If it weren't for Slashdot, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't be facing a six-hour deposition over alleged involvement in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, argues long-time Slashdot reader theodp: In 2003, Harvard's student newspaper the Harvard Crimson reported that Zuck's programming skills attracted attention from the likes of Microsoft and others following a 2003 Slashdot post. That post — titled Machine Learning and MP3s — described how "Students at Caltech [freshman Adam D'Angelo, Quora CEO and co-founder] and Harvard [freshman Zuck] developed a system that analyzes playlists and learns people's listening patterns." The playlist-making software, Synapse AI, was Zuck's high school senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Interestingly, in a modded-up comment ("Informative") on the post, Slashdot user Mark Zuckerberg vowed to protect user privacy. "And a note about privacy," promised Zuck. "None of your musical listening data will be available to anyone other than you. We hope to use massive amounts of data to aid in analysis, but your individual data will never be seen by anyone else."

Hey, things change. And Slashdot user SkyIce (apparently D'Angelo) added, "I'm not going to spam people. I promise." .
Zuckerberg was just 18 years old — and Steven Levy's 2020 book Facebook: The Inside Story recounts how all "the Slashdot attention was a boon." Zuckerberg heard from multiple companies interested in the student project, including Microsoft and AOL. Zuckerberg and D'Angelo got an offer approaching a million dollars from one of those suitors. But the payout would be contingent on Zuckerberg and D'Angelo committing to work for that company for three years. They turned it down.
That summer, back in Cambridge, young Mark Zuckerberg "thought it was interesting that I was so excited about Friendster," D'Angelo remembered in the book. Friendster was an earlier social network founded in 2002 (which eventually closed in 2018). D'Angelo remembered that Zuckerberg "wasn't into it as a user, but it was clear to him that there was something there...."

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offense will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. The Guardian reports: In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver "non-fitted devices" to monitor "specific cohorts" as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of 6 million pounds. A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve "daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control," with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times.

A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve "daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control," with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times. Photographs taken using the smartwatches will be cross-checked against biometric facial images on Home Office systems and if the image verification fails, a check must be performed manually. The data will be shared with the Home Office, MoJ and the police, with Home Office officials adding: "The sharing of this data [to] police colleagues is not new."

The number of devices to be produced and the cost of each smartwatch was redacted in the contract and there is no mention of risk assessments to determine whether it is appropriate to monitor vulnerable or at-risk asylum seekers. The Home Office says the smartwatch scheme will be for foreign-national offenders who have been convicted of a criminal offense, rather than other groups, such as asylum seekers. However, it is expected that those obliged to wear the smartwatches will be subject to similar conditions to those fitted with GPS ankle tags, with references in the DPIA to curfews and inclusion and exclusion zones. Those who oppose the 24-hour surveillance of migrants say it breaches human rights and may have a detrimental impact on their health and wellbeing. Lucie Audibert, a lawyer and legal officer for Privacy International, said: "Facial recognition is known to be an imperfect and dangerous technology that tends to discriminate against people of color and marginalized communities. These 'innovations' in policing and surveillance are often driven by private companies, who profit from governments' race towards total surveillance and control of populations.

"Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanizing and invasive technology against migrants."

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. From a report: In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver "non-fitted devices" to monitor "specific cohorts" as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of $7.24m.

A Home Office data protection impact assessment (DPIA) from August 2021, obtained by the charity Privacy International through a freedom of information request, assessed the impact of the smartwatch technology before contracting a supplier. In the documents, seen by the Guardian, the Home Office says the scheme will involve "daily monitoring of individuals subject to immigration control," with the requirement to wear either a fitted ankle tag or a smartwatch, carried with them at all times. Those obliged to wear the devices will need to complete periodic monitoring checks throughout the day by taking a photograph of themselves on a smartwatch, with information including their names, date of birth, nationality and photographs stored for up to six years. Locations will be tracked "24/7, allowing trail monitoring data to be recorded."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The head of WhatsApp will not compromise the security of its messenger service to bend to the UK government's efforts to scan private conversations. Will Cathcart, who has been at parent company Meta for more than 12 years and head of WhatsApp since 2019, told the BBC that the popular communications service wouldn't downgrade or bypass its end-to-end encryption (EE2E) just for British snoops, saying it would be "foolish" to do so and that WhatsApp needs to offer a consistent set of standards around the globe. "If we had to lower security for the world, to accommodate the requirement in one country, that ... would be very foolish for us to accept, making our product less desirable to 98 percent of our users because of the requirements from 2 percent," Cathcart told the broadcaster. "What's being proposed is that we -- either directly or indirectly through software -- read everyone's messages. I don't think people want that."

Strong EE2E ensures that only the intended sender and receiver of a message can read it, and not even the provider of the communications channel nor anyone eavesdropping on the encrypted chatter. The UK government is proposing that app builders add an automated AI-powered scanner in the pipeline -- ideally in the client app -- to detect and report illegal content, in this case child sex abuse material (CSAM).

The upside is that at least messages are encrypted as usual when transmitted: the software on your phone, say, studies the material, and continues on as normal if the data is deemed CSAM-free. One downside is that any false positives mean people's private communications get flagged up and potentially analyzed by law enforcement or a government agent. Another downside is that the definition of what is filtered may gradually change over time, and before you know it: everyone's conversations are being automatically screened for things politicians have decided are verboten. And another downside is that client-side AI models that don't produce a lot of false positives are likely to be easily defeated, and are mainly good for catching well-known, unaltered CSAM examples.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Data centers have caused skyrocketing power demand in parts of London. Now, new housing construction could be banned for more than a decade in some neighborhoods of the UK's biggest city because the electricity grid is reaching capacity, as first reported on by the Financial Times. The reason: too many data centers are taking up too much electricity and hogging available fiber optic cables. The Financial Times obtained multiple letters sent from the city's government, the Greater London Authority (GLA), to developers. "Major new applicants to the distribution network... including housing developments, commercial premises and industrial activities will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections," said one note, according to the news outlet.

The GLA also confirmed the grid issue to Gizmodo in an email, and sent along text from one of the letters, which noted that for some areas utilities are saying "electricity connections will not be available for their sites until 2027 to 2030." Though the Financial Times reported that at least one letter indicated making the necessary electric grid updates in London could take up until 2035. [...] "Data centres use large quantities of electricity, the equivalent of towns or small cities, to power servers and ensure resilience in service," one of the GLA letters seen by the Financial Times reportedly said. [...] Developers are "still getting their heads round this, but our basic understanding is that developments of 25 units or more will be affected. Our understanding is that you just can't build them," said David O'Leary, policy director at the Home Builders Federation, a trade body. Combined, those sections of London contain about 5,000 homes and make up about 11% of the city's housing supply, according the Financial Times. A spokesperson for the London Mayor told Gizmodo in a statement: "The Mayor is very concerned that electricity capacity constraints in three West London boroughs are creating a significant challenge for developers securing timely connections to the electricity network, which could affect the delivery of thousands of much-needed homes...The increased demand for electricity capacity in the area is believed to be largely due to a rapid influx of batteries and data centers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For years Craig Wright has claimed that he is the mythical figure who created bitcoin. But a legal bid by the Australian computer scientist to defend his assertion that he is Satoshi Nakamoto resulted in a pyrrhic victory and a tarnished reputation on Monday. A high court judge ruled (PDF) Wright had given "deliberately false evidence" in a libel case and awarded him one pound in damages after he sued a blogger for alleging that his claim to be the elusive Nakamoto was fraudulent. "Because he [Wright] advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial, he will recover only nominal damages," wrote Justice Chamberlain.

Wright had sued blogger Peter McCormack over a series of tweets in 2019, and a video discussion broadcast on YouTube, in which McCormack said Wright was a "fraud" and is not Satoshi. The issue of Nakamoto's identity was not covered by the judge's ruling because McCormack had earlier abandoned a defense of truth in his case. Wright claimed that his reputation within the cryptocurrency industry had been "seriously harmed" by McCormack's claims. He said he had been invited to speak at numerous conferences after the successful submission of academic papers for blind peer review, but 10 invites had been withdrawn following McCormack's tweets. This included alleged potential appearances at events in France, Vietnam, the US, Canada and Portugal.

But McCormack submitted evidence from academics challenging Wright's claims, which were then dropped from his case at the trial in May. Wright later accepted that some of his evidence was "wrong" but said that this was "inadvertent," Chamberlain said in his judgment. The judge noted that there was "no documentary evidence" that Wright had a paper accepted at any of the conferences identified in the earlier version of his libel claim, nor that he received an invitation to speak at them except possibly at one, and that any invitation was withdrawn. Wright's explanation for abandoning this part of his case because the alleged damage to his reputation from the "disinvitations" was outside England and Wales "does not withstand scrutiny," the judge added. He concluded: "Dr Wright's original case on serious harm, and the evidence supporting it, both of which were maintained until days before trial, were deliberately false." [...] [T]he judge said that Wright's pre-trial case over the serious harm to his reputation made it "unconscionable" that he should receive "any more than nominal damages." In statement Wright said: "I intend to appeal the adverse findings of the judgment in which my evidence was clearly misunderstood. I will continue legal challenges until these baseless and harmful attacks designed to belittle my reputation stop."

The F-35 stealth-combat aircraft is the "crown jewel" of America's Air Force fight fleet, according to the defense news site Task & Purpose.

But Friday they were all grounded — "sidelined for an indeterminate amount of time as the service inspects most of its F-35 fighter jet ejection seats for faulty launch cartridges, service officials said..." The news marks the latest difficult headline for the beleaguered fighter, which U.S. military officials have placed at the forefront of their airpower strategy despite a long list of maintenance issues. Air Combat Command, the Air Force command which oversees the bulk of the service's fighter fleet, made the decision to ground its F-35s on Friday after other units of the Air Force and Navy grounded many of their aircraft due to concerns over faulty parts which could prevent the pilot ejection seat from launching out of the cockpit in an emergency. Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexi Worley said that the command started a 90-day inspection period of all cartridges on its F-35 ejection seats on July 19.

"Out of an abundance of caution, ACC units will execute a stand-down on July 29 to expedite the inspection process," Worley said. "Based on data gathered from those inspections, ACC will make a determination to resume operations."

Worley later added that the stand-down "will continue through the weekend, and a determination to safely resume normal operations is expected to be made early next week, pending analysis of the inspection data."

Many jet aircraft in the U.S. military are equipped with ejection seats made by the company Martin-Baker, which notified the Navy about potential defects earlier this month, according to Breaking Defense, which first reported the F-35 grounding story on Friday. The problem part is the cartridge actuated device, an explosive cartridge that helps launch the ejection seat out of an aircraft. Martin-Baker identified certain production lots of cartridge actuated devices as being defective and in need of replacement, the Air Force told Breaking Defense.

"While the aircraft are flyable, I don't think too many pilots would be willing to fly knowing they may not be able [to] eject," Michael Cisek, a senior associate at the aviation consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, told Breaking Defense....

America's allies may also be affected by the issue. On Wednesday, Breaking Defense reported that the Navy had informed foreign military sales customers about the issue and was working with them to resolve it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: A single chemical could be responsible for whether people go bald or not, a new study has found. In the UK, approximately two thirds of men will face male pattern baldness. The study says the discovery of the chemical could "not only treat baldness, but ultimately speed wound healing." In the study published in the Biophysical Journal, study co-author Qixuan Wang said: "In science fiction when characters heal quickly from injuries, the idea is that stem cells allowed it. In real life, our new research gets us closer to understanding stem cell behavior, so that we can control it and promote wound healing."

The team looked at hair follicles as these are the only human organ that regenerates regularly and automatically, and discovered that a type of protein called TGF-beta controls how the stem cells in hair follicles divide and why some can die off. Wang explained: "TGF-beta has two opposite roles. It helps activate some hair follicle cells to produce new life, and later, it helps orchestrate apoptosis, the process of cell death. Even when a hair follicle kills itself, it never kills its stem cell reservoir. When the surviving stem cells receive the signal to regenerate, they divide, make new cell and develop into a new follicle." However, the scientists found that when a hair follicle dies, the stem cell reservoir still remains. "When the surviving stem cells receive the signal to regenerate, they divide, make new cells and develop into a new follicle," Wang said. The study authors added that it may be possible to stimulate hair growth by activating follicle stem cells, but more research on the subject needs to be done.

A study of 39,000 video gamers has found "little to no evidence" time spent playing affects their wellbeing. From a report: The average player would have to play for 10 hours more than usual per day to notice any difference, it found. And the reasons for playing were far more likely to have an impact. Well-being was measured by asking about life satisfaction and levels of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and frustration. The results contradict a 2020 study.

Conducted by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute -- but with a much smaller group of players -- the 2020 study had suggested that those who played for longer were happier. "Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies. "But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being. "If players were playing because they wanted to, rather than because they felt compelled to, they had to, they tended to feel better."

A Chinese government entity responsible for public relations attempted to open a stealth account on TikTok targeting Western audiences with propaganda, according to internal messages seen by Bloomberg. From a report: The attempt, which met with push-back from TikTok executives, highlights the internal tensions within the fast-growing social media app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, which has constantly attempted to distance itself from Chinese state influence. In an April 2020 message addressed to Elizabeth Kanter, TikTok's head of government relations for the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and Israel, a colleague flagged a "Chinese government entity that's interested in joining TikTok but would not want to be openly seen as a government account as the main purpose is for promoting content that showcase the best side of China (some sort of propaganda)."

The messages indicate that some of ByteDance's most senior government relations team, including Kanter and US-based Erich Andersen, Global Head of Corporate Affairs and General Counsel, discussed the matter internally but pushed back on the request, which they described as "sensitive." TikTok used the incident to spark an internal discussion about other sensitive requests, the messages state. "We declined to offer support for this request, as we believed the creation of such an account would violate our Community Guidelines," said a TikTok spokeswoman, who downplayed the incident as an informal request from a friend of an employee. TikTok has rules against "coordinated inauthentic behavior," where accounts conceal their true identity to exert influence or sway public opinion, and against political advertising, the spokeswoman said.

The heat that demolished records in Britain last week, bringing temperatures as high as 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit to a country unaccustomed to scorching summers, would have been "extremely unlikely" without the influence of human-caused climate change, a new scientific report issued Thursday has found. From a report: Heat of last week's intensity is still highly unusual for Britain, even at current levels of global warming, said Mariam Zachariah, a research associate at Imperial College London and lead author of the new report. The chances of seeing the daytime highs that some parts of the country recorded last week were 1-in-1,000 in any given year, she and her colleagues found.

Still, Dr. Zachariah said, those temperatures were at least 10 times as likely as they would have been in a world without greenhouse-gas emissions, and at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. "It's still a rare event today," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and another author of the report. "It would have been an extremely unlikely event without climate change." Severe heat has become more frequent and intense across most regions of the world, and scientists have little doubt that global warming is a key driver. As the burning of fossil fuels causes average global temperatures to rise, the range of possible temperatures shifts upward, too, making blistering highs more likely. This means every heat wave is now made worse, to some extent, by changes in planetary chemistry caused by greenhouse-gas emissions.

Longtime Slashdot reader HnT shares a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft said on Wednesday that an Austria-based company named DSIRF used multiple Windows and Adobe Reader zero-days to hack organizations located in Europe and Central America. Members of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, or MSTIC, said they have found Subzero malware infections spread through a variety of methods, including the exploitation of what at the time were Windows and Adobe Reader zero-days, meaning the attackers knew of the vulnerabilities before Microsoft and Adobe did. Targets of the attacks observed to date include law firms, banks, and strategic consultancies in countries such as Austria, the UK, and Panama, although those aren't necessarily the countries in which the DSIRF customers who paid for the attack resided.

"MSTIC has found multiple links between DSIRF and the exploits and malware used in these attacks," Microsoft researchers wrote. "These include command-and-control infrastructure used by the malware directly linking to DSIRF, a DSIRF-associated GitHub account being used in one attack, a code signing certificate issued to DSIRF being used to sign an exploit, and other open source news reports attributing Subzero to DSIRF." Referring to DSIRF using the work KNOTWEED, Microsoft researchers wrote: In May 2022, MSTIC found an Adobe Reader remote code execution (RCE) and a 0-day Windows privilege escalation exploit chain being used in an attack that led to the deployment of Subzero. The exploits were packaged into a PDF document that was sent to the victim via email. Microsoft was not able to acquire the PDF or Adobe Reader RCE portion of the exploit chain, but the victim's Adobe Reader version was released in January 2022, meaning that the exploit used was either a 1-day exploit developed between January and May, or a 0-day exploit. Based on KNOTWEED's extensive use of other 0-days, we assess with medium confidence that the Adobe Reader RCE is a 0-day exploit. The Windows exploit was analyzed by MSRC, found to be a 0-day exploit, and then patched in July 2022 as CVE-2022-22047. Interestingly, there were indications in the Windows exploit code that it was also designed to be used from Chromium-based browsers, although we've seen no evidence of browser-based attacks.

The CVE-2022-22047 vulnerability is related to an issue with activation context caching in the Client Server Run-Time Subsystem (CSRSS) on Windows. At a high level, the vulnerability could enable an attacker to provide a crafted assembly manifest, which would create a malicious activation context in the activation context cache, for an arbitrary process. This cached context is used the next time the process spawned.

CVE-2022-22047 was used in KNOTWEED related attacks for privilege escalation. The vulnerability also provided the ability to escape sandboxes (with some caveats, as discussed below) and achieve system-level code execution. The exploit chain starts with writing a malicious DLL to disk from the sandboxed Adobe Reader renderer process. The CVE-2022-22047 exploit was then used to target a system process by providing an application manifest with an undocumented attribute that specified the path of the malicious DLL. Then, when the system process next spawned, the attribute in the malicious activation context was used, the malicious DLL was loaded from the given path, and system-level code execution was achieved. Microsoft recommends a number of security considerations to help mitigate this attack, including patching CVE-2022-22047, updating Microsoft Defender Antivirus to update 1.371.503.0 or later, and enabling multifactor authentication (MFA).

Developers in west London face a potential ban on new housing projects until 2035 because the electricity grid has run out of capacity to support new homes, jeopardising housebuilding targets in the capital. From a report: The Greater London Authority wrote to developers this week warning them that it might take more than a decade to bulk up grid capacity and get developments under way again in three west London boroughs -- Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow. In those boroughs, "major new applicants to the distribution network... including housing developments, commercial premises and industrial activities will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections," according to the GLA's note, which has been seen by the Financial Times.

A recent applicant to the distribution network was told that there is not "sufficient electrical capacity for a new connection" until up to 2035, according to the note. The three boroughs accounted for almost 5,000 homes in 2019-20, equivalent to 11 per cent of London's housing supply. Stalling new projects would exacerbate a chronic housing shortage in a city which already routinely undershoots its delivery targets.

Charter Communications must pay out $7 billion in damages after one of its Spectrum cable technicians robbed and killed an elderly woman, a jury decided Tuesday. The Register reports: Betty Thomas, 83, was stabbed to death by Roy Holden Jr in December 2019. He had dropped by her home in Irving, Texas, on a service call after she reported a problem with her internet-TV bundle, and returned the next day in his company uniform and van, inviting himself in and killing her using his Spectrum-issued gloves and utility knife. She was found dead by her family on her living room floor after she didn't show up to a Christmas and birthday party that night. Holden pleaded guilty to murder last year and was sentenced to life behind in bars.

Thomas' family sued Charter [PDF] in 2020 for negligence. It was alleged in testimony that Holden had complained to his bosses that he was penniless and desperate after a divorce. It was further alleged that he had stolen credit cards and checks from elderly Spectrum subscribers, and that the corporation turned a blind eye to a pattern of theft by its installers and technicians. During that civil trial it was also claimed Thomas' family was charged $58 for Holden's service call, and continued to be billed after their grandmother's brutal slaying to the point where her account was sent to collections.

The court heard how Holden was not working the day he killed Thomas, and went out to her home anyway to rob her. He was able to use his company keycard to access a Charter vehicle lot and drive off in one of its service vans even though he was off-duty. According to the family's legal team, while Holden was seemingly making repairs, he tried to steal one or more of her bank cards from her purse, and murdered her when he was caught in the act. He later went on a spending spree with her funds, it was claimed. "This was a shocking breach of faith by a company that sends workers inside millions of homes every year," said the one of family's trial lawyers Chris Hamilton, of Dallas-based Hamilton Wingo, in a statement.

According to the law firm, Holden lied about his employment history -- such as not revealing he had been previously fired -- which wasn't checked by Charter when it hired him and would have been one of many red flags against him. During the civil trial, the court heard how Holden would break down crying at work, at one point was convinced he was a former Dallas Cowboys football player, suffered from insomnia, and was probably sleeping overnight in his Spectrum van. It was further claimed the cable giant tried to force the lawsuit into closed-door arbitration where the results would have been secret and damages limited.

James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, has died on his 103rd birthday. The climate scientist died at home on Tuesday surrounded by loved ones, his family said. From a report: Lovelock, who was one of the UK's most respected independent scientists, had been in good health until six months ago, when he had a bad fall. Known as something of a maverick, he had been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory since the mid-1960s, and in his old age he continued to work. His Gaia hypothesis posits that life on Earth is a self-regulating community of organisms interacting with each other and their surroundings. He said two years ago that the biosphere was in the last 1% of its life. [...] Lovelock spent his life advocating for climate measures, starting decades before many others started to take notice of the crisis. By the time he died he did not believe there was hope of avoiding some of the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Damien Hirst, the artist famous for pickling dead animals in the 1990s, is to burn thousands of his paintings next month in a project focusing on art as currency. Hirst, who was the UK's richest artist in 2020 with a net worth of more than 315 million British pounds, will destroy the artworks at his London gallery.

He created 10,000 unique dot paintings in 2016, each with its own title, that were later linked to corresponding NFTs and sold for $2,000 each. Buyers were given the option of keeping the NFTs or trading them in for the physical artwork. "The collector ... cannot keep both. This exchange is a one-way process, so choose carefully," buyers were told. Twenty-four hours before a deadline of 3pm Wednesday, 4,180 people had chosen to swap their NFT for a physical artwork, with 5,820 opting to keep their NFTs, according to Heni, a technology company focusing on the art market. The alternative version is to be destroyed, with the physical artworks -- oil on paper -- going up in flames on a daily basis from 9 September.

Internet satellite operators OneWeb and Eutelsat are planning to merge in the hopes of becoming a stronger rival to SpaceX's Starlink. Engadget reports: The merger, which is subject to approval from regulators and Eutelsat shareholders, is expected to close by mid-2023 and it values OneWeb at $3.4 billion. Shareholders of OneWeb and Eutelsat will each own half of the combined company. Eutelsat has a fleet of 36 geostationary orbit satellites. These will be combined with OneWeb's cluster of low-earth orbit satellites, which can provide internet access from the skies. OneWeb currently has 428 satellites in orbit of a planned 648 in its first-generation network.

OneWeb and Eutelsat expect to have combined revenues of $1.56 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year. Eutelsat chair Dominique D'Hinnin and CEO Eva Berneke will remain in those positions in the merged entity. OneWeb investor Sunil Bharti Mittal will become co-chairman. [...] After the expected merger, the UK will retain a "special share" in OneWeb as well as exclusive rights over the company. These grant the government a significant say in national security controls over the network and veto rights over certain decisions, such as the location of OneWeb's headquarters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shoppers at a supermarket chain in southern England are being tracked by facial recognition cameras, prompting a legal complaint by a privacy rights group. Big Brother Watch said Southern Co-operative's use of biometric scans in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton, and London was "Orwellian in the extreme" and urged Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate whether it breaches data protection legislation.

The complaint claims the use of the biometric cameras "is infringing the data rights of a significant number of UK data subjects." It outlines how the facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers. If a customer on the list enters the store, staff are alerted. [...] "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse," Southern Co-operative said. It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender. Kmart and Bunnings stores in Australia are also being investigated for the privacy implications of their facial recognition systems. The two chains were trialing the technology to spot banned customers, prevent refund fraud and reduce theft.

Scientists have found more than 30 potentially new species living at the bottom of the sea. From a report: Researchers from the UK's Natural History Museum used a remotely operated vehicle to collect specimens from the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific. Previously, creatures from this area had been studied only from photographs. The study, published in the journal Zookeys, found there is a high species diversity of larger organisms in the abyss. Of the 55 specimens recovered, 48 were of different species. The animals found include segmented worms, invertebrates from the same family as centipedes, marine animals from the same family as jellyfish, and different types of coral. Thirty-six specimens were found at more than 4,800 metres deep, two were collected on a seamount slope at 4,125 metres, and 17 were found at between 3,095 and 3,562 metres deep.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Former IT worker James Howells -- who once stood on the very forefront of the crypto boom and could have been a multimillionaire -- is desperate to scour a UK landfill located in Newport, Wales where he might find a missing drive that contains the passcode for a crypto wallet containing 8,000 bitcoin, worth close to $176 million as of writing. Howells said he accidentally dumped the wrong hard drive back in 2013. Though the price of crypto remains in the proverbial dumpster, this data cache represents millions of dollars simply stuck on the blockchain, with nobody able to access the wallet without the required passcode. It's been a long road, and he hasn't given up on his quest to rescue his missing millions. Only problem is finding that hard drive would require digging through a literal mountain of garbage.

In an interview with Business Insider released Sunday, Howell said he has a foolproof scheme to rescue his bitcoin from an actual trash pile. He's put together an $11 million business plan which he'll use to get investors and the Newport City Council on board to help excavate the landfill. His proposal would require them to dig through 110,000 tons of trash over three years. A $6 million version of the plan would go over 18 months. A video hosted by Top Gear alum Richard Hammond said the bitcoin "proponent" has already reportedly secured funding from two Euro-based venture capitalists Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn, if Howells can get approval from the local government.

The garbage would be sorted at a separate pop-up facility near the landfill using human pickers and an AI system used to spot that hard drive amidst all that other refuse. He's even brought on eight experts in artificial intelligence, excavation, waste management, and data extraction, all to find a lone hard drive in a trash pile. The plan also involves making use of the Boston Dynamics robotic dogs. The former IT worker told reporters the machines could be used as security and CCTV cameras to scan the ground, looking for the hard drive. When they were released, each "Spot" robot model cost $74,500. Even with that price tag, Howells said he already has names for the two. Insider reported he would name one Satoshi, named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the person or group behind the white paper that first proposed bitcoin back in 2008. The other one would be named "Hal" -- no, not that HAL -- but Hal Finney, the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction. A spokesperson for the local government told Insider Howells could present or say "nothing" that would convince them to go along with the plan, citing ecological risk. If the council says no -- again -- Howells told reporters he'd take the government to court.