Microsoft is launching a new communities feature for Microsoft Teams today, designed for consumers to use the best parts of Teams free of charge to create and organize groups. From a report: The new community feature will allow groups to use the calendar, meeting, and chat features of Teams. Features like group chat, calling, and file / photo sharing are all supported, and groups will also be able to use a shared calendar (which includes Google Calendar integration) to organize community events. This new community integration is really aimed at groups like sports clubs or even virtual community groups for small businesses and simple groups like a carpool for co-workers to organize transportation. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Twitter, and many other services already provide a variety of ways to organize groups online, so Microsoft is entering a crowded market, but it believes Teams has something different to offer.

Boeing's final 747 rolled out of the company's cavernous factory north of Seattle Tuesday night as airlines' push for more fuel-efficient planes ends the more than half-century production run of the jumbo jet. From a report: The 1,574th -- and last -- 747 will later be flown by a Boeing test pilot, painted and handed over to cargo and charter carrier Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings early next year.

"It's a very surreal time, obviously," said Kim Smith, vice president and general manager of Boeing's 747 and 767s programs out of the assembly plant here. "For the first time in well over 50 years we will not have a 747 in this facility."

The federal government plans to invest $1.5 billion to help spur a standards-based alternative for the gear at the heart of modern cellular networks. From a report: Experts say -- and the government agrees -- that there are economic and national security risks in having such equipment made only by a handful of companies overseas, with the most affordable products coming from China's Huawei. The most likely effort to benefit from the new funding is known as ORAN (Open Radio Access Network), which uses standard computing gear to replace what has been proprietary hardware from companies like Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei. The federal government is kicking off the program with a public comment period, which will run through Jan. 23. Funding for the effort was provided by the Chips and Science Act. The U.S. has largely banned use of Huawei's devices over security concerns amid deepening U.S.-China tensions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Kevin Purdy: Available tomorrow on Steam and itch.io, the new version of Dwarf Fortress updates the legendary (and legendarily arcane) colony-building roguelike with new pixel-art graphics, music, some (default) keyboard shortcuts, and a beginners' tutorial. The commercial release aims to do two things: make the game somewhat more accessible and provide Tarn and Zach Adams, the brothers who maintained the game as a free download for 20 years, some financial security. I know it has succeeded at its first job, and I suspect it will hit the second mark, too. I approached the game as a head-first review expedition into likely frustrating territory. Now I find myself distracted from writing about it because I keep thinking about my goblin defense and whether the fisherdwarf might be better assigned to gem crafting. "For me, the commercial release of Dwarf Fortress succeeded at transforming the game from a grim, time-killing in-joke for diehards into a viable, if not graceful, challenge," writes Purdy. "I will start again, I will keep the badgers and floods at bay, and next time, I might have the privilege of failing to a magma monster, an outbreak of disease, or even a miscarriage of dwarf justice."

Further reading:
The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (Slashdot, 2011)
Dwarf Fortress Gets Biggest Update In Years (Slashdot, 2014)

The release candidate for Winamp version 5.9.1 builds on the groundwork laid by August's 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new features to the reanimated music player. "Most of these are straightforward updates or improvements to existing features, but because it's 2022, one of the only new features is support for music NFTs," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "Winamp's latest version lets music fans link their Metamask wallet via Brave, Chrome, or Firefox to Winamp. It then connects their favorite music NFTs to their tried-and-true player," the company said in a press release provided to Ars. "Winamp supports audio and video files distributed under both the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards, and is launching this new feature for Ethereum and Polygon/Matic protocols." To directly display websites needed to download these NFT playlists, according to the release notes, would require an updated rendering engine for Winamp's in-app browser, which is currently based on Internet Explorer 10.

There's still plenty here for legacy Winamp fans to like, and it's nice to see that all the modernization work done in the 5.9 update is paying off in the form of faster updates. Among many other fixes, the new release includes a "memory footprint reduction," a bandwidth increase for streamed music, an update to OpenSSL 3.0.5, and a few other updates for the underlying codecs and other software that Winamp uses to do its thing. As for the NFT support, Winamp developer Eddy Richman (who goes by the handle "DJ Egg" on the Winamp forums) wrote that people who don't want it can remove it, either during the install process or after Winamp is installed.

Telegram Premium has amassed over 1 million subscribers, less than six months after the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and began a serious effort to monetize the business. From a report: Pavel Durov shared the update on his Telegram channel Tuesday, calling the milestone "one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched." The subscription, however, still "represents just a fraction of Telegram's overall revenue," he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.

Some Amazon users will now earn $2 dollar per month for agreeing to share their traffic data with the retail giant. From a report: Under the company's new invite-only Ad Verification program, Amazon is tracking what ads participants saw, where they saw them, and the time of day they were viewed. This includes Amazon's own ads and third-party ads on the platform. Through the program, Amazon hopes to offer more personalized-ad experiences to customers that reflect what they have previously purchased, according to Amazon.

"Your participation will help brands offer better products and make ads from Amazon more relevant,"Amazon wrote in its Shopper Panel FAQ. The $2 reward only applies to Amazon users invited to participate in the program, though customers who didn't get invited can get added to a waitlist and potentially join later, an Amazon spokesperson told Insider. The spokesperson declined to tell Insider how the company decided who to invite.

The next wave of Moore's Law will rely on a developing concept called system technology co-optimization, Ann B. Kelleher, general manager of technology development at Intel told IEEE Spectrum in an interview ahead of her plenary talk at the 2022 IEEE Electron Device Meeting. From a report: "Moore's Law is about increasing the integration of functions," says Kelleher. "As we look forward into the next 10 to 20 years, there's a pipeline full of innovation" that will continue the cadence of improved products every two years. That path includes the usual continued improvements in semiconductor processes and design, but system technology co-optimization (STCO) will make the biggest difference. Kelleher calls it an "outside-in" manner of development. It starts with the workload a product needs to support and its software, then works down to system architecture, then what type of silicon must be within a package, and finally down to the semiconductor manufacturing process. "With system technology co-optimization, it means all the pieces are optimized together so that you're getting your best answer for the end product," she says.

STCO is an option now in large part because advanced packaging, such as 3D integration, is allowing the high-bandwidth connection of chiplets -- small, functional chips -- inside a single package. This means that what would once be functions on a single chip can be disaggregated onto dedicated chiplets, which can each then be made using the most optimal semiconductor process technology. For example, Kelleher points out in her plenary that high-performance computing demands a large amount of cache memory per processor core, but chipmaker's ability to shrink SRAM is not proceeding at the same pace as the scaling down of logic. So it makes sense to build SRAM caches and compute cores as separate chiplets using different process technology and then stitch them together using 3D integration. A key example of STCO in action, says Kelleher, is the Ponte Vecchio processor at the heart of the Aurora supercomputer. It's composed of 47 active chiplets (as well as 8 blanks for thermal conduction). These are stitched together using both advanced horizontal connections (2.5 packaging tech) and 3D stacking. "It brings together silicon from different fabs and enables them to come together so that the system is able to perform against the workload that it's designed for," she says.

Apple has scaled back ambitious self-driving plans for its future electric vehicle and postponed the car's target launch date by about a year to 2026, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The car project, dubbed Titan inside the company, has been in limbo for the past several months as Apple executives grappled with the reality that its vision for a fully autonomous vehicle -- without a steering wheel or pedals -- isn't feasible with current technology. In a significant shift for the project, the company is now planning a less-ambitious design that will include a steering wheel and pedals and only support full autonomous capabilities on highways, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. [...] Apple had expected each car to sell for more than $120,000, but the company is now aiming to offer the vehicle to consumers for less than $100,000, according to the people.

Google's search results on desktop will load in a continuous scroll instead of dividing into pages, the company has announced. From a report: The move follows a similar change made on mobile in October last year, but isn't quite an "infinite" scroll. Instead, Google will load six pages of results into a single scroll before offering users a "See more" button to show more results. Google says the change is rolling out first for English searches in the US, but judging by the rollout of the feature on mobile it seems safe to expect to see additional markets and languages added over time.

Competitive Excel clearly is not the NFL, but it does have the beginnings of a fan base. From a report: This was just the second year of the World Championship, but it's already streaming on ESPN3. This year's edition has 30,000 views on YouTube. Supporters of Michael Jarman, the No. 3 seed in this year's competition, call themselves the "Jarmy Army." A few months ago, an all-star game of sorts aired on ESPN2, and this month, ESPNU will televise the collegiate championship. The tournament begins with a 128-player field and proceeds March Madness -- style, in one-on-one, single-elimination contests. The format lends itself to frequent upsets: This year, the No. 2 seed was eliminated in the third round. In each match, players work as fast as possible -- they're generally given about 30 minutes -- to answer a series of progressively more difficult questions testing both their puzzle-solving skills and their fluency with Excel.

The questions all revolve around the same scenario. In the quarterfinal, for example, the questions all had to do with a fictional country transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. The first and easiest question asked players to calculate how many votes were cast for the purple party. The championship case, which was far more difficult, centered on a 100x100 chessboard. This year's total prize money was $10,000. Naturally, a large proportion of Excel competitors work in Excel-heavy jobs; the field included plenty of finance bros, data analysts, mathematicians, actuaries, and engineers. All but one of the eight finalists had over the course of their lives spent thousands of hours working in Excel (the other is a Google Sheets guy), and half of them had spent more than 10,000. The tournament is not particularly diverse. Of the eight finalists, Deaton was the only woman. In the field of 128, she told me, she counted no more than a dozen, which didn't surprise her, given how heavily male the relevant occupations skew.

France has been given the green light to ban short haul domestic flights. The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours. From a report: The decision was announced on Friday. The changes are part of the country's 2021 Climate Law and were first proposed by France's Citizens' Convention on Climate -- a citizens' assembly tasked with finding ways to reduce the country's carbon emissions. France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population. Transport minister Clement Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.

An anonymous reader shares a report: KmsdBot, a cryptomining botnet that could also be used for denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, broke into systems through weak secure shell credentials. It could remotely control a system, it was hard to reverse-engineer, didn't stay persistent, and could target multiple architectures. KmsdBot was a complex malware with no easy fix. That was the case until researchers at Akamai Security Research witnessed a novel solution: forgetting to put a space between an IP address and a port in a command. And it came from whoever was controlling the botnet.

With no error-checking built in, sending KmsdBot a malformed command -- like its controllers did one day while Akamai was watching -- created a panic crash with an "index out of range" error. Because there's no persistence, the bot stays down, and malicious agents would need to reinfect a machine and rebuild the bot's functions. It is, as Akamai notes, "a nice story" and "a strong example of the fickle nature of technology." KmsdBot is an intriguing modern malware. It's written in Golang, partly because Golang is difficult to reverse-engineer. When Akamai's honeypot caught the malware, it defaulted to targeting a company that created private Grand Theft Auto Online servers. It has a cryptomining ability, though it was latent while the DDOS activity was running. At times, it wanted to attack other security companies or luxury car brands.

ConsenSys, the company behind the MetaMask crypto wallet, said Tuesday it will release a series of updates to the platform in response to user backlash regarding its data-collection practices. From a report: In a statement, the company explained how and why it was sharing MetaMask user internet-protocol information with Infura, the ConsenSys-made RPC (remote procedure call) service for reading and writing data to the Ethereum blockchain. A change in wording to the ConsenSys user agreement last month revealed that MetaMask, by default, shared users' transaction data with Infura alongside their IP addresses. The revelation sparked outrage in a vocal corner of the crypto community, with some users worrying aloud that their transaction data wasn't as private as they assumed.

In its statement, ConsenSys clarified that it would only "collect wallet and IP address information in connection with 'write' requests, also known as transactions, when MetaMask users broadcast transactions through Infura's RPC endpoints." "We do not store wallet account address information when a MetaMask user makes a 'read' request through Infura, for example in order to check their account balances within MetaMask," the company said. According to MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay, the platform began collecting and sharing IP-linked transaction data with Infura in 2018 to prevent network overload and to monitor pending transactions. Finlay said MetaMask cannot stop logging IP addresses entirely; if a user interacts with an RPC service like Infura, their IP address will always be visible. ConsenSys, however, will stop logging user IP information directly alongside their transaction data, thereby making it more difficult for the firm to trace transaction activity back to specific users. ConsenSys said it will also make updates to the MetaMask interface.

Microsoft recently considered building a "super app" that could combine shopping, messaging, web search, news feeds and other services in a one-stop smartphone app, in what would be an ambitious move by the software giant to expand further into consumer services, The Information reported Tuesday, citing people with direct knowledge of the discussions. From the report: Microsoft executives wanted the app to boost the company's multibillion-dollar advertising business and Bing search, as well as draw more users to Teams messaging and other mobile services. Unlike Apple and Google, Microsoft doesn't operate a mobile app store for smartphone users. By creating an all-in-one app that people don't need to leave to access its other offerings, Microsoft hoped to emulate a mobile strategy that has worked for Tencent. The Chinese firm's WeChat app, which combines messaging with shopping, online games, news and a variety of services including grocery ordering, is a source of inspiration for top Microsoft executives, the people said. While it isn't clear whether Microsoft will ultimately launch such an app, the people with knowledge of the discussions said CEO Satya Nadella has laid the groundwork by pushing the Bing search engine to work better with other Microsoft mobile products. For instance, he has directed Bing to integrate with Microsoft's Teams messaging and Outlook email apps, making it easier for customers to share search results in messages.

Amazon has reached a final deal with EU antitrust regulators over concerns its use of data undermined rivals, in a move that will close two of the most high-profile probes in Brussels. From a report: The US ecommerce group has committed to increasing the visibility of rival products by giving them equal treatment on Amazon's "buy box," which generates the majority of purchases on the site. It will also create an alternative featured offer for those buyers where speed of delivery is less important. The European Commission plans to announce the deal on December 20, according to four people with direct knowledge of the timing. However they warned the date could still change at the last minute.

The commitments, which are set to remain in force for five years, have been "market tested" with rivals and agreed with EU officials, these people said. "There's very little to discuss," a person with knowledge of the process said. The move represents a win for the EU as it will serve as a blueprint for the tech group's compliance with the new Digital Markets Act, a piece of legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. It also means Amazon will avoid formal charges of breaking EU law and a large fine of up to 10 per cent of global revenues.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Facebook parent company Meta on Monday threatened to remove news from its social media platform in the US if Congress approves a bill that would allow news organizations to collectively bargain with tech companies for compensation. Andy Stone, Meta's head of policy communications, wrote on Twitter that Facebook would "be forced to consider removing news" if the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act becomes law. He added that the proposal fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put their content on Facebook "because it benefits their bottom line -- not the other way around."

The bill, which was proposed in March 2021, is reportedly being considered by lawmakers for inclusion with a must-pass annual defense bill. The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing newspaper publishers that supports the bill, called Facebook's threat "undemocratic and unbecoming," adding that "as the tech platforms compensate news publishers around the world, it demonstrates there is a demand and economic value for news." More than 20 organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, have urged lawmakers to reconsider support for the "problematic" bill, warning (PDF) that it would "create an ill-advised antitrust exemption for publishers and broadcasters." A similar law in Australia giving the government power to make internet giants Meta and Alphabet's Google negotiate content supply deals with media outlets has largely worked, a government report said last week. But the bill did result in a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield. CNBC reports: "While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use," the company wrote on its website. Few details are available about the intended scope and capabilities of Starshield. The company hasn't previously announced tests or work on Starshield technology.

On its website, SpaceX said the system will have "an initial focus" on three areas: Imagery, communications and "hosted payloads" -- the third of which effectively offers government customers the company's satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform. The company also markets Starshield as the center of an "end-to-end" offering for national security: SpaceX would build everything from the ground antennas to the satellites, launch the latter with its rockets, and operate the network in space.

SpaceX notes that Starshield uses "additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely," building upon the data encryption it uses with its Starlink system. Another key feature: the "inter-satellite laser communications" links, which the company currently has connecting its Starlink spacecraft. It notes that the terminals can be added to "partner satellites," so as to connect other companies' government systems "into the Starshield network."

This year, Oxford Languages, the creator of the Oxford English Dictionary, titled "goblin mode" as the 2022 Word of the Year, meaning it best reflected the ethos and mood of the past 12 months. The slang term is defined as a "type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations." NPR reports: The term first appeared on Twitter in 2009 but didn't go viral until 2022, according to Oxford Languages. "It captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to 'normal life', or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media," the group wrote in a press release. "People are embracing their inner goblin," said Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages.

The Word of the Year is typically based on analyzing language data on emerging words and their popularity. But this year, Oxford Languages incorporated a public vote into the process and asked people to cast their ballot between the top three expressions of the year: "goblin mode," "metaverse" and "#IStandWith." More than 300,000 people voted with an overwhelming majority -- about 93% -- favoring "goblin mode."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: In December 2021, Google filed a civil lawsuit against two Russian men thought to be responsible for operating Glupteba, one of the Internet's largest and oldest botnets. The defendants, who initially pursued a strategy of counter suing Google for tortious interference in their sprawling cybercrime business, later brazenly offered to dismantle the botnet in exchange for payment from Google. The judge in the case was not amused, found for the plaintiff, and ordered the defendants and their U.S. attorney to pay Google's legal fees. The lawyer for the defendants, New York-based cybercrime defense attorney Igor Litvak, filed a motion to reconsider (PDF), asking the court to vacate the sanctions against him. He said his goal is to get the case back into court. "The judge was completely wrong to issue sanctions," Litvak told KrebsOnSecurity. "From the beginning of the case, she acted as if she needed to protect Google from something. If the court does not decide to vacate the sanctions, we will have to go to the Second Circuit (Court of Appeals) and get justice there."

Meanwhile, Google said the court's decision will have significant ramifications for online crime, adding that it's observed a 78 percent reduction in the number of hosts infected by Glupteba since its technical and legal attacks on the botnet last year.

"While Glupteba operators have resumed activity on some non-Google platforms and IoT devices, shining a legal spotlight on the group makes it less appealing for other criminal operations to work with them," reads a blog post from Google's General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado and vice president of engineering Royal Hansen. "And the steps [Google] took last year to disrupt their operations have already had significant impact."