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Japan's Transport Safety Board on Thursday judged that a cargo ship that spilled 1,000 tons of fuel oil into a pristine marine environment off the coast of Mauritius in 2020 was travelling off course in search of a cell phone signal. From a report: The MV Wakashio was en route from Lianyungang, China to a Brazilian port when, on July 25 2020, it struck trouble near Blue Bay Marine Park, a popular snorkeling spot on the Indian Ocean nation Mauritius. The Japanese-owned vessel was sailing under a Panamanian flag of convenience, and captained by a Indian national. According to the report, two days before it ran aground, the captain changed the 100,000-plus ton ship's route to travel five nautical miles from the coast line instead of the originally planned 22 nautical miles. He ordered the course change without obtaining proper marine charts of the area and therefore did not know that waters in the area are less than 20 meters deep. The ship subsequently hit a coral reef. "Reefs and obstacles were displayed near the place of occurrence," reads the 89-page Japan Transport Safety Board report in Japanese. "The body buckled due to being knocked to the seabed and broke into the skin near the fuel oil tank. As a result, about 1,000 tons of fuel oil loaded in the tank spilled out to sea," the document states. The report noted that the captain of the vessel changed the voyage plan for the purpose of coming within range of signal for his smartphone. It also noted the behavior was not an isolated incident and that safety awareness among the crew at large was lacking.

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'Research purposes' excuse didn't fly

A PhD student has been found guilty of building a potentially deadly drone for Islamic State terrorists, in part using his home 3D printer.…

Two designers from New Zealand built a wildly popular social network for movie buffs. Now, they're cashing in (and sticking around for the sequel). The New York Times: The "Barbie" star Margot Robbie created an account. Ditto Rian Johnson, the "Knives Out" auteur. Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise's directing partner, has used his to heap praise on another action star (Sylvester Stallone). Letterboxd, the social network for recommending and reviewing movies, has become a kind of shibboleth for film nerds over the past decade. Roughly 10 million people now use the service to share their favorites: You like Studio Ghibli, too? What's your favorite Spike Lee joint? The service has not undergone any revolutionary changes since it was founded in 2011. But Letterboxd is undergoing two big changes: a new owner and, eventually, user recommendations and review of TV shows. Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, Letterboxd's founders, announced on Friday that they were selling a majority stake in the service to Tiny, a public company in Victoria, British Columbia. The deal values Letterboxd at more than $50 million, said a person familiar with the sale, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential financial information. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. von Randow, two entrepreneurs based in New Zealand, have reassurances for their users who may be afraid of what a sale could mean for their corner of the internet. First, neither co-founder is planning to leave any time soon, and both will remain shareholders. And the service itself isn't changing immediately. The proposal to incorporate TV is still in its infancy, and the founders said they did not expect that the addition would disrupt their existing products.

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Slash_Account_Dot writes: I recently got my hands on an ordinary-looking iPhone-to-HDMI adapter that mimics Apple's branding and, when plugged in, runs a program that implores you to "Scan QR code for use." That QR code takes you to an ad-riddled website that asks you to download an app that asks for your location data, access to your photos and videos, runs a bizarre web browser, installs tracking cookies, takes "sensor data," and uses that data to target you with ads. The adapter's app also kindly informed me that it's sending all of my data to China. The cord was discovered by friend of 404 Media John Bumstead, an electronics refurbisher and artist who buys devices in bulk from electronics recyclers. Bumstead tweeted about the cord and was kind enough to send me one so I could try it myself. Joseph has written about malicious lightning cables and USB cables made by hackers that can be used for keystroke logging and spying. While those malicious lightning cables are products marketed for spying, the HDMI adapter Bumstead has been found in the wild and is just another crappy knockoff cable sold on Amazon's increasingly difficult to navigate website. This HDMI adapter is designed to look exactly like Apple's same adapter.

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Now have a look at these third-party alternatives from our partners, says Chocolate Factory

Customers aren't usually left with a mostly useless 55-inch Android tablet when Google sends another of its many services to the graveyard, but here we are. The Jamboard and its accompanying apps will cease to work in a little more than a year.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine demanding an "honest" debate over the cost of net zero in a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible? Well, let me tell you how Civitas, one of the thinktanks housed at 55 Tufton Street in London, did exactly that, and nearly got away with it. On Wednesday, Civitas published a pamphlet on net zero by Ewen Stewart, whose consultancy, Walbrook Economics, works on "the interaction of macroeconomics, politics and capital markets." Stewart is also a climate sceptic, having written in 2021 that human-caused warming is a "contested theory." Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an "honest debate about the cost of net-zero" in 2020. The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."

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A changed RMS appeared at the GNU 40th anniversary event in Switzerland

Richard Stallman has revealed he is undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of cancer of the white blood cells, but says that his prognosis is good.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In December 2022, we published a short PSA, reminding users they could still activate Windows 11 and 10 with valid Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 keys. This practice dates back to 2015 when Microsoft launched Windows 10 with a one-year free upgrade window. Besides letting Windows 7/8 users upgrade for free to Windows 10, Microsoft allowed activating its newest OS using keys from the previous releases. Upgrade from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows is no longer possible, and it now seems that Microsoft is removing the loophole to prevent users from activating Windows 11 with old Windows license keys. As spotted by Deskmodder, Microsoft published a message on the Device Partner Center, notifying customers that the installation path to obtain free upgrades from Windows 7 and 8 to more recent Windows versions is no longer available. What it means is that you can no longer update from Windows 7/8/8.1 to Windows 10 or 11.

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Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu was apprehended in Singapore while trying to leave the country on Friday. From a report: Teneo, which is liquidating the defunct firm's estate, said it received a committal order against Zhu after he failed to comply with an earlier Singapore court order compelling him to cooperate with the liquidation investigation. The order sentenced Zhu to four months in prison, according to a statement by Teneo. Zhu was apprehended at Singapore's Changi Airport on Friday afternoon, Teneo said, adding that the Sept. 25 order also saw Zhu's co-founder Kyle Davies receive the same sentence. Zhu didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Like some sort of bizarro greatest hits album, the EEOC case sounds just like multiple previous suits

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit against Tesla alleging "widespread and ongoing racial harassment of Black employees," at the company's Fremont, California plant.…

Microsoft discussed selling its Bing search engine to Apple around 2020, a deal that would have replaced Google as the default option on the iPhone maker's devices, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: Executives from Microsoft met with Apple's services chief, Eddy Cue, who brokered the current search engine relationship with Alphabet's Google, to discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation was confidential. The talks were exploratory and never reached an advanced stage, they said. Over the years, the companies have discussed other ways to make Bing the preferred option, though Apple ultimately stuck with Google. Those talks have taken on fresh significance now that the US Department of Justice is in a legal fight with Google to show that the company abused its search dominance. Apple's relationship with Google, which pays billions of dollars to give its search engine a prime spot in the iPhone and other devices, is central to the case.

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Chipmaker Intel said on Friday it had begun high-volume production using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines at its $18.5 billion plant in Ireland, calling it a "landmark" moment as it seeks to regain ground on its rivals. From a report: The EUV tools, which are theoretically precise enough to hit a person's thumb with a laser pointer from the moon, will play a key role in meeting Intel's goal of delivering five generations of technology in four years, the U.S. company said. The effort in Ireland is Intel's first attempt at high-volume manufacturing using EUV technology. Once the world's leading chip manufacturer, Intel has lost the lead but says it is on track to regain it with manufacturing technology it says will rival the best from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. "This is a landmark for Intel and the semiconductor industry as a whole," Ann Kelleher, Intel's general manager of technology development, said in a statement. "The transfer of Intel 4 process technology into high-volume production in Ireland is a giant step toward enabling leading-edge manufacturing in Europe." The plant, located in the town of Leixlip outside Dublin, is the first high-volume location for its manufacturing process called Intel 4 that uses EUV. The advanced manufacturing technique will produce its forthcoming "Meteor Lake" chip for laptops, which will pave the way for AI PCs.

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Fancy running Windows, Linux and Classic MacOS on your modern x86-64 or Arm64 Mac? Walk this way

Friday FOSS Fest UTM is a handy hypervisor for Macs and Apple fondleslabs, but it's more than just that. It has some very particular skills. We are quite taken with it.…

slack_justyb writes: Richard Stallman revealed his diagnosis of lymphoma at the GNU Hacker's meeting in Biel, Switzerland yesterday. He did not share much about his health condition but did indicate that it is "manageable" and that he expects to be around for many more years ahead.

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Senator Dianne Feinstein, the trailblazing Democratic power broker who served in the Senate for 30 years, died on Thursday night, according to a family member. From a report: In recent years, Ms. Feinstein, 90, had suffered from frail health and memory issues that made it difficult for her to function alone and prompted calls for her to step down, which she consistently rejected. Her condition had grown more acute over the past several months, after a bout with shingles that caused serious complications, including a case of encephalitis, and prompted her to begin using a wheelchair in the halls of the Capitol. Ms. Feinstein's long and very public decline shed a spotlight on the advanced age of members of Congress and particularly the Senate, where many continue to serve long after retirement age. On Capitol Hill, where the Senate is racing to pass a temporary spending bill to avert a government shutdown at midnight on Saturday, her absence was unlikely to have an immediate impact. Her vote had not been expected to be determinative for passing that measure, which has broad bipartisan backing.

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But Meta was just about to start asking people for their permission!

Norway has told the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) it believes a countrywide ban on Meta harvesting user data to serve up advertising on Facebook and Instagram should be made permanent and extended across Europe.…

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the trailblazing Democratic power broker who served in the Senate for 30 years, died on Thursday night, according to a family member. New York Times: In recent years, Ms. Feinstein, 90, had suffered from frail health and memory issues that made it difficult for her to function alone and prompted calls for her to step down, which she consistently rejected. Her staff was being informed at 9 a.m.

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Whatever the cause, MNVO customers not happy

UK government orders to remove Huawei equipment from Britain's 5G networks have reportedly led to outages for customers of Sky Mobile.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: New York state banned the use of facial recognition technology in schools Wednesday, following a report that concluded the risks to student privacy and civil rights outweigh potential security benefits. Education Commissioner Betty Rosa's order leaves decisions on digital fingerprinting and other biometric technology up to local districts. The state has had a moratorium on facial recognition since parents filed a court challenge to its adoption by an upstate district. [A]n analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools." Biotechnology would not stop a student from entering a school "unless an administrator or staff member first noticed that the student was in crisis, had made some sort of threat, or indicated in some other way that they could be a threat to school security," the report said. The state report found that the use of digital fingerprinting was less risky and could be beneficial for school lunch payments and accessing electronic tablets and other devices. Schools may use that technology after seeking parental input, Rosa said. "Schools should be safe places to learn and grow, not spaces where they are constantly scanned and monitored, with their most sensitive information at risk," said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the NYCLU's Education Policy Center.

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NHS also launches £2M project to engage patients with data strategy

The contract award for the £480 million ($588 million) NHS Federated Data Platform – a huge analytics project for one of the world's largest healthcare providers – has been delayed by a few weeks.…