The co-founder of Silicon Valley-based software testing startup HeadSpin was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison and a $1 million fine, reports SFGate — for defrauding investors. Lachwani pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and a count of securities fraud in April 2023, after federal prosecutors accused him of, for years, lying to investors about HeadSpin's finances to raise more money. HeadSpin, founded in 2015, grew to a $1.1 billion valuation by 2020 with over $115 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures and Iconiq Capital... He had personally altered invoices, lied to the company accountant and sent slide decks with fraudulent information to investors, [according to the government's 2021 criminal complaint]...

Breyer, per the New York Times, rejected Lachwani's lawyer's argument that because HeadSpin investors didn't end up losing money, he should receive a light sentence. The judge, who often oversees tech industry cases, reportedly said: "If you win, there are no serious consequences — that simply can't be the law." Still, the sentencing was far lighter than it could have been. The government's prosecuting attorneys had asked for a five-year prison term.
The New York Times reported in December that HeadSpin's financial statements had "often arrived months late, if at all, investors said in legal declarations," while the company's financial department "consisted of one external accountant who worked mostly from home using QuickBooks." And the comnpany also had no human resources department or organizational chart... After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software start-up HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company's revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin's cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created fake invoices to cover it all up.

What was especially breathtaking was how easily Mr. Lachwani, now 48, pulled all that off... [HeadSpin] had no chief financial officer, had no human resources department and was never audited. Mr. Lachwani used that lack of oversight to paint a rosier picture of HeadSpin's growth. Even though its main investors knew the start-up's financials were not accurate, according to Mr. Lachwani's lawyers, they chose to invest anyway, eventually propelling HeadSpin to a $1.1 billion valuation in 2020. When the investors pushed Mr. Lachwani to add a chief financial officer and share more details about the company's finances, he simply brushed them off. These details emerged this month in filings in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after Mr. Lachwani had pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud in April...

The absence of controls at HeadSpin is part of an increasingly noticeable pattern at Silicon Valley start-ups that have run into trouble. Over the past decade, investors in tech start-ups were so eager to back hot companies that many often overlooked reckless behavior and gave up key controls like board seats, all in the service of fast growth and disruption. Then when founders took the ethos of "fake it till you make it" too far, their investors were often unaware or helpless...

Now, amid a start-up shakeout, more frauds have started coming to light. The founder of the college aid company Frank has been charged, the internet connectivity start-up Cloudbrink has been sued, and the social media app IRL has been investigated and sued. Last month, Mike Rothenberg, a Silicon Valley investor, was found guilty on 21 counts of fraud and money laundering. On Monday, Trevor Milton, founder of the electric vehicle company Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison for lying about Nikola's technological capabilities.
The Times points out that similarly, FTX only had a three-person board "with barely any influence over the company, tracked its finances on QuickBooks and used a small, little-known accounting firm." And that Theranos had no financial audits for six years.

A monthslong "Star Wars"-themed festival called Season of the Force is now happening at Disneyland — including John Williams compositions in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land during the park's fireworks. SFGate reports: Before the show starts, a voice rings through the land. "Black Spire Outpost has a long and colorful history of heroes and legends, Jedi and Sith, royalty and resistance," it says. "Those who would rule and those who refuse to bow. Here we celebrate that fiery spirit tonight." Then as the first fireworks fly into the sky, the majestic "Star Wars" music begins...

During the day, the land is overrun with tiny robots. Season of the Force also includes daily appearances from the new BDX Droids, cute little "explorer companions," per Disneyland, designed to assist with "exploration and research." These new audio-animatronics interact with guests, clicking and whirring with a surprising amount of personality.

Sabine Wren from "Ahsoka" is also making appearances in Galaxy's Edge during Season of the Force, and there are specialty food offerings in the land like the Celto Slush (a green, pandan-flavored horchata cold brew coffee drink) and the return of Dewback Chili Noodles (spicy fettuccine with ginger-spiced ground pork, broccolini stems and shredded red cabbage).
For the event, Disneyland's long-running Star Tours ride now includes appearances from the Mandalorian (and Grogu), Ahsoka, and Cassian Andor, according to the article. "Also back this year is Hyperspace Mountain, the seasonal overlay of Space Mountain that puts riders into an intergalactic fight between the Resistance and the First Order."

Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova.

It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S." The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pushed it to the brink multiple times in recent years... The town of Menifee gets to move on from the power plant exhaust that used to join the smog flowing from Los Angeles... And the grid gets a bunch more clean capacity that can, ideally, displace fossil fuels...

Moreover, [the power bank] represents Calpine's grand arrival in the energy storage market, after years operating one of the biggest independent gas power plant fleets in the country alongside Vistra and NRG... Federal analysts predict 2024 will be the biggest-ever year for grid battery installations across the U.S., and they highlighted Calpine's project as one of the single largest projects. The 620 megawatts the company plans to energize this year represent more than 4% of the industry's total expected new additions.

Many of these new grid batteries will be built in California, which needs all the dispatchable power it can get to meet demand when its massive solar fleet stops producing, and to keep pace with the electrification of vehicles and buildings. The Menifee Power Bank, and the other gigawatts worth of storage expected to come online in the state this year, will deliver much-needed reinforcement.
The company says it's planning "a portfolio" of 2,000 megawatts of California battery capacity.

But even this 680-megawatt project consists of 1,096 total battery containers holding 26,304 battery modules (or a total of 3 million cells), "all manufactured by Chinese battery powerhouse BYD, according to Robert Stuart, an electrical project manager with Calpine. That's enough electricity to supply 680,000 homes for four hours before it runs out." What's remarkable is just how quickly the project came together. Construction began last August, and is expected to hit 510 megawatts of fully operational capacity over the course of this summer, even as installation continues on other parts of the plant. Erecting a conventional gas plant of comparable scale would have taken three or four years of construction labor, due to the complexity of the systems and the many different trades required for it, Stuart told Canary Media... That speed and flexibility makes batteries a crucial solution as utilities across the nation grapple with a spike in expected electricity demand unlike anything seen in the last few decades.
The article notes a 2013 Caifornia policy mandating battery storage for its utility companies, which "kicked off a decade-long project to will an energy storage market into existence through methodical policies and regulations, and the knock-on effects of building the nation's foremost solar fleet." Those energy storage policies succeeded in jumpstarting the modern grid battery market: California leads the nation with more than 7 gigawatts of batteries installed as of last year (though Texas is poised to overtake California in battery installations this year, on the back of no particular policy effort but a general openness to building energy projects)... California's interlocking climate regulations effectively rule out new gas construction. The state's energy roadmap instead calls for massive expansion of battery capacity to shift the ample amounts of solar generation into the evening peaks.
"These trends, along with the falling price of batteries and maturing business model for storage, nudged Calpine to get into the battery business, too."

The PHP programming language has sunk to its lowest position ever on the long-running TIOBE index of programming language popularity. It now ranks #17 — lower than Assembly Language, Ruby, Swift, Scratch, and MATLAB. InfoWorld reports: When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. PHP even reached the top 3 spot in the index, ranking third several times between 2006 and 2010. But as competing web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and React arrived in other languages, PHP's popularity waned.

"The major driving languages behind these new frameworks were Ruby, Python, and most notably JavaScript," Jansen noted in his statement accompanying the index. "On top of this competition, some security issues were found in PHP. As a result, PHP had to reinvent itself." Nowadays, PHP still has a strong presence in small and medium websites and is the language leveraged in the WordPress web content management system. "PHP is certainly not gone, but its glory days seem to be over," Jansen said.
A note on the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index argues that the TIOBE Index "is a lagging indicator. It counts the number of web pages with the language name." So while "Objective-C" ranks #30 on TIOBE's index (one rank above Classic Visual Basic), "who is reading those Objective-C web pages? Hardly anyone, according to Google Trends data." On TIOBE's index, Fortran now ranks #10.

Meanwhile, PHP ranks #7 on Pypl (based on the frequency of searches for language tutorials).

TIOBE's top ten?

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Go
8. Visual Basic
9. SQL
10. Fortran

The next two languages, ranked #11 and #12, are Delphi/Object Pascal and Assembly Language.

Aboard the deck of a World War II-era aircraft carrier, University of Washington scientists flicked the switch on a glorified snow-making machine," reports the Seattle Times. They describe the scientists "blasting a plume of saline spray off the coast of Alameda, California... trying to perfect a shot of salty particles that would make clouds better at reflecting sunlight back toward space, and help cool the Earth.

"It's called marine cloud brightening." Compressed air was pumped at hundreds of pounds per square inch through a nozzle full of a salty mix with a similar composition to seawater housed in an apparatus similar to a snow-making machine. The New York Times reported the machine produced a deafening hiss, releasing a fine mist that traveled hundreds of feet through the air. The scientists wanted to see if the machine could generate a consistent spray of the right size salt aerosols, taking samples downwind with instruments mounted on scissor lifts, commonly used in construction.
"This study is not yet large enough to affect local weather," the article points out. Yet "the idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday's test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them," reported the New York Times.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth's oceans..."I hope, and I think all my colleagues hope, that we never use these things, that we never have to," said Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and the manager of its marine cloud brightening program. She said there were potential side effects that still needed to be studied, including changing ocean circulation patterns and temperatures, which might hurt fisheries. Cloud brightening could also alter precipitation patterns, reducing rainfall in one place while increasing it elsewhere. But it's vital to find out whether and how such technologies could work, Doherty said, in case society needs them. And no one can say when the world might reach that point.
More from the Seattle Times: Some scientists warn that human influence on natural phenomena has rarely yielded the desired outcome, and often comes with unintended consequences. But, as the fossil-fueled world hurtles toward the internationally approved global warming limit to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, some argue there's a need to study backup plans.

"When I started graduate school in 1995, climate change, global warming was on the horizon, but there was still time to do something like reduce emissions at a scale that would allow us to avoid serious climate disruption," program manager Sarah Doherty said in an interview. "I think it's come to the point where the science community recognizes that a fairly significant degree of climate disruption and damage and suffering is pretty inevitable...." Doherty and the team are not advocating that anyone try cloud brightening now, but instead are hoping to develop a foundation for research that future decision-makers could rely on if they are evaluating geoengineering as a means of reducing suffering.
More info here from Politico and San Francisco Chronicle.

The New York Times notes that Bill Gates began funding early research in 2006.

Liam Proven reports via The Register: Bad news for those who want to play with OpenVMS in non-production use. Older versions are disappearing, and the terms are getting much more restrictive. The corporation behind the continued development of OpenVMS, VMS Software, Inc. -- or VSI to its friends, if it has any left after this -- has announced the latest Updates to the Community Program. The news does not look good: you can't get the Alpha and Itanium versions any more, only a limited x86-64 edition.

OpenVMS is one of the granddaddies of big serious OSes. A direct descendant of the OSes that inspired DOS, CP/M, OS/2, and Windows, as well as the native OS of the hardware on which Unix first went 32-bit, VMS has been around for nearly half a century. For decades, its various owners have offered various flavors of "hobbyist program" under which you could get licenses to install and run it for free, as long as it wasn't in production use. Since Compaq acquired DEC, then HP acquired Compaq, its prospects looked checkered. HP officially killed it off in 2013, then in 2014 granted it a reprieve and sold it off instead. New owner VSI ported it to x86-64, releasing that new version 9.2 in 2022. Around this time last year, we covered VSI adding AMD support and opening a hobbyist program of its own. It seems from the latest announcement that it has been disappointed by the reception: "Despite our initial aspirations for robust community engagement, the reality has fallen short of our expectations. The level of participation in activities such as contributing open source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on forums has not matched the scale of the program. As a result, we find ourselves at a crossroads, compelled to reassess and recalibrate our approach."

Although HPE stopped offering hobbyist licenses for the original VAX versions of OpenVMS in 2020, VSI continued to maintain OpenVMS 8 (in other words, the Alpha and Itanium editions) while it worked on version 9 for x86-64. VSI even offered a Student Edition, which included a freeware Alpha emulator and a copy of OpenVMS 8.4 to run inside it. Those licenses run out in 2025, and they won't be renewed. If you have vintage DEC Alpha or HP Integrity boxes with Itanic chips, you won't be able to get a legal licensed copy of OpenVMS for them, or renew the license of any existing installations -- unless you pay, of course. There will still be a Community license edition, but from now on it's x86-64 only. Although OpenVMS 9 mainly targets hypervisors anyway, it does support bare-metal operations on a single model of HPE server, the ProLiant DL380 Gen10. If you have one of them to play with -- well, tough. Now Community users only get a VM image, supplied as a VMWare .vmdk file. It contains a ready-to-go "OpenVMS system disk with OpenVMS, compilers and development tools installed." Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually. The only alternative for those with older systems is to apply to be an OpenVMS Ambassador.

The foundations behind Rust, Python, Apache, Eclipse, PHP, OpenSSL, and Blender announced plans to create "common specifications for secure software development," based on "existing open source best practices."

From the Eclipse Foundation: This collaborative effort will be hosted at the Brussels-based Eclipse Foundation [an international non-profit association] under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process and a new working group... Other code-hosting open source foundations, SMEs, industry players, and researchers are invited to join in as well.

The starting point for this highly technical standardisation effort will be today's existing security policies and procedures of the respective open source foundations, and similar documents describing best practices.

The governance of the working group will follow the Eclipse Foundation's usual member-led model but will be augmented by explicit representation from the open source community to ensure diversity and balance in decision-making. The deliverables will consist of one or more process specifications made available under a liberal specification copyright licence and a royalty-free patent licence... While open source communities and foundations generally adhere to and have historically established industry best practices around security, their approaches often lack alignment and comprehensive documentation.

The open source community and the broader software industry now share a common challenge: legislation has introduced an urgent need for cybersecurity process standards.
The Apache Foundation notes the working group is forming partly "to demonstrate our commitment to cooperation with and implementation of" the EU's Cyber Resilience Act. But the Eclipse Foundation adds that even before it goes into effect in 2027, they're recognizing open source software's "increasingly vital role in modern society" and an increasing need for reliability, safety, and security, so new regulations like the CRA "underscore the urgency for secure by design and robust supply chain security standards."

Their announcement adds that "It is also important to note that it is similarly necessary that these standards be developed in a manner that also includes the requirements of proprietary software development, large enterprises, vertical industries, and small and medium enterprises." But at the same time, "Today's global software infrastructure is over 80% open source... [W]hen we discuss the 'software supply chain,' we are primarily, but not exclusively, referring to open source."

"We invite you to join our collaborative effort to create specifications for secure open source development," their announcement concludes," promising initiative updates on a new mailing list. "Contribute your ideas and participate in the magic that unfolds when open source foundations, SMEs, industry leaders, and researchers combine forces to tackle big challenges."

The Python Foundation's announcement calls it a "community-driven initiative" that will have "a lasting impact on the future of cybersecurity and our shared open source communities."

"The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark," writes SFGate.

"The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app." The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats...

The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...

[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's the only way in which it's being utilized."
Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.

And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."

Disneyland is a proposing part of its park be dedicated to James Cameron's Avatar, reports SFGate. "The rendering isn't a carbon copy of the Pandora land in Disney World's Animal Kingdom; instead, it's themed more closely to the recent sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water." The teaser was dropped as part of Wednesday's company shareholders meeting. The concept art shows a large lake in the middle of the land, surrounded by the signature floating mountains that loom over Animal Kingdom's Pandora. Boats filled with guests can be seen in the water, suggesting some sort of ride. No attractions have been announced for the land yet. Animal Kingdom has two: the spectacular flight simulator Flight of Passage and bucolic indoor boat ride Na'vi River Journey...

There's no timeline for construction to begin. Disney officials have consistently referred to it as a "potential" project, often calling it an "experience" rather than a land.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Tesla "is poised to roll out its version of a robotaxi later this year, according to CEO Elon Musk." ("Musk made the announcement on social media saying 'Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8.' His cryptic post contained no other details about the forthcoming line of autonomous vehicles.")

Electrek thinks they know what it'll look like. "Through Walter Issacson's approved biography of Musk, we learned that Tesla Robotaxi will be 'Cybertruck-like'."

8/8 (of the year 2024) would be a Thursday — although CNBC adds one additional clarification: At Tesla, "unveil" dates do not predict a near-future date for a commercial release of a new product. For example, Tesla unveiled its fully electric heavy-duty truck, the Semi, in 2017 and did not begin deliveries until December 2022. It still produces and sells very few Semis to this day.
"Tesla shares rose over 3% in extended trading after Musk's tweet."

As a department of America's federal Health agency, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for public health rules, including prescription medicines. And the FDA "has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19," they confirmed to CNN this week. "The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19."

But there was also a lawsuit. In "one of its more popular pandemic-era social media campaigns," the agency tweeted out "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it." The post attracted nearly 106,000 likes — and over 46,000 reposts, and was followed by another post on Instagram. "Stop it with the #ivermectin. It's not authorized for treating #COVID."

Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that the posts triggered a "groundless" lawsuit: It was those latter two lines that exercised three physicians who had been prescribing ivermectin for patients. They sued the FDA in 2022, asserting that its advisory illegally interfered with the practice of medicine — specifically with their ability to continue prescribing the drug. A federal judge in Texas threw out their case, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals — the source of a series of chuckleheaded antigovernment rulings in recent years — reinstated it last year, returning it to the original judge for reconsideration.

Now the FDA has settled the case by agreeing to delete the horse post and two similar posts from its accounts on the social media platforms X, LinkedIn and Facebook. The agency also agreed to retire a consumer advisory titled "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19." In defending its decision, the FDA said it "has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old."

That sounds reasonable enough, but it's a major blunder. It leaves on the books the 5th Circuit's adverse ruling, in which a panel of three judges found that the FDA's advisory crossed the line from informing consumers, which they said is all right, to recommending that consumers take some action, which they said is not all right... That's a misinterpretation of the law and the FDA's actions, according to Dorit Rubinstein Reiss of UC College of the Law in San Francisco. "The FDA will seek to make recommendations against the misuse of products in the future, and having that decision on the books will be used to litigate against it," she observed after the settlement.
"A survey by Boston University and the University of Michigan estimated that Medicare and private insurers had wasted $130 million on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID in 2021 alone."

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The New York Times has an occasional series called "Overlooked," whereby notable people whose deaths were overlooked at the time receive the obituary they deserve. Their latest installment eulogizes Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who passed away in 1921 at age 53. From the report: "In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was... Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women [computers] who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it."

Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars. The relationship, now known as Leavitt's Law, is a crucial rung in the cosmic distance ladder, the methods for measuring the distance to stars, galaxies, and across the visible universe. From the report: "[Leavitt's Law] underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system's place in the cosmos. Leavitt's Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth. 'She cracked into something that was not only impressive scientifically but shifted an entire paradigm of thinking...'"

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

Fast food chain Wendy's announced it's adopting a similar approach to Uber's Surge Pricing policy by dynamically adjusting the prices of its menu items during peak demand periods at certain locations. The controversial strategy seeks to leverage real-time data to align pricing and demand, enhancing efficiency and potentially improving customer satisfaction. From a report: During a conference call earlier this month, Wendy's CEO Kirk Tanner said the fast-food chain would experiment with dynamic pricing as early as next year. "Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling," he said. "As we continue to show the benefit of this technology in our company-operated restaurants, franchisee interest in digital menu boards should increase, further supporting sales and profit growth across the system."

Prices seesaw all the time on the sites of online retailers like Amazon that use algorithms and artificial intelligence to monitor competitors and glean insights into individual shoppers, adjusting prices depending on interest in the product or in the brand, said Timothy Webb, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware's hospitality and sport business management program. Coupons and other offers are also routinely dangled in mobile apps to encourage people to make purchases. "A lot of this stuff is already happening even if you don't realize that it is happening. If you have the Starbucks app and I have the Starbucks app, we probably have different offers," Webb said. "We might not be in the drive-through and they just increased the prices, but we are already paying different prices for the same products."

But, he says, Wendy's fans will likely see moderate, not massive, price swings during periods of peak demand. "It's not like $200 or $300 on a flight. This is a hypercompetitive industry. If Wendy's goes up $2 to $3 on a burger at dinner time, I would be shocked. People have too many options. They will just walk down the street and eat at Burger King instead," Webb said. "There will just be little price changes here."

"If you drive a car in California, you may be in for a payday thanks to a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by a Texas company," report SFGate: The 2021 lawsuit, given class-action status in September, alleges that Digital Recognition Network is breaking a California law meant to regulate the use of automatic license plate readers. DRN, a Fort Worth-based company, uses plate-scanning cameras to create location data for people's vehicles, then sells that data to marketers, car repossessors and insurers.

What's particularly notable about the case is the size of the class. The court has established that if you're a California resident whose license plate data was collected by DRN at least 15 times since June 2017, you're a class member. The plaintiff's legal team estimates that the tally includes about 23 million people, alleging that DRN cameras were mounted to cars on public roads. The case website lets Californians check whether their plates were scanned.

Barring a settlement or delay, the trial to decide whether DRN must pay a penalty to those class members will begin on May 17 in San Diego County Superior Court... The company's cameras scan 220 million plates a month, its website says, and customers can use plate data to "create comprehensive vehicle stories."
A lawyer for the firm representing class members told SFGATE Friday that his team will try to show DRN's business is a "mass surveillance program."

"Crypto mines will have to start reporting their energy use in the U.S.," wrote the Verge in January, saying America's Energy department would "begin collecting data on crypto mines' electricity use, following criticism from environmental advocates over how energy-hungry those operations are."

But then "constitutional freedoms" group New Civil Liberties Alliance (founded with seed money from the Charles Koch Foundation) objected. And "on behalf of its clients" — the Texas Blockchain Council and Colorado bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms — the group said it "looks forward to derailing the Department of Energy's unlawful data collection effort once and for all."

While America's Energy department said the survey would take 30 minutes to complete, the complaint argued it would take 40 hours. According to the judge, the complaint "alleged three main sources of irreparable injury..."

- Nonrecoverable costs of compliance with the Survey
- A credible threat of prosecution if they do not comply with the Survey
- The disclosure of proprietary information requested by the Survey, thus risking disclosure of sensitive business strategy

But more importantly, the survey was implemented under "emergency" provisions, which the judge said is only appropriate when "public harm is reasonably likely to result if normal clearance procedures are followed."

Or, as Semafor.com puts it, the complaint was "seeking to push off the reporting deadline, on the grounds that the survey was rushed through...without a public comment period." The judge, Alan Albright, granted the request late Friday night, blocking the [Department of Energy's Information Administration] from collecting survey data or requiring bitcoin companies to respond to it, at least until a more comprehensive injunction hearing scheduled for Feb. 28. The ruling also concludes that the plaintiffs are "likely to succeed in showing that the facts alleged by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to support an emergency request fall far short of justifying such an action."
The U.S. Department of Energy is now...

• Restrained from requiring Plaintiffs or their members to respond to the Survey
• Restrained from collecting data required by the Survey
• "...and shall sequester and not share any such data that Defendants have already received from Survey respondents."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

U.S. healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems. In a brief statement, the company said it was "experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue." From a report: "Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact," Change Healthcare wrote on its status page. "The disruption is expected to last at least through the day."

The incident began early on Tuesday morning on the U.S. East Coast, according to the incident tracker. The specific nature of the cybersecurity incident was not disclosed. Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare were inaccessible or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing. Michigan local newspaper the Huron Daily Tribune is reporting that local pharmacies are experiencing outages due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.

Meizu is quitting the smartphone business. The company, owned by car maker Geely, said AI is the future and will invest "All in AI". From a report: According to a post on Weibo, the FlymeOS team will be restructured into working on new AI terminal devices that will use globally available LLM (large language model) such as Open AI. Meizu already laid the cornerstones of its multi-terminal experience when it announced Flyme Auto -- an infotainment system for Geely-made vehicles, including Polestar and Lotus, which connects seamlessly with FlymeOS 10 devices, such as the Meizu 20 and Meizu 21 flagships.

According to Shen Ziyu, Chairman and CEO of Xingji Meizu Group, smartphone users take longer to upgrade -- an average of 51 months, which is more than 4 years. The added companies now offer comparable performance in smoothness, photography, and software features. That's why there will be no Meizu 21 Pro, Meizu 22 and Meizu 23 series.

The Tiobe index tries to gauge the popularity of programming languages based on search results for courses, programmers, and third-party vendors, according to InfoWorld.

And by that criteria, "Google's Go language, or golang, has reached its highest position ever..." The language, now in the eighth ranked position for language popularity, has been on the rise for several years.... In 2015, Go hit position #122 in the TIOBE index and all seemed lost," said Paul Jansen, CEO of Tiobe. "One year later, Go adopted a very strict 'half-a-year' release cycle — backed up by Google. Every new release, Go improved... Nowadays, Go is used in many software fields such as back-end programming, web services and APIs," added Jansen...

Elsewhere in the February release of Tiobe's index, Google's Carbon language, positioned as a successor to C++, reached the top 100 for the first time. Python is #1 on both TIOBE's index and the alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which InfoWorld says "assesses language popularity based on how often language tutorials are searched on in Google." But the two lists differ on whether Java and JavaScript are more popular than C-derived languages — and which languages should then come after them. (Go ranks #12 on the Pypl index...)

TIOBE's calculation of the 10 most-popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. SQL
8. Go
9. Visual Basic
10. PHP

Pypl's calculation of the 10 most-popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. Java
3. JavaScript
4. C/C++
5. C#
6. R
7. PHP
8. TypeScript
9. Swift
10. Objective-C

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco's leaders have spent the past few years desperately trying to figure out how to deal with a glut of empty offices, shuttered retail and public safety concerns plaguing the city's once vibrant downtown. Now, a California lawmaker wants to try a sweeping plan to revive the city's core by exempting most new real estate projects from environmental review, potentially quickening development by months or even years. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced SB1227 on Friday as a proposal to exempt downtown projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, for a decade. The 1970 landmark law requires studies of a project's expected impact on air, water, noise and other areas, but Wiener said it has been abused to slow down or kill infill development near public transit.

"Downtown San Francisco matters to our city's future, and it's struggling -- to bring people back, we need to make big changes and have open minds," Wiener said in a statement. "That starts with remodeling, converting, or even replacing buildings that may have become outdated and that simply aren't going to succeed going forward." Eligible projects would include academic institutions, sports facilities, mixed-use projects including housing, biotech labs, offices, public works and even smaller changes such as modifying an existing building's exterior. The city's existing zoning and permit requirements would remain intact. "We're not taking away any local control," Wiener said in an interview with the Chronicle on Friday.

California Sen. Scott Wiener is proposing a bill that, he said, would make it easier for San Francisco's downtown area to recover from the pandemic. However, it's not clear how much of an impact the bill would have if it's eventually passed since other factors are at play. New construction has been nearly frozen in San Francisco since the pandemic, amid consistently high labor costs, elevated interest rates and weakening demand for both apartments and commercial space.Major developers have reiterated that they have no plans to start work on significant new projects any time soon. Last week, Kilroy Realty, which has approval for a massive 2.3 million-square-foot redevelopment ofSouth of Market's Flower Mart, said no groundbreakings are planned this year -- anywhere.