Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said they are planning an initial public offering of the Kingdom's $500 billion megaproject Neom as soon as 2024. Arabian Business reports: Talking to reporters in Jeddah, the crown prince said the Kingdom is setting aside $80 billion for Neom Investment Fund, where it would invest in companies that agree to operate in the futuristic city, Bloomberg has reported. The announcement was witnessed by global investors including Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, Tim Collins of Ripplewood, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Kuwaiti retail billionaire Mohammed Alshaya.

The Saudi crown prince also unveiled funding details of Neom. First phase, which runs until 2030, will cost 1.2 trillion riyals, with about half of that covered by the Public Investment Fund. Officials will then seek to raise another 600 billion riyals from other sovereign wealth funds in the region, private investors in Saudi Arabia and abroad, and the planned IPO on Tadawul. The IPO, which could happen by 2024, will add more than 1 trillion riyals to the Kingdom's stock market, the crown prince noted. In addition to the news about the IPO, a teaser video was released, revealing the design for The Line: a "vertical city" some 500 meters tall, 170 kilometers in length, and covered in mirrors.

"Although it looks like a wall, The Line is actually supposed to be comprised of two huge parallel buildings, connected via walkways and divided into neighborhoods that are supposed to offer all the amenities of city life within a five-minute walking distance," reports The Verge.

"Vegetables will be 'autonomously harvested and bundled' from community farms; 'a high-speed train will run under the mirrored buildings'; the Line will include a stadium 'up to 1,000 feet above the ground,' and there'll be a marina for yachts under an arch between the buildings." A report from the Wall Street Journal in 2019 also noted robots will outnumber humans and hologram teachers will education genetically-enhanced students.

"In what's being hailed as an important first for chemistry, an international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can selectively rearrange atomic bonds within a single molecule," reports New Atlas. "The breakthrough allows for an unprecedented level of control over chemical bonds within these structures, and could open up some exciting possibilities in what's known as molecular machinery."

"Selective chemistry — the ability to steer reactions at will and to form exactly the chemical bonds you want and no others — is a long-standing quest in chemistry," adds the announcement from IBM Research. "Our team has been able to achieve this level of selectivity in tip-induced redox reactions using scanning probe microscopy." Our technique consisted in using the tip of a scanning probe microscope to apply voltage pulses to single molecules. We were able to target specific chemical bonds in those molecules, breaking those bonds and forging new, different ones to switch back and forth at will among three different molecular structures.

The molecules in our experiment all consisted of the same atoms, but differed in the way those atoms were bonded together and arranged in space... Our findings were published today and featured on the cover of Science.

Our demonstration of selective and reversible formation of intramolecular covalent bonds is unprecedented. It advances our understanding of chemical reactions and opens a route towards advanced artificial molecular machines.... Imagine one could rearrange bonds inside a molecule at will, transforming one structural isomer into various other ones in a controlled manner. In this paper, we describe a system and a method to make exactly that possible — including the control of the direction of the atomic rearrangements by means of an external driving voltage, and without the use of reagents.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Grokew for sharing the story!

"T2 SDE is not just a regular Linux distribution," reads the announcement. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit (others might even name it Meta Distribution). T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

Slashdot reader ReneR writes: The T2 project released a major milestone update, shipping full support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. Support for cross compiling was further improved to also cover Rust, Ada, ObjC, Fortran, and Go!

This is also the first major release where an AI powered package update bot named 'data' contributed more changes than human contributors combined! [Data: 164, humans: 141]

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support as well as supporting nearly all existing CPU architectures: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, spare, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 for a wide use in Embedded systems. The project also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi Octane and Sun workstations as well as state of the art ARM64, RISCV64 as well as AMD64 for regular cloud, server, or simply enthusiast workstation use.

It appears that a crypto Twitter user named Cobie influenced the FBI into bringing an insider trading case. From a report: The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York is bringing an indictment against a former Coinbase employee, who allegedly tipped his brother and his buddy about which assets were about to list on Coinbase -- leading to $1.5 million in "realized and unrealized gains," according to the indictment. This is the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency markets, says U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, in a statement.

Ishan Wahi, the Coinbase employee who was charged, was involved in listing new crypto assets on Coinbase's exchange. When Coinbase announces that a new token will be listed, that token often pops in value -- which means that the company told employees to keep silent about Coinbase's listing plans. Wahi started working for Coinbase in October 2020. In August 2021, he was allowed access to a channel where Coinbase employees discussed listing new projects with details like "exact announcement / launch dates + timelines."

NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. The Verge reports: NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket's debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then. NASA officials stressed that they are not committing to any of these dates at the moment, but the announcement puts the rocket closer than it's ever been to its launch. The SLS has been in development for roughly a decade, and its inaugural launch date has been an ever-moving target. NASA originally planned to launch as early as 2017, but schedule delays, development mishaps, and poor management have caused the rocket's debut to slip again and again.

But after conducting a mostly full dress rehearsal with the rocket back in June, NASA is in the development end game, and an actual launch looms on the horizon. A more solid launch date should come closer to actual liftoff. "We'll make the agency commitment at the flight readiness review, just a little over a week before launch," NASA's Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a press conference. "But these are the dates that the team is working to and have a plan to."

If NASA rolls out SLS to the launchpad in mid-August but cannot launch by September 5th, then the rocket's liftoff could see a significant delay. It all has to do with the SLS's flight termination system, which is used to destroy the rocket if something goes catastrophically wrong during the launch and the vehicle starts to veer off course. Teams must fully test the flight termination system before launch, and that work can only be done inside the VAB. Once the SLS is rolled out from the VAB, there is a 20-day time limit for the flight termination system before it has to be tested again. That means the rocket has to launch within 20 days of its rollout, or it must be returned to the VAB so that the flight termination system can get checked out again. That testing takes time, so if SLS is forced to come back to the VAB after rolling out in August, chances are it wouldn't be ready to fly until late October.

The U.S. Postal Service will order more than twice the number of electric vehicles initially projected for its new fleet, the agency announced Wednesday. From a report: The move follows months of controversy after the Postal Service initially sought to make about 10 percent of its fleet electric. Now it plans to make at least 40 percent of its fleet electric. The Postal Service said in a statement it adjusted the fleet's Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to include more electric vehicles under the current contract. The Postal Service is targeting a purchase of at least 25,000 electric vehicles, it said. The Postal Service said in February that its initial order to have 10 percent of its new trucks be electric included an option to adjust the percentage later, but the announcement sparked pushback from members of Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Postal Service maintains the largest vehicle fleet in the federal government, and critics argued that not including more electric vehicles in the fleet would fly in the face of President Biden's push for the federal government to pursue carbon neutrality.

MIT News has an announcement: The boiling of water or other fluids is an energy-intensive step at the heart of a wide range of industrial processes, including most electricity generating plants, many chemical production systems, and even cooling systems for electronics. Improving the efficiency of systems that heat and evaporate water could significantly reduce their energy use. Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to do just that, with a specially tailored surface treatment for the materials used in these systems. The improved efficiency comes from a combination of three different kinds of surface modifications, at different size scales. The new findings are described in the journal Advanced Materials in a paper by recent MIT graduate Youngsup Song PhD '21, Ford Professor of Engineering Evelyn Wang, and four others at MIT..... "If we have lots of bubbles on the boiling surface, that means boiling is very efficient, but if we have too many bubbles on the surface, they can coalesce together, which can form a vapor film over the boiling surface," Song says. That film introduces resistance to the heat transfer from the hot surface to the water. "If we have vapor in between the surface and water, that prevents the heat transfer efficiency and lowers the critical heat flux value," he says.... Adding a series of microscale cavities, or dents, to a surface is a way of controlling the way bubbles form on that surface, keeping them effectively pinned to the locations of the dents and preventing them from spreading out into a heat-resisting film... In these experiments, the cavities were made in the centers of a series of pillars on the material's surface. These pillars, combined with nanostructures, promote wicking of liquid from the base to their tops, and this enhances the boiling process by providing more surface area exposed to the water. In combination, the three "tiers" of the surface texture — the cavity separation, the posts, and the nanoscale texturing — provide a greatly enhanced efficiency for the boiling process, Song says... The nanostructures promote evaporation under the bubbles, and the capillary action induced by the pillars supplies liquid to the bubble base. That maintains a layer of liquid water between the boiling surface and the bubbles of vapor, which enhances the maximum heat flux.
While the article stresses it's still a laboratory-scale process (needing more work to become a practical "industry-scale" process), "There may be some significant small-scale applications that could use this process in its present form, such as the thermal management of electronic devices, an area that is becoming more important as semiconductor devices get smaller and managing their heat output becomes ever more important." Wang says in the announcement, "There's definitely a space there where this is really important." The article includes a bizarre-looking video showing how water now boils on their specially treated surface.

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link!

"As many as 100 people could be looking at the board and see something different," reports the Michigan news site MLive.com. "Look up at a Detroit Metropolitan Airport departure board and you could see a personalized travel itinerary."

Delta's site features a trippy video showing the screen with a different greeting depending on where the camera is positioned.

"Hello Liz!"
"Hello Albert!"
"Hello Cora!"

The maker's of the technology envision it someday being used in theme parks, stadiums, and convention centers. But what exactly is happening here? MLive explains: In late June, Delta Airlines launched a beta version of its new Parallel Reality technology that allows dozens of people to simultaneously see unique content on the same digital screen. Detroit is the first, and currently only, airport in the country to experiment with the futuristic technology developed by Misapplied Sciences, based in California...

Delta passengers can scan their boarding pass, select a language and test out the system. Using "multi-view pixels and proprietary technology," the board then shows personal flight information, boarding time or even standby status, a news release said... Delta Senior Vice President of Customer Experience Ranjan Goswami said the new system means "customers will no longer have to search for flight and gate information."

"This technology truly must be seen to be believed," Goswami said in an announcement. The Parallel Reality displays project up to millions of light rays that can be directed to a specific person. Non-biometric sensors then reportedly track passengers who can see the display even if they move....

Delta says the Parallel Reality experience will "always be opt-in" and customer information is not stored.
"If this new technology can make finding your gate and departure information quicker and easier, we're not just showing customers a magic trick — we're solving a real problem," said Delta's senior VP of customer experience. "Customers already rely on personalized navigation via their mobile devices, but this is enabling a public screen to act as a personal one — removing the clutter of information not relevant to you to empower a better journey."

The company's statement adds that Delta "is also investing in digital identity technology, which allows customers to move through the airport using facial recognition, eliminating the need to show a boarding pass or government ID." The technology is already available at airports in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York, "and will eventually be activated in all of Delta's U.S. hubs."

Bungie, the developer of Destiny 2, is now officially a part of Sony. The Verge reports: The PlayStation maker had announced its intent to acquire the gaming studio in January, and now, that acquisition is complete. At the initial announcement, Sony said (pdf) the deal was worth $3.6 billion, but in an SEC filing on Friday, it said the deal was worth "approximately" $3.7 billion. Though it's now under the Sony umbrella, Bungie will "continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games," Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said in a blog post from the original announcement of the acquisition. And future games in development won't be PlayStation exclusives, Bungie's Joe Blackburn and Justin Truman said.

But Sony does plan to lean on Bungie for its "world-class expertise in multi-platform development and live game services," which "will help us deliver on our vision of expanding PlayStation to hundreds of millions of gamers," Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan said in January. Sony views live service games as a critical part of PlayStation's future, as it plans to launch more than 10 new live service games by March 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Tor Project team has announced the release of Tor Browser 11.5, a major release that brings new features to help users fight censorship easier. [...] The updates in Tor Browser 11.5 focus on circumventing censorship, a process that started a year ago in version 10.5 with improving the Tor connection experience. In the new version, users no longer have to manually try out bridge configurations to unblock Tor.

Tor Browser version 11.5 comes with a new feature called "Connection Assist," which assigns automatically the bridge configuration known to work best for the user's location. "Connection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent)," explains the release announcement. "It manages to do so without needing to connect to the Tor Network first by utilizing moat – the same domain-fronting tool that Tor Browser uses to request a bridge from torproject.org." Since Connection Assist is still in an early stage of development (v1.0), the Tor team welcomes user feedback and reports, which would help them iron out any kinks and improve on the system.

Another important new feature in version 11.5 is making 'HTTPS-Only Mode' the default browsing mode, so that the connection is through a secure tunnel. This ensures that all data exchange between the user and the server hosting the website will be encrypted, to defend against man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and to protect users from SSL stripping on malicious exit relays. [...] The third significant improvement in Tor Browser 11.5 is a heavily revamped Network Settings menu, now called "Connection Settings," which should make it easier to find and understand specific settings. Most notably, bridge configuration and connection options have been redesigned to enable quick and easy review and management. Using emojis on the saved Bridges, the new interface offers visualization for the configuration for the first time, making it easy to identify the right bridge and select it when needed. You can download the latest Tor Browser from the official download portal.

theodp writes: In partnership with tech-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org, over 500 of the nation's business, education and nonprofit leaders issued a letter calling for state governments and education leaders to bring more Computer Science to K-12 students across the U.S. The signatories include a who's who of tech leaders, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg. A new website -- CEOs for CS -- was launched in conjunction with the campaign. "The United States leads the world in technology, yet only 5% of our high school students study computer science. How is this acceptable?" the CEOs demand to know in their letter addressed "To the Governors and Education Leaders of the United States of America." They add, "Nearly two-thirds of high-skilled immigration is for computer scientists, and every state is an importer of this strategic talent. The USA has over 700,000 open computing jobs but only 80,000 computer science graduates a year. We must educate American students as a matter of national competitiveness."

A press release explains that the announcement "coincides with the culmination of the National Governors Association Chairman's Initiative for K-12 computer science, led by Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson." Hutchinson is a founding Governor of the Code.org-led advocacy group Govs for CS, which launched in anticipation of President Obama's tech-supported but never materialized $4 billion CS for All initiative. Hutchinson was a signatory of an earlier 2016 Code.org organized letter from Governors, business, education, and nonprofit leaders that implored Congress to make CS education for K-12 students a priority.

"If I want AWS to ignore me completely all I have to do is open a pull request against one of their repositories," quipped cloud economist Corey Quinn in April, while also complaining that the real problem is "how they consistently and in my opinion incorrectly try to shape a narrative where they're contributing to the open source ecosystem at a level that's on par with their big tech company peers."

But on Friday tech columnist Matt Asay argued that AWS is quietly getting better at open source. "Agreed," tweeted tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in response, commending "Good open source people, good open-source work." (And Vaughan-Nichols later retweeted an AWS principle software engineer's announcement that "Over at Amazon Linux we are hiring, and also trying to lead and better serve customers by being more involved in upstream communities.") Mark Atwood, principle engineer for open source at Amazon, also joined Asay's thread, tweeting "I'm glad that people are noticing. Me and my team have been doing heavy work for years to get to this point. Generally we don't want to sit at the head of the table, but we are seeing the value of sitting at the table."

Asay himself was AWS's head of developer marketing/Open Source strategy for two years, leaving in August of 2021. But Friday Asay's article noted a recent tweet where AWS engineer Divij Vaidya announced he'd suddenly become one of the top 10 contributors to Apache Kafka after three months as the founding engineer for AWS's Apache Kafka open source team. (Vaida added "We are hiring for a globally distributed fully remote team to work on open source Apache Kafka! Join us.")

Asay writes: Apache Kafka is just the latest example of this.... This is exactly what critics have been saying AWS doesn't do. And, for years, they were mostly correct.

AWS was, and is, far more concerned with taking care of customers than being popular with open-source audiences. So, the company has focused on being "the best place for customers to build and run open-source software in the cloud." Historically, that tended to not involve or require contributing to the open-source projects it kept building managed services around. Many felt that was a mistake — that a company so dependent on open source for its business was putting its supply chain at risk by not sustaining the projects upon which it depended...

PostgreSQL contributor (and sometime AWS open-source critic) Paul Ramsey has noticed. As he told me recently, it "[f]eels like a switch flipped at AWS a year or two ago. The strategic value of being a real stakeholder in the software they spin is now recognized as being worth the dollars spent to make it happen...." What seems to be happening at AWS, if quietly and usually behind the scenes, is a shift toward AWS service teams taking greater ownership in the open-source projects they operationalize for customers. This allows them to more effectively deliver results because they can help shape the roadmap for customers, and it ensures AWS customers get the full open-source experience, rather than a forked repo with patches that pile up as technical debt.

Vaidya and the Managed Service for Kafka team is an example along with Madelyn Olson, an engineer with AWS's ElastiCache team and one of five core maintainers for Redis. And then there are the AWS employees contributing to Kubernetes, etcd and more. No, AWS is still not the primary contributor to most of these. Not yet. Google, Microsoft and Red Hat tend to top many of the charts, to Quinn's point above. This also isn't somehow morally wrong, as Quinn also argued: "Amazon (and any company) is there to make money, not be your friend."

But slowly and surely, AWS product teams are discovering that a key element of obsessing over customers is taking care of the open-source projects upon which those customers depend. In other words, part of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" that AWS takes on for customers needs to be stewardship for the open-source projects those same customers demand.
UPDATE: Reached for a comment today, Asay clarified his position on Quinn's original complaints about AWS's low level of open source contributions. "What I was trying to say was that while Corey's point had been more-or-less true, it wasn't really true anymore."

"Today at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we're celebrating 32 years of fighting for technology users around the world," reads a new announcement posted at EFF.org: If you were online back in the 90s, you might remember that it was pretty wild. We had bulletin boards, FTP, Gopher, and, a few years later, homespun websites. You could glimpse a future where anyone, anywhere in the world could access information, float new ideas, and reach each other across vast distances. It was exciting and the possibilities seemed endless.

But the founders of EFF also knew that a better future wasn't automatic. You don't organize a team of lawyers, technologists, and activists because you think technology will magically fix everything — you do it because you expect a fight.

Three decades later, thanks to those battles, the internet does much of what it promised: it connects and lifts up major grassroots movements for equity, civil liberties, and human rights and allows people to connect and organize to counteract the ugliness of the world.

But we haven't yet won that future we envisioned. Just as the web connects us, it also serves as a hunting ground for those who want to surveil and control our actions, those who wish to harass and spread hate, as well as others who seek to monetize our every move and thought. Information collected for one purpose is freely repurposed in ways that oppress us, rather than lift us up. The truth is that digital tools allow those with horrible ideas to connect with each other just as it does those with beautiful, healing ones.

EFF has always seen both the beauty and destructive potential of the internet, and we've always put our marker down on the side of justice, freedom, and innovation.

We work every day toward a future we want to live in, and we don't do it alone. Support from the public makes every one of EFF's activism campaigns, software projects, and court filings possible. Together, we anchor the movement for a better digital world, and ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.

In fact, I invite every digital freedom supporter to join EFF during our summer membership drive. Right now, you can be a member for as little as $20, get some special new gear, and ensure that tech users always have a formidable defender in EFF.

So how does the EFF team celebrate this auspicious anniversary? EFF does what it does best: stand up for users and innovators in the courts, in the halls of power, in the public conversation. We build privacy-protecting tools, teach skills to community members, share knowledge with allies, and preserve the best aspects of the wild web.

In other words, we use every tool in our deep arsenal to fight for a better and brighter digital future for all. Thank you for standing with EFF when it counts.

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat. Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: So far no public announcement appears to have been made, but according to a source has been reportedly removed from Red Hat's internal employee database. Yesterday Lennart did comment on the public Fedora devel mailing list to having now created a personal Red Hat Bugzilla account for his Fedora contributions after it was raised in bug reports and brought up on the mailing list that Lennart's Red Hat account is disabled. Emailing his Red Hat address this morning indeed yields an auto-response that it's no longer in use.

He's still active in systemd world with new commits made as of today, so it will be interesting to see where he ends up or his next moves with his vast Linux ecosystem expertise and pivotal role in spearheading systemd's direction.

Photosynthesis "is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant," according to a new announcement from the University of California, Riverside. But now scientists at the school and the University of Delaware "have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis." The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

"With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering...

Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn. "We were able to grow food-producing organisms without any contributions from biological photosynthesis..." said Elizabeth Hann, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study. The potential for employing this technology to grow crop plants was also investigated. Cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea were all able to utilize carbon from acetate when cultivated in the dark....

By liberating agriculture from complete dependence on the sun, artificial photosynthesis opens the door to countless possibilities for growing food under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by anthropogenic climate change. Drought, floods, and reduced land availability would be less of a threat to global food security if crops for humans and animals grew in less resource-intensive, controlled environments. Crops could also be grown in cities and other areas currently unsuitable for agriculture, and even provide food for future space explorers.

"Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people," said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. "By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment. And for agriculture in non-traditional environments, like outer space, the increased energy efficiency could help feed more crew members with less inputs...."

"Imagine someday giant vessels growing tomato plants in the dark and on Mars — how much easier would that be for future Martians?" said co-author Martha Orozco-Cárdenas, director of the UC Riverside Plant Transformation Research Center.
Thans to Slashdot reader John.Banister for sharing the link!

93-year-old Peter Higgs was awarded a Nobel Prize nine years ago after the Large Hadron Collider experiments finally confirmed of the existence Higgs boson particles he'd predicted back in 1964. "This discovery was a seminal moment in human culture," says physicist Frank Close, who's written the new book Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass .

But Scientific American reports there's more to the story: For years, the significance of the prediction was lost on most scientists, including Higgs himself. But gradually it became clear that the Higgs boson was not just an exotic sideshow in the particle circus but rather the main event. The particle and its associated Higgs field turned out to be responsible for giving all other particles mass and, in turn, creating the structure of galaxies, stars and planets that define our universe and enable our species... Yet the finding, however scientifically thrilling, pushed a press-shy Peter Higgs into the public eye. When he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics the next year, Higgs left his home in Edinburgh and camped out at a pub across town on the day of the announcement so the prize committee wouldn't be able to reach him.
Physicist Close shares more details in an interview with Scientific American: Close: One of the biggest shocks I had when I was interviewing him was when he said the discovery of the boson "ruined [his] life." I thought, "How can it ruin your life when you have done some beautiful mathematics, and then it turns out you had mysteriously touched on the pulse of nature, and everything you've believed in has been shown to be correct, and you've won a Nobel Prize? How can these things amount to ruin?" He said, "My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation and occasionally have a bright idea." He is a very retiring person who was being thrust into the limelight.

That, to my mind, is why Peter Higgs the person is still elusive to me even though I've known him for 40 years...

Higgs had spent two to three years really trying to understand a particular problem. And because he had done that hard work and was still trying to deepen his understanding of this very profound concept, when a paper turned up on his desk posing a related question, Higgs happened to have the answer because of the work he'd done. He sometimes says, "I'm primarily known for three weeks of my life." I say, "Yes, Peter, but you spent two years preparing for that moment."

Q: The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs's prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime. What did it mean to him that the particle was finally detected?

He said to me that his first reaction was one of relief that it was indeed confirmed. At that moment he knew [the particle existed] after all, and he felt a profound sense of being moved that that was really the way it was in nature — and then panic that his life was going to change.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix, written by Michael Larabel: RISC-V International has relayed word to us that in China the DeepComputing and Xcalibyte organizations have announced pre-orders on the first RISC-V laptop intended for developers. The "ROMA" development platform features a quad-core RISC-V processor, up to 16GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, and should work with most RISC-V Linux distributions. [...] DeepComputing and Xcalibyte say this laptop uses an "unannounced" quad-core RISC-V processor so is very light on the details. But frankly if it wasn't a RISC-V International PR contact relaying this to me, it sounds more like a satire announcement. The ROMA press release today goes on to note, "A Web3-friendly platform with NFT creation and publication plus integrated MetaMask-style wallet, ROMA will create an even more integrated experience with future AR glasses and AI speakers operating entirely on RISC-V software and powered by RISC-V hardware."

Quantities are also said to be limited for this ROMA laptop, which likely will put a pricing premium on it. Their cringe-worthy press release filled with buzzwords and scant technical details goes on to note, "The first 100 customers to pre-order ROMA will receive a unique NFT to mark the birth of the world's first native RISC-V development platform laptop. And you can have your ROMA personally engraved with your name or company name." [...] So right now this announcement just raises a lot more questions than answers, but we are certainly looking forward to hearing more about RISC-V laptops... Further reading: Pine64 Is Working On a RISC-V Single-Board Computer

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The day after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter (PDF) to Google warning it to be on alert for "exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities," and calling on the company to audit its advertising business's compliance with economic sanctions. But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia's largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Google allowed RuTarget, a Russian company that helps brands and agencies buy digital ads, to access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine and other parts of the world, according to research from digital ad analysis firm Adalytics. Adalytics identified close to 700 examples of RuTarget receiving user data from Google after the company was added to a U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned entities on Feb. 24. The data sharing between Google and RuTarget stopped four months later on June 23, the day ProPublica contacted Google about the activity.

RuTarget, which also operates under the name Segmento, is owned by Sberbank, a Russian state bank that the Treasury described as "uniquely important" to the country's economy when it hit the lender with initial sanctions. RuTarget was later listed in an April 6 Treasury announcement that imposed full blocking sanctions on Sberbank and other Russian entities and people. The sanctions mean U.S. individuals and entities are not supposed to conduct business with RuTarget or Sberbank. Of particular concern, the analysis showed that Google shared data with RuTarget about users browsing websites based in Ukraine. This means Google may have turned over such critical information as unique mobile phone IDs, IP addresses, location information and details about users' interests and online activity, data that U.S. senators and experts say could be used by Russian military and intelligence services to track people or zero in on locations of interest. Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told ProPublica that the company blocked RuTarget from using its ad products in March, and that RuTarget has not purchased ads directly via Google since then. "He acknowledged the Russian company was still receiving user and ad buying data from Google before being alerted by ProPublica and Adalytics," adds the report.

"Aciman said this action includes not only preventing RuTarget from further accessing user data, but from purchasing ads through third parties in Russia that may not be sanctioned. He declined to say whether RuTarget had purchased ads via Google systems using such third parties, and he did not comment on whether data about Ukrainians had been shared with RuTarget."

Amazon has agreed to simplify the process required for cancelling its Prime membership subscription service across its sites in the European Union, both on desktop and mobile interfaces, following a series of complaints from regional consumer protection groups. From a report: The coordinated complaints about Amazon's confusing and convoluted cancellation process for Prime were announced back in April 2021 -- so it's taken just over a year for the e-commerce giant to agree to change its ways.

Following the engagement with EU regulators, the Commission said today that Amazon started to make some revisions to the Prime web interface -- such as labelling the cancel button more clearly and shortening the explanatory text -- but today's announcement is that it has agreed to further simplify the experience by further reducing the text so consumers do not get distracted by warnings and deterred from cancelling.

Google today announced a preview of Advanced API Security, a new product headed to Google Cloud that's designed to detect security threats as they relate to APIs. TechCrunch reports: Built on Apigee, Google's platform for API management, the company says that customers can request access starting today. Short for "application programming interface," APIs are documented connections between computers or between computer programs. API usage is on the rise, with one survey finding that more than 61.6% of developers relied on APIs more in 2021 than in 2020. But they're also increasingly becoming the target of attacks. According to a 2018 report commissioned by cybersecurity vendor Imperva, two-thirds of organizations are exposing unsecured APIs to the public and partners.

Advanced API Security specializes in two tasks: identifying API misconfigurations and detecting bots. The service regularly assesses managed APIs and provides recommended actions when it detects configuration issues, and it uses preconfigured rules to provide a way to identify malicious bots within API traffic. Each rule represents a different type of unusual traffic from a single IP address; if an API traffic pattern meets any of the rules, Advanced API Security reports it as a bot. [...] With the launch of Advanced API Security, Google is evidently seeking to bolster its security offerings under Apigee, which it acquired in 2016 for over half a billion dollars. But the company is also responding to increased competition in the API security segment. "Misconfigured APIs are one of the leading reasons for API security incidents. While identifying and resolving API misconfigurations is a top priority for many organizations, the configuration management process is time consuming and requires considerable resources," Vikas Ananda, head of product at Google Cloud, said in a blog post shared with TechCrunch ahead of the announcement. "Advanced API Security makes it easier for API teams to identify API proxies that do not conform to security standards... Additionally, Advanced API Security speeds up the process of identifying data breaches by identifying bots that successfully resulted in the HTTP 200 OK success status response code."