Skype with two choices: create a Microsoft account and use Teams, or export all of their contact information from Skype.
First released in 2003, Skype was bought by the tech giant in 2011 for $8.5bn (£6.1bn) — its biggest-ever acquisition at the time.
As Microsoft once outlined, Skype became integrated with the company's other products such as Xbox and Windows devices.
In December 2010, tech industry commentator Om Malik called it one of the "key applications of the modern web", when the website suffered a two-day global outage.
Following news of its imminent closure, one Skype user said: "My best friend and I share many good memories on Skype. This is a sad day and almost a feeling of losing yet another fragment of my adolescence."
175542359
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quonset writes:
One of the most iconic video games of the 80s is being developed into a movie. Originally developed as a board game to simulate settlers moving west on the Oregon Trail, the developer, Bill Heinemann sensed an opportunity to develop it as a computer game.
Now more than 50 years after the first "Oregon Trail" program, Apple is reportedly developing the game into an action-comedy movie.
"Surprising to me how popular it's become and how long the interest in it has been around," Heinemann said. "And this is just the next step I guess."
He won't be making any money off the movie. In fact, Heinemann's never seen a dime from the iconic game.
He and his two co-creators, Rawitsch and Paul Dillenberger, turned it over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium shortly after they invented it.
175469421
submission
quonset writes:
Between August 2022 and January 2024, hundreds of swatting calls were made across the country targetting religious institutions, government offices, schools, and random people. Authorities were finally able to track down the criminal, Alan Fillon, who entered the plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, the US Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a news release. He faces up to five years in prison on each count. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
Filion also pleaded guilty to making three other threatening calls, including an October 2022 call to a public high school in the Western District of Washington, in which he threatened to commit a mass shooting and claimed to have planted bombs throughout the school.
He also pleaded guilty to a May 2023 call to a historically black college and university in the Northern District of Florida, in which he claimed to have placed bombs in the walls and ceilings of campus housing that would detonate in about an hour.
Another incident was a July 2023 call to a local police-department dispatch number in the Western District of Texas, in which he falsely identified himself as a senior federal law enforcement officer, provided the officer’s residential address to the dispatcher, claimed to have killed the federal officer’s mother, and threatened to kill any responding police officers.
175312469
submission
quonset writes:
Boeing has had a series of issues over the past few years. From planes crashing, lost service records, to a recent strike which cost them $6 billion, now comes word a satellite they made has exploded in space.
The Intelsat 33e satellite, which was launched in 2016 and provides communications across Europe, Asia and Africa, experienced "an anomaly" on Saturday, Intelsat said in a news release. Attempts were made to work with Boeing and repair the satellite, but on Monday, the U.S. Space Force confirmed that the satellite had exploded.
The satellite's breakup left some customers without power or communications services. Intelsat said it is working with third-party providers to limit service interruptions, and is in communication with customers.
Since the breakup, the U.S. Space Force is now tracking "around 20 associated pieces" of the satellite in space. The agency said that there are "no immediate threats" and routine assessments to ensure safety are ongoing.
173896513
submission
quonset writes:
Arup, the British multinational company behind the design of the Sydney Opera House, has admitted it was the victim of a $25 million scam involving deepfakes.
Hong Kong police said in February that during the elaborate scam the employee, a finance worker, was duped into attending a video call with people he believed were the chief financial officer and other members of staff, but all of whom turned out to be deepfake re-creations. The authorities did not name the company or parties involved at the time.
According to police, the worker had initially suspected he had received a phishing email from the company’s UK office, as it specified the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized.
He subsequently agreed to send a total of 200 million Hong Kong dollars — about $25.6 million. The amount was sent across 15 transactions, Hong Kong public broadcaster RTHK reported, citing police.
173842239
submission
quonset writes:
The last floppy disk was manufactured in 2011. Despite no new supplies being available for over a decade, there are still people, and organizations, who rely on floppy disks. Each has their own story as to why they rely on what is essentially 1970s technology.
When an idea for a new piece of music begins swirling in Espen Kraft's mind, he turns to one of his many boxes of floppy disks. Flipping open the lid, the musician and YouTuber from Norway stares down at rows of colourful plastic squares inside. His fingers browse across them, as fast as lightning.
"Bass sound from Moog" reads one label. Just what Kraft was looking for. He plucks the disk out and slams it into his synthesizer. As the machine embraces it, there are clunky yet reassuring noises. This part, Kraft says, is where the magic happens.
The sample is almost ready to play but not quite – it's the anticipation as it loads that sparks a certain nostalgia, what Kraft calls, "a nice, warm, cosy place". The idea is flowing now. He presses a key. His ears fill with sound.
. . .
But it is well-known that some Boeing 747s, for example, use floppy disks to load critical software updates into their navigation and avionics computers. While these older aircraft might not be so common in Europe or the US these days, you might find one in the developing world, for instance, Persky hints. There are also pieces of factory equipment, government systems – or even animatronic figures – that still rely on floppy disks.
And in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless the staff in charge pick up a floppy disk and slip it into the computer that controls the railway's Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "The computer has to be told what it's supposed to do every day," explains a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA). "Without a hard drive, there is nowhere to install software on a permanent basis."
This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds – it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading.
In some sectors, the legacy use of floppy disks is being phased out. In 2022, a Japanese politician "declared war" on the ongoing use of older media. Subsequently, earlier this year, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced that the government would no longer require businesses to submit official forms and applications on floppy disk. The US military was still using 8in (20cm) floppy disks for its nuclear weapons control system as recently as 2019. That summer, however, the military switched to a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution" instead.
There are other reasons why some organisations have been reluctant to move away from using floppy disks. While there can be security risks when it comes to relying on old computer systems in the 21st Century, because antiquated and unpatched systems are in principle easier to hack, the physical nature of floppy disks also offers some protection. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk," says Ken Munro, a cyber-security expert at Pen Test Partners. "That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker," he says.
173612900
submission
quonset writes:
Just over two weeks ago, NASA figured out why its Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped sending useful data. They suspected corrupted memory in its flight data system (FDS) was the culprit. Today, for the first time since November, Voyager 1 is sending useful data about its health and the status of its onboard systems back to NASA. How did NASA accomplish this feat of long distance repair? They broke up the code into smaller pieces and redistributed them throughout the memory. From NASA:
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
173440096
submission
quonset writes:
On Tuesday, the Cyber Safety Review Board, released a report laying blame on Microsoft for its shoddy cybersecurity practices, lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company’s knowledge of a targeted breach, which affected multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China last year. In short, a cascade of errors let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
The panel said the intrusion, discovered in June by the State Department and dating to May “was preventable and should never have occurred,” blaming its success on “a cascade of avoidable errors.” What’s more, the board said, Microsoft still doesn’t know how the hackers got in.
The panel made sweeping recommendations, including urging Microsoft to put on hold adding features to its cloud computing environment until “substantial security improvements have been made.”
It said Microsoft’s CEO and board should institute “rapid cultural change” including publicly sharing “a plan with specific timelines to make fundamental, security-focused reforms across the company and its full suite of products.”
In all, the state-backed Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft Exchange Online email of 22 organizations and more than 500 individuals around the world including the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns — accessing some cloud-based email boxes for at least six weeks and downloading some 60,000 emails from the State Department alone, the 34-page report said. Three think tanks and four foreign government entities, including Britain’s National Cyber Security Center, were among those compromised, it said.
173364713
submission
quonset writes:
Last year's actors strike lasted for months during which production of movies and tv shows was shut down. Now it appears voice actors for video games may be the next group to strike. Their biggest issue? Use of AI to recreate their voice.
"We're currently in bargaining with all the major game studios, and the major sticking point is AI," SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Thursday. "Actors at all levels are at risk of digital replication. We have strike authorization on that contract and it is, at this point — we could end up going on strike."
Voice actor Sarah Elmaleh chairs the union's interactive-media-agreement negotiating committee. "I've seen nothing like this in technology to impact our jobs," she said. "A replicated voice cannot display a spectrum of emotions — yet. For now, it is technology based on averaging and best questions. It lacks nuance."
The union, which navigated its way to a new film and TV contract after a 118-day strike against the Hollywood studios last year, is again focusing on regulating artificial intelligence and its impact on wages and jobs. "It will be a recurring issue with each successive contract" every three years, Crabtree-Ireland said.
Companies facing a possible strike are Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Activision Publishing, Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices International Inc. (DIS), Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), Epic Games Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Take 2 Productions, VoiceWorks Productions Inc. and Warner Bros. Games (WBD).
"Actors and actresses should be very much afraid," Chris Mattmann, an adjunct research professor at the University of Southern California's Computer Science Department, said in an interview. "Within three seconds, gen AI can effectively clone a voice."
172788273
submission
quonset writes:
After decades of study and testing, a potential vaccine for cancer may be on the horizon. Dr. Thomas Wagner, founder of Orbis Health Solutions, is using the body's own immune system to fight off the disease, with each shot personalized to the patient. As the CBS article relates:
The most recent data presented at an academic conference showed nearly 95% of people given only the vaccine were still alive three years after starting treatment and 64% were still disease-free. Among the most advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared to about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for those with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group, and zero in the placebo group.
The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after the injection – similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response.
Based on this data and other studies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has greenlit Wagner's vaccine to start a Phase 3 clinical trial. It will be a three-year endeavor with a goal to enroll 500 people and is planned to launch sometime this year, Riley Polk, president of Orbis Health Solutions, told WLOS, an ABC News affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina.
Perhaps the most startling success story is Mary Carol Abercrombie:
One of those patients is a woman named Mary Carol Abercrombie who Wagner believes is one of the longest surviving people previously diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma, the most advanced form of the disease. Just before Christmas in 2001, Abercrombie told WLOS she completed a year of cancer treatment with "horrendous" side effects but once the treatment stopped, her cancer advanced. Abercrombie said her doctors told her she only had a few more months to live, telling her to "just enjoy Christmas."
Abercrombie's surgical oncologist at the time was working with Wagner on a cancer vaccine. "Sign me up, 'cause there wasn't anything [else] out there," Abercrombie said, who was just hoping to live long enough to see her son get married that year. Over 20 years have since passed and Abercrombie said her melanoma has never recurred. She not only saw her son get married, but she's watching her four grandchildren grow up.
172751795
submission
quonset writes:
When self-checkout at stores was rolled out, many people, including on /., cheered. No longer would they have to wait behind the senior citizen who couldn't remember the PIN for their debit card. No longer would they have to wait in long lines trying to ignore the idle chitchat from fellow shoppers. From now on it would be a breeze to get in and get out without human interaction. Except that hasn't happened.
For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?
While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.
The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth.
"It hasn't delivered anything that it promises," says Christopher Andrews, associate professor and chair of sociology at Drew University, US, and author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. "Stores saw this as the next frontier If they could get the consumer to think that [self-checkout] was a preferable way to shop, then they could cut labour costs. But they're finding that people need help doing it, or that they'll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they're not saving money, they're losing money."
172724241
submission
quonset writes:
Hertz rental has announced they are selling off one third of their 20,000 electric vehicle fleet and replacing them with gas powered vehicles. The reason? It's costing them too much to repair damaged EVs and their deprecitation is hurting the bottom line.
“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.
Hertz expects to take a loss of about $245 million due to depreciation on the EVs, an average of about $12,250, per vehicle the company said in an SEC filing.
While Hertz isn’t directly pointing a finger, it appears that Tesla has been largely to blame.
Tesla makes up about 80% of Hertz’s EV fleet, and, altogether, EVs make up about 11% of Hertz’s total rental fleet. Tesla has been aggressively cutting its vehicle prices leading other automakers to do the same for their electric vehicles. When automakers reduce the prices of new vehicles, that pushes down the value of those models in the used car market, causing rapid depreciation.
172152994
submission
quonset writes:
“Orders with no tip might take longer to get delivered — are you sure you want to continue?”
That is the message DoorDash is trying out on customers though users do have the option of continuing without leaving a tip.
The message is just a test, DoorDash spokesperson Jenn Rosenberg told CNN in an email. “This reminder screen is something that we’re currently testing to help create the best possible experience for all members of our community,” she said. “As with anything we pilot, we look forward to closely analyzing the results and feedback.”
Rosenberg noted that Dashers, the people who deliver orders, are “independent contractors” who “have full freedom to accept or reject offers based on what they view as valuable and rewarding.” Tips go directly to Dashers, according to the company. So if an order comes in without a tip, they’re more likely to let it linger.
171983435
submission
quonset writes:
Whenever the subject of muscians making money comes up, inevitably it is said musicians make their money by doing shows and selling merchandise, not through record deals or streaming services. That may no longer be enough to keep some going.
In her first five years in the industry, however, Tomberlin said she doesn’t believe she was able to turn an annual profit. As she prepared to go on tour as an opening act for Ray LaMontagne this year, she took steps to cut costs, such as choosing to bring along only one support person instead of a full band.
So when the Filene Center near Washington, D.C., informed her that it was cutting deeply into her main way of making a profit, she took a stand. After being told she would have to hand over more than 40% of the money she collected from selling T-shirts and other items, Tomberlin refused to sell her merchandise at the venue and publicly spoke about a practice she calls robbery — venues taking cuts from bands’ merchandise sales.
“You make a budget and then you see the possibility of having your funds drained and you don’t know what you’re going to sell each night, so it’s just a real crapshoot,” Tomberlin said. “We can bank on what my guarantee is that night, but the merch is what really is covering your costs and hopefully helping you make, like, an actual profit.”
Other musicians are also speaking out about the practice, and their complaints seem to be having an effect. Industry giant Live Nation Entertainment Inc. announced recently that it would stop collecting merch fees at nearly 80 of the smaller clubs it owns and operates and provide all bands that play at those venues with an additional $1,500 in gas cards and cash.
Musicians who spoke with MarketWatch remain unsatisfied, however. Because of the way the announcement is phrased, many think merch fees at Live Nation clubs are only being paused until the end of the year. The musicians said they also wonder about the roughly 250 other Live Nation concert facilities, as well as the hundreds of venues owned by other companies.
A Live Nation spokesperson told MarketWatch the change is “open-ended.”
171797650
submission
quonset writes:
Roblox Corporation was to have its award ceremony for developers on Saturday when it cancelled the event at the last moment. According to reports, a game developer was reportedly arrested on gun charges outside the event.
Citing jail records, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday that a man identified as game developer Mikhail Olson, known by the nickname Simbuilder, was arrested by U.S. Park Police on suspicion of having a concealed firearm in his vehicle, along with armor-piercing ammunition and a large-capacity magazine.
The awards ceremony was held at Fort Mason Center, which is on federal property. According to the Chronicle, the suspect was arrested Saturday afternoon after allegedly assaulting U.S. Park Police officers who had been called over a report of a disturbance outside the Roblox conference.
