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Submission + - Legendary Comedian and Commodore PET Owner Bob Newhart Dead at 94

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Bob Newhart, whose stammering, deadpan unflappability carried him to stardom as a standup comedian and later in television and movies, has died at age 94. He remains best known for the television shows, "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-78) and "Newhart" (1982-90), both of which were built around his persona as a reasonable man put-upon by crazies. A younger crowd may remember Newhart from his roles in the movie "Elf" (2003) and TV's "The Big Bang Theory" (2013-18).

Less known about Newhart is that he was an early Commodore PET owner, recalling for the LA Times in 2001: "I remember leafing through a copy of Popular Science magazine and seeing an ad for a Commodore computer that had 8- or 16 kilobytes. It had an awful-looking screen, and it was $795. I thought I’d better get one because I had sons who were going to be in high school and might want to know about computers. Later, I moved up to the 64 KB model and thought that was silly because it was more memory than I would ever possibly need. I got them for the kids and then found I was fascinated by them. The first ones had tape drives. You would get a program like a word processor, put the tape in and then walk away for about a half an hour while the computer loaded it. But the first time I used a spell checker and it corrected a word, I thought, 'We are getting close to God here."

Submission + - Southwest Airlines Outdated Computers Keep Company Running (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: Nearly every flight in the U.S. is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that’s affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks — but not Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest is still flying high, unaffected by the outage that’s plaguing the world today, and that’s apparently because it’s using Windows 3.1.

Submission + - Judge disembowles SEC argument re CyberSecurity (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by krakman
krakman writes: In the SEC's case against 2020 hacking victim SolarWinds, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer on Thursday, granted most of the company’s motion to dismiss, holding that current laws give the SEC authority only over financial controls, not all internal controls.

Engelmayer did not dismiss the case entirely, allowing the SEC to try to show that SolarWinds and top security executive Timothy Brown committed securities fraud by not warning in a public “security statement” before the hack that it knew it was highly vulnerable to attacks.

Submission + - China is installing renewables equivalent of five large nuclear plants per week

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: New figures show the pace of China's clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week. A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early. It's installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.

Because its large cities of the eastern seaboard are dominated by apartment buildings, China hasn't seen an uptake of rooftop solar like in other countries. To find space for all the solar panels and wind turbines required for the nation's energy needs, the planners of China's energy transition have looked west, to areas like the Gobi Desert. The world's largest solar and wind farms are being built on the western edge of the country and connected to the east via the world's longest high-voltage transmission lines.

Submission + - Websites across Australia go dark after apparent CrowdStrike update (cyberdaily.au)

Submitted by labnet
labnet writes: Millions of people across Australia have been affected by major outages across multiple businesses, affecting banks, airlines and media outlets.

Around 3pm on Friday, computers across the country began shutting down with multiple workers reporting issues at multiple different businesses.

The issue comes from a "bluescreen error" which is a result of a Crowdstrike outage, with servers and devices getting stuck in "boot loops".

Multiple media organisations reported issues with networks, including the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and News Corp Australia.

Submission + - Mozilla enables ad-tracking by default in Firefox 128

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A couple of years ago, Mozilla acquired Anonym, an adtech firm started by two Meta employees that claims to anonymize user ad tracking including information on when they click on ads. Mozilla calls this feature Privacy Preserving Attribution and as of Firefox 128, it is enabled by default. Mozilla claims it's an experiement but further justfies enabling it by default as a user-hostile distraction. Now, the problem is not the technology — but Mozilla keeps advertising their browser as the most privacy protecting browser over its competitors. To disable this ad-tracking, in Firefox, go to Settings, select Privacy and Security and scroll down to Website Advertising Preferences. Uncheck "Allow websites to perform privacy preserving ad measurement".

Submission + - Not Learning to Code In An Age of AI Considered Harmful

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Conference kicked off Tuesday in Las Vegas, new guidance was issued by authors from tech-backed CSTA and Code.org led TeachAI arguing that K-12 computer science education is more important than ever in an age of AI.

From the press release: "As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt the teaching of core CS skills like programming. With these briefs, TeachAI and CSTA hope to reinforce the idea that learning to program is the cornerstone of computational thinking and an important gateway to the problem-solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking skills necessary to thrive in today's digitally driven world. The rise of AI only makes CS education more important."

To help drive home the point to educators, the 39-page Guidance on the Future of Computer Science Education in an Age of AI (penned by five authors from nonprofits CSTA and Code.org) includes a pretty grim comic entitled Learn to Program or Follow Commands. In the panel, two high school students who scoff at the idea of having to learn to code and instead use GenAI to create their Python apps wind up getting stuck in miserable warehouse jobs several years later as a result where they're ordered about by an AI robot. One wonders how the comic will play with Code.org Platinum Supporter ($3,000,000+) and CSTA Strategic Partner Amazon, who coincidentally came under fire in a Senate report Wednesday for its treatment of warehouse workers.

Amazon is also the Presenting Sponsor for this week's CSTA 2024 Conference, which will feature a panel Thursday on CS Education in the Age of AI, where experts will be asked the already-answered-by-CSTA questions: "Is computer science education still relevant in the age of AI? Why learn to code when AI can do it for you?"

Submission + - More Than 40% of Japanese Companies Have No Plan To Make Use of AI (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nearly a quarter of Japanese companies have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) in their businesses, while more than 40% have no plan to make use of the cutting-edge technology, a Reuters survey showed on Thursday. The survey, conducted for Reuters by Nikkei Research, pitched a range of questions to 506 companies over July 3-12 with roughly 250 firms responding, on condition of anonymity. About 24% of respondents said they have already introduced AI in their businesses and 35% are planning to do so, while the remaining 41% have no such plans, illustrating varying degrees of embracing the technological innovation in corporate Japan.

Asked for objectives when adopting AI in a question allowing multiple answers, 60% of respondents said they were trying to cope with a shortage of workers, while 53% aimed to cut labour costs and 36% cited acceleration in research and development. As for hurdles to introduction, a manager at a transportation company cited "anxiety among employees over possible headcount reduction." Other obstacles include a lack of technological expertise, substantial capital expenditure and concern about reliability, the survey showed.

Submission + - This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.

The scans, published Wednesday in thejournal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. “Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”

Submission + - Instagram Will Help Researchers Study If It's Hurting Teen Mental Health (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now, after years of contentious relationships with academic researchers, Meta is opening a small pilot program that would allow a handful of them to access Instagram data for up to about six months in order to study the app’s effect on the well-being of teens and young adults. The company will announce today that it is seeking proposals that focus on certain research areas—investigating whether social-media use is associated with different effects in different regions of the world, for example—and that it plans to accept up to seven submissions. Once approved, researchers will be able to access relevant data from study participants—how many accounts they follow, for example, or how much they use Instagram and when. Meta has said that certain types of data will be off-limits, such as user-demographic information and the content of media published by users; a full list of eligible data is forthcoming, and it is as yet unclear whether internal information related to ads that are served to users or Instagram’s content-sorting algorithm, for example, might be provided. The program is being run in partnership with the Center for Open Science, or COS, a nonprofit. Researchers, not Meta, will be responsible for recruiting the teens, and will be required to get parental consent and take privacy precautions.

Submission + - The Biggest Data Breaches In 2024: 1 Billion Stolen Records and Rising (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We’re over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history. And just when you think that some of these hacks can’t get any worse, they do. From huge stores of customers’ personal information getting scraped, stolen and posted online, to reams of medical data covering most people in the United States getting stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 to date have already surpassed at least 1 billion stolen records and rising. These breaches not only affect the individuals whose data was irretrievably exposed, but also embolden the criminals who profit from their malicious cyberattacks. Travel with us to the not-so-distant past to look at how some of the biggest security incidents of 2024 went down, their impact and. in some cases, how they could have been stopped.

Submission + - 10th Circuit Overturns Conviction For Instagram Posting of Forest Service Land (nclalegal.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned New Civil Liberties Alliance client David Lesh’s criminal conviction for allegedly violating a regulation promulgated by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). The Court ruled that the USFS regulation banning unauthorized ‘work activity or service’ on USFS lands is impermissibly vague as applied to his conduct. This means Mr. Lesh could not have known that taking photos on USFS land and posting them to his personal Instagram account would be punishable under the regulation. The Tenth Circuit, under binding Supreme Court precedent, determined that Mr. Lesh was not deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial because the so-called petty offense exception applies, but two judges implied that the exception might be inconsistent with the Constitution and should be revisited.”

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