Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have developed a special antenna that can control all five important aspects of electromagnetic waves using computer software. Interesting Engineering reports: The antenna, which they have named 'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control. [...] The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are, their timing, frequency, direction, and even the way they vibrate, all at the same time. It's the first time anyone has made an antenna that can do all these things simultaneously, marking a significant breakthrough in this field.

The antenna is special because it can be used in advanced information systems, like the ones we might have in the future. It's great for handling a lot of data and keeping that data very safe. It can also transfer power wirelessly, meaning it can charge devices without physical connections. One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals, adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations.

Although demonstrated in the microwave band, the UMA's concept can be expanded to terahertz frequencies using specific technologies, enabling applications in augmented reality, holography, integrated sensing and communications for 6G, quantum optics, and quantum information science, noted the researchers in their study. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

China on Friday proposed a four-tier classification to help it respond to data security incidents, highlighting Beijing's concern with large-scale data leaks and hacking within its borders. From a report: The plan, which is currently soliciting opinions from the public, proposes a four-tier, colour-coded system depending on the degree of harm inflicted upon national security, a company's online and information network, or the running of the economy.

According to the plan, incidents that involve losses surpassing 1 billion yuan ($141 million) and affect the personal information of over 100 million people, or the "sensitive" information of over 10 million people, will be classed as "especially grave," to which a red warning must be issued. The plan demands that in response to red and orange warnings, the involved companies and relevant local regulatory authorities must establish a 24-hour work rota to address the incident and MIIT must be notified of the data breach within ten minutes of the incident happening, among other measures.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is now available to users in the European Union. "Today we're opening Threads to more countries in Europe," wrote Zuckerberg in a post on the platform. "Welcome everyone." MacRumors reports: The move comes five months after the social media network launched in most markets around the world, but remained unavailable to EU-based users due to regulatory hurdles. [...] In addition to creating a Threads profile for posting, users in the EU can also simply browse Threads without having an Instagram account, an option likely introduced to comply with legislation surrounding online services.

The expansion into a market of 448 million people should see Threads' user numbers get a decent boost. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a company earnings call in October that Threads now has "just under" 100 million monthly users. Since its launch earlier this year it has gained a web app, an ability to search for posts, and a post editing feature.

The Economist reports: "Shake, shake, shake, shake," Taylor Swift sings from the stage of Lumen Field in Seattle at 10.35 in the evening on July 22nd. The fans respond, enthusiastically; the stadium duly shakes; a nearby seismometer takes note. To pop aficionados "Shake it off" is an empowering up-tempo anthem played at 160 beats per minute. To the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which is designed to monitor earthquakes, it is a 2.6 hertz signal in which the amplitude of the acceleration was as large as one centimetre per second, per second.

The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as "Beast Mode." The "Beast Quake" went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco.

[...] Dr Caplan-Auerbach wanted to see whether such resonant amplification might also be at play elsewhere, and to distinguish between the effect of the music itself and the audience's response. Her concert-night data showed two distinct sets of signals, one in higher frequencies (30-80hz), one in lower frequencies (1-8hz). The higher-frequency signals were present during the sound check, when the band were on stage but the stadium empty, and absent during the concerts' "surprise songs," played without the band by Ms Swift alone. The lower frequencies were absent when the audience had yet to arrive. Clearly those higher frequencies were from the music itself.

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Miklos Daniel Brody, a cloud engineer, was sentenced to two years in prison and a restitution of $529,000 for wiping the code repositories of his former employer in retaliation for being fired by the company. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announcement, Brody was fired on March 11, 2020, from First Republic Bank (FRB) in San Francisco, where he worked as a cloud engineer. The court documents state that Brody's employment was terminated after he violated company policies by connecting a USB drive containing pornography to company computers.

Following his dismissal, Brody allegedly refused to return his work laptop and instead used his still-valid account to access the bank's computer network and cause damages estimated to be above $220,000. "Among other things, Brody deleted the bank's code repositories, ran a malicious script to delete logs, left taunts within the bank's code for former colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names," describes the U.S. DOJ announcement. "He also emailed himself proprietary bank code that he had worked on as an employee, which was valued at over $5,000."

After the incident, Brody falsely reported to the San Francisco Police Department that the FRB-issued laptop had been stolen from his car. He continued to uphold this story when interviewed by United States Secret Service agents following his arrest in March 2021. Eventually, in April 2023, Brody pleaded guilty to lying about the laptop and to two charges concerning violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In addition to the two-year prison term and the payment of the restitution, Brody will serve three years of supervised release.

According to Reuters, Ukraine's biggest mobile network was hit by "what appeared to be the largest cyber attack of the war with Russia so far," severing mobile and internet services for millions of people and knocking out the air raid alert system in parts of Kyiv. From the report: Kyivstar has 24.3 million mobile subscribers - more than half of Ukraine's population - as well as over 1.1 million home internet subscribers. Its CEO Oleksandr Komarov said the attack was "a result of" the war with Russia, although he did not say which Russian body he believed to be responsible, and that the company's IT infrastructure had been "partially destroyed." "(The attack) significantly damaged (our) infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy's access," Komarov said.

A source close to Ukraine's cyber defense also said that Russia was suspected to be the source of the attack, but no specific group had been identified. "It's definitely a state actor," said the source, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue, adding that data cable interception showed "a lot of Russian controlled traffic directed at these networks." "There's no ransom. It's all destruction. So it's not a financially motivated attack," said the source. Ukrainian officials said that air raid alert systems in more than 75 settlements in the central Kyiv region were affected by the cyber attack.

Komarov said two databases containing customer data had been damaged and were currently locked. "The most important thing is that the personal data of users has not been compromised," Kyivstar said in its statement, promising to compensate customers for loss of access to services. Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense intelligence director (GUR) said it infected thousands of servers belonging to Russia's state tax service with malware, and destroyed databases and backups. "According to GUR's statement published Tuesday, the attack led to the 'complete destruction' of the agency's infrastructure," reports The Record. "GUR claimed they destroyed configuration files 'which for years ensured the functioning of Russia's tax system.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Huawei will start building its mobile phone network equipment factory in France next year, a source familiar with the matter said, pressing ahead with its first plant in Europe even as some European governments curb the use of the firm's 5G gear. The company outlined plans for the factory with an initial investment of 200 million euros ($215.28 million) in 2020, but the roll-out was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the source said on Monday. The source did not give a timeline for when the factory in Brumath, near Strasbourg, will be up and running. A French government source said the site was expected to open in 2025. Further reading: 'How Washington Chased Huawei Out of Europe'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Kentucky-based nonprofit healthcare system Norton Healthcare has confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of millions of patients and employees during an earlier ransomware attack. Norton operates more than 40 clinics and hospitals in and around Louisville, Kentucky, and is the city's third-largest private employer. The organization has more than 20,000 employees, and more than 3,000 total providers on its medical staff, according to its website. In a filing with Maine's attorney general on Friday, Norton said that the sensitive data of approximately 2.5 million patients, as well as employees and their dependents, was accessed during its May ransomware attack.

In a letter sent to those affected, the nonprofit said that hackers had access to "certain network storage devices between May 7 and May 9," but did not access Norton Healthcare's medical record system or Norton MyChart, its electronic medical record system. But Norton admitted that following a "time-consuming" internal investigation, which the organization completed in November, Norton found that hackers accessed a "wide range of sensitive information," including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health and insurance information and medical identification numbers. Norton Healthcare says that, for some individuals, the exposed data may have also included financial account numbers, driver licenses or other government ID numbers, as well as digital signatures. It's not known if any of the accessed data was encrypted.

Norton says it notified law enforcement about the attack and confirmed it did not pay any ransom payment. The organization did not name the hackers responsible for the cyberattack, but the incident was claimed by the notorious ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang in May, according to data breach news site DataBreaches.net, which reported that the group claimed it exfiltrated almost five terabytes of data. TechCrunch could not confirm this, as the ALPHV website was inaccessible at the time of writing.

All those original shows on streaming services brought us "peak TV." But the New York Times reports on the flipside: back in the cable universe, they're experiencing "zombie TV": In 2015, the USA cable network was a force in original programming. Dramas like "Suits," "Mr. Robot" and "Royal Pains" either won awards or attracted big audiences. What a difference a few years make. Viewership is way down, and USA's original programming department is gone. The channel has had just one original scripted show this year, and it is not exclusive to the network — it also airs on another channel. During one 46-hour stretch last week, USA showed repeats of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" for all but two hours, when it showed reruns of CBS' "NCIS" and "NCIS: Los Angeles."

Instead of standing out among its peers, USA is emblematic of cable television's transformation. Many of the most popular channels — TBS, Comedy Central, MTV — have quickly morphed into zombie versions of their former selves. Networks that were once rich with original scripted programming are now vessels for endless marathons of reruns, along with occasional reality shows and live sports... Advertisers have begun to pull money from cable at high rates, analysts say, and leaders at cable providers have started to question what their consumers are paying for. In a dispute with Disney this year, executives who oversee the Spectrum cable service said media companies were letting their cable "programming house burn to the ground...."

The media companies that own the channels are in a bind. The so-called cable bundle was enormously profitable for media companies, and more than 100 million households subscribed at the peak. But subscribers are rapidly declining as people migrate toward streaming. Now roughly 70 million households subscribe to cable. As a result, most media companies are pulling resources from their individual cable networks and directing investment toward their streaming services. Peacock, which is owned by NBCUniversal, also the parent of USA, has begun making more and more original scripted shows over the last three years.

However, most streaming services are hemorrhaging cash. (An NBCUniversal executive said this week that Peacock would lose $2.8 billion this year.) Cable, although it is getting smaller, remains profitable.
Media analyst Michael Nathanson believes last year was saw a "tipping point" when cable advertising decreased — by double-digit percentages — in five consecutive fiscal quarters. "Advertisers are starting to realize that there's really nothing on here and they shouldn't pay for it."

One consultant who works with entertainment companies and used to run marketing at the Oxygen cable network tells the newspaper that cable channels "are being stripped for parts." The article calculates that in 2022 there were 39% fewer scripted programs on basic and premium cable than there were in 2015.

"Reruns are filling the hole."

UPDATE: John Romero released a new 9-map episode of Doom.

But it was 30 years ago today that Doom "invented the modern PC games industry, as a place dominated by technologically advanced action shooters," remembers the Guardian: In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block... The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom... [W]hen Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project... "There were no critters in it yet," recalls Taylor of that first demo. "There was no gaming stuff at all. It was really just a 3D engine. But you could move around it really fluidly and you got such a sense of immersion it was shocking. The renderer was kick ass and the textures were so gritty and cool. I thought I was looking at an in-game cinematic. And Romero is just the consummate demo man: he really feeds off of your energy. So as my jaw hit the floor, he got more and more animated. Doom was amazing, but John was at least half of that demo's impact on me." [...]

In late 1992, it had become clear that the 3D engine John Carmack was planning for Doom would speed up real-time rendering while also allowing the use of texture maps to add detail to environments. As a result, Romero's ambition was to set Doom in architecturally complex worlds with multiple storeys, curved walls, moving platforms. A hellish Escher-esque mall of death... "Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas," says Romero, "and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before...."

[T]he way Doom combined fast-paced 3D action with elaborate, highly staged level design would prove hugely influential in the years to come. It's there in every first-person action game we play today... But Doom wasn't just a single-player game. Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together... Doom brought fast-paced, real-time action, both competitive and cooperative, into the gaming mainstream. Seeing your friends battling imps and zombie space marines beside you in a virtual world was an exhilarating experience...

When Doom was launched on 10 December 1993, it became immediately clear that the game was all-consuming — id Software had chosen to make the abbreviated shareware version available via the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that crashed almost immediately, bringing the institution's network to its knees... "We changed the rules of design," says Romero. "Getting rid of lives, which was an arcade holdover that every game had; getting rid of score because it was not the goal of the game. We wanted to make it so that, if the player died, they'd just start that level over — we were constantly pushing them forward. The game's attitude was, I want you to keep playing. We wanted to get people to the point where they always needed more."
It was a unique moment in time. In the article designer Sandy Petersen remembers that "I would sometimes get old dungeons I'd done for D&D and use them as the basis for making a map in Doom." Cheat codes had been included for debugging purposes — but were left in the game rs to discover. The article even includes a link to a half-hour video of a 1993 visit to Id software filmed by BBS owner Dan Linton.

And today on X, John Romero shared a link to the Guardian's article, along with some appreciative words for anyone who's ever played the game. "DOOM is still remembered because of the community that plays and mods it 30 years on. I'm grateful to be a part of that community and fortunate to have been there at its beginning."

The Guardian's article notes that now Romero "is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series."

Long-time Slashdot reader jd writes: The Register is reporting that Akamai security researchers have found a way to hack Active Directory and obtain the information stored within it. The researchers go on to say that Microsoft is NOT planning to fix the vulnerability.
From the article: While the current report doesn't provide technical details or proof-of-concept exploits, Akamai has promised, in the near future, to publish code that implements these attacks called DDSpoof — short for DHCP DNS Spoof.

'We will show how unauthenticated attackers can collect necessary data from DHCP servers, identify vulnerable DNS records, overwrite them, and use that ability to compromise AD domains,' Akamai security researcher Ori David said.

The DHCP attack research builds on earlier work by NETSPI's Kevin Roberton, who detailed ways to exploit flaws in DNS zones.

Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found -- and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one. From a report: At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It'll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race.

CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you'll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around. While it's true that 5G has actually arrived, the fantastic use cases we heard about years ago haven't materialized. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to get internet to your home router. These aren't bad things! But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay. Now, network operators are looking high and low for every bit of profit they can drum up -- including our wallets.

If there's a poster child for the whole 5G situation in the US, it's Verizon: the loudest and biggest spender in the room. The company committed $45.5 billion to new spectrum in 2021's FCC license auction -- almost twice as much as AT&T. And we don't have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they'll see a return -- they asked point blank in the company's most recent earnings call. CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases "having the right offers for our customers" and "generating the bottom line for ourselves," while nodding to "price adjustments" that also "included new value" for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing.

Twitch, the popular video streaming service, plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27 after finding that operating in one of the world's largest esports markets is "prohibitively expensive." From a report: Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the firm undertook a "significant effort" to reduce the network costs to operate in Korea, but ultimately the fees to operate in the East Asian nation was still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries. The ceasing of operations in Korea is a "unique situation," he wrote in a blog post.

South Korea's expensive internet fees have led to legal fights -- streaming giant Netflix unsuccessfully sued a local broadband supplier last year to avoid paying usage charges, but Seoul's court ruled that Netflix must contribute to the network costs enabling its half-billion-dollar Korean business. Twitch attempted to lower its network costs by experimenting with a peer-to-peer model and then downgrading the streaming quality to 720p video resolution, Clancy said. While these efforts helped the firm lower its network costs, it wasn't enough.

Press2ToContinue shares a report from Politico: Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change. Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger. States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers -- let alone begin construction. [...]

The goal is a reliable and standardized network in every corner of the nation, said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which leads the federal government's efforts on EV charging. "You have to go slow to go fast," Klein said in an interview. "These are things that take a little bit of time, but boy, when you're done, it's going to completely change the game." [...] Aatish Patel, president of charger manufacturer XCharge North America, is worried the delays in installing chargers are imperiling efforts to drive up EV adoption. "As an EV driver, a charger being installed in two years isn't really going to help me out now," Patel said. "We're in dire need of chargers here."

The Biden administration is expecting a deluge of chargers funded by the law to break ground in early 2024. A senior administration official granted anonymity to speak on the specifics of the rollout said the pace is to be expected, given that the goal is to create a "convenient, affordable, reliable, made-in-America equitable network." "Anybody can throw a charger in the ground -- that's not that hard, it doesn't take that long," the official said. "Building a network is different." The administration insists it is doing all it can to speed up the process, including by streamlining federal permitting for EV chargers and providing technical assistance to states and companies through the Joint Office. It expects the U.S. to hit Biden's 500,000 charger target four years early, in 2026, the official said.

Many PlayStation Network users reported Monday that their accounts were unexpectedly permanently suspended. As of Tuesday morning, many of the people who had received the messages now say their accounts have been restored. From a report: Some of them contacted customer service while others did not, but nearly a day after the issues began, Sony hasn't commented publicly or responded to us about the wave of bans or the restorations that followed. A message to one user read: "This account is permanently suspended from PlayStation Network due to violations of the PlayStation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement."

Jon Porter reports via The Verge: UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users' ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act. Although the law gives sites the choice of how they keep out underage users, the regulator is publishing a list of measures they'll be able to use to comply. These include having a bank or mobile network confirm that a user is at least 18 years old (with that user's consent) or asking a user to supply valid details for a credit card that's only available to people who are 18 and older. The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year's time.

Ofcom lists six age verification methods in today's draft guidelines. As well as turning to banks, mobile networks, and credit cards, other suggested measures include asking users to upload photo ID like a driver's license or passport, or for sites to use "facial age estimation" technology to analyze a person's face to determine that they've turned 18. Simply asking a site visitor to declare that they're an adult won't be considered strict enough. Once the duties come into force, pornography sites will be able to choose from Ofcom's approaches or implement their own age verification measures so long as they're deemed to hit the "highly effective" bar demanded by the Online Safety Act. The regulator will work with larger sites directly and keep tabs on smaller sites by listening to complaints, monitoring media coverage, and working with frontline services. Noncompliance with the Online Safety Act can be punished with fines of up to [$22.7 million] or 10 percent of global revenue (whichever is higher).

The guidelines being announced today will eventually apply to pornography sites both big and small so long as the content has been "published or displayed on an online service by the provider of the service." In other words, they're designed for professionally made pornography, rather than the kinds of user-generated content found on sites like OnlyFans. That's a tricky distinction when the two kinds often sit together side by side on the largest tube sites. But Ofcom will be opening a consultation on rules for user-generated content, search engines, and social media sites in the new year, and Whitehead suggests that the both sets of rules will come into effect at around the same time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: One of the world's most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It's a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an "interrogator." This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It's a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Because DAS can track seismicity, other scientists are increasingly using it to monitor earthquakes and volcanic activity. (A buried system is so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect people walking and driving above.) But the scientists in Princeton just stumbled upon a rather noisier use of the technology.

In the spring of 2021, Sarper Ozharar -- a physicist at NEC Laboratories, which operates the Princeton test bed -- noticed a strange signal in the DAS data. "We realized there were some weird things happening," says Ozharar. "Something that shouldn't be there. There was a distinct frequency buzzing everywhere." The team suspected the "something" wasn't a rumbling volcano -- not inNew Jersey -- but the cacophony of the giant swarm of cicadas that had just emerged from underground, a population known as Brood X. A colleague suggested reaching out to Jessica Ware, an entomologist and cicada expert at the American Museum of Natural History, to confirm it. "I had been observing the cicadas and had gone around Princeton because we were collecting them for biological samples," says Ware. "So when Sarper and the team showed that you could actually hear the volume of the cicadas, and it kind of matched their patterns, I was really excited."

Add insects to the quickly growing list of things DAS can spy on. Thanks to some specialized anatomy, cicadas are the loudest insects on the planet, but all sorts of other six-legged species make a lot of noise, like crickets and grasshoppers. With fiber optic cables, entomologists might have stumbled upon a powerful new way to cheaply and constantly listen in on species -- from afar. "Part of the challenge that we face in a time when there's insect decline is that we still need to collect data about what population sizes are, and what insects are where," says Ware. "Once we are able to familiarize ourselves with what's possible with this type of remote sensing, I think we can be really creative."

100 miles south of the Canadian border, the tiny town of Bemidji, Minnesota "has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages" since early November, reports the Washington Post, "and local postal workers say they have been ordered to deliver those packages first."

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service tells the Post that's not true, and that their service "does not prioritize the delivery of packages from Amazon or other customers."

But whatever's going on, the Post reports that "The result has been chaos..." Mail is getting backed up, sometimes for days, leaving local residents waiting for checks, credit card statements, health insurance documents and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12. At least five carriers have quit, and the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year, carriers say... Dennis Nelson, a veteran mail carrier, said he got so frustrated watching multiple co-workers "breaking down and crying" that he staged a symbolic strike earlier this month outside the post office where he has worked for more than 20 years...

Bemidji is not the only place where postal workers say they have been overwhelmed by packages from Amazon... Carriers and local officials say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state's San Juan Islands.

The situation stems from a crisis at the Postal Service, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year. The post office has had a contract with Amazon since 2013, when it started delivering packages on Sundays. But in recent years, that business has exploded as Amazon has increasingly come to rely on postal carriers to make "last-mile" deliveries in harder-to-reach rural locations. The Postal Service considers the contract proprietary and has declined to disclose its terms. But U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said publicly that "increasing package volume" — not just from Amazon, but from FedEx and UPS as well — is key to the mail service's financial future. In a Nov. 14 speech to the Postal Service Board of Governors, DeJoy said he wants the post office to become the "preferred delivery provider in the nation...."

In bigger cities, Amazon has its own distribution network, which takes some of the pressure off the post office. But in rural areas, where carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their personal vehicles, the arrangement has caused problems. In the mountains of Colorado, biologists in Crested Butte are struggling with the delay of time-sensitive samples, the Denver Post reported in September, while mail carriers in Carbondale say they are overwhelmed by Amazon packages. Other Minnesota towns including Brainerd and La Porte have been hit hard by Amazon in the past, carriers said...

Partenheimer defended the post office's record in an email, while conceding "much work remains to be done...."
An Amazon spokesperson told the Post "We work directly with the USPS to balance our delivery needs with their available capacity," and "we'll continue to collaborate on package volume each week and adjust as needed."

Sony is about to delete tons of Discovery shows from PlayStation users' libraries even if they already "purchased" them. Why? Because most users don't actually own the digital content they buy thanks to the mess of online DRM and license agreements. Some of the soon-to-be-deleted TV shows include Mythbusters and Naked and Afraid. Kotaku reports: The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. "Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library," read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.

It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery's penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more. [...] Now, essentially anything you buy on PSN, whether a PS5 blockbuster or, uh, Police Women of Cincinnati, is essentially just on indefinite loan until such time as the PlayStation servers die or the original copyright owner decides to pull the content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: Valve just launched a free official Steam Link app on Meta Quest. The app, which is on the official Quest Store and approved by Meta, lets you wirelessly play SteamVR games like Half-Life: Alyx on your Quest 2, Quest Pro, or Quest 3 by streaming from your gaming PC over your home Wi-Fi network. You can also play your traditional non-VR Steam games on a giant virtual screen.