A new book by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton"feels like an existential crisis," writes Fast Company, "as he questions his own legacy — and wonders whether policies prescribed by economists over the years have unintentionally contributed to inequality" in America. Angus Deaton: People who have a four-year college degree are doing pretty well. But if you go to the people who don't have a college degree, horrible things are happening to them... The opportunities are getting bigger and bigger, but the safety net's falling further and further away. . . I think of it as much broader than income inequality: People without a BA are like an underclass. They're dispensable...

Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?

Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...

Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?

Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."

The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."

Four California dams are now being dismantled, reports the Arizona Republic: Sometime in January, work crews will start drilling a tunnel at the base of a concrete dam on the Klamath River, near the California-Oregon border. The tunnel will begin the process of drawing down the reservoir behind the dam, known as Copco-1, and prepare the site to remove the dam from the river. Time was, removing a dam in the West was unheard of. Dams were built to store water, generate electricity, manage the use of rivers for growers. But environmental activists started telling the story of how dams damage a river and its ecosystem, and Indigenous communities have told their stories of how dams took away traditional resources and food sources. And so, in recent years, we've seen more dams removed. In Arizona, the removal of a hydroelectric dam on Fossil Creek led to the restoration of a sparkling waterway and a habitat for fish, birds and other wildlife.
California's dam-removal project began in June, reports the Los Angeles Time, when the smallest of the four dams was torn down by crews using heavy machinery. "The other three dams are set to be dismantled next year, starting with a drawdown of the reservoirs in January." "The scale of this is enormous," said Mark Bransom, CEO of the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corp., which is overseeing dam removal and river restoration efforts. "This is the largest dam removal project ever undertaken in the United States, and perhaps even the world." The $450-million budget includes about $200 million from ratepayers of PacifiCorp, who have been paying a surcharge for the project. The Portland-based utility — part of billionaire Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway — agreed to remove the aging dams after determining it would be less expensive than trying to bring them up to current environmental standards.

The dams were used purely for power generation, not to store water for cities or farms. "The reason that these dams are coming down is that they've reached the end of their useful life," Bransom said. "The power generated from these dams is really a trivial amount of power, something on the order of 2% of the electric utility that previously owned the dams." An additional $250 million came through Proposition 1, a bond measure passed by California voters in 2014 that included money for removing barriers blocking fish on rivers.

Crews hired by the contractor Kiewet Corp. have been working on roads and bridges to prepare for the army of excavators and dump trucks. "We have thousands of tons of concrete and steel that make up these dams that we have to remove," Bransom said. "We'll probably end up with 400 to 500 workers at the peak of the work..."

In addition to tearing down the dams, the project involves restoring about 2,200 acres of reservoir bottom to a natural state.

Google's "Project Green Light" uses machine learning on Maps data to optimize the length of green lights, reports Engadget, "reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there." When the program was first announced in 2021, it had only been pilot tested in four intersections in Israel in partnership with the Israel National Roads Company but Google had reportedly observed a "10 to 20% reduction in fuel and intersection delay time" during those tests. The pilot program has grown since then, spreading to a dozen partner cities around the world, including Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Manchester, England and Jakarta, Indonesia. "Today we're happy to share that... we plan to scale to more cities in 2024," Yael Maguire, Google VP of Geo Sustainability, told reporters during a pre-brief event last week. "Early numbers indicate a potential for us to see a 30% reduction in stops...."

Maguire also noted that the Manchester test reportedly saw improvements to emission levels and air quality rise by as much as 18%. The company also touted the efficacy of its Maps routing in reducing emissions, with Maguire pointing out that it had "helped prevent more than 2.4 million metric tons of carbon emissions — the equivalent of taking about 500,000 fuel-based cars off the road for an entire year."

This week Bloomberg explored so-called "zombie viruses" — that is, long-dormant microbes which they call "yet another risk that climate change poses to public health" as ground that's been frozen for "milleniums" suddenly starts thawing — for example, in the Arctic, which they write is warming "faster than any other area on earth." With the planet already 1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times, scientists are predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2030s. Concerns that the hotter climate will release trapped greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere as the region's permafrost melts have been well-documented, but dormant pathogens are a lesser explored danger. Last year, virologist Jean-Michel Claverie's team published research showing they'd extracted multiple ancient viruses from the Siberian permafrost, all of which remained infectious...

Ways in which this could present a threat are still emerging. A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it...

Claverie first showed "live" viruses could be extracted from the Siberian permafrost and successfully revived in 2014. For safety reasons his research focused only on viruses capable of infecting amoebas, which are far enough removed from the human species to avoid any risk of inadvertent contamination. But he felt the scale of the public health threat the findings indicated had been under-appreciated or mistakenly considered a rarity. So, in 2019, his team proceeded to isolate 13 new viruses, including one frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples — evidence to their ubiquity. Publishing the findings in a 2022 study, he emphasized that a viral infection from an unknown, ancient pathogen in humans, animals or plants could have potentially "disastrous" effects.

"50,000 years back in time takes us to when Neanderthal disappeared from the region," he says. "If Neanderthals died of an unknown viral disease and this virus resurfaces, it could be a danger to us."

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again — two novellas based on Toho's first two Godzilla movies — were finally published in an English translation this month.

Both were written by science fiction author Shigeru Kayama, "who also penned the original scenarios from which the films in question were based," according to Our Culture magazine. And the book's translator calls Kayama both "a figure who is a little bit like Philip K. Dick in this country" and "the key person who developed the contours of the Godzilla story. I think it is no exaggeration to say that he perhaps the closest to being Godzilla's real father than anyone else. Without him, the monster we have today wouldn't exist." The original Godzilla film is a deeply powerful, mournful film that isn't just about a big monster stomping on buildings. It is a serious reflection on Japan's nuclear fears during the Cold War, which left it caught between heavily armed superpowers. Japan recognized that radioactive weapons of mass destruction being developed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R were threats that had the power to suddenly emerge and destroy its citizens and cities at any moment — like Godzilla. We should remember that in the film, it was hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that disturbed Godzilla, who then took revenge for his destroyed habitat by trampling Tokyo and blasting it with atomic rays...

Interestingly, in the novellas that I've translated, Kayama sometimes restored elements that the director and his assistants removed in the moviemaking process. Perhaps the most noticeable one is that in the scenario, Kayama wanted to begin with a long voice-over that talks directly about the horrors of atomic and hydrogen bombs. He envisioned that as the voice was speaking, the screen would show images from historical footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as images of the tremendously unlucky (and ironically named) fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5, which accidentally found itself in the path of an H-bomb test in the South Pacific in early 1954. (The horrific fate of this boat directly inspired the producer at Toho Studios to make the film.)

However, the director of the film, Ishiro Honda, and his assistant who helped with the screenplay both felt that this kind of direct commentary was too direct for a popular film, and so they toned down the "protest" element in the story. It's clear that they, like Kayama, wanted Godzilla to serve as a monstrous embodiment of radiation and all of the destruction that it could bring, but they also didn't point fingers at the U.S. military which had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was busily developing even more horrifying weapons. After all, the U.S.S.R. had built its own arsenal, and so nuclear weapons no longer belonged to a single country — the threat was broader than that. Plus, protest films rarely attracted a big, popular following. So, Honda and his crew toned down the outspoken language and imagery, but there was still imagery left enough for viewers in 1954 to recall Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon. Interestingly, when Kayama published the novellas, he included an author preface that talks about the anti-nuclear movement and encourages readers to read Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again as his contribution to that movement.
Next the translator hopes to create an English translation of the novel The Luminous Fairies and Mothra.

But for this book, he struggled with how to assign a gender to Godzilla. "Some people feel very viscerally, like the people at Toho studios feel very strongly that Godzilla is an 'it' and not a 'he' or 'she' or 'they,'" he told MovieWeb. "I kind of give my rationale for that choice in the afterward — Kayama thought about Godzilla as a stand-in for the nuclear bomb, and it was men in America who were developing the hydrogen bombs that frightened Japan so much in 1954. So maybe it's perhaps not inappropriate to call Godzilla 'he.'"

"A recent analysis accounting for nearly 1.2 million open source software projects primarily across four major ecosystems found that only about 11% of projects were actively maintained," reports InfoWorld: In its 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain report, published October 3, software supply chain management company Sonatype assessed 1,176,407 projects and reported an 18% decline this year in actively maintained projects. Just 11% of projects — 118,028 — were receiving active maintenance.

The report also found some new projects, unmaintained in 2022, now being maintained.

The four ecosystems included JavaScript, via NPM; Java, via the Maven project management tool; Python, via the PyPI package index; and .NET, through the NuGet gallery. Some Go projects also were included. According to the report, 18.6% of Java and JavaScript projects that were being maintained in 2022 are no longer being maintained today.
Other interesting findings:

• Nearly 10% reported security breaches due to open source vulnerabilities in the past 12 months.

• Use of AI and machine learning software components within corporate environments surged 135% over the last year.

Devin Ulibarri, the Free Software Foundation's outreach and communications coordinator, writes up an event he describes as meeting with some old and new friends: On Sunday, October 1, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) hosted a hackday to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GNU Project. Folks came from both near and far to join in the festivities at FSF headquarters, Boston, MA... Sadi moma bela loza, the Bulgarian melody from which The Free Software Song is set, could be heard faintly playing in a nearby room, its distinctive odd-metered tune performed by a fully-liberated X200...

All in all, the event succeeded in our goal of welcoming both long-time members as well as introducing new people to free software and our cause. A few college students from local universities, for example, were able to ask questions seeking to better understand free software licenses and GNU Project history. We received multiple requests from attendees to host similar events again in the near future. And one parent, whose son played NetHack at the event, reported that, the following morning, his son asked to go to the FSF office after school to play it again. When playing he mastered the "vi" movement keys immediately. We hope they serve him well...!

Happy hacking and please stay tuned for more FSF-hosted events, including LibrePlanet 2024!

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phys.org: If global temperatures increase by 1 degrees Celsius (C) or more than current levels, each year billions of people will be exposed to heat and humidity so extreme they will be unable to naturally cool themselves, according to interdisciplinary research from the Penn State College of Health and Human Development, Purdue University College of Sciences and Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future... Humans can only withstand certain combinations of heat and humidity before their bodies begin to experience heat-related health problems, such as heat stroke or heart attack. As climate change pushes temperatures higher around the world, billions of people could be pushed beyond these limits...

Results of the study indicate that if global temperatures increase by 2 degreesC above pre-industrial levels, the 2.2 billion residents of Pakistan and India's Indus River Valley, the one billion people living in eastern China and the 800 million residents of sub-Saharan Africa will annually experience many hours of heat that surpass human tolerance... Troublingly, researchers said, these regions are also in lower-to-middle income nations, so many of the affected people may not have access to air conditioning or any effective way to mitigate the negative health effects of the heat.

Due to an air traffic control mistake in February, a FedEx cargo plane flew within 100 feet of a Southwest Airlines flight in February. The New York Times reports that the flight's 128 passengers "were unaware that they had nearly died." In a year filled with close calls involving US airlines, this was the one that most unnerved federal aviation officials: A disaster had barely been averted, and multiple layers of the vaunted US air-safety system had failed... But the errors by the controller — who has continued to direct some plane traffic in Austin, Texas — were far from the whole story, according to 10 current and former controllers there, as well as internal Federal Aviation Administration documents reviewed by the Times. Austin-Bergstrom, like the vast majority of US airports, lacks technology that allows controllers to track planes on the ground and that warns of imminent collisions. The result is that on foggy days, controllers can't always see what is happening on runways and taxiways. Some have even resorted to using a public flight-tracking website in lieu of radar.

In addition, for years Austin has had a shortage of experienced controllers, even as traffic at the airport has surged to record levels. Nearly three-quarters of shifts have been understaffed. Managers and rank-and-file controllers have repeatedly warned that staffing levels pose a public danger. The controller on that February morning was working an overtime shift. In June, Stephen B. Martin, then Austin's top manager, and a local union representative wrote a memo pleading for more controllers. "Drastic steps are needed to allow the facility to adequately staff for existing traffic," they wrote to FAA and union officials.

Austin is a microcosm of a systemic crisis. The safety net that underpins air travel in America is fraying, exposing passengers to potential tragedies like the episode in February.
And yet the chair of America's National Transportation Safety Board calls the February incident "just one of seven serious close calls and near misses involving commercial airlines that we have initiated investigations on this year."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

The BBC reports: Doctor Who's first writer could finally be recognised 60 years after he helped launch the hugely-popular series. Anthony Coburn penned the first four episodes of the sci-fi drama in 1963 — a story called An Unearthly Child. But after his second story did not air, the writer has been seen as a minor figure among some Doctor Who fans.

However, a campaign to erect a memorial to Coburn in his home town of Herne Bay, Kent, is gathering pace a month ahead of the show's 60th anniversary.
A local elected councillor told the BBC they're working to find a location for the memorial.

The BBC writes that Coburn's episode — broadcast November 23, 1963 — "introduced the character of The Doctor, his three travelling companions, and his time and space machine, the TARDIS, stuck in the form of a British police box." Richard Bignell, a Doctor Who historian, believes Coburn played a significant role in sowing the seeds of the programme's success. He said: "Although the major elements that would go on to form the core of the series were devised within the BBC, as the scriptwriter for the first story, Coburn was the one who really put the flesh on the bones of the idea and how it would work dramatically. "Many opening episodes of a new television series can be very clunky as they attempt to land their audience with too much information about the characters, the setting and what's going to happen, but Coburn was very reserved in how much he revealed, preserving all the wonder and mystery."
In 2013, the Independent reported: Mr Coburn's son claims that the BBC has been in breach of copyright since his father's death in 1977. He has demanded that the corporation either stop using the Tardis in the show or pay his family for its every use since then. Stef Coburn claims that upon his father's death, any informal permission his father gave the BBC to use his work expired and the copyright of all of his ideas passed to his widow, Joan. Earlier this year she passed it on to him.

He said: "It is by no means my wish to deprive legions of Doctor Who fans (of whom I was never one) of any aspect of their favourite children's programme. The only ends I wish to accomplish, by whatever lawful means present themselves, involve bringing about the public recognition that should by rights always have been his due, of my father James Anthony Coburn's seminal contribution to Doctor Who, and proper lawful recompense to his surviving estate."
Today jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) notes that Stef Coburn apparently has a Twitter feed, where this week Stef claimed he'd cancelled the BBC's license to distribute his father's episodes after being offered what he complained was "a pittance" to relicense them.

In response to someone who asked "What do you actually gain from doing this though?" Stef Coburn replied: "Vengeance." But elsewhere Stef Coburn writes "There are OTHER as yet unfulfilled projects & aspirations of Tony's (of one of which, I was a significant part, in his final year), which I would like to see brought to fruition. If Doctor Who is my ONLY available leverage. So be it!"

Stef Coburn also announced plans to publish his father's "precursor draft-scripts (At least one very different backstory; sans 'Timelords') plus accompanying notes, for the story that became 'The Tribe of Gum'."

Yesterday America's Federal Trade Commission said it remained focused on its appeal opposing Microsoft's deal to buy Activision, reports Reuters.

Reuters notes that Microsoft and Activision closed their transaction Friday "after winning approval from Britain on condition that they sell the streaming rights to Activision's games to Ubisoft Entertainment." But the U.S. Federal Trade Commission "has also fought the deal, and has an argument scheduled before an appeals court on December 6. The agency said on Friday that it remained focused on that appeal." An FTC spokesperson had this comment for Reuters.

"The FTC continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A thief who stole more than $470 million in cryptocurrency when FTX crashed is trying to cash it out while the exchange's founder is on trial. Sam Bankman-Fried's high-profile court case began last week. The former crypto mogul denies fraud. After lying dormant for nine months, experts say $20 million of the stolen stash is being laundered into traditional money every day. New analysis shows how the mystery thief is trying to hide their tracks. [...] On the day FTX collapsed, hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency controlled by the exchange were stolen by an unidentified thief that is believed to still have control of the funds. No one knows how the thief -- or thieves -- was able to get digital keys to FTX crypto wallets, but it is thought it was either an insider or a hacker who was able to steal the information. The criminal moved 9,500 Ethereum coins, then worth $15.5 million, from a wallet belonging to FTX, to a new wallet. Over the next few hours, hundreds of other cryptoassets were taken from the company's wallets, in transactions eventually totaling $477 million.

According to researchers from Elliptic, a cryptocurrency investigation firm, the thief lost more than $100 million in the weeks following the hack as some was frozen or lost in processing fees as they frantically moved the funds around to evade capture. But by December around $70 million was successfully sent to a cryptocurrency mixer -- a criminal service used to launder Bitcoin, making it difficult to trace. [...] Although mixers make it difficult to trace Bitcoin, Elliptic was able to follow a small amount of the funds -- $4 million -- that was sent to an exchange. The rest of the stolen FTX stash -- around $230 million -- remained untouched until 30 September -- the weekend before Mr Bankman-Fried's trial began. Nearly every day since then chunks worth millions have been sent to a mixer for laundering and then presumably cashing out. Elliptic has been able to trace $54 million of Bitcoin being sent to the Sinbad mixer after which the trail has gone cold for now. "Crypto launderers have been known to wait for years to move and cash out assets once public attention has dissipated, but in this case they have begun to move just as the world's attention is once again directed towards FTX and the events of November 2022," said Tom Robinson, Elliptic's co-founder.

Saqib Rahim reports via Wired: It's been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers -- colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn't the number of storms, but their strength and rat-a-tat frequency. The downpours shocked a water system that had just experienced the driest three years in recorded state history, causing floods, mass evacuations, and at least 22 deaths.

Swinging between wet and dry extremes is typical for California, but last winter's rain, potentially intensified by climate change, was almost unmanageable. Add to that the arrival of El Nino, and more extreme weather looks likely for the state. This is going to make life very difficult for the dam operators tasked with capturing and controlling much of the state's water. Like most of the world's 58,700 large dams, those in California were built for yesterday's more stable climate patterns. But as climate change taxes the world's water systems -- affecting rainfall, snowmelt, and evaporation -- it's getting tough to predict how much water gets to a dam, and when. Dams are increasingly either water-starved, unable to maintain supplies of power and water for their communities, or overwhelmed and forced to release more water than desired -- risking flooding downstream.

But at one major dam in Northern California, operators have been demonstrating how to not just weather these erratic and intense storms, but capitalize on them. Management crews at New Bullards Bar, built in 1970, entered last winter armed with new forecasting tools that gave unprecedented insight into the size and strength of the coming storms -- allowing them to strategize how to handle the rain. First, they let the rains refill their reservoir, a typical move after a long drought. Then, as more storms formed at sea, they made the tough choice to release some of this precious hoard through their hydropower turbines, confident that more rain was coming. "I felt a little nervous at first," says John James, director of resource planning at Yuba Water Agency in northern California. Fresh showers soon validated the move. New Bullards Bar ended winter with plumped water supplies, a 150 percent boost in power generation, and a clean safety record. The strategy offers a glimpse of how better forecasting can allow hydropower to adapt to the climate age.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Philadelphia on Friday to announce the recipients of $7 billion in federal grants across 16 states for the development of seven regional hydrogen hubs, advancing a key part of a plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy. The announcement of the funding to boost manufacturing and blue-collar jobs was held in Pennsylvania -- a state that could decide the 2024 presidential election -- underscoring the power Biden wields as he spends the upcoming months doling out money flowing from his landmark pieces of legislation that remain largely unknown to large swaths of the American public.

The seven proposed hubs involving companies ranging from Exxon Mobil to Amazon were selected, with their projects spanning 16 states from Pennsylvania to California. The program is intended to jump-start the production of "clean hydrogen" along with the infrastructure needed to get it to industrial users like steelmakers and cement plants. "I'm here to announce one of the largest advanced manufacturing investments in the history of this nation," Biden said," He noted that the total investment will reach $50 billion when taking into account additional investments from private companies.

The hub selections will now kick off a long process that includes multiple phases, from design and development to permitting, financing and construction. "It's not guaranteed that someone selected is even going to make it through negotiations and get awarded the money," said Jason Munster, who was involved in analyzing the projects for the Department of Energy and is now a hydrogen consultant at CleanEpic. The hubs selected will serve the Middle Atlantic, Appalachian, Midwest, Minnesota and Plains states, the Gulf Coast, Pacific Northwest and California. The two largest projects include $1.2 billion each for Texas and California -- the former an oil giant and the other a green energy leader.

According to the New York Times, Chinese-owned bitcoin mining operations in the United States are causing security concerns due to their proximity to important sites and the potential for cyber threats. The Crypto Times reports: There are some mining facilities close to critical sites such as Microsoft data center for Pentagon's Air Force nuclear's missile base in Wyoming USA. Officials in U.S. fear Chinese espionage activities at these places. These mining operations began after China banned bitcoin mining in 2021. These individuals sometimes maintain connections with the Chinese Communist Party or state-owned companies which may be kept concealed through multiple layers of companies.

Texas has turned out to be a haven for Chinese-linked Bitcoin mining, with some US states having restrictions but Texas offers incentives. This might pose a threat to the power grid or essential infrastructure. A new concern has recently been raised in a report related to a potential cyber strike on the US infrastructure by China in case a major conflict arose.

Computer networking company Sandvine has scrapped an effort to sell US law enforcement agencies a controversial internet surveillance technology that tracks encrypted messages and laid off most of the employees involved in the initiative, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing four people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: Sandvine had pitched the new product, called "Digital Witness," to governments and law enforcement agencies in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America. It was marketed as a tool to covertly monitor people's internet use and encrypted messages sent using popular applications such as Meta Platform's WhatsApp and Signal, according to the people, who asked not to be identified to discuss confidential matters.

Sandvine had already provided trial versions of the technology in the US, these people said. But a combination of broader economic woes and lingering concern over the company's previous work with authoritarian governments hindered the product's success, the people said. Sandvine declined to comment when asked about Digital Witness. The company's marketing materials indicate the product is sold only to law enforcement and government agencies, and it is still listed on Sandvine's website.

More than 40% of Antarctica's ice shelves have shrunk since 1997 with almost half showing "no sign of recovery," a study has found, linking the change to the climate breakdown. From a report: Scientists at the University of Leeds have calculated that 67tn tonnes of ice was lost in the west while 59tn tonnes was added to the east between 1997 and 2021, resulting in a net loss of 7.5tn tonnes. Warm water on the western side of Antarctica has been melting ice, whereas in the east, ice shelves have either stayed the same or grown as the water is colder there. The ice shelves sit at the end of glaciers and slow their rate of flow into the sea. When they shrink, glaciers release larger amounts of freshwater into the sea which can disrupt the currents of the Southern Ocean.

Dr Benjamin Davison, an expert in Earth observation and the study's lead, said: "There is a mixed picture of ice-shelf deterioration, and this is to do with the ocean temperature and ocean currents around Antarctica. The western half is exposed to warm water, which can rapidly erode the ice shelves from below, whereas much of east Antarctica is currently protected from nearby warm water by a band of cold water at the coast." Scientists measured year-by-year changes to the ice using satellites that can see through the thick cloud during long polar nights.

SpzToid writes: Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release, and it's one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn't stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.

Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.

Elsewhere in the installer, you can now choose ZFS as your primary file system. There's also an experimental option to set up Trusted Platform Module (TPM) full-disk encryption rather than rely entirely on passphrases to encrypt your disk. This brings Ubuntu up to speed with Windows in offering a way to both secure your system and find out the hard way that you lack a backup key to get in after messing with your boot options. (Kidding! Somewhat.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: One e-toy for every person on Earth -- that's the staggering amount of electric trains, drones, talking dolls, R/C cars, and other children's gadgets tossed into landfills every year. Some of what most consumers consider to be e-waste -- like electronics such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and speaker systems -- are usual suspects. Others, like power tools, vapes, LED accessories, USB cables, anything involving rechargeable lithium batteries and countless other similar, "nontraditional" e-waste materials, are less obviously in need of special disposal. In all, people across the world throw out roughly 9 billion kilograms (19.8 billion pounds) of e-waste commonly not recognized as such by consumers.

This "invisible e-waste" is the focal point of the sixth annual International E-Waste Day on October 14, organized by Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum. In anticipation of the event, the organization recently commissioned the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to delve into just how much unconventional e-waste is discarded every year -- and global population numbers are just some of the ways to visualize the issue.

According to UNITAR's findings, for example, the total weight of all e-cig vapes thrown away every year roughly equals 6 Eiffel Towers. Meanwhile, the total weight of all invisible e-waste tallies up to "almost half a million 40 [metric ton] trucks," enough to create a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching approximately 3,504 miles -- the distance between Rome and Nairobi. From a purely economic standpoint, nearly $10 billion in essential raw materials is literally thrown into the garbage every year. Further reading: Half a Billion Cheap Electrical Items Go To UK Landfills in a Year, Research Finds

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle reports via The Register: The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) may open source the proprietary encryption algorithms used to secure emergency radio communications after a public backlash over security flaws found this summer. "The ETSI Technical Committee in charge of TETRA algorithms is discussing whether to make them public," Claire Boyer, a spokesperson for the European standards body, told The Register. The committee will discuss the issue at its next meeting on October 26, she said, adding: "If the consensus is not reached, it will go to a vote."

TETRA is the Terrestrial Trunked Radio protocol, which is used in Europe, the UK, and other countries to secure radio communications used by government agencies, law enforcement, military and emergency services organizations. In July, a Netherlands security biz uncovered five vulnerabilities in TETRA, two deemed critical, that could allow criminals to decrypt communications, including in real-time, to inject messages, deanonymize users, or set the session key to zero for uplink interception. At the time ETSI downplayed the flaws, which it said had been fixed last October, and noted that "it's not aware of any active exploitation of operational networks."

At the time ETSI downplayed the flaws, which it said had been fixed last October, and noted that "it's not aware of any active exploitation of operational networks." It did, however, face criticism from the security community over its response to the vulnerabilities -- and the proprietary nature of the encryption algorithms, which makes it more difficult for proper pentesting of the emergency network system. "This whole idea of secret encryption algorithms is crazy, old-fashioned stuff," said security author Kim Zetter who first reported the story. "It's very 1960s and 1970s and quaint. If you're not publishing [intentionally] weak algorithms, I don't know why you would keep the algorithms secret."