One of Slashdot's most-visited stories of all time was the 2016 story asking: Can Cow Backpacks Reduce Global Methane Emissions? "Enteric fermentation," or livestock's digestive process, accounts for 22 percent of all U.S. methane emissions, and the manure they produce makes up eight percent more, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency... Methane, like carbon, is a greenhouse gas, but methane's global warming impact per molecule is 25 times greater than carbon's, according to the EPA.
Cow methane still "heats the Earth more than every flight across the world combined," the Washington Post added today, reporting on a new $30 million genetic engineering experiment undertaken by the Innovative Genomics Institute and the University of California at Davis.

Its mission: to transform a cow's gut so it no longer releases methane. Using tools that snip and transfer DNA, researchers plan to genetically engineer microbes in the cow stomach to eliminate those emissions. If they succeed, they could wipe out the world's largest human-made source of methane and help change the trajectory of planetary warming... The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization...

Scientists envision a kind of probiotic pill, given to the cow at birth, that can transform its microbiome permanently...

The current project doesn't target only a particular cow species — it takes aim at the microbiome itself, offering a solution that could apply to all of them. Brad Ringeisen, executive director at the genomics institute, cut his teeth running biotechnology at the U.S. defense research agency DARPA, which helped pioneer transformative innovations including the internet, miniaturized GPS, stealth aircraft and the computer mouse. "I'm taking the DARPA mentality here," he said. "Let's solve it for all cows, not just a fraction of the cows." ...]

"There's no reason a cow has to produce methane," Ringeisen said. So what if scientists could just ... turn it off?
"I personally think this is the one that can make the biggest impact in the world," Ringeisen said. "Say you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all those emissions."

The article says that currently the scientists are feeding red-seaweed oil to a cow to measure the changes, to prepare for their final goal: "replicate those changes with gene editing." (They're using machine learning to reassemble the hundreds of pieces of each miccroorganism's DNA, so they can understand which changes they need to make with their early-intervention probiotic.) Such a probiotic could also improve a farm's productivity. Cows can lose up to 12 percent of their energy through burping up methane; other ruminants, like sheep and goats, also lose energy in this way. "If there is a way to redirect that hydrogen and convert it into milk, meat, wool — it would be much more accepted by farmers," said Ermias Kebreab [a professor of animal science at UC-Davis].

Early treatments will be tested on the cows at Davis, with researchers tracking their burps to evaluate the drop-off in methane emissions. There is still a long way to go. While scientists have proved that they can gene-edit microbes, researchers have so far only shown that they can edit a small fraction of the microbes in the cow gut — or the human gut, for that matter. Institute researchers are developing microbial gene-editing tools, even as they are mapping the species of the microbiome. They are building the plane while flying it.

The teams have received enough funding for seven years of research. The project started last year, and they hope to have a trial treatment ready for testing in cows in the next two years.

Six months after going public, Reddit "is winning over advertisers," reports Bloomberg, "by showing that it's different than other internet platforms, which often rely on users' identities and personal information to target ads." Instead, Reddit is targeting people based on their interests, relying on the site's [100,000+] deeply detailed communities — called subreddits — to match advertisers with potential customers... Early returns on that strategy have been promising. The text-based site easily surpassed expectations in its first two earnings reports this year, disclosing strong sales and better-than-expected projected growth. The stock is up 66% from its $34 initial public offering price in March.

Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...

Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."

Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...

Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.

Under the streets of New York City, they're testing a "quantum network," reports Phys.org — where engineers from a Brooklyn company named Qunnect Inc are taking steps to "overcome the fragility of entangled states in a fiber cable and ensure the efficiency of signal delivery." For their prototype network, the Qunnect researchers used a leased 34-kilometer-long fiber circuit they called the GothamQ loop. Using polarization-entangled photons, they operated the loop for 15 continuous days, achieving an uptime of 99.84% and a compensation fidelity of 99% for entangled photon pairs transmitted at a rate of about 20,000 per second. At a half-million entangled photon pairs per second, the fidelity was still nearly 90%...

They sent 1,324 nm polarization-entangled photon pairs in quantum superpositions through the fiber, one state with both polarizations horizontal and the other with both vertical — a two-qubit configuration more generally known as a Bell state. In such a superposition, the quantum mechanical photon pairs are in both states at the same time.
"While others have transmitted entangled photons before, there has been too much noise and polarization drift in the fiber environment for entanglement to survive," the article points out, "particularly in a long-term stable network." So the Qunnect team built "automated polarization compensation" devices to correct the polarization of the entangled pairs: In their design, an infrared photon [with a wavelength of 1,324 nanometers] is entangled with a near-infrared photon of 795 nanometers. The latter photon is compatible in wavelength and bandwidth with the rubidium atomic systems, such as are used in quantum memories and quantum processors. It was found that polarization drift was both wavelength- and time-dependent, requiring Qunnect to design and build equipment for active compensation at the same wavelengths...

Qunnect's GothamQ loop demonstration was especially noteworthy for its duration, the hands-off nature of the operation time, and its uptime percentage. It showed, they wrote, "progress toward a fully automated practical entanglement network" that would be required for a quantum internet.
And Qunnect's co-founder/chief science officer says "since we finished this work, we have already made all the parts rack-mounted, so they can be used everywhere..."

Their network design and results are published in PRX Quantum.

South Africa's telecoms industry body is pushing for digital content and service providers to help pay for the roll out of network infrastructure because they generate a huge part of the internet traffic. From a report: The Association of Comms and Technology (ACT) CEO Nomvuyiso Batyi said that the revenues generated by over-the-top (OTT) platforms and the continued success of the OTT model was dependent on the availability of high-quality, reliable and efficient network infrastructure. So "what we're saying is that the OTTs should contribute towards the network upgrades, the network building," she added. OTT platforms or services deliver digital content such as video, audio and messaging directly to consumers over the internet. "Fair share" arrangements ensure that OTT providers contribute to the costs of building, maintaining, and upgrading the infrastructure that supports their business.

A new TV series is capturing the dramatic saga of the The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing website that openly challenged the entertainment industry in the early 2000s. A just-launched teaser is available on YouTube. TorrentFreak reports: A few years ago, news broke that The Pirate Bay story was being turned into a TV series. Written by Piotr Marciniak and directed by Jens Sjogren, who also made the "I am Zlatan" documentary, production was in the hands of B-Reel Films, working for the Swedish broadcaster SVT. American distribution company Dynamic Television scooped up worldwide rights. As far as we know, international deals have not yet been announced. The Swedish premiere on November 8 is coming closer, however, and a few days ago SVT released an official teaser.

The founders of The Pirate Bay -- Anakata, Brokep and Tiamo -- are played by Arvid Swedrup, Simon Greger Carlsson and Willjam Lempling. The teaser doesn't give away much, but it's interesting that one of The Pirate Bay's infamous responses to legal threats features prominently. The teaser quotes from Anakata's response to a letter from DreamWorks, written twenty years ago. The movie company sent a DMCA takedown notice requesting the removal of a torrent for the film Shrek 2, but the reply was not what they had hoped for. "As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here," Anakata wrote. "It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ........ morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons."

The response was public information and made it into the series. Whether there will be any new revelations has yet to be seen, however, as none of the site's founders were actively involved in production. Instead, the producers used interviews with other people involved, plus the vast amount of public information available on the Internet. That includes the infamous responses to legal threats. Time will tell how the producers and director have decided to tell this story. Production took place in Stockholm, Sweden, but also ventured to other countries, including Chile and Thailand, where Fredrik Neij was arrested and paraded in front of the press in 2014.

Global technology giants are pushing back against attempts by India's telecom networks to bring internet services under stricter regulation, rejecting arguments that such measures are necessary to create a "level playing field" and address national security concerns. From a report: The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), a powerful industry body that represents Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify, has forcefully argued against inclusion of the so-called over-the-top (OTT) services in the proposed regulatory framework for telecom operators. In a submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the AIC said there are fundamental differences in technology, operations and functionality between OTT services and traditional telecom operations.

[...] This resistance comes in response to a coordinated push by India's top telecom operators -- Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea -- to bring OTT services under a new authorization framework. Jio, India's largest telecom operator with more than 475 million subscribers, along with other telco operators have recommended that OTT providers contribute to network development costs based on their traffic consumption, turnover and user base.

Apple's Podcasts app is now available on all major web browsers, allowing you to stream episodes directly from the web at www.podcasts.apple.com. TechCrunch reports: The new dedicated web experience aims to make it easier for anyone with a web browser on any device to access podcasts. Web listening has been available for some time; however, in order to listen to an episode, users had to look up a show on a search engine and go to the show's Apple Podcasts Preview page.

Now Apple Podcasts on the web has launched a new interface, allowing users to access features that were previously only available on the app. These include browsing millions of shows, accessing sections like Library and Top Charts, purchasing premium podcast subscriptions, and more. Listeners can sync their Apple Accounts to be able to pause a podcast and save their play progress to listen to later, as well as see their followed shows and subscriptions. Users without an Apple Account can also use the web experience but can only browse and listen. You can try it out by listening to the latest episode of the SourceForge Podcast!

Smonster writes: The maker of the Snoo, a popular high-tech bassinet, touched off a firestorm of outrage after requiring a paid subscription to use several key features. Most new parents are looking for a way to reclaim even a hint of the sleep they used to get pre-infant. So a smart bassinet that uses sensors to detect when a crying baby needs pacifying, simulating the sounds and rhythms of the womb, offers an irresistible promise to sleep-strapped parents: another hour or two of shut-eye. The dream doesn't come cheap: One of the more popular models, the Snoo retails for $1,700, though enterprising parents can score one secondhand from friends, neighbors or relatives whose own children have outgrown it.

But last month, that hand-me-down network was dealt a blow when Happiest Baby, the company that makes Snoo, began charging for access to some of the bassinet's premium features -- features that used to be available to Snoo users indefinitely, at no extra cost. Now, access to the app needed to lock in the bassinet's rocking level, to track the baby's sleep and to use the so-called weaning mode, among other features, will cost parents $20 a month. The change has angered secondhand users and original buyers alike. On Reddit, the new subscription model has prompted review bombs, group brainstorms for collective action and detailed instructions for outraged parents seeking recourse. Some have taken to filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau and state-run consumer protection offices.

In the 1980s, a radio show about home computers was broadcast on a handful of California radio stations. 40 years later, reel-to-reel tapes of the shows were re-discovered — and digitized — by an Internet Archive special collections manager.

An Internet Archive blog post tells the story: Earlier this year archivist Kay Savetz recovered several of the tapes in a property sale, and recognizing their value and worthiness of professional transfer, launched a GoFundMe to have them digitized, and made them available at Internet Archive with the permission of the show's creators...

Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari's Jack Tramiel, Apple's Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others. The recovered shows span November 17 1984 through July 12, 1985.

Many more of the original reel-to-reel tapes — including shows with interviews with Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond, and Gene Roddenberry — are still lost, and perhaps are still waiting to be found in the Los Angeles area. [Though there appears to be a transcript of the Gene Roddenberry interview.]

The stories of how The Famous Computer Cafe was created — and saved, 40 years later — is explored in an episode of the Radio Survivor podcast. The podcast interviewed show co-creator Ellen Fields and archivist Kay Savetz, providing a dual perspective of how the show was created and how it was recovered.

The recovery of these interviews, 40 years after their original airing, holds out hope that many more relics and treasures still await discovery.
You get another perspective on the past from the show's advertisements for 1980s software (and from the production values of 1980s-era radio technology).

Bill Gates was just 29 when he recorded his interview. And Douglas Adams was 32.

"AI is already able to mimic sight and hearing," writes CNBC. And now a startup named Osmo "wants to use the technology to digitize another: smell."

Co-founded by a former Google research scientist, the company built an AI that's "superhuman in its ability to predict what things smelled like," the company's co-founder says. And he believes this might actually prove useful. "We've known that smell contains information we can use to detect disease. But computers can't speak that language and can't interpret that data yet... We will eventually be able to detect disease with scent and we're on our way to building that technology. It's not going to happen this year or anytime soon, but we're on our way."

CoinTelegraph describes how the company invented a training dataset from scratch — a kind of "smell map" with labelled examples of molecular bond associations to teach the AI to identify specific patterns. The team also hopes to develop a method to recreate smells using molecular synthesis. This would, for example, allow a computer in one place to "smell" something and then send that information to another computer for resynthesis — essentially teleporting odor over the internet. This also means scent could join sight and sound as part of the marketing and branding world.

"A new Mozilla logo appears to be on the way," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, " marking the company's first major update to its word-mark since 2017." The existing logo, which incorporates the internet protocol "://" and chosen based on feedback from the community, has become synonymous with the non-profit company. But German blogger Sören Hentzschel, an avid watcher of all things Mozilla, recently noticed that a different Mozilla word-mark was accompanying the (unchanged) Firefox logo on Mozilla's 'Nothing Personal' webpage [upper-left]. Some digging uncovered a number of recent code commits readying and referencing a refreshed word-mark and symbol for use in the navigation areas of Mozilla websites, landing pages, and so on...

However, what's most exciting (to a nerd like me) with this new logo is the ASCII symbol at the end. It could be viewed as a flag on a pole. Sort of like Mozilla planting its values in the ground to say "we're here, come join". But it's more likely a nod to the original Mozilla mascot (inherited from its Netscape beginnings), which was a red dinosaur (an interesting logo of itself as it was designed by Shepard Fairey who created other seminal design works, and the skate brand OBEY)...

Between the inclusion on a live webpage, code commits readying new logo for Mozilla websites, and the fact people can buy official Mozilla merchandise emblazoned with the new design, it seems a formal rebrand announcement is fairly imminent...

Data center construction "could delay California's transition away from fossil fuels and raise electric bills for everyone else," warns the Los Angeles Times — and also increase the risk of blackouts: Even now, California is at the verge of not having enough power. An analysis of public data by the nonprofit GridClue ranks California 49th of the 50 states in resilience — or the ability to avoid blackouts by having more electricity available than homes and businesses need at peak hours... The state has already extended the lives of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant as well as some natural gas-fueled plants in an attempt to avoid blackouts on sweltering days when power use surges... "I'm just surprised that the state isn't tracking this, with so much attention on power and water use here in California," said Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside. Ren and his colleagues calculated that the global use of AI could require as much fresh water in 2027 as that now used by four to six countries the size of Denmark.

Driving the data center construction is money. Today's stock market rewards companies that say they are investing in AI. Electric utilities profit as power use rises. And local governments benefit from the property taxes paid by data centers.
The article notes a Goldman Sachs estimate that by 2030, data centers could consume up to 11% of all U.S. power demand — up from 3% now. And it shows how the sprawling build-out of data centers across America is impacting surrounding communities:

• The article notes that California's biggest concentration of data centers — more than 50 near the Silicon Valley city of Santa Clara — are powered by a utility emitting "more greenhouse gas than the average California electric utility because 23% of its power for commercial customers comes from gas-fired plants. Another 35% is purchased on the open market where the electricity's origin can't be traced." Consumer electric rates are rising "as the municipal utility spends heavily on transmission lines and other infrastructure," while the data centers now consume 60% of the city's electricity.

• Energy officials in northern Virginia "have proposed a transmission line to shore up the grid that would depend on coal plants that had been expected to be shuttered."

• In 2022 an Oregon newspaper discovered Google data centers were consuming 29% of one city's water supply.

• "Earlier this year, Pacific Gas & Electric told investors that its customers have proposed more than two dozen data centers, requiring 3.5 gigawatts of power — the output of three new nuclear reactors."

17,000 AT&T workers from the CWA union went on strike Friday. NPR notes the strike affects workers in nine states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. A North Carolina newspaper says the union will remain on strike until they believe AT&T "begins to bargain over a new contract in good faith" after their previous contract expired back on August 3.

And meanwhile, their article notes that the strike comes as some AT&T customers in North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area "report prolonged internet outages." Saturday afternoon, AT&T also reported internet outages within a circle of northern Charlotte neighborhoods. "As far as the impact, the trained, experienced CWA members who are on strike do critical work installing, maintaining and supporting AT&T's residential and business wireline telecommunications network," CWA communications director Beth Allen said. "Customers should be aware that these workers will not be available to respond to service calls during the strike."

Since at least Wednesday, AT&T internet customers in Durham have reported being without residential service. According to the company's website, outages have been detected across a wide section of the city, including downtown and around Duke University.

AT&T has alerted some affected residents in southwest Durham their internet service "should be online" by Tuesday morning.
An AT&T spokesperson told the newspaper that "We have various business continuity measures in place to avoid disruptions to operations and will continue to provide our customers with the great service they expect."

A union executive said in a statement that AT&T's contract negotiators "did not seem to have the actual bargaining authority required by the legal obligation to bargain in good faith. Our members want to be on the job, providing the quality service that our customers deserve. It's time for AT&T to start negotiating in good faith so that we can move forward towards a fair contract."

ISPs have asked the US Supreme Court to strike down a New York law that requires broadband providers to offer $15-per-month service to people with low incomes. From a report: On Monday, a Supreme Court petition challenging the state law was filed by six trade groups representing the cable, telecom, mobile, and satellite industries. Although ISPs were recently able to block the FCC's net neutrality rules, this week's petition shows the firms are worried about states stepping into the regulatory vacuum with various kinds of laws targeting broadband prices and practices. A broadband-industry victory over federal regulation could bolster the authority of New York and other states to regulate broadband. To prevent that, ISPs said the Supreme Court should strike down both the New York law and the FCC's broadband regulation, although the rulings would have to be made in two different cases.

A situation in which the New York law is upheld while federal rules are struck down "will likely lead to more rate regulation absent the Court's intervention," ISPs told the Supreme Court. "Other States are likely to copy New York once the Attorney General begins enforcing the ABA [Affordable Broadband Act] and New York consumers can buy broadband at below-market rates. As petitioners' members have shown, New York's price cap will require them to sell broadband at a loss and deter them from investing in expanding their broadband networks. As rate regulation proliferates, those harms will as well, stifling critical investment in bringing broadband to unserved and underserved areas." The New York law was upheld in April by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which reversed a 2021 District Court ruling. New York Attorney General Letitia James agreed last week not to enforce the $15 broadband law while the Supreme Court considers whether to take up the case.

TechCrunch's Lauren Forristal reports: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday a final rule that will tackle several types of fake reviews and prohibit marketers from using deceptive practices, such as AI-generated reviews, censoring honest negative reviews and compensating third parties for positive reviews. The decision was the result of a 5-to-0 vote. The new rule will start being enforced 60 days after it's published in the official government publication called Federal Register. [...]

According to the final rule, the maximum civil penalty for fake reviews is $51,744 per violation. However, the courts could impose lower penalties depending on the specific case. "Ultimately, courts will also decide how to calculate the number of violations in a given case," the Commission wrote. [...] The FTC initially proposed the rule on June 30, 2023, following an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking issued in November 2022. You can read the finalized rule here (PDF), but we also included a summary of it below:

- No fake or disingenuous reviews. This includes AI-generated reviews and reviews from anyone who doesn't have experience with the actual product.
- Businesses can't sell or buy reviews, whether negative or positive.
- Company insiders writing reviews need to clearly disclose their connection to the business. Officers or managers are prohibited from giving testimonials and can't ask employees to solicit reviews from relatives.
- Company-controlled review websites that claim to be independent aren't allowed.
- No using legal threats, physical threats or intimidation to forcefully delete or prevent negative reviews. Businesses also can't misrepresent that the review portion of their website comprises all or most of the reviews when it's suppressing the negative ones.
- No selling or buying fake engagement like social media followers, likes or views obtained through bots or hacked accounts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: The family of a French mariner who died on the imploded Titan submersible last year has sued Titan's maker, OceanGate Expeditions, for more than $50 million. The lawsuit claims OceanGate is responsible for explorers' suffering immediately preceding their deaths, as well as for failing to disclose the extent of the submersible's risks. Among those risks are Titan's cheap materials, including the $30 Logitech gaming controller used aboard the vehicle. [...]

The lawsuit points at Titan's "hip, contemporary, wireless electronics system" and then alleges that none of the controllers or gauges inside Titan would operate without a constant source of power and a wireless signal. One of those controllers was a modified Logitech F710 Gamepad, a $30 to $40 device designed for, well, gaming. The gamepad quickly became the subject of internet mockery following the loss of Titan; some speculators said the submersible must have been doomed to fail if it used such cheap components. The lawsuit even claims the controller's Bluetooth (rather than wired) connectivity set it up for failure. Still, other speculators believe the controller wouldn't have had much impact on the submersible's operational durability. Instead, the issue would have been with the vehicle's carbon fiber pressure cylinder, which Rush allegedly bought off Boeing at a discount after the material passed its "airplane shelf life." Regardless of the exact material, it seems the consensus among members of the public is that for OceanGate, quality was an afterthought.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the past few days, a software package called Deep-Live-Cam has been going viral on social media because it can take the face of a person extracted from a single photo and apply it to a live webcam video source while following pose, lighting, and expressions performed by the person on the webcam. While the results aren't perfect, the software shows how quickly the tech is developing -- and how the capability to deceive others remotely is getting dramatically easier over time. The Deep-Live-Cam software project has been in the works since late last year, but example videos that show a person imitating Elon Musk and Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance (among others) in real time have been making the rounds online. The avalanche of attention briefly made the open source project leap to No. 1 on GitHub's trending repositories list (it's currently at No. 4 as of this writing), where it is available for download for free. [...]

Like many open source GitHub projects, Deep-Live-Cam wraps together several existing software packages under a new interface (and is itself a fork of an earlier project called "roop"). It first detects faces in both the source and target images (such as a frame of live video). It then uses a pre-trained AI model called "inswapper" to perform the actual face swap and another model called GFPGAN to improve the quality of the swapped faces by enhancing details and correcting artifacts that occur during the face-swapping process. The inswapper model, developed by a project called InsightFace, can guess what a person (in a provided photo) might look like using different expressions and from different angles because it was trained on a vast dataset containing millions of facial images of thousands of individuals captured from various angles, under different lighting conditions, and with diverse expressions.

During training, the neural network underlying the inswapper model developed an "understanding" of facial structures and their dynamics under various conditions, including learning the ability to infer the three-dimensional structure of a face from a two-dimensional image. It also became capable of separating identity-specific features, which remain constant across different images of the same person, from pose-specific features that change with angle and expression. This separation allows the model to generate new face images that combine the identity of one face with the pose, expression, and lighting of another.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: When "I can has cheezburger?" became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up. But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is "dark data", meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family -- from "All your base are belong to us", through Ryan Gosling saying "Hey Girl", to Tim Walz with a piglet -- are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacenter, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacenters will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.

Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced. "I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have," he said. "And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it's a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact." He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story. [...] One funny meme isn't going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people's camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: "The one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption." Since we're paying to store data in the cloud, cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to keep people from deleting junk data, says Hodgkinson. He recommends people send fewer pointless emails and avoid the "dreaded 'reply all' button."

"One [figure] that often does the rounds is that for every standard email, that equates to about 4g of carbon. If we then think about the amount of what we mainly call 'legacy data' that we hold, so if we think about all the digital photos that we have, for instance, there will be a cumulative impact."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Axios: Locking up merchandise at drugstores and discount retailers hasn't curbed retail theft but is driving frustrated consumers to shop online more, retail experts tell Axios. Retail crime is eating into retailers' profits and high theft rates are also leading to a rise in store closures. Secured cases can cause sales to drop 15% to 25%, Joe Budano, CEO of anti-theft technology company Indyme, previously told Axios. Barricading everything from razors to laundry detergent has largely backfired and broken shopping in America, Bloomberg reports.

Aisles full of locked plexiglass cases are common at many CVS and Walgreens stores where consumers have to wait for an employee to unlock them. Target, Walmart, Dollar General and other retailers have also pulled back on self-checkout to deter shoplifting. "Locking up products worsens the shopping experience, and it makes things inconvenient and difficult," GlobalData retail analyst Neil Saunders said, adding it pushes shoppers to other retailers or to move purchases online.

Driving the news: Manmohan Mahajan, Walgreens global chief financial officer, said in a June earnings call that the retailer was experiencing "higher levels of shrink." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spoke of the "speed and ease" of ordering online versus walking into pharmacies on a call with investors last week. "It's a pretty tough experience with how much is locked behind cabinets, where you have to press a button to get somebody to come out and open the cabinets for you," Jassy said. schwit1 adds: "The American-style retail shopping experience was invented in a high-trust environment. As trust erodes, so does the experience."

In an effort to beef up protections for consumers against corporations, the Biden administration on Monday announced a handful of policies to crack down on "headaches and hassles that waste Americans' time and money." From a report: Through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the administration will ask companies to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions and memberships as it is to sign up for them, and through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new rule will require companies to let customers cut through automated customer service "doom loops" by pressing a single button to reach a real person.

"For a lot of services, it takes one or two clicks on your phone to sign up. It should take one or two clicks on your phone to end the service," White House Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden said on a call with reporters to discuss the new policies. Consumers could see the new rule applied to gym memberships or subscriptions with phone and internet companies. The administration will also call on health insurance companies to allow claims to be submitted online, rather than requiring insured customers to print out and mail forms in for coverage.