"Pornhub has disabled its site in Texas," reports the Hill, "to object to a state law that requires the company to verify the age of users to prevent minors from accessing the site." Texas residents who visit the site are met with a message from the company that criticizes the state's elected officials who are requiring them to track the age of users. The company said the newly passed law impinges on "the rights of adults to access protected speech" and fails to pass strict scrutiny by "employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors." Pornhub said safety and compliance are "at the forefront" of the company's mission, but having users provide identification every time they want to access the site is "not an effective solution for protecting users online... Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible," the message said, adding that "very few sites are able to compare the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place."
The article adds that the state's attorney general is suing the owners of Pornhub for $1.6 million failing to enact age verification, plus an additional $10,000 a day.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for sharing the news.

"Workers at an Amazon air hub in Kentucky celebrated a victory Thursday," reports the Washington Post, "after federal labor regulators found that Amazon violated labor law by trying to prevent workers there from unionizing." The employees have been demanding higher pay, more flexible schedules and safer working conditions since 2022. After a months-long investigation, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Amazon last week, alleging the e-commerce behemoth illegally attempted to curtail those efforts by interrogating workers, threatening to call the police on them and demoting workers involved in union organizing.

The complaint is a victory for union organizers at a crucial air cargo hub in Kentucky who have been alleging that Amazon has been unfairly interfering with their unionization efforts there for months.... Amazon workers at various sites around the country have been trying to unionize for years, with little to show for it. Many have accused Amazon of using illegal tactics to discourage workers from supporting unions — more than 240 such charges have been filed with the labor board, workers said... Amazon employee Marcio Rodriguez said he was threatened with termination for his union-organizing activity along with 10 co-workers. For two weeks, Rodriguez said, Amazon management would "show up to where I was working out on the ramp in front of my co-workers in a truck and take me to the HR office," where they would interrogate him...

Amazon workers in Kentucky are seeking to form Amazon Labor Union, an independent but associated branch of the group that won a historic victory at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island in 2021. Lawyers for the union there are still battling Amazon, which has yet to come to the bargaining table and continues to argue that the NLRB unfairly sided with workers during that election. More recently, the company has argued in another New York case that the National Labor Relations Board itself is structured unconstitutionally, following legal arguments set forth by lawyers for SpaceX and Trader Joe's...

Amazon is scheduled to appear at a hearing before labor regulators regarding its alleged anti-union activities in Kentucky on April 22.

"Until recently, Linux kernel developers have been the ones keeping long-term support (LTS) versions of the Linux kernel patched and up to date," writes ZDNet.

"Then, because it was too much work with too little support, the Linux kernel developers decided to no longer support the older kernels." Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, announced that the Linux 4.14.336 release was the last maintenance update to the six-year-old LTS Linux 4.14 kernel series. It was the last of the line for 4.14. Or was it?

Kroah-Hartman had stated, "All users of the 4.14 kernel series must upgrade." Maybe not. OpenELA, a trade association of the Linux distributors CIQ (the company backing Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE, is now offering — via its kernel-lts — a new lease on life for 4.14.

This renewed version, tagged with the following format — x.y.z-openela — is already out as v4.14.339-openela. The OpenELA acknowledges the large debt they owe to Kroah-Hartman and Sasha Levin of the Linux Kernel Stable project but underlines that their project is not affiliated with them or any of the other upstream stable maintainers. That said, the OpenELA team will automatically pull most LTS-maintained stable tree patches from the upstream stable branches. When there are cases where patches can't be applied cleanly, OpenELA kernel-lts maintainers will deal with these issues. In addition, a digest of non-applied patches will accompany each release of its LTS kernel, in mbox format.
"The OpenELA kernel-lts project is the first forum for enterprise Linux distribution vendors to pool our resources," an Oracle Linux SVP tells ZDNet, "and collaborate on those older kernels after upstream support for those kernels has ended." And the CEO of CIQ adds that after community support has ended, "We believe that open collaboration is the best way to maintain foundational enterprise infrastructure.

"Through OpenELA, vendors, users, and the open source community at large can work together to provide the longevity that professional IT organizations require for enterprise Linux."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: America's first commercial-scale offshore wind farm is officially open, a long-awaited moment that helps pave the way for a succession of large wind farms. Danish wind energy developer Orsted and the utility Eversource built a 12-turbine wind farm called South Fork Wind 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul went to Long Island Thursday to announce that the turbines are delivering clean power to the local electric grid, flipping a massive light switch to "turn on the future." Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was also on hand.

Achieving commercial scale is a turning point for the industry, but what's next? Experts say the nation needs a major buildout of this type of clean electricity to address climate change. Offshore wind is central to both national and state plans to transition to a carbon-free electricity system. The Biden administration has approved six commercial-scale offshore wind energy projects, and auctioned lease areas for offshore wind for the first time off the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts. New York picked two more projects last month to power more than 1 million homes. This is just the beginning, Hochul said. She said the completion of South Fork shows that New York will aggressively pursue climate change solutions to save future generations from a world that otherwise could be dangerous. South Fork can generate 132 megawatts of offshore wind energy to power more than 70,000 homes.

"It's great to be first, we want to make sure we're not the last. That's why we're showing other states how it can be done, why we're moving forward, on to other projects," Hochul told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview before the announcement. "This is the date and the time that people will look back in the history of our nation and say, 'This is when it changed,'" Hochul added. South Fork will generate more than four times the power of a five-turbine pilot project developed earlier off the coast of Rhode Island, and unlike that subsidized test project, was developed after Orsted and Eversource were chosen in a competitive bidding process to supply power to Long Island. Orsted CEO Mads Nipper called the opening a major milestone that proves large offshore wind farms can be built, both in the United States and in other countries with little or no offshore wind energy currently.
Another large U.S. offshore wind farm began producing energy in January, with plans to eventually power 62 turbines, enough to generate electricity for 400,000 homes.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. From a report: The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user's own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26 million to settle the FTC's charges.)

The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went "undercover" against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives. "Since at least January 2018, Defendants have operated a tech support scheme that has bilked tens of millions of dollars from consumers, particularly older consumers," the FTC's complaint reads. The complaint is seeking a permanent injunction against the two companies as well as monetary relief.

Sheraz Sadiq reports via Oregon Public Broadcasting: An area that's nearly half the size of New Jersey in southern Oregon was recently named the world's largest dark sky sanctuary by DarkSky International. The nonprofit works to combat light pollution through advocacy and conservation, including a program that has certified more than 200 places around the world to protect the night sky. The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary spans 2.5 million acres of mostly public land in eastern Lake County, and could eventually grow to more than four times that size to include parts of Harney and Malheur Counties. To win certification as a Dark Sky Sanctuary, the applicants had to work with numerous stakeholders to draw the site's boundaries, monitor night sky quality, inventory outdoor lights and replace more than 60 lights on public and private lands. With the inclusion of parts of Harney and Malheur Counties, the sanctuary would surpass 11 million acres, notes KLCC. More than half of the area is under the control of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation. Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping's government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.

The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China's Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters. Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing's tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. "We wanted them chasing ghosts," one of these former officials said. [...]

The CIA operation came in response to years of aggressive covert efforts by China aimed at increasing its global influence, the sources said. During his presidency, Trump pushed a tougher response to China than had his predecessors. The CIA's campaign signaled a return to methods that marked Washington's struggle with the former Soviet Union. "The Cold War is back," said Tim Weiner, author of a book on the history of political warfare. Reuters was unable to determine the impact of the secret operations or whether the administration of President Joe Biden has maintained the CIA program.

Refund fraud groups are exploiting lenient refund policies, resulting in significant losses for retailers like Amazon and prompting civil lawsuits and arrests. The scheme has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. CNBC reports: Fraud groups are taking advantage of retailers' lenient return policies, experts told CNBC, which often include unlimited free returns and sometimes even a preference that customers keep the items. It's ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. The figure includes multiple forms of fraud, such as sending back clothing after it's been worn, known as "wardrobing," and returning shoplifted merchandise, the survey said.

In December, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Page and 47 other people across the globe with alleged ties to Rekk, accusing them of conspiring to steal millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation. Amazon described these services as "illegitimate 'businesses'" that look to "exploit the refund process for their own financial gain to the detriment of honest consumers and retailers who must bear the brunt of increased costs, decreased inventory, and service disruption that impacts genuine customers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue "head on" through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud.

Here's how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount. The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says investigators still do not know who worked on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 door plug involved in a Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines midair emergency and that video footage was overwritten. From a report: NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a letter to senators that investigators sought security camera footage when the door plug was opened and closed in September but were informed the material was overwritten. "The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB's investigation moving forward," Homendy said. "To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft."

The NTSB said previously four key bolts were missing from the door plug that blew out on the plane. Last week, Homendy said she spoke to Boeing CEO David Calhoun "and asked for the names of the people who performed the work. He stated he was unable to provide that information and maintained that Boeing has no records of the work being performed." Boeing said it "will continue supporting this investigation in the transparent and proactive fashion we have supported all regulatory inquiries into this accident. We have worked hard to honor the rules about the release of investigative information." A Boeing official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the planemaker standard practice is to overwrite security videos after 30 days.

At this year's SXSW festival, discussions on artificial intelligence's future sparked controversy during screenings of premiers like "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate." Variety reports: The quick-turnaround video editors at SXSW cut a daily sizzle reel highlighting previous panels, premieres and other events, which then runs before festival screenings. On Tuesday, the fourth edition of that daily video focused on the wide variety of keynotes and panelists in town to discuss AI. Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Underwater speakers that broadcast the hustle and bustle of thriving coral could bring life back to more damaged and degraded reefs that are in danger of becoming ocean graveyards, researchers say. Scientists working off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean found that coral larvae were up to seven times more likely to settle at a struggling reef where they played recordings of the snaps, groans, grunts and scratches that form the symphony of a healthy ecosystem. "We're hoping this may be something we can combine with other efforts to put the good stuff back on the reef," said Nadeege Aoki at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "You could leave a speaker out for a certain amount of time and it could be attracting not just coral larvae but fish back to the reef."

The world has lost half its coral reefs since the 1950s through the devastating impact of global heating, overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and outbreaks of disease. The hefty declines have fueled efforts to protect remaining reefs through approaches that range from replanting with nursery-raised corals to developing resilient strains that can withstand warming waters. Aoki and her colleagues took another tack, building on previous research which showed that coral larvae swim towards reef sounds. They set up underwater speakers at three reefs off St John, the smallest of the US Virgin Islands, and measured how many coral larvae, held in sealed containers of filtered sea water, settled on to pieces of rock-like ceramic in the containers up to 30 meters from the speakers.

While the researchers installed speakers at all three sites, they only played sounds from a thriving reef at one: the degraded Salt Pond reef, which was bathed in the marine soundscape for three nights. The other two sites, the degraded Cocoloba and the healthier Tektite reefs were included for comparison. When coral larvae are released into the water column they are carried on the currents, and swim freely, before finding a spot to settle. Once they drop to the ocean floor, they become fixed to the spot and -- if they survive -- mature into adults. Writing in the Royal Society Open Science journal, the researchers describe how, on average, 1.7 times more coral larvae settled at the Salt Pond reef than at the other sites where no reef sounds were played. The settlement rates at Salt Pond dropped with distance from the speaker, suggesting the broadcasts were responsible. While the results are promising, Aoki said more work is afoot to understand whether other coral species respond to reef sounds in the same way, and whether the corals thrive after settling. "You have to be very thoughtful about the application of this technology," Aoki added. "You don't want to encourage them to settle where they will die. It really has to be a multi-pronged effort with steps in place to ensure the survival of these corals and their growth over time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: We are often told that setting the bar high is key to success. After all, if you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you'll land with the stars. But Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wants privileged Gen Z grads to lower their expectations. "People with very high expectations have very low resilience -- and unfortunately, resilience matters in success," Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations."

Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe. The university is one of the most selective in the United States -- it ranks third best in the country, according to the QS World University Rankings, and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, not even the best universities in the world can teach you resilience. "I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you," Huang added. [...]

For those fortunate enough to never have personally experienced hardship growing up, Huang doesn't have any advice on how to welcome more of it into your life now. But he did have some advice on embracing tough times. "I don't know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said. "Greatness comes from character and character isn't formed out of smart people -- it's formed out of people who suffered."It's why despite Nvidia's success -- the company has a $2 trillion market cap -- Huang would still welcome hardship at his organization."To this day I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee," he added. "I mean that in a happy way because you want to refine the character of your company." Essentially, if you want your workforce to always be on their A game, don't let them rest on their laurels.

Roman Sterlingov, the founder of a $400 million crypto-mixing service called Bitcoin Fog, has been convicted of money laundering in a United State District Court on Tuesday. Other charges include money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act. CoinTelegraph reports: Sterlingov, however, had argued throughout the trial that he was only a user of the service, and not its operator. His attorney, Tok Ekeland said in a March 12 X post that his team will appeal the verdict. According to evidence presented at the trial, Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog from October 2011 to April 2021, which acted as a money laundering service for "criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement."

The service moved over 1.2 million Bitcoin over the decade-long operation -- worth $400 million at the time of the transactions -- with the bulk of cryptocurrency coming from darknet marketplaces tied to narcotics, computer fraud abuse and identity theft, the government said. Bitcoin Fog also served distributors of child sexual abuse material. Evidence used to convict Sterlingov found that the "vast majority" of crypto deposited to his crypto exchange accounts came from "Bitcoin clusters" associated with Bitcoin Fog. "Evidence presented at trial clearly showed that the defendant laundered hundreds of millions of illicit funds from the dark web through Bitcoin Fog in an attempt to conceal the origin of those funds," said Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation Chief Jim Lee.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...]

Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end affirmative action in college admissions, there has been increased scrutiny on legacy admissions -- the practice of giving special considerations to the relatives of alumni. Critics say this practice disproportionately benefits white students from wealthy backgrounds. Much of the discussion and research on legacy admissions focuses on Ivy League and other highly selective schools, but these colleges enroll only a small share of students. How widespread is the practice of legacy admissions? Is it common among public colleges? Brookings: In this report, we document the prevalence of legacy admissions, as reported by colleges, across higher education around the time of the SFFA decision. Legacy admissions were more often used at selective and private institutions, but a substantial minority of public and less selective institutions also considered legacy status in admissions. The use of legacy preferences appears to have been most common in the Northeast and South and least common in the West. There is substantial -- but incomplete -- overlap in the colleges that considered legacy status and those that practiced affirmative action (AA) prior to SFFA. A number of colleges, including some public colleges, said they considered relationships to alumni but not racial identity in admissions.

While most state flagships don't consider legacy status in admissions, half have at least one scholarship opportunity that is catered to legacy students. Because the data are available with a lag, we do not know how many colleges have changed their legacy admissions policies in response to the Court's decision on affirmative action, but press reports and our conversations with admissions representatives indicate that some colleges have changed course in the past few years, including at least five state flagships.

The effect of legacy preferences on who enrolls at a particular university may not be substantial overall. Many of the colleges that use legacy admissions are not that selective, and the scholarships for relatives of alumni are typically small. Still, even if the number of students directly displaced by legacies who had a leg up is ultimately not that large, the practice sends students the wrong signal about what's important and is contrary to the mission of a public university. In a recent survey, half of first-generation college students said they thought legacy admissions practices may have hurt their chances. Perceptions of an unfair admissions process might also make some students less likely to apply or undermine the perceived legitimacy of higher education, though we did not find research on this topic.

For decades, U.S. inventors sent in models with their patent applications -- gizmos that reveal a secret history of unmet needs and relentless innovation. The New Yorker: The ruins of American invention have been recently resurrected in a former textile mill in Wilmington, Delaware. The Henry Clay Mill, now better known as Hagley Museum and Library Visitor Center, is perched on the banks of Brandywine Creek, at the southern edge of a sprawling estate once owned by the du Pont family; just upstream lies the oldest of the dynasty's several stately homes in the region, as well as the remains of the gunpowder works upon which its fortune was built. One morning, Chris Cascio, a curator, welcomed me into the mill, where the space once occupied by cotton-picking and carding machines now houses a curious exhibit: the scavenged remainders of a much larger, long-lost museum.

From 1790 to 1880, Cascio explained, the U.S. Patent Office first encouraged and then required an inventor to submit a model along with each application. These models -- thousands of miniature devices, often exquisitely detailed -- were then exhibited in Washington, D.C., in the office's model gallery. Sometimes called the "Temple of Invention," the gallery was a bustling landmark: it regularly attracted up to ten thousand visitors a month and was ranked as "the greatest permanent attraction in the city," according to one newspaper. But by the late nineteenth century it had effectively shut its doors. Hagley's latest exhibit, "Nation of Inventors," is the largest permanent public display of patent models since that time.

[...] The U.S. system was also unique in that no other country required a model to accompany a patent application. The reasons why soon became clear. As early as the eighteen-thirties, the collection had outgrown the Patent Office's cramped headquarters at the former Blodgett's Hotel. In 1836, a fire destroyed at least seven thousand models, but, rather than abandon the requirement, the Patent Office doubled down, securing congressional funding to reconstruct the models and laying the foundations for a truly monumental building, with a facade modelled after the Parthenon. The structure, which now houses the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, occupies an entire city block. In the engineer Pierre L'Enfant's master plan for the capital, it was intended to serve as a kind of nondenominational "church of the republic," between the White House on one side and the Capitol on the other.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Wednesday that would give TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app used by about 170 million Americans or face a ban. From a report: The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps that could pose security concerns. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not indicated how he plans to proceed.

TikTok's fate has become a major issue in Washington. Democratic and Republican lawmakers said their offices had received large volumes of calls from teenaged TikTok users who oppose the legislation, with the volume of complaints at times exceeding the number of calls seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The measure is also the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports. The vote comes just over a week since the bill was proposed following one public hearing with little debate, and after action in Congress had stalled for more than a year. Last month, President Joe Biden's re-election campaign joined TikTok, raising hopes among TikTok officials that legislation was unlikely this year.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.

12P/Pons-Brooks, a Halley-type comet larger than Mount Everest and with a 71.3-year orbit, is expected to become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it makes its closest approach to the sun on April 21. The Guardian reports: While some reports suggest 12P/Pons-Brooks was spotted as far back as the 14th century, it is named after the French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons who discovered it in 1812 and the British-American astronomer William Robert Brooks who observed it on its next orbit in 1883. Thought to have a nucleus about 30km (20 miles) in diameter, it is classed as a cryovolcanic comet, meaning it erupts with dust, gases and ice when pressure builds inside as it is heated. One such outburst last year caused it to brighten a hundredfold and garnered it the sobriquet of "the Devil Comet" after the haze that surrounds it formed a horned shape.

While the comet -- and its green tinge -- has already been spotted in the night sky, experts say it is expected to become even brighter in the coming weeks. "The comet is expected to reach a magnitude of 4.5 which means it ought to be visible from a dark location in the UK," said Dr Paul Strom, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. "The comet moves from the constellation of Andromeda to Pisces. As it does so it passes by bright stars which will make it easier to spot on certain dates. In particular, on March 31 12P/Pons-Brooks will be only 0.5 a degree from the bright star called Hamal," he said. But Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said even if the comet did become brighter it could still be difficult to see, adding that basic instruments such as small telescopes would greatly help.

"If you have a half-decent pair of binoculars, certainly attempt to look for it with those," said Massey, adding that apps that map the sky were also useful. The best views of the comet are currently to be found in the northern hemisphere. Massey said those who wanted to catch a glimpse should venture out on a clear evening and look low in the west-north-west as twilight came to an end. "You want to avoid haze, you want to avoid moonlight, you want to avoid light pollution."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S.

Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.