A week ago, GitHub fused its home page feed with algorithmic recommendations, infuriating more than a few users of the Microsoft-owned code-hosting giant. The Register reports: On Tuesday, GitHub responded to the hostile feedback by stating that some of the questioned behavior was actually due to bugs that have now been fixed, even as it doubled down on its decision to combine the previously separate "Following" and "For You" feeds. The "Following" feed included "activity by people you follow and from repositories you watch." It was the result of deliberate user choice: developers selected the code and contributors they were interested in. The "For You" feed included "activity and recommendations based on your GitHub network." It was the result of GitHub's social algorithm and user behavior data.

As of last week, GitHub combined the two to lighten the burden on its servers, or so the company claimed. "When we launched the latest version of your feed on September 6, 2023, we made changes to the underlying technology of the feed in order to improve overall platform performance," the biz explained in a post on Tuesday. "As a result, we removed the functionality for 'push events for repositories a user is subscribed to'. We don't take these changes lightly, but as our community continues to grow tremendously, we have to prioritize our availability, user experience, and performance."

Bram Borggreve, founder of Columbia-based dev shop BeeSoft Labs, offered one of the more polite objections to the unrequested feed change among the almost two hundred people who commented, not to mention those participating in adjacent discussion threads who asked for a reversal [...]. An engineer at an IT infrastructure management software developer, who wished to remain anonymous as he is not authorized to speak to the media, told The Register in an email, "GitHub tried this before, and their users said no. They are taking away a useful feature and replacing it with social media algorithm garbage. It's like they forgot that people use their platform to do actual work, and not just doom scroll issues, pull requests, and new JavaScript frameworks." "We understand that many of you are upset with the recent changes to your feed," the company stated. "We should have done a better job communicating recent changes and how those decisions relate to our broader platform goals. Your continued feedback is invaluable as we evolve and continue to strive to provide a first-class developer experience that helps every developer be happier and more productive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Belgium said on Thursday it would review potential health risks linked to Apple's iPhone 12, raising the prospect that more European countries might ban the model after France ordered a halt to sales due to breaches of radiation exposure limits. However, there seemed to be no immediate prospect of an EU-wide ban as the European Commission said it would wait for feedback from other EU countries before deciding on any action. European Union member states, which were notified by the French regulator on Wednesday, have three months to provide comments. Some, such as Italy, said they would take no steps for now.

Mathieu Michel, Belgium's state secretary for digitalization told Reuters that the Belgian regulator was looking into the matter after the French moves. "We immediately asked the IBPT (Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications) for confirmation, or at least an analysis, and this is currently under way," he said. Michel also asked the regulator to review all Apple smartphones, and devices made by others, at a later stage. However, he stressed that European standards were extremely cautious and there were no immediate safety concerns. "So that's why today it's obviously a limit which is being crossed (according to the French regulator) and that's not acceptable, but in terms of health and safety, I don't think there's any reason to think that we're all going to turn into little green men."

The iPhone 12 had passed the radiation test conducted by the French agency in 2021. Germany's network regulator BNetzA reiterated that the work in France could act as a guide for Europe as a whole and that it would examine the issue for the German market if the process in France had progressed sufficiently. The Dutch digital watchdog also said it was looking into the matter and would ask the U.S. firm for an explanation, while stressing there was "no acute safety risk." Portugal's telecommunications regulator ANACOM said it was monitoring and analyzing developments in coordination with France, and expected one of the two likely outcomes: Apple correcting the situation or, failing that, Brussels telling EU member states "to adopt proportional measures." Britain, where the iPhone 12 met radiation safety standards when it was released, has not announced any plans in the wake of France's decision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills. The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country's hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills. Swedish Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology. "Sweden's students need more textbooks," Edholm said in March. "Physical books are important for student learning."

The minister announced last month in a statement that the government wants to reverse the decision by the National Agency for Education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press. [...] "There's clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning," Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement last month on the country's national digitalization strategy in education. "We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy," said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research. To counter Sweden's decline in 4th grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth 685 million kronor (60 million euros or $64.7 million) in book purchases for the country's schools this year. Another 500 million kronor will be spent annually in 2024 and 2025 to speed up the return of textbooks to schools. "The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that's because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology," said Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education."

Credit card disputes at Visa continued rising past their pandemic boom despite the proliferation of prevention software, as fraud grows alongside e-commerce and inflation. From a report: Disputes on Visa's network rose to more than 90 million in 2022, data provided by the payment company showed. More than 70 million disputes were filed in 2019, Visa said in a presentation, before rising 24% in 2020 during the pandemic and about 2% a year in 2021 and 2022.

Despite being easy for consumers to file, making it one of the most-common credit card frauds, disputes are an opaque part of the payments industry. Both Mastercard Inc. and American Express declined to provide disputes data. Visa and Mastercard both bought dispute prevention companies in 2019, Verifi and Ethoca, respectively, and regularly promote their offerings at conferences. Disputes can be costly and onerous for both credit card companies and merchants to process, while chargebacks, when a dispute results in a refund, cost merchants dearly -- about $2.40 for every dollar disputed, according to Visa's Verifi, or as high as $3.36 for every dollar, according to Mastercard's Ethoca.

Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows. From a report: The death rattle will be lengthy, as the timeline for the end of servicing stretches into 2027 -- although Microsoft noted that the dates will be subject to change. There is, after all, always that important customer with a strange old printer lacking Mopria support.

Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then. Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: "This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the New York Times: The collapse in cryptocurrency prices last year forced a procession of major firms into bankruptcy, triggering a government crackdown and erasing the savings of millions of inexperienced investors. But for a small group of corporate turnaround specialists, crypto's implosion has become a financial bonanza.

Lawyers, accountants, consultants, cryptocurrency analysts and other professionals have racked up more than $700 million in fees since last year from the bankruptcies of five major crypto firms, including the digital currency exchange FTX, according to a New York Times analysis of court records. That sum is likely to grow significantly as the cases unfold over the coming months. Large fees are common in corporate bankruptcies, which require complex and time-intensive legal work to untangle. But in the crypto world, the mounting fees have sparked widespread outrage because many of the people owed money are amateur traders who lost their personal savings, rather than corporations with the ability to weather a financial crisis. Every dollar in fees is deducted from the pool of funds that will be returned to creditors at the end of the bankruptcies.

The fees are "exorbitant and ridiculous," said Daniel Frishberg, a 19-year-old investor who lost about $3,000 when the crypto company Celsius Network filed for bankruptcy last year. "At every hearing, they have an army of people there, and most of them don't need to be there. You don't need 20 people taking notes."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: China-linked hackers breached the corporate account of a Microsoft engineer and are suspected of using that access to steal a valuable key that enabled the hack of senior U.S. officials' email accounts, the company said in a blog post. The hackers used the key to forge authentication tokens to access email accounts on Microsoft's cloud servers, including those belonging to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Representative Don Bacon and State Department officials earlier this year.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Microsoft disclosed the breach in June, but it was still unclear at the time exactly how hackers were able to steal the key that allowed them to access the email accounts. Microsoft said the key had been improperly stored within a "crash dump," which is data stored after a computer or application unexpectedly crashes...

The incident has brought fresh scrutiny to Microsoft's cybersecurity practices.
Microsoft's blog post says they corrected two conditions which allowed this to occur. First, "a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump," and second, "the key material's presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems." We found that this crash dump, believed at the time not to contain key material, was subsequently moved from the isolated production network into our debugging environment on the internet connected corporate network. This is consistent with our standard debugging processes. Our credential scanning methods did not detect its presence (this issue has been corrected).

After April 2021, when the key was leaked to the corporate environment in the crash dump, the Storm-0558 actor was able to successfully compromise a Microsoft engineer's corporate account. This account had access to the debugging environment containing the crash dump which incorrectly contained the key. Due to log retention policies, we don't have logs with specific evidence of this exfiltration by this actor, but this was the most probable mechanism by which the actor acquired the key.

Star Trek: The Animated Series was a half-hour Saturday morning cartoon that premiered exactly one half century ago — yesterday. You can watch its opening credits sequence on YouTube — with its strange 1970s version of the theme song. CBS's YouTube channel also offers clips from various episodes.

Starting in 1973, it ran for two seasons — a total of just 22 episodes. But the BBC notes it kept Star Trek in people's minds after the original series had been cancelled in 1969: While The Original Series had struggled in the ratings during its initial run, the show thrived in syndication, and created the phenomenon of fan conventions (think Comic-con in the present day). Because of this, studios were interested in more Star Trek, but there was a problem: the sets had been scrapped, the costumes were gone, and it would have been cost-prohibitive to rebuild everything from scratch. NBC settled on a different approach: an animated series.

According to The Fifty-Year Mission by Mark Altman and Edward Gross (an oral history of Star Trek), Gene Roddenberry wasn't overly interested in an animated show in and of itself. However, he was willing to go along with it because he saw it as a stepping stone to another live-action show or a feature film. An animated show would energise fans, he thought, so he agreed on the condition that he would have full creative control of The Animated Series. After a fight, the network gave in. The full, regular cast returned, with the exception of Walter Koenig's Pavel Chekov, who was cut for budget reasons...

[I]t was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones... [Another episode was a sequel to The City on the Edge of Forever.] Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That's why the show didn't catch on — while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children's series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture...

Whatever is decided regarding "the canon", The Animated Series sits firmly within Star Trek's guiding ethos: Gene Roddenberry's vision for a utopian future where humans coexist peacefully with aliens as part of a Federation, and there's no poverty or war.

Internet services has long been slow for the Winnebago Tribe in the state of Nebraska, reports the Wall Street Journal. Now the U.S. government "plans to fix that by crisscrossing the reservation with fiber-optic cable — at an average cost of $53,000 for each household and workplace connected."

While that amount exceeds the assessed value of some of the 658 homes getting hookups — at a cost of $35.2 million — "the tribe is also starting an internet company to run the network, creating jobs and competing with an existing provider known for slow customer service." While most connections will cost far less, the expense to reach some remote communities has triggered concerns over the ultimate price tag for ensuring every rural home, business, school and workplace in America has the same internet that city dwellers enjoy... The U.S. has committed more than $60 billion for what the Biden administration calls the "Internet for All" program, the latest in a series of sometimes troubled efforts to bring high-speed internet to rural areas... Providing fiber-optic cable is the industry standard, but alternative options such as satellite service are cheaper, if less reliable. Congress has left it up to state and federal officials implementing the program to decide how much is too much in hard-to-reach areas...

Defenders of the broadband programs say a simple per-location cost doesn't capture their benefits. Once built, rural fiber lines can be used to upgrade cell service or to add more connections to nearby towns...

Some of the differences can be explained by the distinct geographic areas the programs are targeting. While the FCC program included some suburbs and excluded remote locations such as Alaska, the programs run by Commerce and USDA specifically targeted far-flung regions with difficult construction conditions. "These are some of the most challenging locations that there are to reach in America," said Andy Berke, administrator of the USDA's Rural Utilities Service. He cited one project in Alaska that involves a 793-mile undersea fiber cable to reach remote villages.

Rotten Tomatoes celebrated its 25th year of assigning scores to movies based on their aggregate review. Now Vulture writes that Rotten Tomatoes "can make or break" movies, "with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit". But unfortuately, the site "is also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked."

Vulture tells the story of a movie-publicity company contacting "obscure, often self-published critics" to say the film's teams "feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics" — while making undisclosed payments of $50 or more.) A critic asking if it's okay to pan the movie was informed that "super nice" critics move their bad reviews onto sites not included in Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Vulture says after bringing this to the site's attention, Rotten Tomatoes "delisted a number of the company's movies from its website and sent a warning to writers who reviewed them." But is there a larger problem? Filmmaker Paul Schrader even opines that "Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do...." A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they're more likely to boast that a film has been "Certified Fresh...."

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Here's how. When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It's a film publicist's job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie's review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales... [I]n February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film's grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.

In studios' defense, Rotten Tomatoes' hastiness in computing its scores has made it practically necessary to cork one's bat. In a strategic blunder in May, Disney held the first screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at Cannes, the world's snootiest film festival, from which the first 12 reviews begot an initial score of 33 percent. "What they should've done," says Publicist No. 1, "was have simultaneous screenings in the States for critics who might've been more friendly." A month and a half later, Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office even though friendly critics eventually lifted its rating to 69 percent. "They had a low Rotten Tomatoes score just sitting out there for six weeks before release, and that was deadly," says a third publicist.

On August 30th the University of Michigan announced it had finally restored its internet connectivity and Wi-Fi network, according to the Ann Arbor News, "after several days of outages caused by a 'significant security concern,' officials said." The outage coincided with the first days of the new school year, although "classes continued through the outage." The internet was shut down on 1:45 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 27, after the Information Assurance team at the university identified a security concern, according to previous reporting. The Information Assurance team fights cybersecurity threats and malicious actors... The investigation into the security issue is ongoing and no other information will be released, said Santa Ono, president of University of Michigan.
But a local CBS station heard some theories from cybersecurity experts: "The fact that they took their systems down, like proactively took their systems down, is the indication that it is a cybersecurity incident," said co-founder and CTO of SensCy Dave Kelly. "The reason why you do that is that you don't want it to spread further."

"They probably didn't know to what extent they'd been compromised," senior penetration tester and ethical hacker at NetWorks Group Chris Neuwirth said. "They probably didn't know how many accounts were compromised or the initial entry point that the threat actor used to gain access into the network." Sources close to the investigation told CBS News Detroit that U-M detected malware on its Wi-Fi network and decided to shut it down in response.

So, did the school avoid a disaster? Neuwirth thinks it very well could have. "They likely had very robust backups and data recover, plans, procedures in place that helped them make the decision very confidently and rapidly," he said. "Four days in that they're already bringing up their systems tells me that it's likely that a lot of what they had been preparing for worked."

Kelly said these types of incidents are on the rise. "There's been a large increase in cybersecurity incidents," he said. It's been trending up, quite frankly, for the last several years. It used to be that these threat actors were targeting the government and Fortune 500 companies, but they've started to, more and more over the years, look at universities."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader regoli for sharing the news.

"On the morning of his arrest, Grigor Sargsyan was still fixing matches. Four cellphones buzzed on his nightstand with calls and messages from around the world.... The information on his devices would provide a remarkable window into what has become the world's most manipulated sport, according to betting regulators. Thousands of texts, gambling receipts and bank transfers laid out Sargsyan's ascent in remarkable detail..."

That's part one of a two-part story in which more than 181 tennis players are involved, and from more than 30 countries, fixing more than 375 professional tennis matches. The Washington Post reveals the years-long investigation that began when Belgium's gambling commission tipped off their federal prosecutor's office to "irregular wagers on obscure tennis matches played around the world."

The breakthrough came with geolocation data on a cellphone, cross-referenced against the the names of people who'd recently flown to that country... The bets were made in small towns in the Flemish countryside. The gamblers appeared to be acting on inside information; they consistently won even when they bet against steep odds... [Nicolas Borremans, a 45-year-old police investigator based in the Flanders region of Belgium] knew little about sports. He had never watched an entire tennis match. But even a cursory description of the case was enough for him to see how a gambling operation might be used to launder money...

Within a few months, he had traced the accounts of four men who had placed suspicious bets in Belgium, all Armenian immigrants. Their wagers were mostly small — a few hundred euros each — ostensibly to avoid scrutiny. Almost all of the bets were on low-level professional tennis tournaments, where players earned barely enough to pay for their travel. Borremans secured wiretaps on the gamblers' phones, and a team of Armenian interpreters listened in. It became clear that the gamblers were working for someone. They received detailed instructions about which matches to bet on. They weren't gambling just on the outcomes, but on specific scores for sets and games... Borremans added more gamblers to his diagram. "Money mules," he called them. Eventually, he would uncover 1,671 accounts at gambling establishments across Europe. Many were registered by working-class Armenians: mechanics, a pizza deliveryman, a taxi driver.
While the tennis tour "has in recent months issued a raft of bans and suspensions," the article points out that the scale of the gambler/tennis player network "has remained a secret until now, in part because the tour is still working on active investigations related to the operation." (The professional tennis tour has its own investigation unit "formed in part because of pervasive allegations of match-fixing in the sport," which assisted the Belgian police.)

The operation's "maestro" had tried to evade investigators. (One French player received his payment in 21 separate transfers from Armenia.) The maestro also gave the tennis players anonymously-registered SIM cards for communication. But unfortunately, the article points out, every professional tennis player "signs a contract agreeing to hand their phones over to tennis investigators at any time if required." Soon investigators were reading the mastermind's text messages — and even wiretapping his phone calls to his mother.

His phone's search history would later offer a glimpse into his life and concerns. Sargsyan scoured the internet for references to himself and his players ("maestro tennis," "match fixing tennis hossam"); he did some broader research into his world ("tennis corruption," "armenian mafia"); he searched for ways to spend his new fortune ("escort geneve," "villa rent close port mallorca") But, mostly, he searched for new bookmakers ("croatia betting shop," "usa betting," "mybet Australia").
Caught in the investigation were Sebastian Rivera, the Chilean coach based in the United States, and Slovakian tennis player Dagmara Baskova (who says she was paid 10,000 euros for each thrown match). Another French player told investigators "Since 2015, I estimate that I have accepted to deliberately lose or manipulate the outcome of 20 to 30 matches for Maestro, both in singles and doubles." Some tennis players infuriated the maestro by tipping off other gamblers about their plans to throw matches.

Leaving the courtroom for his own trial, the maestro gave this response to the Post reporter asking how he felt about the courtroom proceedings. "If the prosecutor knew what I know, there would be many more people on trial." Later the maestro was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud, money laundering, and leading a criminal organization.

New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data. From a report: Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for allegedly using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users. NYPD purchased Voyager Labs products that the company claims can use artificial intelligence to analyze online human behavior and detect and predict fraud and crimes, the documents show.

A separate document reveals a contract between the Queens district attorney and Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies, which also offers social network mapping products, as well as tools to track location information through phones. It's unclear how much that contract is worth. Law enforcement across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and make sense of the hordes of personal information available on the internet. But experts have argued the practice can cross ethical and legal lines, particularly when used to access private information, make inferences or predict future criminality based on the content posted on social media, or otherwise help law enforcement skip obtaining subpoenas and warrants before gathering information on someone.

Due to confidence issues and difficulties interviewing, neurodivergent individuals often face higher unemployment rates than their non-neurodivergent counterparts. However, they may possess specialized skills that can enhance team productivity by up to 30% in suitable work settings. A startup backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman aims to help these job seekers find suitable employment opportunities, leveraging technology and assessments to match individuals with roles that best align with their abilities and skills. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from TechCrunch: Enter Mentra. The Charlotte, N.C.-based startup, whose three co-founders are all autistic is building what it describes as an AI-powered "neuroinclusive employment network." Specifically, its tech platform leverages artificial intelligence to help large enterprises hire employees with cognitive differences such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The startup's unique premise caught the early attention of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who first invested in the company with a $1 million pre-seed investment in February 2022 through his venture firm, Hydrazine Capital. Mentra also won an AI for accessibility grant from Microsoft. Shine Capital led its $3.5 million seed round this year, which also included participation from Altman's fund, Verissimo, Full Circle, Charlotte Fund, as well as angel investors including David Apple and Dawn Dobras.

What sets Mentra apart is its approach to job fit, maintains Mentra co-founder and CEO Jhillika Kumar. The startup goes beyond keywords in resumes to match employers with talent, she said, considering factors around a person's neurotype, aptitude, environmental sensitivities. To date, its one-year retention rate has remained at an impressive 97.5%. [...] One way Mentra uses AI is to parse through job descriptions to make sure they are cognitively accessible and broken down in a consistent format that is not exclusionary. "Then we are able to use an algorithm to go through the jobseekers on our platform to identify who's the best fit based on mostly neuro type," Kumar told TechCrunch. "One person might be extremely good at hyper focusing, very detail-oriented, very process-oriented or very strategic, and you have specific skills that map to their strengths in the role." Over 70% of the data Mentra collects is not collected by an Indeed or a traditional job-finding platform. It uses that holistic data to make the match between the job and the individual.

The startup's current revenue model is free for neurodivergent jobseekers, and it charges an annual subscription for enterprise companies to access the platform. It is also building out a neuroinclusion marketplace for service providers such as consultancies and training firms to provide hands-on services to companies that accompany Mentra's core platform. "In the future, we plan to have a similar marketplace available for neurodivergents to access tailored services as well throughout the life of their career such as bootcamps and job coaches," Kumar added.

In a press release today, the Federal Aviation Administration said UPS delivery drones are now allowed to fly longer distance flights beyond the sight of ground operators. "This is the kind of move that opens the door for drone delivery companies like Wing, FedEx, and Zip to deliver packages across a wider area and service more customers," reports The Verge. From the report: UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) without spotters on the ground monitoring the route and skies for other aircraft, using SwissDrones SVO 50 V2 drones. The FAA also announced authorizations for two other companies to fly beyond sight for commercial purposes. That includes uAvionix Corp. and, last week, infrastructure inspection company Phoenix Air Unmanned.

UPS first received government approval to operate its drone service in 2019, the same year the FAA authorized Alphabet's Wing service to operate commercially. The company first focused on building a drone delivery network for US hospital campuses.

The Pentagon is considering the development of a vast network of AI-powered technology, drones and autonomous systems within the next two years to counter threats from China and other adversaries. WSJ: Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, will provide new details in a speech later Wednesday about the department's plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an array of thousands of air-, land- and sea-based artificial-intelligence systems that are intended to be "small, smart, cheap."

The U.S. is seeking to keep pace with China's rapidly expanding military amid concerns that the Pentagon bureaucracy takes too long to develop and deploy cutting-edge systems. [...] One approach could be to build on the capabilities demonstrated by Task Force 59, the U.S. Navy's network of drones and sensors designed to monitor Iran's military activities in the Middle East.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rick Klein and his team have been preserving TV adverts, forgotten tapes, and decades-old TV programming for years. Now operating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television has called YouTube home since 2007. However, copyright notices sent on behalf of Sony, protecting TV shows between 40 and 60 years old, could shut down the project in 48 hours. "Our YouTube channel with 150k subscribers is in danger of being terminated by September 6th if I don't find a way to resolve these copyright claims that Markscan made," Klein told TorrentFreak on Friday. "At this point, I don't even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not -- I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes. I am willing to remove the material manually to get the strikes reversed."

Over the weekend Klein shared details of the copyright complaints filed with YouTube. Two of the claims can be seen in the image below and on first view, appear straightforward enough. Two episodes of the TV series Bewitched dated 1964 aired on ABC Network and almost sixty years later, archive copies of those transmissions were removed from YouTube for violating Sony copyrights, with MCCTv receiving a strike. A claim targeting an upload titled Bewitched -- 'Twitch or Treat' -- WPWR Channel 60 (Complete Broadcast, 8/6/1984) follows the same pattern, but what isn't shown are the details added by MCCTv to place the episode (and the included commercials) in historical context. Another takedown target -- Bewitched -- 'Sam in the Moon' (Complete 16mm Network Print, 1/5/1967) is accompanied by even more detail, including references in the episode to then-current events.

Given that copyright law locks content down for decades, Klein understands that can sometimes cause issues, although 16 years on YouTube suggests that the overwhelming majority of rightsholders don't consider his channel a threat. If they did, the option to monetize the recordings can be an option. [...] Klein says MCCTv certainly doesn't set out to hurt copyright holders. However, there's always a balance between preserving "rare pieces of video ephemera" and the likelihood that nobody needs to enforce any rights, versus unusual circumstances like these where unexpected complaints need to be resolved with impossible-to-reach parties. Klein says the team is happy to comply with Sony's wishes and they hope that given a little leeway, the project won't be consigned to history. Perhaps Sony will recall the importance of time-shifting while understanding that time itself is running out for The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.

Telecom operators in India, the second largest wireless market, would like internet companies to compensate for using their networks, a recommendation they've made to the local regulatory body, echoing a viewpoint that is gaining some momentum in other parts of the world but also stoking fears about violation of net neutrality. From a report: Jio, India's largest telecom operator with more than 450 million subscribers, recommended to the local regulator that internet companies should be made to "contribute" towards telecom network costs based on the traffic they consume, their turnover and number of users.

"We suggest that TRAI [India's telecom regulator] should recommend for OTT providers contributing in the network development and building a backbone for the country. In this effort, the Other OTT service providers should also be required to pay their fair share," said the unit of Reliance, which is run by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani. Reliance, which carries 55% share of India's total data traffic, contends that requiring internet companies to compensate for network usage will ensure a level playing field. Jio said there is a "near consensus" among telecom operators across the globe on this subject.

The Verge argues we're seeing "the end of the Googleverse. For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content.

"Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly, already over." There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users...

Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google's results but for Reddit content. Google's place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago. On top of it all, OpenAI's massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
Their article quotes the founder of the long-ago Google-watching blog, "Google Blogoscoped," who remembers that when Google first came along, "they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design. If we fast-forward to now, it's kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then."

The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program. "Prior to 2003-2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?" Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight...."

As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. "At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go," he said.

Some customers of the network security company LogicMonitor have been hacked due to the use of default passwords, TechCrunch reports. From the report: A LogicMonitor spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that there's "a security incident" affecting some of the company's customers. "We are currently addressing a security incident that has affected a small number of our customers. We are in direct communication and working closely with those customers to take appropriate measures to mitigate impact," LogicMonitor's spokesperson Jesica Church said in a statement.

The incident is due to the fact that, until recently, LogicMonitor was assigning customers default -- and weak -- passwords such as "Welcome@" plus a short number, according to a source at a company that was impacted by the incident, and who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press.