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Submission + - callupcontact. - Bremerton Lock and Key (callupcontact.com)

Submitted by bremertonlockandkey
bremertonlockandkey writes: We know that motorist expect a fast and efficient job whenever they call for help and we deliver this to them, every time they rely on us for service. We value and appreciate your business and when given the opportunity, we show you just how much by offering you the best job possible. When you do not want any further frustration, call on the services of Bremerton Lock and Key.

Submission + - Tesla must face owners' lawsuit claiming it monopolizes vehicle repairs and part (reuters.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: A U.S. judge said Tesla vehicle owners can pursue a proposed class action accusing billionaire Elon Musk's electric car company of monopolizing markets for repairs and parts, breathing new life into a lawsuit she dismissed last November.
U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson in San Francisco ruled on Monday that owners could try to prove that Tesla coerced them into paying high prices and suffering long waits to have their vehicles fixed, under fear of losing warranty coverage.
Owners said Tesla's alleged coercion violated the federal Sherman antitrust law and California antitrust law.

Evidence of a parts monopoly included restricting original equipment manufacturers from selling "to anyone other than Tesla," and Tesla's selling parts to consumers only on a limited basis, the judge said.

Submission + - Microplastics discovered in human penises for the first time (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have found microplastics in human penises for the first time, as concerns over the tiny particles’ proliferation and potential health effects mount.

Seven different kinds of microplastics were found in four out of five samples of penis tissue taken from five different men as part of a study published in IJIR: Your Sexual Medicine Journal on Wednesday.

Microplastics are polymer fragments that can range from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) down to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometer). Anything smaller is a nanoplastic that must be measured in billionths of a meter. They form when larger plastics break down, either by chemically degrading or physically wearing down into smaller pieces.

  Seven different types of microplastics were detected, with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polypropylene (PP) the most prevalent, according to the study.

Now their presence has been confirmed, more research is needed to investigate potential links to conditions such as ED, Ramasamy said.

Prior research has found that one liter of bottled water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles.

As we are trying to understand the potential health effects of plastics, this is another concerning paper,” said Campen, a regents’ professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who wasn’t involved in the research.

“Plastics are generally non-reactive with the cells and chemicals of our bodies, but they could be physically disruptive to the many processes our bodies undertake for normal function, including functions related to erection and sperm production.”

Campen coauthored a study published in May that found that human testicles contain microplastics and nanoplastics at levels three times higher than animal testes and human placentas.

The study tested 23 preserved testes from cadavers of males who were ages 16 to 88 at the time of their death, then compared the levels of 12 different types of plastics in those testicles with plastics found in 47 dog testes.

“The levels of microplastic shards and types of plastics in human testes were three times greater than those found in dogs, and the dogs are eating off the floor,” Campen said at the time the study was published. “So it really puts in perspective of what we’re putting in our own bodies.”

Submission + - Our Brains React Differently to Deepfake Voices

Submitted by jenningsthecat
jenningsthecat writes: University of Zurich researchers have discovered that our brains process natural human voices and "deepfake" voices differently:

The researchers first used psychoacoustical methods to test how well human voice identity is preserved in deepfake voices. To do this, they recorded the voices of four male speakers and then used a conversion algorithm to generate deepfake voices. In the main experiment, 25 participants listened to multiple voices and were asked to decide whether or not the identities of two voices were the same. Participants either had to match the identity of two natural voices, or of one natural and one deepfake voice.
The deepfakes were correctly identified in two thirds of cases. “This illustrates that current deepfake voices might not perfectly mimic an identity, but do have the potential to deceive people,” says Claudia Roswandowitz, first author and a postdoc at the Department of Computational Linguistics...
The researchers then used imaging techniques to examine which brain regions responded differently to deepfake voices compared to natural voices. They successfully identified two regions that were able to recognize the fake voices: the nucleus accumbens and the auditory cortex. “The nucleus accumbens is a crucial part of the brain’s reward system. It was less active when participants were tasked with matching the identity between deepfakes and natural voices,” says Claudia Roswandowitz. In contrast, the nucleus accumbens showed much more activity when it came to comparing two natural voices.

The complete paper appears in Nature.

Submission + - A Radical New Magnet Without Rare-Earth Metals Is About to Change Motors Forever (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: For society to transition to an electrified world, many technologies—like EV motors and electric grid batteries—will need to gain prominence. And many of those technologies require rare earth metals, which can be costly in terms of both money and environmental and societal degradation.

A U.K.-based company announced last week that they’d successfully developed, in just three months, a magnet that doesn’t use rare earth metals at all using AI—according to the company, that’s roughly 200 times faster than normal.

AI is already being leveraged to discover materials in other crucial areas of the green energy transition, showcasing that artificial intelligence can be a powerful ally in the battle against climate change.

Submission + - Satellite 'Megaconstellations' May Jeopardize Recovery of Ozone Hole (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When old satellites fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, they leave behind tiny particles of aluminum oxide, which eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer. A new study finds that these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022 and will continue to accumulate as the number of low-Earth-orbit satellites skyrockets. The 1987 Montreal Protocol successfully regulated ozone-damaging CFCs to protect the ozone layer, shrinking the ozone hole over Antarctica with recovery expected within fifty years. But the unanticipated growth of aluminum oxides may push pause on the ozone success story in decades to come. Of the 8,100 objects in low Earth orbit, 6,000 are Starlink satellites launched in the last few years. Demand for global internet coverage is driving a rapid ramp up of launches of small communication satellite swarms. SpaceX is the frontrunner in this enterprise, with permission to launch another 12,000 Starlink satellites and as many as 42,000 planned. Amazon and other companies around the globe are also planning constellations ranging from 3,000 to 13,000 satellites, the authors of the study said. Internet satellites in low Earth orbit are short-lived, at about five years. Companies must then launch replacement satellites to maintain internet service, continuing a cycle of planned obsolescence and unplanned pollution.

Aluminum oxides spark chemical reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone, which protects Earth from harmful UV radiation. The oxides don't react chemically with ozone molecules, instead triggering destructive reactions between ozone and chlorine that deplete the ozone layer. Because aluminum oxides are not consumed by these chemical reactions, they can continue to destroy molecule after molecule of ozone for decades as they drift down through the stratosphere. Yet little attention has yet been paid to pollutants formed when satellites fall into the upper atmosphere and burn. Earlier studies of satellite pollution largely focused on the consequences of propelling a launch vehicle into space, such as the release of rocket fuel. The new study, by a research team from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, is the first realistic estimate of the extent of this long-lived pollution in the upper atmosphere, the authors said. [...]

In 2022, reentering satellites increased aluminum in the atmosphere by 29.5% over natural levels, the researchers found. The modeling showed that a typical 250-kilogram (550-pound) satellite with 30% of its mass being aluminum will generate about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of aluminum oxide nanoparticles (1-100 nanometers in size) during its reentry plunge. Most of these particles are created in the mesosphere, 50-85 kilometers (30-50 miles) above Earth's surface. The team then calculated that based on particle size, it would take up to 30 years for the aluminum oxides to drift down to stratospheric altitudes, where 90% of Earth's ozone is located. The researchers estimated that by the time the currently planned satellite constellations are complete, every year, 912 metric tons of aluminum (1,005 U.S. tons) will fall to Earth. That will release around 360 metric tons (397 U.S. tons) of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.

Submission + - Asda IT Staff Shuffled Off To TCS Amid Messy Tech Divorce From Walmart (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Asda is transferring more than 100 internal IT workers to Indian outsourcing company TCS as it labors to meet deadlines to move away from IT systems supported by previous owner Walmart by the end of the year. According to documents seen by The Register, a collective consultation for a staff transfer under TUPE – an arrangement by which employment rights are protected under UK law – begins today (June 17). The UK's third-largest supermarket expects affected staff to meet line managers from June 24, while the transfer date is set for September 16. Contractors will be let go at the end of their current contracts. Asda employs around 5,000 staff in its UK offices. Between 130 and 135 members of the IT team have entered the collective consultation to move to TCS.

The move came as private equity company TDR Capital gained majority ownership of the supermarket group. It was acquired from Walmart by the brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa and TDR Capital in February 2021 at a value of 6.8 billion pounds. The US retail giant retained "an equity investment." Project Future is a massive shift in the retailer's IT function. It is upgrading a legacy ERP system from SAP ECC – run on-prem by Walmart – to the latest SAP S/4HANA in the Microsoft Azure cloud, changing the application software, infrastructure, and business processes at the same time. Other applications are also set to move to Azure, including ecommerce and store systems, while Asda is creating an IT security team for the first time – the work had previously been carried out by its US owner.

Asda signed up to SAP's "RISE" program in a deal to lift, shift, and transform its ERP system – a vital plank in the German vendor's strategy to get customers to the cloud – in December 2021. But the project has already been beset by delays. The UK retailer had signed a three-year deal with Walmart in February 2021 to continue to support its existing system, but was forced to renegotiate to extend the arrangement, saying it planned to move away from the legacy systems before the end of 2024. Although one insider told El Reg that deadline was "totally unachievable," the Walmart deal extends to September 2025, giving the UK retailer room to accommodate further delays without renegotiating the contract.

Asda has yet to migrate a single store to the new infrastructure. The first – Yorkshire's Otley – is set to go live by the end of June. One insider pointed out that project managers were trying to book resources from the infrastructure team for later this year and into the next, but, as they were set to transfer to TCS, the infrastructure team did not know who would be doing the work or what resources would be available. "They have a thousand stores to migrate and they're going to be doing that with an infrastructure team who have their eyes on the door. They'll be very professional, but they're not going above and beyond and doing on-call they don't have to do," the insider said.

Submission + - Wine 9.11 released continuing the ARM improvements (gamingonlinux.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Wine 9.11 has arrived as a new development release for the Windows compatibility layer, and with it new features and bug fixes for a big part of what makes Proton possible.”

Submission + - Evaluating banking apps' security

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Evaluating banking apps' security

“Every 10 minutes, someone steals a mobile phone in London, making phone security a critical concern for all of us. A recent Financial Times article highlights this surge in thefts, revealing our personal and financial information is at significant risk. As I learned from discussions with 2 of my neighbors that had their phones stolen by bikers, securing our phones is essential, not just advisable.”

“In this post, we will first evaluate the security features of iOS and Android, focusing on theft prevention. We will then present a detailed attack scenario targeting the Monzo banking app in the event of device theft, assuming that jailbreaking a brand-new device is not possible.”

Submission + - KDE Plasma 6.1 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: The KDE community announces the latest release of their popular desktop environment: Plasma 6.1 . While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct, Plasma 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take you desktop to a new level. In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too). Among some of the new features in this release you will find improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server, overhauled and streamlined desktop edit mode, restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland, synchronization of keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color, making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it, edge barriers (a sticky area for mouse cursor near the edges between screens), explicit sync support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland, and triple buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering. For detailed information see the KDE Plasma 6.1 release announcement.

Submission + - Ukraine turning to AI to prioritise 700 years of landmine removal (newscientist.com)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen so many landmines deployed across the country that clearing them would take 700 years, say researchers. To make the task more manageable, Ukrainian scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to identify which regions are a priority for de-mining, though they expect some may simply have to be left as a permanent “scar” on the country.

The model considers vast amounts of data, including tax and property ownership records, agricultural maps, data on soil fertility, logs from the military and emergency services of where bombs and shells have landed, information gleaned from satellite images and interviews with local civilians and the military. Even climate change models and data on population density derived from mobile phone operators could be assessed. The AI then weighs factors such as civilian safety and potential economic benefits to determine the importance of a given piece of land and how urgent it is to make it safe.

Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy minister at Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy, is leading the team, and he likens the task of de-mining during an ongoing war to designing and building a submarine entirely underwater, except that the water is on fire. “It’s a big problem,” he says.

Submission + - London Underground Hosts Tests For 'Quantum Compass' That Could Replace GPS (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr Joseph Cotter takes some unusual pieces of luggage on his trips on the London underground. They include a stainless steel vacuum chamber, a few billion atoms of rubidium and an array of lasers that are used to cool his equipment to a temperature just above absolute zero. While not the average kit you would expect to find being dragged into carriages on the District Line, this is the gear that Cotter – who works at Imperial College London’s Centre for Cold Matter – uses on his underground travels. Though the baggage may be bizarre, it has an ambitious purpose. It is being used to develop a quantum compass – an instrument that will exploit the behavior of subatomic matter in order to develop devices that can accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they are placed, paving the way for the creation of a new generation of underground and underwater sensors. The ideal place to test it is the London underground, Cotter and his team have discovered. “We are developing very precise new sensors using quantum mechanics, and these are showing great promise in the laboratory,” he told the Observer last week. “However, they are less accurate in real-life settings. That is why we are taking our equipment to the London underground. It’s the perfect place for smoothing out the rough edges and getting our equipment to work in real life." [...]

At the heart of the quantum compass – which could be ready for widespread use in a few years – is a device known as an accelerometer that can measure how an object’s velocity changes over time. This information, combined with the starting point of that object, allows its future positions to be calculated. Mobile phones and laptops possess accelerometers but these versions cannot maintain their accuracy over lengthy periods. However, quantum mechanics offers scientists a way to provide new precision and accuracy by measuring properties of supercool atoms. At extremely low temperatures, atoms behave in a “quantum” way. They act like matter and like waves. “When atoms are ultra-cold, we can use quantum mechanics to describe how they move, and this allows us to make accurate measurements that tell us how our device is changing its position,” said Cotter. In the devices – which have been carried on board London underground track-testing trains and not on commuter services – rubidium is inserted into the vacuum chamber that lies at the machine’s heart. Powerful lasers are then used to cool these atoms to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15C). In these conditions, the wave properties of the rubidium atoms are affected by the acceleration of the vehicle that is carrying the equipment, and these minute changes can be measured accurately. The system has been found to work well in a stable laboratory but needs to be tested in more extreme conditions if it is to be turned into a transportable, standalone device that can be used in remote or complex locations, added Cotter.

Submission + - Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumventio (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: A French court has ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison their DNS resolvers to prevent circumvention of blocking measures, targeting around 117 pirate sports streaming domains. The move is another anti-piracy escalation for broadcaster Canal+, which also has permission to completely deindex the sites from search engine results.

Stopping someone from acting is not the same as censoring what others may see via search engines. If this becomes a common resort it could be applied to much more than streaming sites.

Submission + - Kenya's First Nuclear Plant Faces Fierce Opposition (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kilifi County’s white sandy beaches have made it one of Kenya’s most popular tourist destinations. Hotels and beach bars line the 165 mile-long (265km) coast; fishers supply the district’s restaurants with fresh seafood; and visitors spend their days boating, snorkelling around coral reefs or bird watching in dense mangrove forests. Soon, this idyllic coastline will host Kenya’s first nuclear plant, as the country, like its east African neighbour Uganda, pushes forward with atomic energy plans. The proposals have sparked fierce opposition in Kilifi. In a building by Mida Creek, a swampy bayou known for its birdlife and mangrove forests, more than a dozen conservation and rights groups meet regularly to discuss the proposed plant.

“Kana nuclear!” Phyllis Omido, an award-winning environmentalist who is leading the protests, tells one such meeting. The Swahili slogan means “reject nuclear”, and encompasses the acronym for the Kenya Anti-Nuclear Alliance who say the plant will deepen Kenya’s debt and are calling for broader public awareness of the cost. Construction on the power station is expected to start in 2027, with it due to be operational in 2034. “It is the worst economic decision we could make for our country,” says Omido, who began her campaign last year. A lawsuit filed in the environmental court by lawyers Collins Sang and Cecilia Ndeti in July 2023 on behalf of Kilifi residents, seeks to stop the plant, arguing that the process has been “rushed” and was “illegal”, and that public participation meetings were “clandestine”. They argue the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (Nupea) should not proceed with fixing any site for the plant before laws and adequate safeguards are in place. Nupea said construction would not begin for years, that laws were under discussion and that adequate public participation was being carried out. Hearings are continuing to take place.

In November, people in Kilifi filed a petition with parliament calling for an inquiry. The petition, sponsored by the Centre for Justice Governance and Environmental Action (CJGEA), a non-profit founded by Omido in 2009, also claimed that locals had limited information on the proposed plant and the criteria for selecting preferred sites. It raised concerns over the risks to health, the environment and tourism in the event of a nuclear spill, saying the country was undertaking a “high-risk venture” without proper legal and disaster response measures in place. The petition also flagged concerns over security and the handling of radioactive waste in a nation prone to floods and drought. The senate suspended (PDF) the inquiry until the lawsuit was heard. “If we really have to invest in nuclear, why can’t [the government] put it in a place that does not cause so much risk to our ecological assets?” says Omido. “Why don’t they choose an area that would not mean that if there was a nuclear leak we would lose so much as a country?”

Peter Musila, a marine scientist who monitors the impacts of global heating on coral reefs, fears that a nuclear power station will threaten aquatic life. The coral cover in Watamu marine national reserve, a protected area near Kilifi’s coast, has improved over the last decade and Musila fears progress could be reversed by thermal pollution from the plant, whose cooling system would suck large amounts of water from the ocean and return it a few degrees warmer, potentially killing fish and the micro-organisms such as plankton, which are essential for a thriving aquatic ecosystem. “It’s terrifying,” says Musila, who works with the conservation organisation A Rocha Kenya. “It could wreak havoc.”

Submission + - The short, happy reign of CD-ROM (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Over at Fast Company, where we’re celebrating 1994 Week, I wrote about the year of Peak CD-ROM, when excitement over the medium’s potential was sky-high and the World Wide Web’s audience still numbered in the extremely low millions. I cover once-famous products such as Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia, the curse of shovelware, the rise of a San Francisco neighborhood known as “Multimedia Gulch,” and why the whole dream soon came crashing down.

Submission + - NHS warns 150,000 patients of blackmail risk (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The NHS has warned nearly 150,000 patients that criminals could attempt to blackmail them after their health records were published online.

Submission + - Used EV price crash keeps getting deeper with 'premium' brand idea history (cnbc.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The decline has been dramatic over the past year. In June 2023, average used EV prices were over 25% higher than used gas car prices, but by May, used EVs were on average 8% lower than the average price for a used gasoline-powered car in U.S. In dollar terms, the gap widened from $265 in February to $2,657 in May, according to an analysis of 2.2 million one to five year-old used cars conducted by iSeeCars. Over the past year, gasoline-powered used vehicle prices have declined between 3-7%, while electric vehicle prices have decreased 30-39%.

“It’s clear used car shoppers will no longer pay a premium for electric vehicles,” iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer stated in an iSeeCars report published last week. Electric power is now a detractor in the consumer’s mind, with EVs “less desirable” and therefore less valuable than traditional cars, he said.

The gap between used luxury brands and EVs has widened, too. Used BMW prices exceed prices for comparable, all-electric, Tesla vehicles by a significant amount, according to iSeeCars. A Tesla Model 3 cost $2,635 more than a BMW 3 Series in May 2023, but by May of this year, was priced over $4,800 less than the 3 Series.

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