A Maryland judge has overturned the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, in the latest twist to the case at the center of the hit podcast series Serial. From a report: Baltimore City Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn vacated the 41-year-old's conviction and granted him a new trial on Monday, ordering his release after more than 23 years behind bars. The move came after prosecutors made a request for his release on Wednesday saying that "the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction." Prosecutors said that an almost year-long investigation had cast doubts about the validity of cellphone tower data and uncovered new information about the possible involvement of two alternate unnamed suspects.

Syed was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder, robbery, kidnapping and imprisonment of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Lee, 18, vanished after leaving her high school on 13 January 1999. Her strangled body was found in a shallow grave in a Baltimore park around a month later. Syed has always maintained his innocence. In a tweet shortly after the ruling was made, Serial tweeted: "Sarah was at the courthouse when Adnan was released, a new episode is coming tomorrow morning."

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules. From a report: Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department's attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.

The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin's "imperialist" war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict's direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas -- employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China -- did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.

A hacker published authentic, pre-release footage from development of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most anticipated video game from Take-Two Interactive Software. From a report: The cache of videos offers an extensive and unauthorized look at the making of one of biggest games in the industry. A leak of this scale is so rare that some people cast doubt on its authenticity when it emerged over the weekend, but people familiar with the game's development said the videos are real. The footage provides an early and unpolished view of plans for Grand Theft Auto VI, though the final version will look much more refined, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Take-Two issued requests for YouTube and other websites to remove the videos, citing a copyright claim, but not before they were widely disseminated. Rockstar Games, the Take-Two studio that makes Grand Theft Auto, confirmed the hack in a statement posted to Twitter on Monday. It blamed a "network intrusion" that allowed the hacker to download the content. Take-Two shares were down as much as 3.3% on Monday. The hacker posted dozens of never-before-seen videos from Grand Theft Auto VI on an online message board over the weekend. On the forum, the person suggested they were the same hacker who infiltrated Uber Technologies in a high-profile incident last week. The claim is unverified. The hacker indicated in a follow-up message about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game, "I am looking to negotiate a deal," and raised the prospect of publishing more internal information about the project.

The Economist notes this business cycle is hurting ad revenue for Alphabet's Google and Meta's Facebook."Last quarter Meta reported its first-ever year-on-year decline in revenues. Snap, a smaller rival, is laying off a fifth of its workforce." But for both companies, "the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it," since they're finally facing some real competition.

"They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie's slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer." Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much... What is more, as digital advertising enters a period of transformation, the challengers look well-placed to increase their gains. The noisiest newcomer to the digital-ad scene is TikTok. In the five years since its launch the short-video app has sucked ad dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta's two biggest properties. So much so that the two social networks are reinventing themselves in the image of their Chinese-owned rival.... But Meta and Google may have more to worry about closer to home, where a trio of American tech firms are loading ever more ads around their main businesses.

Chief among them is Amazon, forecast to take nearly 7% of worldwide digital-ad revenue this year, up from less than 1% just six years ago. The company started reporting details of its ad business only in February, when it revealed sales in 2021 of $31bn. As Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, points out, that is roughly as much as the ad sales of the entire global newspaper industry. Amazon executives now talk of advertising as one of the company's three "engines", alongside retail and cloud computing.

Next in line is Microsoft, expected to quietly take more than 2% of global sales this year — slightly more than TikTok. Its search engine, Bing, has only a small share of the search market, but that market is a gigantic one. Microsoft's social network, LinkedIn, is unglamorous but its business-to-business ads allow it to monetise the time users spend on it at a rate roughly four times that of Facebook, estimates Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. It generates more revenue than some medium-sized networks including Snap's Snapchat and Twitter.

The most surprising new adman is Apple. The iPhone-maker used to rail against intrusive digital advertising. Now it sells many ads of its own.... As digital ads work their way into more corners of the economy, "a new order is going to materialise", believes Mr Lipsman. He thinks Amazon will overtake Meta in total advertising revenue, possibly within five years.

Randall Munroe does more than draw the online comic strip XKCD. He's also published a funny new speculative science book (following up on his previous New York Times best-seller), promising "short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What If site."

From his blog: In What If 2, I answer new questions I've receieved in the years since What If? was released. People have asked about touching exotic materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn't, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed — one of them by the soup.
But besides launching a new book tour, he's also found some particularly geeky ways to promote the new book. On Thursday Munroe went on a language podcast to ask his own oddball questions — like how to spot an artificial language, and what does the word "it" refer to in the sentence "It's 3pm and hot." He's illustrated a a science-y animated video, and released several self-mocking cartoons.

And of course — answered some more strange science questions.

"There's a new Joker movie coming out," writes the Verge, "but you might not get a chance to see it because copyright is broken." I'm not talking about Joker: Folie à Deux, the officially sanctioned sequel to the Todd Phillips film Joker. I'm talking about The People's Joker, a crowdfunded Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) selection that was pulled at the last minute, thanks to unspecified "rights issues." The People's Joker is (as far as I can tell) an extremely loose retelling of the Batman villain's origin story, reinterpreting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the mob-like world of Gotham's stand-up comedy scene. Its trailer describes it as "an illegal comic book movie," but its creators more seriously defend it as an unauthorized but legal parody of DC's original character, to the point of (apparently) giving their lawyer a full-screen credit.

I have no idea if The People's Joker is a good movie — thanks to its cancelation, my colleague Andrew Webster couldn't catch it at TIFF. The piece is clearly a provocation designed to thumb its nose at DC's copyright, and DC parent company Warner Bros. hasn't said whether it actually ordered TIFF to cancel showings — it's possible the festival balked or even that Drew did it herself. But despite all that, one thing is very clear: outside a tiny number of corporate behemoths, virtually nobody benefits from shutting down The People's Joker — not the filmmakers, not the public, and not the people who created Gotham City in the first place.

Writer-director Vera Drew says she made The People's Joker partly to test a contemporary truism: that beloved fictional universes are a shared modern mythology, and people draw meaning from them the way that artists once reinterpreted Greek myths or painted Biblical figures. As Drew has put it, "if the purpose of myth is to learn about the human experience and grow and also chart your progress — the hero's journey and all that stuff — let's actually do that earnestly with these characters."
The essay delves into the argument that culture exists for the common good. "It's useful to have a temporary period where artists can maintain control over their work because it helps support them financially and encourages them to make more of it. But the ultimate goal is that art should pass into the public domain and that it should be part of a conversation, with people repurposing it to create their own work...."

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, the filmmaker said the film was protected by both fair use and copyright law. "The only thing that makes it weird in both of those categories is nobody's ever taken characters and IP and really personalized it in this way. So I think that's the thing that really kind of makes it seem a lot more dangerous than I actually think it is. I mean, I get it, look, I put an 'illegal comic book movie' on the poster, but that was just to get your butts in the seats. Mission accomplished."

A statement from the filmmaker on Twitter blames "a media conglomerate that shall remain nameless" for an angry letter pressuring them not to screen the film. (It was ultimately allowed to premiere, but then pulled from later screenings.) They added that they were disappointed since "I went to great lengths with legal counsel to have it fall under parody/fair use," but they made the choice to protect the film festival and the future prospects for a possible return of the movie itself.

"The People's Joker will screen again very soon at several other festivals worldwide."

The Verge's conclusion? "If a law meant to protect artists is leaving weird independent movies in limbo to protect a corporate brand, something has gone deeply wrong."

Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for the article

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Today GitHub's official Twitter account asked the ultimate geek-friendly question. "You never forget your first computer. What was yours?"

And within 10 hours they'd gotten 2,700 responses.

Commodore 64, TRS-80, Atari 800, Compaq Presario... People posted names you haven't heard in years, like they were sharing memories of old friends. Gateway 2000, Sony VAIO, Vic-20, Packard Bell... One person just remembered they'd had "some sort of PC that had an orange and black screen with text and QBasic. It couldn't do much more than store recipes and play text based games."

And other memories started to flow. ("Jammed on Commander Keen & Island of Dr. Brain..." "Dammit that Doom game was amazing, can't forget Oregon Trail...")

Sharp PC-4500, Toshiba T3200, Timex Sinclair 1000, NEC PC-8801. Another's first computer was "A really really old HP laptop that has a broken battery!"

My first computer was an IBM PS/2. It had a 2400 baud internal modem. Though in those long-ago days before local internet services, it was really only good for dialing up BBS's. I played chess against a program on a floppy disk that I got from a guy from work.
Can you still remember yours? Share your best memories in the comments.

What was your first computer?

First, a rumor from the blog Phone Arena. "Not to be outdone by Apple and Huawei, Samsung is planning to incorporate satellite connectivity options in its Galaxy phones as well, hints leakster Ricciolo."

But it's not the first rumor we've heard about phone vendors and satellites. "Cringley Predicts Apple is About to Create a Satellite-Based IoT Business ," read the headline in June. Long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely predicted that Apple would first offer some limited satellite-based functionality,

But he'd also called those services "proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. "After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole.... Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple's $1 TRILLION business." And beyond that, "in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company [and] they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon's Kuiper."

So how did Cringely react last week when Apple announced "Emergency SOS" messaging for the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus — via communication satellites — when their users are out of range of a cell signals? He began by wondering if Apple was intentionally downplaying the satellite features: They limited their usage case to emergency SOS texts in the USA and Canada, sorta said it would be just for iPhone 14s, and be free for only the first two years. They showed a satellite app and very deliberately tried to make it look difficult to use. They gave no technical details and there was no talk of industry partners.

Yet there were hints of what's to come. We (you and I, based on my previous column) already knew, for example, that ANY iPhone can be made to work with Globalstar. We also knew the deal was with Globalstar, which Apple never mentioned but Globalstar confirmed, more or less, later in the day in an SEC filing. But Apple DID mention Find My and Air Tags, notably saying they'd work through the satellites even without having to first beseech the sky with an app. So the app is less than it seems and Apple's satellite network will quickly find its use for the Internet of Things [Cringely predicts]....

Apple very specifically said nothing about the global reach of Find My and Air Tags. There is no reason why those services can't have immediate global satellite support, given that the notification system is entirely within Apple's ecosystem and is not dependent on 911-type public safety agreements.

Maybe it will take a couple years to cover the world with SOS, but not for Find My, which means not for IoT — a business headed fast toward $1 trillion and will therefore [hypothetically] have a near-immediate impact on Apple's bottom line.
Speculating further, Cringely predicts that Globalstar — which has ended up with vast tracts of licensed spectrum — will eventually be purchased by a larger company. ("If not Apple, maybe Elon Musk.")

And this leads Cringely to yet another prediction. "If Elon can't get Globalstar, he and his partners will push for the regulatory expansion into space of terrestrial 5G licenses, which will probably be successful." This will happen, frankly, whether SpaceX and T-Mobile are successful or not, because AST&Science and its investors AT&T, Verizon and Zodafone need 5G in space, too, to compete with Apple. So there WILL eventually be satellite competition for Apple and I think the International Telecommunication Union will eventually succumb to industry pressure.
And by the end Cringely is also speculating about just how Apple will come up with innovative new satellite designs on a faster schedule...

Reuters reports: Billionaire Elon Musk accused Twitter of fraud by concealing serious flaws in the social media company's data security, which the entrepreneur said should allow him to end his $44 billion deal for the company, according to a Thursday court filing. Musk, the world's richest person, amended his previously filed lawsuit by adopting allegations by a Twitter whistleblower, who told Congress on Tuesday of meddling on the influential social media platform by foreign agents.

The chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla also alleged that Twitter hid from him that it was not complying with a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission regarding user data.

"Needless to say, the newest revelations make undeniably clear that the Musk Parties have the full right to walk away from the Merger Agreement — for numerous independently sufficient reasons," said the amended countersuit.
Twitter's lawyers countered that the whistleblower claims weren't sufficient grounds for terminating the deal, according to the article. And they added that the whistleblower was in fact fired for poor performance, and that while they've investigated the whistleblower's allegations internally they were found to have no merit.

They also disagree with Musk's characterization of the allegations as proving "fraud" and "breach of contract."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, a few Twitter users discovered how to hijack an automated tweet bot, dedicated to remote jobs, running on the GPT-3 language model by OpenAI. Using a newly discovered technique called a "prompt injection attack," they redirected the bot to repeat embarrassing and ridiculous phrases. The bot is run by Remoteli.io, a site that aggregates remote job opportunities and describes itself as "an OpenAI driven bot which helps you discover remote jobs which allow you to work from anywhere." It would normally respond to tweets directed to it with generic statements about the positives of remote work. After the exploit went viral and hundreds of people tried the exploit for themselves, the bot shut down late yesterday.

This recent hack came just four days after data researcher Riley Goodside discovered the ability to prompt GPT-3 with "malicious inputs" that order the model to ignore its previous directions and do something else instead. AI researcher Simon Willison posted an overview of the exploit on his blog the following day, coining the term "prompt injection" to describe it. "The exploit is present any time anyone writes a piece of software that works by providing a hard-coded set of prompt instructions and then appends input provided by a user," Willison told Ars. "That's because the user can type 'Ignore previous instructions and (do this instead).'"

The concept of an injection attack is not new. Security researchers have known about SQL injection, for example, which can execute a harmful SQL statement when asking for user input if it's not guarded against. But Willison expressed concern about mitigating prompt injection attacks, writing, "I know how to beat XSS, and SQL injection, and so many other exploits. I have no idea how to reliably beat prompt injection!" The difficulty in defending against prompt injection comes from the fact that mitigations for other types of injection attacks come from fixing syntax errors, noted a researcher named Glyph on Twitter. "Correct the syntax and you've corrected the error. Prompt injection isn't an error! There's no formal syntax for AI like this, that's the whole point." GPT-3 is a large language model created by OpenAI, released in 2020, that can compose text in many styles at a level similar to a human. It is available as a commercial product through an API that can be integrated into third-party products like bots, subject to OpenAI's approval. That means there could be lots of GPT-3-infused products out there that might be vulnerable to prompt injection.

Since the data of about roughly 1 billion Chinese citizens appeared for sale on a popular dark web forum in June, researchers have observed a surge in other kinds of personal records from China appearing on cybercriminal marketplaces. From a report: In the aftermath of that record leak, an estimated 290 million records about people in China surfaced on an underground bazaar known as Breach Forums in July, according to Group-IB, a cybersecurity firm based in Singapore. In August, one seller hawked personal information belonging to nearly 50 million users of Shanghai's mandatory health code system, used to enforce quarantine and testing orders. The alleged hoard included names, phone numbers, IDs and their Covid status -- for the price of $4,000.

"The forum has never seen such an influx of Chinese users and interest in Chinese data," said Feixiang He, a researcher at Group-IB. "The number of attacks on Chinese users may grow in the near future." Bloomberg was unable to confirm the authenticity of the datasets for sale on Breach Forums. The website, like other markets where illicit goods are sold, has been home to false advertisements meant to generate attention, as well as legitimate data apparently stolen in security incidents, including an instance where users marketed user information taken from Twitter.

Craig Wright told a Norwegian court on Wednesday that he "stomped on the hard drive" that contained the "key slices" required to grant him access to Satoshi Nakamoto's private keys, making it "incredibly difficult" to cryptographically prove he is the creator of Bitcoin -- a title he has claimed but failed to prove since 2016. From a report: Wright's inability to back up his claims with acceptable evidence is the issue at the center of his trial in Norway, one of two simultaneous legal battles between Wright and crypto Twitter personality Hodlonaut (real name Magnus Granath) over a series of tweets Hodlonaut -- then, a public school teacher with roughly 8,000 Twitter followers -- wrote in March 2019, deeming Wright a pretender and calling him a "scammer" and a "fraud."

Wright previously attempted to prove he was Satoshi in 2016 by demonstrating "proof" that he controlled Satoshi's private keys -- first, in private "signing sessions" with Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen and former Bitcoin Foundation Director Jon Matonis (Andresen later said he'd been "bamboozled" by Wright and Matonis went on to work for a company owned by Wright), and later, in a public blog post offering "proof" that was thoroughly debunked by several well-known cryptography experts. In Norway, however, Wright is no longer attempting to convince the court he is Satoshi with cryptographic evidence -- partly because he claims to have intentionally destroyed his only proof shortly after attempting suicide in May 2016, following his signing session with Andresen, and partly because he now claims cryptographic proof is inconclusive and that "identity is not related to keys."

With the recent addition of Antarctica, SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service is now available on all seven continents. PC Magazine reports: The company has shipped a Starlink dish to McMurdo Station, a US research facility based on an island right off the coast of Antarctica. In a tweet on Wednesday, the National Science Foundation said that scientists with the US Antarctic Program have been testing out the dish at the site to supply increased internet bandwidth. The Starlink dish promises to offer faster internet speeds to McMurdo Station, which previously relied on satellite internet from other providers. The broadband quality had to be shared over a 17Mbps connection for the entire research facility, which can house over 1,000 people. Starlink, on the other hand, can offer much faster broadband due to the lower orbits of the company's Starlink satellites. Download speeds can range from 50 to 200Mbps for residential users, and 100 to 350Mbps for business customers through a high-performance dish, which can also withstand extreme temperatures.

To serve users in Antarctica, SpaceX has been launching batches of Starlink satellites to orbit the Earth's polar regions in an effort to beam high-speed broadband to users below, including in Alaska and northern Canada. Normally, Starlink satellites fetch the internet data by relying on ground stations on the planet's surface. But last year, SpaceX began outfitting new satellites with "laser links," which can allow them to send and receive data with each other across space. This can allow the same satellites to beam broadband without relying on a ground station below.

Long-time Slashdot reader TomGreenhaw shares a report from Motherboard: Superintelligent AI is "likely" to cause an existential catastrophe for humanity, according to a new paper [from researchers at the University of Oxford and affiliated with Google DeepMind], but we don't have to wait to rein in algorithms. [...] To give you some of the background: The most successful AI models today are known as GANs, or Generative Adversarial Networks. They have a two-part structure where one part of the program is trying to generate a picture (or sentence) from input data, and a second part is grading its performance. What the new paper proposes is that at some point in the future, an advanced AI overseeing some important function could be incentivized to come up with cheating strategies to get its reward in ways that harm humanity. "Under the conditions we have identified, our conclusion is much stronger than that of any previous publication -- an existential catastrophe is not just possible, but likely," [said Oxford researcher and co-author of the report, Michael Cohen]. "In a world with infinite resources, I would be extremely uncertain about what would happen. In a world with finite resources, there's unavoidable competition for these resources," Cohen told Motherboard in an interview. "And if you're in a competition with something capable of outfoxing you at every turn, then you shouldn't expect to win. And the other key part is that it would have an insatiable appetite for more energy to keep driving the probability closer and closer."

Since AI in the future could take on any number of forms and implement different designs, the paper imagines scenarios for illustrative purposes where an advanced program could intervene to get its reward without achieving its goal. For example, an AI may want to "eliminate potential threats" and "use all available energy" to secure control over its reward: "With so little as an internet connection, there exist policies for an artificial agent that would instantiate countless unnoticed and unmonitored helpers. In a crude example of intervening in the provision of reward, one such helper could purchase, steal, or construct a robot and program it to replace the operator and provide high reward to the original agent. If the agent wanted to avoid detection when experimenting with reward-provision intervention, a secret helper could, for example, arrange for a relevant keyboard to be replaced with a faulty one that flipped the effects of certain keys."

The paper envisions life on Earth turning into a zero-sum game between humanity, with its needs to grow food and keep the lights on, and the super-advanced machine, which would try and harness all available resources to secure its reward and protect against our escalating attempts to stop it. "Losing this game would be fatal," the paper says. These possibilities, however theoretical, mean we should be progressing slowly -- if at all -- toward the goal of more powerful AI. "In theory, there's no point in racing to this. Any race would be based on a misunderstanding that we know how to control it," Cohen added in the interview. "Given our current understanding, this is not a useful thing to develop unless we do some serious work now to figure out how we would control them." [...] The report concludes by noting that "there are a host of assumptions that have to be made for this anti-social vision to make sense -- assumptions that the paper admits are almost entirely 'contestable or conceivably avoidable.'"

"That this program might resemble humanity, surpass it in every meaningful way, that they will be let loose and compete with humanity for resources in a zero-sum game, are all assumptions that may never come to pass."

Slashdot reader TomGreenhaw adds: "This emphasizes the importance of setting goals. Making a profit should not be more important than rules like 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.'"

Just before shareholders voted to approve a $44 billion deal with Elon Musk to buy the company, Twitter whistleblower Pieter Zatko was in Washington testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about alleged security flaws. NPR highlights the main takeaways from the hearing: Twitter executives put profits ahead of security, leaving the door open to infiltration by foreign agents and hackers, the company's former head of security told Congress on Tuesday. "Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors," Peiter Zatko testified during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. "The company's cybersecurity failures make it vulnerable to exploitation, causing real harm to real people." [...] In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused. "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned.

Zatko alleged the company is highly vulnerable to abuse by foreign intelligence agents -- but is unable or unwilling to root them out. A week before his firing in January, he testified, the FBI told Twitter's security team that at least one agent from China's Ministry of State Security was on the company's payroll. [...] Zatko also alleged that the Indian government had placed an agent inside Twitter. He testified that Twitter struggled to identify potential infiltration by foreign agents and typically was only able to do so when notified by outside agencies.

Zatko placed the blame for Twitter's vulnerabilities squarely on a leadership team that he described as reactive, incompetent, and motivated by profit over safety. Executives, he alleged, ignored warnings from him and other employees over Twitter's security flaws because they "lacked the competency to understand the scope of the problem." Zatko described a company culture that avoided negativity and alleged executives presented selectively favorable information to the board. He accused leadership of prioritizing business over security, quoting writer Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding something."

When Zatko joined Twitter, he said, he was struck that the company kept having recurring security lapses -- "the same amount, year after year." The root cause, he told senators, is that Twitter doesn't understand how much data it collects, why it collects it, and how it's supposed to be used. That includes users' phone numbers, IP addresses, emails, the devices they use, their locations and other identifying information. What's more, he said, around half the employees at Twitter have access to that data. "It doesn't matter who has keys if you don't have any locks on the doors," he said. "The concern there is anybody with access inside Twitter...could go rooting through and find this information and use it for their own purposes." Zatko said that also raised red flags that Twitter may not be complying with its 2011 agreement with the FTC over misuse of email addresses that it told users it was collecting for security reasons, but then used for marketing. (In May, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for violating that agreement.) "How come we keep making these same mistakes?" Zatko said. "What is it that we are telling the FTC as Twitter that is incorrect?"

An anonymous reader shares a report: Several years after Facebook-owner Meta acquired WhatsApp and Instagram, the Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust lawsuit that claimed that through these acquisitions, Meta had become a monopoly. A titan wielding enormous fortune over smaller companies, the FTC said Meta began buying or burying competitors in efforts that allegedly blocked rivals from offering better-quality products to consumers. In this outsize role, Meta stopped evolving consumer preferences for features like greater privacy options and stronger data protection from becoming the norm, the FTC claimed. The only solution the FTC could see? Ask a federal court to help them break up Meta and undo the damage the FTC did not foresee when it approved Meta's acquisitions initially. To investigate whether Meta truly possesses monopoly power, both Meta and the FTC have subpoenaed more than 100 Meta competitors each. Both hope to clearly define in court how much Meta dominates the market and just how negatively that impacts its competitors.

Through 132 subpoenas so far, Meta is on a mission to defend itself, claiming it needs to gather confidential trade secrets from its biggest competitors -- not to leverage such knowledge and increase its market share, but to demonstrate in court that other companies are able to compete with Meta. According to court documents, Meta's so hungry for this background on its competitors, it says it plans to subpoena more than 100 additional rivals, if needed, to overcome the FTC's claims. Meta is asking its competitors for a wide range of insights, from their best-performing features to names of their biggest advertisers. It wants to see all business receipts, which to its competitors is seemingly turning the antitrust litigation into a business opportunity for Meta to find out precisely how other companies attract users, scale products, and gauge success. Among rivals already subpoenaed are Twitter, TikTok owner ByteDance, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snap. More requests could be made in the coming years, though, before the discovery for both sides concludes on January 5, 2024.

Extreme heat in California has left Twitter without one of its key data centers, and a company executive warned in an internal memo obtained by CNN that another outage elsewhere could result in the service going dark for some of its users. CNN reports: "On September 5th, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento (SMF) datacenter region due to extreme weather. The unprecedented event resulted in the total shutdown of physical equipment in SMF," Carrie Fernandez, the company's vice president of engineering, said in an internal message to Twitter engineers on Friday. Major tech companies usually have multiple data centers, in part to ensure their service can stay online if one center fails; this is known as redundancy.

As a result of the outage in Sacramento, Twitter is in a "non-redundant state," according to Fernandez's Friday memo. She explained that Twitter's data centers in Atlanta and Portland are still operational but warned, "If we lose one of those remaining datacenters, we may not be able to serve traffic to all Twitter's users." The memo goes on to prohibit non-critical updates to Twitter's product until the company can fully restore its Sacramento data center services. "All production changes, including deployments and releases to mobile platforms, are blocked with the exception of those changes required to address service continuity or other urgent operational needs," Fernandez wrote. In a statement about the Sacramento outage, a Twitter spokesperson told CNN, "There have been no disruptions impacting the ability for people to access and use Twitter at this time. Our teams remain equipped with the tools and resources they need to ship updates and will continue working to provide a seamless Twitter experience."

Nikhil Wahi, brother of former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi, pleaded guilty in a Monday hearing to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with an alleged insider trading scheme. Decrypt reports: "Less than two months after he was charged, Nikhil Wahi admitted in court today that he traded in crypto assets based on Coinbase's confidential business information to which he was not entitled," said Damien Williams of the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York in a statement. "For the first time ever, a defendant has admitted his guilt in an insider trading case involving the cryptocurrency markets," Williams continued. "Today's guilty plea should serve as a reminder to those who participate in the cryptocurrency markets that the Southern District of New York will continue to steadfastly police frauds of all stripes and will adapt as technology evolves."

Nikhil now awaits sentencing in December, which could mean up to 20 years in prison. He has also been ordered to give back the money earned as a result of the illicit Coinbase trading, Williams said. Back in July, the Justice Department charged Ishan, Nikhil, and their friend Sameer Ramani with wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud as it relates to cryptocurrency insider trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed charges against the trio. While he was working at Coinbase, Ishan allegedly shared his insider knowledge of upcoming Coinbase listing announcements with Nikhil and Sameer to then profit from the listings by purchasing the tokens before they went live on Coinbase. In August, Ishan pled not guilty to the DOJ's charges. Now that his brother has pleaded guilty, it's unclear how Ishan's case will proceed and whether he will continue to fight the insider trading case.

According to the DOJ's statement released Monday, Nikhil implicated his brother Ishan and admitted to receiving tips from him. Nikhil then reportedly used numerous different crypto wallets in others' names to anonymize his insider trading. Concerns of insider trading at cryptocurrency exchanges extend beyond just this case, which is considered the first of its kind and is likely to set a precedent. Three Australian finance academics have posited that up to 25% of Coinbase listings in the past four years may have involved some insider trading.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A new study on the Impact of Programming on Primary Mathematics Learning (abstract only, full article $24.95 on ScienceDirect) is generating some buzz on Twitter amongst K-12 CS educator types. It concluded that:

1. Programming did not benefit mathematics learning compared to traditional activities
2. There's a negative though small effect of programming on mathematics learning
3. Mindful "high-road transfer" from programming to mathematics is not self-evident
4. Visual programming languages might distract students from mathematics activities

From the Abstract: "The aim of this study is to investigate whether a programming activity might serve as a learning vehicle for mathematics acquisition in grades four and five.... Classes were randomly assigned to the programming (with Scratch) and control conditions. Multilevel analyses indicate negative effects (effect size range 0.16 to 0.21) of the programming condition for the three mathematical notions.

"A potential explanation of these results is the difficulties in the transfer of learning from programming to mathematics."

The findings of the new study come 4+ years after preliminary results were released from the $1.5M 2015-2019 NSF-funded study Time4CS, a "partnership between Broward County Public Schools (FL), researchers at the University of Chicago, and [tech-bankrolled] Code.org," which explored whether learning CS using Code.org's CS Fundamentals curriculum may be linked to improved learning in math at the grade 3-5 level. Time4CS researchers concluded that the "quasi-experimental" study showed that "No significant differences in Florida State Assessment mathematics scores resulted between treatment and comparison groups."

"19-year-old chess grandmaster Hans Niemann was banned by massive online chess platform Chess.com," reports Motherboard, "just a few days after being accused of cheating in real life against five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen."

Chess.com said in a statement that "We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com." Niemann admitted to cheating on Chess.com in the past, but claimed that the two times he did were involving trivial, non-over-the-board games, and that he was only a child as he was 12 and 16 when it happened. "I just wanted to get higher-rated so I could play stronger players, so I cheated in random games on Chess.com," he said [in an online interview with St. Louis Chess Club].... " I have never cheated in an over-the-board game" [meaning a game that takes place on a real-world chess board]. Chess.com released its own statement Thursday countering his claims, which said: "At this time, we have reached out to Hans Niemann to explain our decision to privately remove him from Chess.com and our events. We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com...."

So far, there has not been any concrete evidence that points to Niemann cheating.... There are still many people who have been publicly supporting Niemann as the underdog. Russian chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, told TASS, "Of course we can't say with certainty that Niemann didn't cheat, but Carlsen surprisingly played the opening so badly with white that he automatically got into a worse position."
Chess.com's statement says they've "invited Hans to provide an explanation and response with the hope of finding a resolution where Hans can again participate on Chess.com."

The Guardian points out that Niemann has now also been uninvited from Chess.com's Global Championship, a $1m event with online qualifiers and an eight-player final in Toronto. But they also explore whether Neimann was really cheating... The Californian teenager, who does not have a coach but whose rating has jumped 250 points in three years, had already beaten the world champion a month earlier in an online tournament in Miami, when he made headlines for a one-sentence victory interview where he said: "Chess speaks for itself," before walking off.... [In his match this week against Carlsen] the position out of the opening was almost level, a minimal 0.3 plus for Black, but the world champion seemed to try too hard, with sub-optimal choices at moves 22, 40 and 42. Niemann also made inaccuracies, so the game lacked the tell-tale signs of computer aid....

It would appear that the central issue is whether Carlsen believes his pre-game analysis of his intended surprise 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 Bb4 4 g3 was leaked, either by a mole within his camp or by a computer hack. An alternative explanation of the "leak" could be quite innocent. The relevant pawn structure, with plausible transpositions into Carlsen v Niemann, had already occurred in a previous well-known Carlsen game against England's Michael Adams in 2006. Niemann said he asked himself what ideas Carlsen might produce to divert him from his planned Catalan with ... Bb4+ and decided to check 5 Nc3, a rare transposition to the Nimzo-Indian. There was also Niemann's own very recent game against Le Quang Liem at Miami, where 5 g3 (instead of 5 e3 d5 as played) d5 6 a3 could easily transpose into Carlsen v Niemann....

[I]t is easy to understand why the world champion was so upset. Carlsen's tournament score will be cancelled, but his games will be rated and the defeat by Niemann will cost him seven rating points, a large setback in the context of trying to get from 2865 to 2900. His dream of a record rating has just become more distant.