America's outgoing national security adviser has "wide access to the world's secrets," writes Axios, adding that the security adviser delivered a "chilling" warning that "The next few years will determine whether AI leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race."

But in addition, Sullivan "said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states... 'There's going to have to be a new model of relationship because of just the sheer capability in the hands of a private actor,' Sullivan says..." Somehow, government will have to join forces with these companies to nurture and protect America's early AI edge, and shape the global rules for using potentially God-like powers, he says. U.S. failure to get this right, Sullivan warns, could be "dramatic, and dramatically negative — to include the democratization of extremely powerful and lethal weapons; massive disruption and dislocation of jobs; an avalanche of misinformation..."

To distill Sullivan: America must quickly perfect a technology that many believe will be smarter and more capable than humans. We need to do this without decimating U.S. jobs, and inadvertently unleashing something with capabilities we didn't anticipate or prepare for. We need to both beat China on the technology and in shaping and setting global usage and monitoring of it, so bad actors don't use it catastrophically. Oh, and it can only be done with unprecedented government-private sector collaboration — and probably difficult, but vital, cooperation with China...

There's no person we know in a position of power in AI or governance who doesn't share Sullivan's broad belief in the stakes ahead...

That said, AI is like the climate: America could do everything right — but if China refuses to do the same, the problem persists and metastasizes fast. Sullivan said Trump, like Biden, should try to work with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a global AI framework, much like the world did with nuclear weapons.
"I personally am not an AI doomer," Sullivan says in the interview. "I am a person who believes that we can seize the opportunities of AI. But to do so, we've got to manage the downside risks, and we have to be clear-eyed and real about those risks."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank for sharing the article.

"As large-scale solar farms crop up across the U.S.," reports ABC News, "the booming solar industry has found an unlikely mascot..." Sheep. In Milam County, outside Austin [Texas], SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the country, capable of generating 900 megawatts of power across 4,000 acres (1,618 hectares). How do they manage all that grass? With the help of about 3,000 sheep, which are better suited than lawnmowers to fit between small crevices and chew away rain or shine. The proliferation of sheep on solar farms is part of a broader trend — solar grazing — that has exploded alongside the solar industry. Agrivoltaics, a method using land for both solar energy production and agriculture, is on the rise with more than 60 solar grazing projects in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The American Solar Grazing Association says 27 states engage in the practice. "The industry tends to rely on gas-powered mowers, which kind of contradicts the purpose of renewables," SB Energy asset manager James Hawkins said... Because solar fields use sunny, flat land that is often ideal for livestock grazing, the power plants have been used in coordination with farmers rather than against them....

Some agriculture experts say [solar sheepherders'] success reflects how solar farms have become a boon for some ranchers. Reid Redden, a sheep farmer and solar vegetation manager in San Angelo, Texas, said a successful sheep business requires agricultural land that has become increasingly scarce. "Solar grazing is probably the biggest opportunity that the sheep industry had in the United States in several generations," Redden said. The response to solar grazing has been overwhelmingly positive in rural communities near South Texas solar farms where Redden raises sheep for sites to use, he said. "I think it softens the blow of the big shock and awe of a big solar farm coming in," Redden said.

In 2022 Google released a tool to easily scan for vulnerabilities in dependencies named OSV-Scanner. "Together with the open source community, we've continued to build this tool, adding remediation features," according to Google's security blog, "as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats... Users looking for an out-of-the-box vulnerability scanning CLI tool should check out OSV-Scanner, which already provides comprehensive language package scanning capabilities..."

Thursday they also announced an extensible library for "software composition analysis" scanning (as well as file-system scanning) named OSV-SCALIBR (Open Source Vulnerability — Software Composition Analysis LIBRary). The new library "combines Google's internal vulnerability management expertise into one scanning library with significant new capabilities such as:

• Software composition analysis for installed packages, standalone binaries, as well as source code

• OSes package scanning on Linux (COS, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and much more), Windows, and Mac

• Artifact and lockfile scanning in major language ecosystems (Go, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and much more)

• Vulnerability scanning tools such as weak credential detectors for Linux, Windows, and Mac

• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation in SPDX and CycloneDX, the two most popular document formats

• Optimization for on-host scanning of resource constrained environments where performance and low resource consumption is critical

"OSV-SCALIBR is now the primary software composition analysis engine used within Google for live hosts, code repos, and containers. It's been used and tested extensively across many different products and internal tools to help generate SBOMs, find vulnerabilities, and help protect our users' data at Google scale. We offer OSV-SCALIBR primarily as an open source Go library today, and we're working on adding its new capabilities into OSV-Scanner as the primary CLI interface."

CNN has the latest on "a startling discovery made public in July that metallic rocks were apparently producing oxygen on the Pacific Ocean's seabed, where no light can penetrate.

"Initial research suggested potato-size nodules rich in metals, predominantly found 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) below the surface in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, released an electrical charge, splitting seawater into oxygen and hydrogen through electrolysis." The unprecedented natural phenomenon challenges the idea that oxygen can only be made from sunlight via photosynthesis. Andrew Sweetman, a professor at the UK's Scottish Association for Marine Science who was behind the find, is embarking on a three-year project to investigate the production of "dark" oxygen further... Uncovering dark oxygen revealed just how little is known about the deep ocean, and the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ, in particular. The region is being explored for the deep-sea mining of rare metals contained in the rock nodules. The latter are formed over millions of years, and the metals play a key role in new and green technologies...

Understanding the phenomenon better could also help space scientists find life beyond Earth, [Sweetman] added... Officials at NASA are interested in the research on dark oxygen production because it could inform scientific understanding of how life might be sustained on other planets without direct sunlight, Sweetman said. The space agency wants to run experiments to understand the amount of energy required to potentially produce oxygen at higher pressures that occur on Enceladus and Europa, the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, respectively, he added. Those moons are among the targets for investigating the possibility of life.

Deep-sea mining companies are aiming to mine the cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium and manganese contained in the nodules for use in solar panels, electric car batteries and other green technology. Some companies have taken issue with Sweetman's research. Critics say deep-sea mining could irrevocably damage the pristine underwater environment and that it could disrupt the way carbon is stored in the ocean, contributing to the climate crisis.
CNN's article also notes Massachusetts microbiologist Emil Ruff, who found unexpected oxygen far below the Canadian prairie in water isolated from the atmosphere for more than 40,000 years.

"Nature keeps surprising us," he said. "There are so many things that people have said, 'Oh, this is impossible,' and then later it turns out it's not."

Jersey is an island in the English channel, "a self-governing British Crown Dependency near the coast of northwest France," according to Wikipedia — population: 103,267.

But now some residents of Jersey "have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of 'forever chemicals' in their blood," reports the Guardian, "after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems." Private drinking water supplies in Jersey were polluted by the use of firefighting foams containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) at the island's airport, which were manufactured by the U.S. multinational 3M. .. Bloodletting draws blood from a vein in measured amounts. It is safe and the body replenishes the blood naturally, but it must be repeated until clean...

In response to the blood results, the government established an independent PFAS scientific advisory panel to advise public policy. The panel's first report recommended that the government should look at offering bloodletting to affected residents. "Studies show that bloodletting is an effective way to lower levels of PFAS in blood," said Ian Cousins, one of the panel members, though he added that there were no guarantees the process would prevent or cure diseases associated with the chemicals. The therapy costs about £100,000 upfront and then as much as £200,000 a year to treat 50 people. The panel is also considering the benefit of the drug cholestyramine, which a study has shown reduces PFAS in blood more quickly and cheaply, albeit with possible side effects. The government says it plans to launch a clinical service by early 2025.

Contamination persisted on the island for decades. "We know they started to use 3M's firefighting foam in the 1960s and then ramped up in the 1990s in weekly fire training exercises, after which foam started to appear in nearby streams," said Jeremy Snowdon, a former Jersey airport engineer who drank contaminated water for years. He has measured elevated levels of PFAS in his own blood and has high cholesterol.
The article includes this quote from one of the 88 residents of the polluted area found to have high levels of PFAS after blood testing. "I just want this out of my body. I don't want to end up with bladder cancer."

A new law is being considered by New York's state legislature, reports a local news outlet, which "if passed, will require anyone buying a 3D printer to pass a background check. If you can't legally own a firearm, you won't be able to buy one of these printers..." It is illegal to print most gun parts in New York. Attorney Greg Rinckey believes the proposal is an overreach. "I think this is also gonna face some constitutional problems. I mean, it really comes down to a legal parsing of what are you printing and at what point is it technically a firearm...?"

[Ascent Fabrication owner Joe] Fairley thinks lawmakers should shift their focus on those partial gun kits that produce the metal firing components. Another possibility is to require printer manufacturers to install software that prevents gun parts from being printed. "They would need to agree on some algorithm to look at the part and say nope, that is a gun component, you're not allowed to print that part somehow," said Fairley. "But I feel like it would be extremely difficult to get to that point."

America's Federal Trade Commission has been "raising antitrust concerns" about them for years, reports NBC News.

The latest? America's three largest drug middlemen "inflated the costs of numerous life-saving medications by billions of dollars over the past few years, the FTC said in a report Tuesday." The top pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna's Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx — generated roughly $7.3 billion through price hikes over about five years starting in 2017, the FTC said. The "excess" price hikes affected generic drugs used to treat heart disease, HIV and cancer, among other conditions, with some increases more than 1,000% of the national average costs of acquiring the medications, the commission said. The FTC also said these so-called Big Three health care companies — which it estimates administer 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S. — are inflating drug prices "at an alarming rate, which means there is an urgent need for policymakers to address it...."

Some of the steepest drug markups were "hundreds and thousands of percent," according to Tuesday's report, which highlights just how profitable specialty drugs have become for the three leading PBMs. Cancer drugs alone made up nearly half of the $7.3 billion, the commission wrote, with multiple sclerosis medications accounting for another 25%. Dispensing highly marked-up specialty drugs was a massive income stream for the companies in 2021, the FTC found. Out of tens of thousands of drugs dispensed, the top 10 specialty generics alone made up nearly 11% of the companies' pharmacy-related operating income that year, the agency estimated. Across the 51 drugs the agency analyzed, the Big Three's price-markup revenue surged from $522 million in 2017 to $2.1 billion in 2021, the report said.
"The FTC found that 22 percent of specialty drugs dispensed by PBM-affiliated pharmacies were marked up by more than 1,000 percent," reports The Hill, "while 41 percent were marked up between 100 and 1,000 percent. Among those drugs marked up by more than 1,000 percent, half of them were marked up by more than 2,000 percent."

And the nonprofit site progressive news site Common Dreams shares some examples from the FTC's 60-page report: "For the pulmonary hypertension drug tadalafil (generic Adcirca), for example, pharmacies purchased the drug at an average of $27 in 2022, yet the Big Three PBMs marked up the drug by $2,079 and paid their affiliated pharmacies $2,106, on average, for a 30-day supply of the medication on commercial claims," the publication notes. That's a staggering average markup of 7,736%... The new analysis follows a July 2024 report that revealed Big Three PBM-affiliated pharmacies received 68% of the dispensing revenue generated by specialty drugs in 2023, a 14% increase from 2016...

Responding to the FTC report, Emma Freer, senior policy analyst for healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project — a corporate accountability and antitrust advocacy group — said in a statement Tuesday that "the FTC's second interim report lays bare the blatant profiteering by PBM giants, which are marking up lifesaving drugs like cancer, HIV, and multiple sclerosis treatments by thousands of percent and forcing patients to pay the price."

Sales of electric vehicles and hybrids reached 20% of new car sales in the U.S. last year, with Tesla maintaining dominance in the EV market despite a slight decline in market share. CNBC reports: Auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports more than 3.2 million "electrified" vehicles were sold last year, or 1.9 million hybrid vehicles, including plug-in models, and 1.3 million all-electric models. Traditional vehicles with gas or diesel internal combustion engines still made up the majority of sales, but declined to 79.8%, falling under 80% for the first time in modern automotive history, according to the data.

Regarding sales of pure EVs, Tesla continued to dominate, but Cox Automotive estimated its annual sales fell and its market share dropped to about 49%, down from 55% in 2023. The Tesla Model Y and Model 3 were estimated to be the bestselling EVs in 2024. Following Tesla in EV sales was Hyundai Motor, including Kia, at 9.3% of EV market share; General Motors at 8.7%; and then Ford Motor at 7.5%, according to Motor Intelligence. BMW rounded out the top five at 4.1%. The EV market in the U.S. is highly competitive: Of the 68 mainstream EV models tracked by Cox's Kelley Blue Book, 24 models posted year-over-year sales increases; 17 models were all new to the market; and 27 decreased in volume.

An anonymous reader shares a report: FBI leaders have warned that they believe hackers who broke into AT&T's system last year stole months of their agents' call and text logs, setting off a race within the bureau to protect the identities of confidential informants, a document reviewed by Bloomberg News shows.

FBI officials told agents across the country that details about their use on the telecom carrier's network were believed to be among the billions of records stolen, according to the document and interviews with a current and a former law enforcement official. They asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information. Data from all FBI devices under the bureau's AT&T service for public safety agencies were presumed taken, the document shows.

The cache of hacked AT&T records didn't reveal the substance of communications but, according to the document, could link investigators to their secret sources. The data was believed to include agents' mobile phone numbers and the numbers with which they called and texted, the document shows. Records for calls and texts that weren't on the AT&T network, such as through encrypted messaging apps, weren't part of the stolen data.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it's sold by its China-based parent company, holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.

A sale does not appear imminent and, although experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users' phones once the law takes effect on Jan. 19, new users won't be able to download it and updates won't be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department has said in court filings.

According to Axios, Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law. From the report: In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google's global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission's new Disinformation Code of Practice "simply isn't appropriate or effective for our services" and said Google won't commit to it. The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google's search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms.

Walker said Google's current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year's "unprecedented cycle of global elections" as proof. He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos "has significant potential." (That program is similar to X's Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)

The EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on. The Code, originally created in 2018, predates the EU's new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in 2022.

The Commission has held private discussions over the past year with tech companies, urging them to convert the voluntary measures into an official code of conduct under the DSA. Walker said in his letter Thursday that Google had already told the Commission that it didn't plan to comply. Google will "pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA Code of Conduct," he wrote. He said Google will continue to invest in improvements to its current content moderation practices, which focus on providing people with more information about their search results through features like Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube.

Megan Hellerer, a career coach and founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers, offers an alternative to the relentless "hustle culture" and "destinational living" mindsets, which often emphasize long-term goals at the expense of present happiness. "There's another way and I call it directional living," writes Hellerer. "Here's the catch: I can't find fulfilment for you. The good news is that it's all up to you..." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report published by The Guardian: Directional living is like the scientific method but for life. You begin with a hypothesis -- your best guess as to the direction of a loose "something bigger". You conduct tests and collect data through your experiences, refining your life hypothesis as you go.

If you have a hypothesis that involves living on the beach, you may test that by renting a house on the coast for one month and collecting data on how right, or not, that is for you. The goal is not to permanently relocate but to find out whether you want to continue exploring that path. Success is in finding what's true, not in proving your original theory correct.

I've found this idea speaks uniquely to UFOAs at this moment in time. [UFOA is a term Hellerer came up with that stands for "underfulfilled overachiever." This describes a constant striver who is living a great-on-paper life, yet feels disconnected from their work, life and self.] The closest thing I have to a personal motto is a quotation that's widely attributed to Carl Jung but that, as it turns out, he never actually said at all. "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." My greatest hope for you is that you get to live this privilege fully.

Google has partnered with Indian startup Varaha to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030, marking its largest deal in India and the largest involving biochar, a carbon removal solution made from biomass. TechCrunch reports: The offtake agreement credits will be delivered to Google by 2030 from Varaha's industrial biochar project in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the two firms said on Thursday. [...] Biochar is produced in two ways: artisanal and industrial. The artisanal method is community-driven, where farmers burn crop residue in conical flasks without using machines. In contrast, industrial biochar is made using large reactors that process 50-60 tons of biomass daily.

Varaha's project will generate industrial biochar from an invasive plant species, Prosopis Juliflora, using its pyrolysis facility in Gujarat. The invasive species impacts plant biodiversity and has overtaken grasslands used for livestock. Varaha will harvest the plant and make efforts to restore native grasslands in the region, the company's co-founder and CEO Madhur Jain said in an interview. Once the biochar is produced, a third-party auditor will submit their report to Puro.Earth to generate credits. Although biochar is seen as a long-term carbon removal solution, its permanence can vary between 1,000 and 2,500 years depending on production and environmental factors.

Jain told TechCrunch that Varaha tried using different feedstocks and different parameters within its reactors to find the best combination to achieve permanence close to 1,600 years. The startup has also built a digital monitoring, reporting and verification system, integrating remote sensing to monitor biomass availability. It even has a mobile app that captures geo-tagged, time-stamped images to geographically document activities, including biomass excavation and biochar's field application. With its first project, Varaha said it processed at least 40,000 tons of biomass and produced 10,000 tons of biochar last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Toyota Motor unit Hino Motors has agreed a $1.6 billion settlement with U.S. agencies and will plead guilty over excess diesel engine emissions in more than 105,000 U.S. vehicles, the company and U.S. government said on Wednesday. The Japanese truck and engine manufacturer was charged with fraud in U.S. District Court in Detroit for unlawfully selling 105,000 heavy-duty diesel engines in the United States from 2010 through 2022 that did not meet emissions standards. The settlement, which still must be approved by a U.S. judge, includes a criminal penalty of $521.76 million, $442.5 million in civil penalties to U.S. authorities and $236.5 million to California.

A company-commissioned panel said in a report in 2022 Hino had falsified emissions data on some engines going back to at least 2003. Hino agreed to plead guilty to engaging in a multi-year criminal conspiracy and serve a five-year term of probation, during which it will be barred from importing any diesel engines it has manufactured into the U.S., and carry out a comprehensive compliance and ethics program, the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency said. [...] The settlement includes a mitigation program, valued at $155 million, to offset excess air emissions from the violations by replacing marine and locomotive engines, and a recall program, valued at $144.2 million, to fix engines in 2017-2019 heavy-duty trucks

The EPA said Hino admitted that between 2010 and 2019, it submitted false applications for engine certification approvals and altered emission test data, conducted tests improperly and fabricated data without conducting any underlying tests. Hino President Satoshi Ogiso said the company had improved its internal culture, oversight and compliance practices. "This resolution is a significant milestone toward resolving legacy issues that we have worked hard to ensure are no longer a part of Hino's operations or culture," he said in a statement. Toyota's Hino Motors isn't the only automaker to admit to selling vehicles with excess diesel emissions. Volkswagen had to pay billions in fines after it admitted in 2015 to cheating emissions tests by installing "defeat devices" and sophisticated software in nearly 11 million vehicles worldwide. Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), BMW, Opel/Vauxhall (General Motors), and Fiat Chrysler have been implicated in similar practices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a news organization and press freedom groups. The rare reversal from the iPhone maker on its heavily marketed Apple Intelligence feature comes after the technology produced misleading or altogether false summaries of news headlines that appear almost identical to regular push notifications.

On Thursday, Apple deployed a beta software update to developers that disabled the AI feature for news and entertainment headlines, which it plans to later roll out to all users while it works to improve the AI feature. The company plans to re-enable the feature in a future update. As part of the update, the company said the Apple Intelligence summaries, which users must opt into, will more explicitly emphasize that the information has been produced by AI, signaling that it may sometimes produce inaccurate results.

U.S. President Joe Biden has issued a comprehensive cybersecurity executive order, four days before leaving office, mandating improvements to government network monitoring, software procurement, AI usage, and foreign hacker penalties.

The 40-page directive aims to leverage AI's security benefits, implement digital identities for citizens, and address vulnerabilities that have allowed Chinese and Russian intrusions into U.S. government systems. It requires software vendors to prove secure development practices and gives the Commerce Department eight months to establish mandatory cybersecurity standards for government contractors.

Raw drinking water sources across England are polluted with toxic forever chemicals, new analysis has revealed, prompting the water sector to demand that ministers ban the substances and polluters pay for the astronomical cleanup costs. The Guardian: The areas covered by Affinity Water and Anglian Water were found to be particularly badly affected, and experts have said they fear "we are drastically underestimating the size of the problem." There are more than 10,000 PFAS in use, known as forever chemicals because they do not break down in the environment.

[...] In an unprecedented move, the industry body Water UK has said it "wants to see PFAS banned and the development of a national plan to remove it from the environment which should be paid for by manufacturers." It described PFAS pollution as a "huge global challenge" and said: "The UK's tap water is rated as the safest in the world, and companies are already taking action to reduce PFAS levels further." In an attempt to tackle the problem, the EU is considering a proposal to regulate all 10,000 or so PFAS together, but the PFAS industry is lobbying against it and the UK has no plans to follow suit.

Sweden has begun constructing a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Forsmark, making it only the second country after Finland to build such a site. It is not expected to be completed until the 2080s, but once finished, it will securely house radioactive waste for up to 100,000 years. Reuters reports: The Forsmark final repository, about 150 kilometers north of Stockholm on Sweden's east coast, will consist of 60 km of tunnels buried 500 meters down in 1.9 billion year old bedrock. It will be the final home for 12,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, encased in 5 meter long, corrosion-resistent copper capsules that will be packed in clay and buried. The facility will take its first waste in the late 2030s but will not be completed until around 2080 when the tunnels will be backfilled and closed, Sweden's Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) said. [...]

The Forsmark repository will cost around 12 billion crowns($1.08 billion) and be paid for by the nuclear industry, SKB said. It will have room to hold all the waste produced by Sweden's nuclear power plants. However, it will not hold fuel from future reactors. Sweden plans to build 10 more reactors by 2045.

The FTC is issuing refunds for 6,764 customers who purchased Razer's Zephyr face mask, which falsely advertised as meeting N95 standards. GameSpot reports: In May 2024, the FTC announced that a settlement was reached with Razer for more than $1 million. The fine occurred because Razer claimed its face mask met N95 requirements, even though it was never submitted for certification to test whether it removed 95% of airborne particles, per the FTC.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Razer revealed the N95 face mask with RGB lighting and voice amplification at CES in January 2021. The Razer Zephyr face mask eventually launched in October 2021 for $100. However, just months later in January 2022, Razer removed the N95 claims about the face mask.

At the time of the settlement with the FTC, Razer stated that it disagreed with the agency's allegations and didn't "admit to any wrongdoing." Meanwhile, the FTC says checks must be cashed within 90 days for the Zephyr face mask refunds, while PayPal payments need to be redeemed within 30 days.

Independent developer Sebastian Vogelsang is building a photo-sharing app for the decentralized social network Bluesky, leveraging its AT Protocol and his earlier app, Skeets. The app, called Flashes, will offer features like photo and short video posts while integrating seamlessly with Bluesky. TechCrunch reports: When launched, Flashes could tap into growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech's social media monopoly. [...] To make this work, Flashes simply filters Bluesky's existing timeline for posts with photos and video posts. (In the future, Vogelsang also plans to add metadata to Flashes' posts so Bluesky users would have a way to keep their feeds on Bluesky's main app from being flooded with photo posts if that became a problem.) Flashes didn't take too long to build because it was able to reuse Skeets' existing code. The app will also be able to market to Skeets' existing user base, who have now downloaded the app some 30,500 times to date.

Vogelsang says he's now working to integrate subscription-based features from both his apps so users don't have to pay twice for the premium features, like Skeets' bookmarks, drafts, muting, rich push notifications, and others specific to Flashes. (Both apps are free to use without a subscription, we should note.) Later, Vogelsang says he wants to launch a video-only app, too, called Blue Screen.

At launch, Flashes will support photo posts of up to four images and videos of up to 1 minute in length, just like Bluesky. Users who post to Flashes will also have their posts appear on Bluesky and comments on those posts will also feed back into the app as if it were just another Bluesky client. It will also support Bluesky's direct messages. The developer expects to be able to launch Flashes to the public in a matter of weeks with a TestFlight beta arriving ahead of that. Interested users can follow Flashes' account on Bluesky for further updates. Flashes could satiate the growing demand for alternatives to Big Tech's social media monopoly, especially after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he will end fact-checking on its platforms.