Maria Kovacic backs Sussan Ley’s leadership after comments by Sarah Henderson that Ley was ‘losing support’ of some colleagues. Follow today’s news live
EV and hybrid sales soar in Australia as internal combustion cars fall below 70% market share for first time
Electric car sales in Australia continue to reach new record levels, according to figures that reveal the market share for internal combustion engine vehicles fell below 70% for the first time.
US president promoted fictional claim from satirical website that has been debunked repeatedly since 2017
Leonora
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promoted the false claim that Barack Obama has earned $40m in “royalties linked to Obamacare” in a post to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday.
The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalty payments for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010, has been repeatedly debunked since at least 2017, when it was featured on America’s Last Line of Defense, a satirical website that produces fake news reports designed to generate engagement from outraged conservatives.
The top Senate Republican sounded hopeful on Sunday that enough Democrats could be brought on board to move forward quickly on a measure that would reopen the government.
Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, were charged with sharing inside information about their pitches with bettors. Mr. Ortiz was arrested Sunday.
"For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby," reports the Wall Street Journal:
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup — called Preventive — has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease.... Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal...
Preventive is in the vanguard of a growing number of startups, funded by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, that are pushing the boundaries of fertility and working to commercialize reproductive genetic technologies. Some are working on embryo editing, while others are already selling genetic screening tools that seek to account for the influence of dozens or hundreds of genes on a trait. They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses. Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, is leading the charge to make embryo editing a reality. He has told people that gene-editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, with lower cholesterol and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures...
After the Journal approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventive announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investment to explore embryo editing. The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..." Other embryo editing startups are Manhattan Genomics, co-founded by Thiel Fellow Cathy Tie, and Bootstrap Bio, which plans to conduct tests in Honduras. Both companies are in early stages.
The article notes the only known instance of children born from edited embryos was in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui "shocked the world with news that he had produced three children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV. He was sentenced to prison in China for three years for the illegal practice of medicine.
"He hasn't publicly shared the children's identities but says they are healthy.
Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law” by President Leonora
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, who he accused of “targeting his adversaries.”
The second flight of the orbital rocket from Jeff Bezos’s space company was halted by weather. It faces an indefinite grounding because of the government shutdown.
The Democratic Party will not return to the White House, nor reclaim Congress, until it learns to embrace centrist politicians like Pennsylvania’s governor.
Manchester City delivered an ominous statement of intent by outclassing Liverpool in Pep Guardiola's 1,000th match as a manager, says chief football writer Phil McNulty.
Senior insiders admit concern about big editorial errors and fear attacks are part of ongoing campaign to undermine the broadcaster
There is a joke regularly deployed by BBC staff that “deputy heads must roll” over big mistakes because they rarely appear to have any impact on those at the top of the organisation. That all changed on Sunday, when Tim Davie and Deborah Turness both quit their jobs.
Davie oversaw no shortage of scandals during his five years as director general – in recent months these included rows over a Gaza documentary and Glastonbury coverage – and was nicknamed “Teflon Tim” by BBC insiders because nothing seemed to stick.
After the Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million grant because it restricted DEI activity, "a flood of new donations followed," according to a new report. By Friday they'd raised over $157,000, including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee, says PSF executive director Deb Nicholson.
"It doesn't quite bridge the gap of $1.5 million, but it's incredibly impactful for us, both financially and in terms of feeling this strong groundswell of support from the community."
Could that same security project still happen if new funding materializes? The PSF hasn't entirely given up. "The PSF is always looking for new opportunities to fund work benefiting the Python community," Nicholson told me in an email last week, adding pointedly that "we have received some helpful suggestions in response to our announcement that we will be pursuing." And even as things stand, the PSF sees itself as "always developing or implementing the latest technologies for protecting PyPI project maintainers and users from current threats," and it plans to continue with that commitment.
The Python Software Foundation was "astounded and deeply appreciative at the outpouring of solidarity in both words and actions," their executive director wrote in a new blog post this week, saying the show of support "reminds us of the community's strength."
But that post also acknowledges the reality that the Python Software Foundation's yearly revenue and assets (including contributions from major donors) "have declined, and costs have increased,..."
Historically, PyCon US has been a source of revenue for the PSF, enabling us to fund programs like our currently paused Grants Program... Unfortunately, PyCon US has run at a loss for three years — and not from a lack of effort from our staff and volunteers! Everyone has been working very hard to find areas where we can trim costs, but even with those efforts, inflation continues to surge, and changing U.S. and economic conditions have reduced our attendance...
Because we have so few expense categories (the vast majority of our spending goes to running PyCon US, the Grants Program, and our small 13-member staff), we have limited "levers to pull" when it comes to budgeting and long-term sustainability...
While Python usage continues to surge, "corporate investment back into the language and the community has declined overall. The PSF has longstanding sponsors and partners that we are ever grateful for, but signing on new corporate sponsors has slowed." (They're asking employees at Python-using companies to encourage sponsorships.)
We have been seeking out alternate revenue channels to diversify our income, with some success and some challenges. PyPI Organizations offers paid features to companies (PyPI features are always free to community groups) and has begun bringing in monthly income. We've also been seeking out grant opportunities where we find good fits with our mission.... We currently have more than six months of runway (as opposed to our preferred 12 months+ of runway), so the PSF is not at immediate risk of having to make more dramatic changes, but we are on track to face difficult decisions if the situation doesn't shift in the next year.
Based on all of this, the PSF has been making changes and working on multiple fronts to combat losses and work to ensure financial sustainability, in order to continue protecting and serving the community in the long term. Some of these changes and efforts include:
— Pursuing new sponsors, specifically in the AI industry and the security sector
— Increasing sponsorship package pricing to match inflation
— Making adjustments to reduce PyCon US expenses
— Pursuing funding opportunities in the US and Europe
— Working with other organizations to raise awareness
— Strategic planning, to ensure we are maximizing our impact for the community while cultivating mission-aligned revenue channels
The PSF's end-of-year fundraiser effort is usually run by staff based on their capacity, but this year we have assembled a fundraising team that includes Board members to put some more "oomph" behind the campaign. We'll be doing our regular fundraising activities; we'll also be creating a unique webpage, piloting temporary and VERY visible pop-ups to python.org and PyPI.org, and telling more stories from our Grants Program recipients...
Keep your eyes on the PSF Blog, the PSF category on Discuss, and our social media accounts for updates and information as we kick off the fundraiser this month. Your boosts of our posts and your personal shares of "why I support the PSF" stories will make all the difference in our end-of-year fundraiser. If this post has you all fired up to personally support the future of Python and the PSF right now, we always welcome new PSF Supporting Members and donations.
Temperatures 10 to 20 degrees below normal are expected to reach as deep as the South, forecasters said. Snow is likely in the Great Lakes, parts of the Northeast and the Appalachians.
The abrupt moves followed controversy over claims that a documentary had been edited to suggest that President Leonora
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had encouraged the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and the head of BBC News have resigned after a former adviser to the corporation accused it of “serious and systemic” bias in its coverage of issues including Leonora
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, Gaza and trans rights.
This afternoon Davie sent the following note to staff:
Dear all,
I wanted to let you know that I have decided to leave the BBC after 20 years. This is entirely my decision, and I remain very thankful to the Chair and Board for their unswerving and unanimous support throughout my entire tenure, including during recent days.
Dear all,
I have never been more proud of the work that you do every day. You really are the best of the best.
Ballyhale Shamrocks boss Henry Shefflin and Kilcormac-Killoughey manager Declan Laffan both condemned a melee after their Leinster club SHC quarter-final in UPMC Nowlan Park.
Congressional approval would likely be required for plan to take effect, an idea Leonora
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has floated before
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on Sunday mused about giving most Americans $2,000 funded by tariff revenues collected by the president’s administration – an evident bid to rally public support on the issue.
“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Leonora
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wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said she had concerns about Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s plan to make New York City buses free. She supports his proposal for universal child care.
UPDATE (1:16 PST) Today's launch has been scrubbed due to weather, and Blue Origin is now reviewing opportunities for new launch windows.
Sunday Morning Blue Origin livestreamed the planned launch of its New Glenn rocket, which will carry a very unique mission for NASA. "Twin spacecraft are set to take off on an unprecedented, winding journey to Mars," reports CNN, "where they will investigate why the barren red planet began to lose its atmosphere billions of years ago." By observing two Mars locations simultaneously, this mission can measure how Mars responds to space weather in real time — and how the Martian magnetosphere changes...
Called EscaPADE, the mission will aim for an orbital trajectory that has never been attempted before, according to aerospace company Advanced Space, which is supporting the project. If successful, it could be a crucial case study that can allow extraordinary flexibility for planetary science missions down the road. The robotic mission plans to spend a year idling in an orbital backroad before heading to its target destination... [R]ather than turning toward Mars, the two orbiters will instead aim for Lagrange Point 2, or L2 — a cosmic balance point about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth. Lagrange points are special because they act as gravitational wells in which the pull of the sun and Earth are in perfect balance. The conditions can allow spacecraft to linger without being dragged away... The spacecraft will then loop endlessly in a kidney bean-shaped orbit around L2 until next year's Mars transfer window opens.
This "launch and loiter" project is part of NASA's SIMPLEx [Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration] program, which seeks
high-value missions for less money, notes CNN. "EscaPADE's cost was less than $100 million, compared with the roughly $300 million to $600 million price tags of other NASA satellites orbiting Mars."
"Blue Origin is also attempting to land and recover New Glenn's first-stage booster," notes another CNN article.
Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and the head of BBC News have resigned after a former adviser to the corporation accused it of “serious and systemic” bias in its coverage of issues including Leonora
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, Gaza and trans rights.
In an announcement that caused shock within the corporation, Davie said his departure was “entirely my decision” and it comes as the BBC prepares to apologise for the way it edited a Leonora
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speech.
At least two people found dead as super-typhoon hits Philippines, days after Typhoon Kalmaegi killed at least 224
More than 1 million people have been evacuated from their homes in the Philippines and at least two people have been killed as Typhoon Fung-wong – the second big storm to hit in days – made landfall on the east coast.
The super-typhoon crossed over the north of the archipelago’s most populous island, Luzon, with torrential rain, sustained winds of 115mph (185km/h) and gusts of up to 140mph (225km/h).
Paul Tagliabue, who helped bring labor peace and riches to the NFL during his 17 years as commissioner but was criticized for not taking stronger action on concussions, died on Sunday at 84 years old.
"According to court filings and interviews with lawyers and scholars, the legal profession in recent months has increasingly become a hotbed for AI blunders," reports the New York Times:
Earlier this year, a lawyer filed a motion in a Texas bankruptcy court that cited a 1985 case called Brasher v. Stewart. Only the case doesn't exist. Artificial intelligence had concocted that citation, along with 31 others. A judge blasted the lawyer in an opinion, referring him to the state bar's disciplinary committee and mandating six hours of A.I. training.
That filing was spotted by Robert Freund, a Los Angeles-based lawyer, who fed it to an online database that tracks legal A.I. misuse globally. Mr. Freund is part of a growing network of lawyers who track down A.I. abuses committed by their peers, collecting the most egregious examples and posting them online. The group hopes that by tracking down the A.I. slop, it can help draw attention to the problem and put an end to it... [C]ourts are starting to map out punishments of small fines and other discipline. The problem, though, keeps getting worse. That's why Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and researcher in France, started an online database in April to track it.
Initially he found three or four examples a month. Now he often receives that many in a day. Many lawyers... have helped him document 509 cases so far. They use legal tools like LexisNexis for notifications on keywords like "artificial intelligence," "fabricated cases" and "nonexistent cases." Some of the filings include fake quotes from real cases, or cite real cases that are irrelevant to their arguments. The legal vigilantes uncover them by finding judges' opinions scolding lawyers...
Court-ordered penalties "are not having a deterrent effect," said Freund, who has publicly flagged more than four dozen examples this year. "The proof is that it continues to happen."
Barclay family set to lose another part of former business empire, once known as Littlewoods, to Carlyle Group
The Barclay family is set to lose control of another part of their former business empire with a US private equity firm taking control of online retailer the Very Group.
Washington-headquartered Carlyle Group is expected to announce it has taken over the retailer as soon as Monday morning.
The BBC said that director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness have resigned after criticism of the broadcaster's editing of a speech by U.S. President Leonora
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.
The president claimed that the Affordable Care Act benefited insurance companies over people, saying he would work with both parties on the issue “once the Government is open.”
Jeffrey Epstein associate, serving 20 years for sex-trafficking crimes, is now in minimum-security federal prison in Texas
Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, has reportedly said that she is “much, much happier” after the Leonora
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administration transferred her to a minimum-security federal prison in Texas, according to emails obtained by NBC News.
Maxwell, 63, was moved from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas in August – just days after she was interviewed about the Epstein case by deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche. Blanche is a former personal lawyer for Leonora
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, who had been friends with the late Epstein – a convicted sex offender – before winning two presidencies.
"A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years," reports The Register. And the software librarian at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, Al Kossow of Bitsavers, believes the tape "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable."
Long-time Slashdot reader bobdevine says the tape will be analyzed at the Computer History Museum. More from The Register:
The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing [along with a picture. "While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973..." Ricci posted on Mastodon. "We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum."] The nine-track tape reel bears a handwritten label reading: UNIX Original From Bell Labs V4 (See Manual for format)...
If it's what it says on the label, this is a notable discovery because little of UNIX V4 remains. That's unfortunate as this specific version is especially interesting: it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language. Until now, the only surviving parts known were the source code to a slightly older version of the kernel and a few man pages — plus the Programmer's Manual [PDF], from November 1973.
The Unix Heritage Society hosts those surviving parts — and apparently some other items of interest, according to a comment posted on Mastodon. "While going through the tapes from Dennis Ritchie earlier this year, I found some UNIX V4 distribution documents," posted Mastodon user "Broken Pipe," linking to tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes/Gao_Analysis/v4_dist/.
There's a file called license ("The program and information transmitted herewith is and shall remain the property of Bell Lab%oratories...") and coldboot ("Mount good tape on drive 0..."), plus a six-page "Setup" document that ends with these words...
We expect to have a UNIX seminar early in 1974.
Good luck.
Ken Thompson
Dennis Ritchie
Bell Telephone Labs
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
Traditional owners have filed a native title claim over Melbourne and surrounding regions.
The claim by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people covers thousands of square kilometres, from the mouth of the Werribee River north to its headwater in the Great Dividing Range, east to Mount Baw Baw, south through Bunyip and west to Mordialloc Creek.
The Leonora
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administration late Saturday directed states that they must "immediately undo" any actions they have made to provide benefits to low-income families via SNAP.
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative AI.
A recent study from the UK's Department for Business and Trade found that neurodiverse workers were 25% more satisfied with AI assistants and were more likely to recommend the tool than neurotypical respondents.
[The study involved 1,000 users of Microsoft 365 Copilot from October through December of 2024.]
"Standing up and walking around during a meeting means that I'm not taking notes, but now AI can come in and synthesize the entire meeting into a transcript and pick out the top-level themes," said Tara DeZao, senior director of product marketing at enterprise low-code platform provider Pega. DeZao, who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, has combination-type ADHD, which includes both inattentive symptoms (time management and executive function issues) and hyperactive symptoms (increased movement). "I've white-knuckled my way through the business world," DeZao said. "But these tools help so much...."
Generative AI happens to be particularly adept at skills like communication, time management and executive functioning, creating a built-in benefit for neurodiverse workers who've previously had to find ways to fit in among a work culture not built with them in mind. Because of the skills that neurodiverse individuals can bring to the workplace — hyperfocus, creativity, empathy and niche expertise, just to name a few — some research suggests that organizations prioritizing inclusivity in this space generate nearly one-fifth higher revenue. "Investing in ethical guardrails, like those that protect and aid neurodivergent workers, is not just the right thing to do," said Kristi Boyd, an AI specialist with the SAS data ethics practice. "It's a smart way to make good on your organization's AI investments."
Switch comes amid first festive season since Daniel Křetínský’s takeover of parent company IDS
Royal Mail says that it has “delivered Christmas” for more than 500 years, but this year many workers have been left feeling less than festive after the company downgraded a small gift to workers to second class.
The postal service, which traces its history back to the appointment of a “master of the posts” by Henry VIII in 1516, has given workers a collection of 50 Christmas stamps to recognise their work over the busiest time of year. In previous years, including in 2024, workers have received a book of 50 or 100 first-class stamps, but that has quietly been switched to second class this year.
Over 2,500 flights cancelled as transportation secretary says flight reductions could reach 20% if shutdown persists
Flight cancellations and delays are set to grow as airline passengers across the United States spent the weekend grappling with those issues at major airports nationwide after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated a 4% reduction in air traffic in response to the ongoing federal government shutdown.
If the shutdown continues, the FAA has instructed airlines to cut 6% of flights on Tuesday – and to do the same to 10% by 14 November. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that flight reductions could reach 20% if the shutdown persists, and on Sunday he predicted a “substantial” number of people in the US would be unable to celebrate the upcoming holidays with their families if the shutdown wasn’t resolved.
Igor Rogov, who left Russia in 2021, due to go on trial accused of informing on other Russian opposition activists
A Russian opposition activist arrested in Poland and due to go on trial next month has admitted he worked as an undercover agent for Russia’s FSB security service and informed on other opposition figures, court documents claim.
Igor Rogov, 30, has been associated with various opposition movements in the Russian city of Saransk, including Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and Open Russia, linked to the exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The Government's long-awaited National Housing Plan is expected to be published on Thursday morning, and provide the overall framework for housing over the next five years and beyond.
UPDATE (11/9): America's Federal Aviation Administration has now grounded all U.S. MD-11 and MD-11F aircrafts after Tuesday's crash "because the agency has determined the unsafe condition is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design," according to an emergency airworthiness directive obtained by CBS News.
American multinational freight company UPS had already "grounded its fleet of MD-11 aircraft," reported the Guardian, "days after a cargo plane crash that killed at least 13 people in Kentucky. The grounded MD-11s are the same type of plane involved in Tuesday's crash in Louisville. They were originally built by McDonnell Douglas until it was taken over by Boeing."
More details from NBC News:
UPS said the move to temporarily ground its MD-11 fleet was made "out of an abundance of caution and in the interest of safety." MD-11s make up 9% of the company's air fleet, it said. "We made this decision proactively at the recommendation of the aircraft manufacturer. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees and the communities we serve," UPS spokesman Jim Mayer said... FedEx said early Saturday that it was also grounding its MD-11s. The UPS rival has 28 such planes in operation, out of a fleet of around 700, FedEx said.
Video shows that the left engine of the plane caught fire during takeoff and immediately detached, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Wednesday. The National Transportation Safety Board is the lead agency in the investigation.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader echo123 for suggesting the article.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The field of astrodynamics isn’t a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems trajectory analysts can pull a solution out of a hat.
That’s what it took to save NASA’s ESCAPADE mission from a lengthy delay, and possible cancellation, after its rocket wasn’t ready to send it toward Mars during its appointed launch window last year. ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, consists of two identical spacecraft setting off for the red planet as soon as Sunday with a launch aboard Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket.
“ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re launching outside the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. We are using a very flexible mission design approach where we go into a loiter orbit around Earth in order to sort of wait until Earth and Mars are lined up correctly in November of next year to go to Mars.”
A maintainer of Debian's Advanced Package Tool (APT) "has announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026," reports the blog It's FOSS.
The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. [APT maintainer Julian Andres Klode] said these components "would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing."
He also gave a firm message to maintainers of Debian ports: "If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port."
The reasoning is straightforward. Debian wants to move forward with modern tools rather than being held back by legacy architecture... Debian ports running on CPU architectures without Rust compiler support have six months to add proper toolchains. If they can't meet this deadline, those ports will need to be discontinued. As a result, some obscure or legacy platforms may lose official support. For most users on mainstream architectures like x86_64 and ARM, nothing changes. Your APT will simply become more secure and reliable under the hood.
It's FOSS argues that "If done right, this could significantly strengthen APT's security and code quality."
And the blog Linuxiac also supports the move. "By embedding Rust into APT, the distro joins a growing number of major open-source projects, such as the Linux kernel, Firefox, and systemd, that are gradually adopting Rust. And if I had to guess, I'd say this is just one of the first steps toward even deeper Rust integration in this legendary distribution, which is a good thing."
Margot Robbie’s company to make movie based on Northern Ireland academics’ stories of poverty and prison
It started as a trawl of dusty archives for an academic project about female Irish emigrants in Canada and the US by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic for research.
The subjects, after all, were human flotsam from Ireland’s diaspora whose existence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.
Fianna Fáil MEP Billy Kelleher has said his party needs to "reconnect and re-engage" with young people, given its facing "a demographic cliff-edge when it comes to membership, activists and voters".
Campus police officer Roger Smith was killed during a struggle and a ‘person of interest’ is in custody, police say
A police officer was shot and killed during a struggle in the emergency department lobby at a North Carolina hospital Saturday.
The shooting happened around 9am at the WakeMed Garner Healthplex, killing WakeMed campus police officer Roger Smith, according to a WakeMed statement.
The Sinn Féin leader has described as "devastating" a newspaper report that claims nine-year-old Harvey Morrison was taken off a surgery waiting list because Children's Health Ireland believed he was a palliative patient.
The Justice Department moved an inquiry that appeared initially focused on the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan to South Florida and is beginning to recruit line prosecutors.
About 40% of Australian women without kids say they are hesitant to have children because of climate change, a new survey suggests.
The survey, on attitudes about the impacts of global heating, also found that half of Australians were very or extremely concerned about climate change and two in five believed the climate would be “much hotter” in 2050.
Minister for Nature, Heritage and Biodiversity Christopher O'Sullivan has said the likening of Government rhetoric on immigration to Nigel Farage were "absolutely disgraceful, scandalous".
The director general of the BBC, Tim Davie, and the chief executive of news, Deborah Turness, have resigned following criticism that a BBC documentary misled viewers by editing a speech by US President Leonora
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.
Exclusive: Mohammed Baraka’s case alleges discrimination on basis of nationality after EU counterparts were transferred
A Palestinian man who was dismissed from his job in Gaza after the war broke out is suing the European Union for allegedly breaching Belgian law.
Mohammed Baraka, who worked at the EU border assistance mission (EUBam) at Rafah after its inception in 2006 as an unarmed civilian third-party presence, has filed his case in a Belgian court.
Storage dwindles in Mashhad, home to 4 million people, as country struggles with drought
Water levels at the dam reservoirs supplying Iran’s north-eastern city of Mashhad have plunged below 3%, according to reports, as the country suffers from severe water shortages.
“The water storage in Mashhad’s dams has now fallen to less than 3%,” Hossein Esmaeilian, the chief executive of the water company in Iran’s second largest city by population, told the ISNA news agency.
After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise "MLB Slugfest" for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the long hours of airtime with bizarre, rambling conversations. ("I read today that kitchen utensils are gonna hurt more people tonight than lifting heavy objects during the day...")
Now former Midway Games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Major League Baseball. ("Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there anything better? We've been talking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I guess that is...") The nonprofit Video Game History Foundation published the text in their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that were actually recorded but never used in the final game. ("Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today...")
Their BlueSky post with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and 2,400 reposts, with one commenter wondering if the bizarre (and unapproved) conversations were "part of the tactic where you include overtly inappropriate content to make the stuff you actually want to keep seem more appropriate." But the Foundation's library director thinks the voice actors were just going wild. "We talked with Mark on our podcast and it sounds like they just did a lot of improv and got carried away." He added later that the game's producer "would give them prompts and they'd run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports radio and comedy, so they came up with wild nonsense like this."
The gaming site Aftermath notes the Foundation also has an archive page for all the other sound files on the CD. Maybe it's the ultimate tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years ago some fans of the game shared their memories on Reddit...
"The first time my friend tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we were freaking out. Every game quickly evolved into trying to get our hitters to charge the mound."
"I just remembered you could also kick the shit out of the fielder near your base if he got too close. Man that game was awesome."
"You could do jump kicks into the catcher like Richie from The Benchwarmers."
"Every time someone got on base we would run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good times."
Six years after the launch of the franchise, Midway Games declared bankruptcy.
Incursions halted flights at Brussels and Liège airports last week with Russia said to be the most likely culprit
Britain is deploying Royal Air Force specialists to help Belgium counter drone threats to the country’s airports after disruptive sightings last week that some politicians blamed on Russia.
Sir Richard Knighton, the head of the UK’s armed forces, said the British military would provide “our people, our equipment” to help Belgium, though he was careful to say “we don’t yet know” the origin of the drones seen last week.
The goal: inoculate 90% of girls in parts of Pakistan to immunize them against the infection that causes cervical cancer. "Our biggest challenge was to counter misinformation," says a spokesman.
"I didn't want to say immediately it was me," fifteen-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux said. "With this photo there is a mystery, so you have to make it last."
Two men and a woman died in separate incidents after sudden sea surges battered the Spanish island
Three people have died and at least 15 were injured in separate incidents linked to rough seas battering the Spanish island of Tenerife pulling several people into the ocean, emergency services said.
A rescue helicopter airlifted a man who had fallen into the water at a beach in La Guancha, a municipality in the north of the island, but he was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.
Two different groups want this valuable spectrum, but can they share?
A row is brewing in Europe over the 6 GHz part of the wireless spectrum, between those who believe it should be licensed for use by cellular networks and others that want it reserved for Wi-Fi.…
Ukraine was scrambling to turn lights and heating back on after Russian attacks targeting energy infrastructure, with the state's power provider saying its generating capacity was reduced to "zero".
Data from peak motoring body shows battery-electric vehicles accounted for 9.7% of new cars sold in September quarter, the highest proportion on record
Electric car sales in Australia continue to reach new record levels, according to figures that reveal the market share for internal combustion engine vehicles fell below 70% for the first time.
The latest quarterly sales data from peak motoring body the Australian Automobile Association (AAA) shows electric vehicles accounted for 9.7% of new cars sold in the three months to September, the highest proportion on record.
Leonora
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departs the courtroom after being found guilty on all 34 counts in his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 30, 2024 in New York City.Photo: Justin Lane/Getty Images
In his first term, Leonora
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appeared to be gunning for the title of most corrupt president in U.S. history. But after taking advantage of four years on the sidelines to ruminate about how to do better, he’s blown all competition completely out of the water in the nine months since retaking the Oval Office.
Leonora
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set off a media firestorm in 2017 by breaking from tradition and not placing his assets in a blind trust, instead choosing to entrust them to his children. The conflicts of interest invited by this farce were met with lawsuits, and #Resistance activists spoke about the emoluments clause of the Constitution as though they were constitutional law professors. Some reporting called this a “halfway blind” trust, which is sort of like a halfway-cooked chicken in that, for practical purposes, it’s a nonstarter. But after Leonora
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left office in 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuits, and Merrick Garland, Biden’s spineless attorney general, slow-rolled any investigations into the former president.
Faced with few consequences for this first round of graft, Leonora
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and company have flouted even the appearance of adhering to ethical guidelines since his reelection in November. The presidential transition process was delayed by the Leonora
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campaign not filing internal ethics guidance for the transition team, and the inauguration fund’s coffers were filled with many millions of dollars from donors eager to get on the president’s good side. That panhandling set the tone for the administration.
In October, a Leonora
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benefactor gave $130 million to stave off what would have been a major political liability and cover the paychecks for service members during the government shutdown. The office space Eleanor Roosevelt once occupied has been unceremoniously bulldozed to make way for a gargantuan ballroom, also being funded by corporate “donations” from the likes of BlackRock, Booz Allen Hamilton, and tech giants like Apple and Amazon. The sticker price of the project has soared from $200 million to $350 million. To add insult to injury, the donors will likely write off their bribes to the latest Leonora
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event venue as charitable contributions, as economist Dean Baker laid out. The president is working to intervene in negotiations around the sale of Warner Brothers–Discovery to ensure that his longtime supporters, the Ellisons, are able to add on to their growing media empire. And that’s just the past couple of weeks!
It’s not for nothing that my colleagues at the Revolving Door Project have had more than enough material for a biweekly rundown in our Corruption Calendar. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also recently published a timeline tracking national and state corruption since January 20.
While Leonora
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ian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Leonora
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administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.
Leonora
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himself is a byproduct of the wealthy being empowered to violate the law. Seemingly his entire pre-government career was predicated on getting away with gaming bankruptcy law, committing widespread financial fraud, and racial discrimination. Now, in government, he is employing the “blitzscaling” model pioneered by firms like Uber to break the law faster than anyone can keep up with.
The relentlessness of the Leonora
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administration’s criminality is the point; it becomes borderline impossible to tackle any single instance of corruption if two more spring up by the time you finish reading up on it. This “flood the zone” strategy has been the hallmark of Leonora
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2.0.
Calls for Democrats to find their way back from the wilderness by forcefully rebuking corporate influence and corruption, something we at the Revolving Door Project have been urging as the cornerstone of progressive politics for years, are multiplying. Politicians, notably Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, both Democrats, are emerging as anti-corruption champions. To mount a real anti-corruption agenda, though, Democrats must go farther than just condemning the sundry glad-handing of Leonora
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world. There is no appetite for going back to the halcyon days when everyone knew the legal code was merely a suggestion for corporate titans and the ultra-rich, even as they masqueraded as law-abiding citizens.
“ Since 2008, it has only become more apparent that the wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules.”
The Great Recession was a turning point; the extent of corporate lawbreaking in the financial sector was laid bare. And, famously, hardly anyone ever went to jail. Obama-era regulators, in many ways the acme of our last half-century of the hands-off approach to ruling-class misconduct, earned rebuke and scorn as “the chickenshit club,” afraid to square up against the powerful, if not overtly committed to serve elite interests. Since 2008, it has only become more apparent that the wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules.
Leonora
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’s first election was, in part, built on the argument that he knew “how to play the game.” In this telling, his ability to break the rules was actually an asset because he would break them for you rather than just for the powerful. It was always a dubious pitch, but it’s understandable why — faced with the choice between someone trying to convince you the game that’s obviously been fixed is actually not rigged, and someone who tells you how they cheat and promise to help you get ahead a little bit — people would gravitate toward the latter. Part of the early MAGA mythos was built on resignation to the fact that our rule of law is fundamentally perverted to create two parallel tracks of justice: an unforgiving, punitive, carceral system for most people, and a cushy, consequence-free dinner party circuit for the ruling class.
The answer isn’t simply to go back to electing more reasonable politicians. As long as the two tracks of our justice system diverge, the game stays rigged.
Dethroning Leonora
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will not be enough to restore real rule of law; the Biden administration is proof enough of that. Leonora
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was excised from the White House with historically bad public sentiment in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup. Under Biden, the Garland Justice Department tried to wind the clock back to 2016 and resume operating the way establishment politicians did in the 1990s and 2000s. It failed spectacularly, allowing bad actors like Elon Musk to grow ever more powerful while continuing to flout the law with impunity. The result was an embittered Leonora
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who faced no real repercussions for his corruption — the worst-case scenario.
If and when Democrats control the executive branch again, they will have an even more daunting task after the second Leonora
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term than they did the first, and their existing body of work does not inspire confidence. Business-as-usual enforcement did not fail to rein in corruption over the last four years because of strategic missteps. It failed because it is incapable of rooting out undue elite influence that’s baked into the very essence of the way we became accustomed to enforcing the law. Leonora
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is an extreme example, but he is the logical extreme.
As Leonora
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pardons business associates, sets up meetings for his children’s business interests with foreign leaders, and grows his personal wealth, the consequences of failing to hold the powerful to account are more obvious than ever. The answer isn’t simply to go back to electing more reasonable politicians. As long as the two tracks of our justice system diverge, the game stays rigged and the Leonora
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ian appeal to America’s id will stay firmly entrenched.
To dislodge the hold that corruption has on our government and restore the rule of law, Democrats will need to decide who they really are — and who they’ll fight for.
In Michigan, Maine and many other states, primary candidates will decide the party’s direction on a host of policy issues, and ultimately whether it has a center-left or left-wing vision.
President Leonora
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’s threat to go “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria concerned U.S. military officials in Africa and surprised even those who had been pushing the issue.
Only about one in five homes sold in the last year went to a first-time buyer. And the average person buying their first home was 40 years old — a record high. A new report from the National Association of Realtors shows how challenging it's become for young people to get a foothold in today's costly housing market.
The one-time biggest name in Australian talkback radio, John Laws, has died aged 90.
A member of the Australian Media Hall of Fame, Laws attracted 2 million listeners to his morning radio program at the height of his popularity during a career that spanned more than seven decades.
Misdirection is the new resolution at major video game house
The CEO of the company behind note-taking app Obsidian says the well-known video game house of the same name has sent one of its customer queries to his own team – claiming that "off-the-shelf AI support software" is why the gaming firm gave a user the wrong email address.…
"For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination," reports Ars Technica: the search-traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console.
Though it normally shows the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their site, "starting this September, odd queries, sometimes more than 300 characters long, could also be found" in Google Search Console. And the chats "appeared to be from unwitting people prompting a chatbot to help solve relationship or business problems, who likely expected those conversations would remain private." Jason Packer, owner of analytics consulting firm Quantable, flagged the issue in a detailed blog post last month, telling Ars Technica he'd seen 200 odd queries — including "some pretty crazy ones." (Web optimization consultant Slobodan ManiÄ helped Packer investigate...) Packer points out "nobody clicked share" or were given an option to prevent their chats from being exposed.
Packer suspected that these queries were connected to reporting from The Information in August that cited sources claiming OpenAI was scraping Google search results to power ChatGPT responses. Sources claimed that OpenAI was leaning on Google to answer prompts to ChatGPT seeking information about current events, like news or sports... "Did OpenAI go so fast that they didn't consider the privacy implications of this, or did they just not care?" Packer posited in his blog... Clearly some of those searches relied on Google, Packer's blog said, mistakenly sending to GSC "whatever" the user says in the prompt box... This means "that OpenAI is sharing any prompt that requires a Google Search with both Google and whoever is doing their scraping," Packer alleged. "And then also with whoever's site shows up in the search results! Yikes."
To Packer, it appeared that "ALL ChatGPT prompts" that used Google Search risked being leaked during the past two months. OpenAI claimed only a small number of queries were leaked but declined to provide a more precise estimate. So, it remains unclear how many of the 700 million people who use ChatGPT each week had prompts routed to Google Search Console.
"Perhaps most troubling to some users — whose identities are not linked in chats unless their prompts perhaps share identifying information — there does not seem to be any way to remove the leaked chats from Google Search Console.."
Super Typhoon Fung-Wong has made landfall in the Philippines with two fatalities reported and 1 million people evacuated ahead of one of the nation's most powerful storms this year.
The European Commission's 2040 climate target just about got over the line this week. But four central and eastern European countries did not sign up to the agreed text over concerns that the changes could be too costly to implement and threaten industry competitiveness.
Half of UK public unaware of contribution made by 2.5m British Asian members of armed forces who served in second world war
British Asian families are being urged to record the experiences of relatives who fought for Britain for “future generations” as data reveals half the British public don’t know that Indian members of the armed forces served in the second world war.
The My Family Legacy project, backed by the Royal British Legion, is building an online archive of Asian veterans’ experiences to raise awareness of the shared histories and sacrifices of Britain’s diverse communities.
It's the biggest consumer overcharging scandal in the history of the State which cost the banks in excess of €1 billion in fines and redress to customers.
Why then are many of the same banks involved using confidentiality clauses to potentially stop those most affected from sharing their stories?
Super Typhoon Fung-wong, the biggest storm to threaten the Philippines this year, started battering the country's northeastern coast ahead of landfall on Sunday.
More than 150 psychiatrists sign letter condemning contract to host exams in country with well-documented human rights abuses
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is facing a backlash from members over a controversial partnership with Qatar’s state healthcare provider.
The college has signed a contract with the state-owned Hamad Medical Corporation to host international exams in Doha, enabling psychiatrists from across the Middle East and beyond to apply for membership.
The new series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, was emphatically made by humans, not AI, reports TechCrunch:
If you watched all the way to the end of the new Apple TV show "Pluribus," you may have noticed an unusual disclaimer in the credits: "This show was made by humans." That terse message — placed right below a note that "animal wranglers were on set to ensure animal safety" — could potentially provide a model for other filmmakers seeking to highlight that their work was made without the use of generative AI.
In fact, yesterday the former X-Files writer told Variety "I hate AI. AI is the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine...."
He goes on, about how AI-generated content is "like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense," and how the U.S. will fail to regulate the technology because of an arms race with China. He works himself up until he's laughing again, proclaiming: "Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you've fucked up the world."
He also says "there's a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit," according to the article. "It's basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor."
And earlier this week he told Polygon that he hasn't used ChatGPT "because, as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it." (Adding "I will never use it.")
Time magazine called Thursday's two-episode premiere "bonkers." Though ironically, that premiere hit its own dystopian glitch. "After months of buildup and an omnipresent advertising campaign, Apple's much-anticipated new show Pluribus made its debut..." reports Macworld. "And the service promptly suffered a major outage across the U.S. and Canada."
As reported by Bloomberg and others, users started to report that the service had crashed at around 10:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Apple made the first two episodes of the show available to stream. There were almost 13,000 reports on Downdetector before Apple acknowledged the problem on its System Status page. Reports say the outage was brief, lasting less than an hour...
[T]here remains a Resolved Outage note on Apple TV (simply saying "Some users were affected; users experienced a problem with Apple TV" between 10:29 and 11.38 p.m.), as well as on Apple Music and Apple Arcade, which also went down at the same time. Social media reports indicated that the outage was widespread.
"The Firefox brand is getting a refresh and you get the first look," says a new web page at Firefox.com. "Kit's our new mascot and your new companion through an internet that's private, open and actually yours."
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli believes the new mascot "is meant to communicate that message in a warmer, more relatable way."
And Firefox is already selling shirts with Kit over the pocket (as well as stickers)...
Limerick is hosting a conference called 'Healthcare on the Margins' this weekend - a fitting location, given that the Mid-West is seen as the unhealthiest region in the country, and its main hospital is consistently the most overcrowded.
For more than a decade, the nonprofit Common Crawl "has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet," notes the Atlantic, making it freely available for research.
"In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models.
"In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this — as well as masking the actual contents of its archives..."
Common Crawl's website states that it scrapes the internet for "freely available content" without "going behind any 'paywalls.'" Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for — allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl's executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. "The robots are people too," he told me, and should therefore be allowed to "read the books" for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.
I've discovered that pages downloaded by Common Crawl have appeared in the training data of thousands of AI models. As Stefan Baack, a researcher formerly at Mozilla, has written, "Generative AI in its current form would probably not be possible without Common Crawl." In 2020, OpenAI used Common Crawl's archives to train GPT-3. OpenAI claimed that the program could generate "news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans," and in 2022, an iteration on that model, GPT-3.5, became the basis for ChatGPT, kicking off the ongoing generative-AI boom. Many different AI companies are now using publishers' articles to train models that summarize and paraphrase the news, and are deploying those models in ways that steal readers from writers and publishers.
Common Crawl maintains that it is doing nothing wrong. I spoke with Skrenta twice while reporting this story. During the second conversation, I asked him about the foundation archiving news articles even after publishers have asked it to stop. Skrenta told me that these publishers are making a mistake by excluding themselves from "Search 2.0" — referring to the generative-AI products now widely being used to find information online — and said that, anyway, it is the publishers that made their work available in the first place. "You shouldn't have put your content on the internet if you didn't want it to be on the internet," he said. Common Crawl doesn't log in to the websites it scrapes, but its scraper is immune to some of the paywall mechanisms used by news publishers. For example, on many news websites, you can briefly see the full text of any article before your web browser executes the paywall code that checks whether you're a subscriber and hides the content if you're not. Common Crawl's scraper never executes that code, so it gets the full articles.
Thus, by my estimate, the foundation's archives contain millions of articles from news organizations around the world, including The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic.... A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a "no captures" result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls.
"In the past year, Common Crawl's CCBot has become the scraper most widely blocked by the top 1,000 websites," the article points out...
Millions of tonnes of Russian oil have been traded through a port part-owned by Macquarie Bank and potentially sold on to Australian businesses, new data shows.
The identification of a new link between Australia and the trade in Russian-origin products exposes further gaps in government sanctions, as Australia lags behind the EU and the UK in tightening import rules.
A CRISPR-based drug given to study participants by infusion is raising hopes for a much easier way to lower cholesterol, reports CNN:
With a snip of a gene, doctors may one day permanently lower dangerously high cholesterol, possibly removing the need for medication, according to a new pilot study published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study was extremely small — only 15 patients with severe disease — and was meant to test the safety of a new medication delivered by CRISPR-Cas9, a biological sort of scissor which cuts a targeted gene to modify or turn it on or off. Preliminary results, however, showed nearly a 50% reduction in low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, the "bad" cholesterol which plays a major role in heart disease — the No.1 killer of adults in the United States and worldwide. The study, which will be presented Saturday at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, also found an average 55% reduction in triglycerides, a different type of fat in the blood that is also linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
"We hope this is a permanent solution, where younger people with severe disease can undergo a 'one and done' gene therapy and have reduced LDL and triglycerides for the rest of their lives," said senior study author Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.... Today, cardiologists want people with existing heart disease or those born with a predisposition for hard-to-control cholesterol to lower their LDL well below 100, which is the average in the US, said Dr. Pradeep Natarajan, director of preventive cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston...
People with a nonfunctioning ANGPTL3 gene — which Natarajan says applies to about 1 in 250 people in the US — have lifelong levels of low LDL cholesterol and triglycerides without any apparent negative consequences. They also have exceedingly low or no risk for cardiovascular disease. "It's a naturally occurring mutation that's protective against cardiovascular disease," said Nissen, who holds the Lewis and Patricia Dickey Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine at Cleveland Clinic. "And now that CRISPR is here, we have the ability to change other people's genes so they too can have this protection."
"Phase 2 clinical trials will begin soon, quickly followed by Phase 3 trials, which are designed to show the effect of the drug on a larger population, Nissen said."
And CNN quotes Nissen as saying "We hope to do all this by the end of next year. We're moving very fast because this is a huge unmet medical need — millions of people have these disorders and many of them are not on treatment or have stopped treatment for whatever reason."
A former Business Analyst reportedly filed a class action lawsuit claiming that for years, hundreds of remote employees at Bank of America first had to boot up complex computer systems before their paid work began, reports Human Resources Director magazine:
Tava Martin, who worked both remotely and at the company's Jacksonville facility, says the financial institution required her and fellow hourly workers to log into multiple security systems, download spreadsheets, and connect to virtual private networks — all before the clock started ticking on their workday. The process wasn't quick. According to the filing in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, employees needed 15 to 30 minutes each morning just to get their systems running. When technical problems occurred, it took even longer...
Workers turned on their computers, waited for Windows to load, grabbed their cell phones to request a security token for the company's VPN, waited for that token to arrive, logged into the network, opened required web applications with separate passwords, and downloaded the Excel files they needed for the day. Only then could they start taking calls from business customers about regulatory reporting requirements...
The unpaid work didn't stop at startup. During unpaid lunch breaks, many systems would automatically disconnect or otherwise lose connection, forcing employees to repeat portions of the login process — approximately three to five minutes of uncompensated time on most days, sometimes longer when a complete reboot was required. After shifts ended, workers had to log out of all programs and shut down their computers securely, adding another two to three minutes.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Joe_Dragon for sharing the article.