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DOT Wants To Know How Big Airlines Use Passenger Data

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 19:20
The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced it will conduct a review of the data practices of the country's ten largest airlines, amid concerns over potential misuse of customer information for upselling, overcharging, targeted advertising, and third-party data sales, as well as the security of systems handling sensitive data such as passport numbers. From a report: The probe will look at air carriers' policies and procedures to determine if they are safeguarding personal info properly, unfairly or deceptively monetizing it, or sharing it with third parties, the agency said yesterday. If they're indeed doing anything "problematic," they can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules, says the DOT. "Airline passengers should have confidence that their personal information is not being shared improperly with third parties or mishandled by employees," said US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. "This review of airline practices is the beginning of a new initiative by DOT to ensure airlines are being good stewards of sensitive passenger data." The ten airlines going under the magnifying glass are Delta, United, American, Southwest, Alaska, JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, Hawaiian and Allegiant.

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Security and Climate Change Drive a Return To Nuclear Energy as Over 30 Nations Sign Summit Pledge

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 18:45
In the shadow of a massive monument glorifying nuclear power, over 30 nations from around the world pledged to use the controversial energy source to help achieve a climate-neutral globe while providing countries with an added sense of strategic security. Associated Press: The idea of a Nuclear Energy Summit would have been unthinkable a dozen years ago after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, but the tide has turned in recent years. A warming planet has made it necessary to phase out fossil fuels, while the war in Ukraine has laid bare Europe's dependence on Russian energy. "We have to do everything possible to facilitate the contribution of nuclear energy," said Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. "It is clear: Nuclear is there. It has an important role to play," he said. In a solemn pledge, 34 nations, including the United States, China, France, Britain and Saudi Arabia, committed "to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear energy by taking measures such as enabling conditions to support and competitively finance the lifetime extension of existing nuclear reactors, the construction of new nuclear power plants and the early deployment of advanced reactors." The statement adds: "We commit to support all countries, especially emerging nuclear ones, in their capacities and efforts to add nuclear energy to their energy mixes."

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Switch Emulator Suyu Hit By GitLab DMCA, Project Lives on Through Self-hosting

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 18:10
Switch emulator Suyu -- a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu -- has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. From a report: While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab's public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice "from a representative of the rightsholder."

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Uncle Sam wants to know how big airlines use passenger data

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 18:00
'Problematic' carriers can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules

Ever suspected an airline was using your data to upsell, overcharge, target you with ads, or was selling it to third parties? Worried about how secure their systems are when you input that passport number? The US Department of Transportation is looking into it with a review of the country's ten biggest airlines.…

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More Than Half of Chickenpox Diagnoses Are Wrong, Study Finds

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 17:22
An anonymous reader shares a report: Thanks to the vaccination program that began in 1995, chickenpox is now relatively rare. Cases of the miserable, itchy condition have fallen more than 97 percent. But, while children have largely put the oatmeal baths and oven mitts behind them, doctors have apparently let their diagnostic skills get a little crusty. According to a study published Thursday, public health researchers in Minnesota found that 55 percent of people diagnosed with chickenpox based on their symptoms were actually negative for the varicella-zoster virus, the virus that causes chickenpox. The study noted that the people were all diagnosed in person by health care providers in medical facilities. But, instead of chickenpox, lab testing showed that some of the patients were actually infected with an enterovirus, which can cause a rash, or the herpes simplex virus 1, which causes cold sores. The study, published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, supports expanding laboratory testing for suspected chickenpox cases in the state's program and highlights that diagnoses based on symptoms are "unreliable." For one thing, doctors simply see far fewer chickenpox cases these days because of the protection from vaccines. While chickenpox cases in the US previously reached 4 million each year, with 10,500 to 13,500 hospitalizations and 100 to 150 deaths, there are now fewer than 150,000 cases,1,400 hospitalizations, and 30 deaths each year, the CDC reports. Vaccination is more than 90 percent effective at preventing the disease. In the rare cases where a vaccinated person contracts chickenpox, the muted rashes are challenging to identify by eye. But even in unvaccinated children, chickenpox can be tricky to pick out; it can easily be confused with measles, insect bites, enterovirus, skin infections such as scabies and impetigo, herpes viruses, and hand, foot, and mouth disease.

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3 million doors open to uninvited guests in keycard exploit

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 17:00
As months go by without fixes, hotels take the scenic route to securing rooms

Around 3 million doors protected by popular keycard locks are thought to be vulnerable to security flaws that allow miscreants to quickly slip into locked rooms.…

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Geologists Reject Declaration of Anthropocene Epoch

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 16:40
The guardians of the world's official geological timescale have firmly rejected a proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch, after an epic academic row. From a report: The proposal would have designated the period from 1952 as the Anthropocene to reflect the planet-changing impact of humanity. It would have ended the Holocene epoch, the 11,700 years of stable climate since the last ice age and during which human civilisation arose. The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has announced, however, that geologists have rejected the idea in a series of votes. Those objecting noted a much longer history of human impacts on Earth, including the dawn of agriculture and the industrial revolution, and unease about including a new unit in the geological timescale with a span of less than less than a single human lifetime, it said. Most units span thousands or millions of years. It also acknowledged: "The Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions." The Anthropocene working group (AWG), which was formed by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), in turn part of the IUGS, took 15 years to develop the proposal. It concluded that the radioactive isotopes spread worldwide by hydrogen bomb tests were the best marker of humanity's transformation of the planet. Geological time units also need a specific location to typify the unit and the Crawford sinkhole lake in Canada was chosen.

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UN unanimously adopts ambitious AI resolution, sans teeth

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 16:25
'Safe, secure and trustworthy' AI a must, says document, but nothing in it ensures anyone plays along

The United Nations has unanimously adopted a resolution aimed at establishing international AI development standards.…

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US Cyber Investors Pledge Spyware is Off Limits - With a Catch

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 16:01
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, the Biden administration announced that six new countries had joined an international coalition to fight the proliferation of commercial spyware, sold by companies such as NSO Group or Intellexa. Now, some investors have announced that they too are committed to fighting spyware. But at least one of those investors, Paladin Capital Group, has previously invested in a company that developed malware, according to a leaked 2021-dated slide deck obtained by TechCrunch, although the firm tells TechCrunch it "got out" of the firm some time ago. In the last couple of years, the U.S. government has led an effort to limit or at least restrain the use of spyware across the world by putting surveillance tech makers like NSO Group, Candiru, and Intellexa on blocklists, as well as imposing export controls on those companies and visa restrictions on people involved in the industry. More recently, the government has imposed economic sanctions not only on companies, but also directly on the executive who founded Intellexa. These actions have put others in the spyware industry on alert. In a call with reporters on Monday that TechCrunch attended, a senior Biden administration official said that a representative from Paladin participated in meetings at the White House on March 7, as well as this week in Seoul, where governments gathered for the Summit for Democracy to discuss spyware. Paladin, one of the biggest investors in cybersecurity startups, and several other venture firms published a set of voluntary investment principles, noting that they would invest in companies that "enhance the defense, national security, and foreign policy interests of free and open societies." "For us, it was an important first step in having an investor outline both recognition that investments should not be going towards companies that are undertaking selling products, and selling to clients that can undermine free and fair societies," the senior administration official said in the call, where journalists agreed not to quote the officials by name.

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Higher Temperatures Mean Higher Food and Other Prices

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 15:20
Food prices and overall inflation will rise as temperatures climb with climate change, a new study by an environmental scientist and the European Central Bank found. From a report: Looking at monthly price tags of food and other goods, temperatures and other climate factors in 121 nations since 1996, researchers calculate that "weather and climate shocks" will cause the cost of food to rise 1.5 to 1.8 percentage points annually within a decade or so, even higher in already hot places like the Middle East, according to a study in Thursday's journal Communications, Earth and the Environment. And that translates to an increase in overall inflation of 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points by 2035, just caused by climate change extreme weather, the study said. Those numbers may look small, but to banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve that fight inflation, they are significant, said study lead author Max Kotz, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "The physical impacts of climate change are going to have a persistent effect on inflation," Kotz said. "This is really from my perspective another example of one of the ways in which climate change can undermine human welfare, economic welfare."

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Hardware-level Apple Silicon vulnerability can leak cryptographic keys

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 15:03
Short of rearchitecting hardware, the fix will seriously degrade performance

Apple is having its own Meltdown/Spectre moment with a new side-channel vulnerability found in the architecture of Apple Silicon processors that gives malicious apps the ability to extract cryptographic keys. …

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DOJ Lawsuit Against Apple is Headline Grabber But Poses Limited Near-Term Impact

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 14:40
An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple Thursday, accusing the company led by CEO Tim Cook of engaging in anti-competitive business practices. The allegations include claims that Apple prevents competitors from accessing certain iPhone features and that the company's actions impact the "flow of speech" through its streaming service, Apple TV+. However, even if the DOJ proves any of the allegations, it is highly unlikely that Apple will face material changes for years, as history shows that such lawsuits often take a significant amount of time to reach the trial, let alone a resolution. The DOJ's ongoing case against Google, filed in 2020, only went to trial in 2023, with no remedies or financial implications expected for up to two more years. This is not the first time Apple has faced legal action from the DOJ. In 2012, the agency sued Apple for conspiring with publishers to increase ebook prices, a lawsuit that was not settled until 2016. "Precedents suggest that resolution of the complaint will take three to five years, including appeals," Bernstein analysts wrote in a note.

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Fujitsu to shutter operations in Republic of Ireland

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 14:30
In wake of Post Office Horizon scandal, global execs set new profit target, and Irish ops fell short

Exclusive Fujitsu is effectively shuttering business operations in the Republic of Ireland and opening consultations with employee representatives before the majority of the workforce is made redundant.…

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Apple Held Talks With China's Baidu Over AI for Its Devices

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 14:01
Apple has held preliminary talks with Baidu about using the Chinese company's generative AI technology in its devices in China, the latest example of the iPhone maker's efforts to widen its AI capabilities. From a report: The U.S. tech giant has been exploring using external partners to help accelerate its AI ambitions. It has held discussions with companies including Google and OpenAI about using their technology to power its mobile features. In China, Apple has been looking for a local generative AI model provider, mainly because China requires such models to be vetted by its cyberspace regulator before being launched to the public, people familiar with the matter said.

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NVD slowdown leaves thousands of vulnerabilities without analysis data

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 13:45
Security world reacts as NIST does a lot less of oft criticized, 'almost always thankless' work

Opinion The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has almost completely stopped adding analysis to Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) listed in the National Vulnerability Database. That means big headaches for anyone using CVEs to maintain their security. …

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EU antitrust team probing Microsoft ties between Entra ID and 365 services

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 13:00
Google claims rival has made an 'art and science' out of licensing

Exclusive Google says the European Union's antitrust authorities have asked if Microsoft unfairly ties authentication to Azure, in a further sign that officials are considering multiple aspects of Redmond's policies.…

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Texas Sues xHamster and Chaturbate

Slashdot - Fri, 2024-03-22 13:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just sued two more porn sites, xHamster and Chaturbate, alleging they aren't complying with age verification laws. As first reported by local news outlet KXAN, the Office of the Attorney General filed two civil lawsuits on Tuesday afternoon against Hammy Media, which owns xHamster, and Multi Media, which owns Chaturbate. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 1181 into law in June, which requires porn sites to verify the ages of users through a driver's license or passport. If porn sites don't force consenting adults to hand over a government-issued ID in order to watch other consenting adults have sex on camera, they face heavy fines. Paxton's lawsuit against xHamster asks the court to force the site to pay a civil penalty of up to $1.67 million, with an additional $10,000 a day since filing. For Chaturbate, it's $1.78 million plus $10,000 per day. Last week, Pornhub's parent company Aylo blocked anyone accessing its network of sites from a Texas IP address, and replaced its network of sites -- which include Pornhub, Brazzers, YouPorn and many more -- with a message about its rejection of age verification legislation that requires adults to show government-issued ID to access porn. [...] As of writing, xHamster and Chaturbate are still accessible in Texas and don't have requirements to verify users' ages with a government ID.

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Vodafone, Three hustle to tie knot before regulators crash wedding

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 12:15
Price hikes and reduced competition in virtual network space raised as major concerns

Vodafone and Three UK have mere days to convince Britain's competition authorities that a merger won't harm consumers. Failure to do so will result in a deeper probe of the proposed corporate marriage.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

CNCF boss talks 'irrational exuberance' in an AI-heavy Kubecon keynote

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 11:25
Kubecon? More like Queuecon as Paris-based show's registration system fails

The European leg of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) Kubecon shindig kicked off this week with an AI-infused keynote and a broken registration system that left many attendees locked out.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Whistleblower says database for registering UK nurses is 'completely unacceptable'

TheRegister - Fri, 2024-03-22 10:29
Regulatory body insists it's on 'a journey of improvement'

Exclusive The UK Information Commissioner's Office has received a complaint detailing the mismanagement of personal data at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the regulator that oversees worker registration.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

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