Apple’s iPhone Pro Shipments May Fall 20 Million Units Short of Estimates

Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max model shipments could miss market expectations by up to 20 million units in the holiday quarter due to labor unrest at a major Chinese factory, TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said. Reuters reports: Kuo is the latest to flag a hit to the world’s most valuable company from protests over pay and strict COVID-19 curbs at the world’s biggest iPhone factory, the Foxconn-operated plant in the central city of Zhengzhou. He trimmed his estimate for quarterly iPhone shipments by about 20% to between 70 million and 75 million units, compared with the market consensus of 80 million to 85 million units.

Kuo, in a blog post on Tuesday, also predicted that the supply shortfall could erase demand for the more popular Pro models, instead of deferring sales, as consumers also grapple with a weakening economy. In contrast, other Apple analysts expect sales to pick up once production constraints ease and more Pro models become available. Some analysts signaled the possibility of the challenges extending into 2023.

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Torrent Site User Who Transferred 120TB of Pirated Content Avoids Prison

A torrent site user accused of downloading and uploading at least 120TB of movies, TV shows, eBooks, music and software, has avoided an immediate prison term. The 28-year-old was arrested as part of a police operation against DanishBytes. A member of the same site was sentenced earlier this month after he uploaded Netflix content obtained using hacked credentials. TorrentFreak reports: Early November 2021, Denmark’s Public Prosecutor for Special Economic and International Crime (SOIK) announced that six people had been arrested following criminal referrals by Rights Alliance. All were members and/or operators of ShareUniversity and DanishBytes. Prosecution of site operators is not uncommon but when it’s deemed in the public interest, pirate site users can also face charges. Every case is unique so criteria differ, especially across national borders, but when evidence shows large volumes of infringement, successful prosecutions become more likely. That was the case when a former DanishBytes user was sentenced last week. According to Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, the 28-year-old man was a regular site member and wasn’t involved in running the site. That being said, evidence showed that for the period January 2021 to November 2021, he downloaded and/or uploaded no less than 3,000 copyrighted works, including movies, TV shows, music, books, audiobooks and comics.

Information released by the National Unit for Special Crimes (NSK), a Danish police unit focused on cybercrime, organized crime, and related financial crime, reveals that the user’s traffic statistics interested prosecutors. “During the period, the man downloaded no less than 100 TB and uploaded no less than 20 TB of copyrighted material,” NSK says. BitTorrent trackers operating a ratio model usually insist on a better ratio of downloads to uploads but DanishBytes’ situation was out of the ordinary.

The site launched in January 2021 in the wake of other sites being shut down, so had to get going from a standing start with no users. Even when arrests were being made, the site still had a relatively small userbase, which can limit opportunities to upload more. That may have been a blessing in disguise. Faced with the evidence, the man decided to plead guilty and was sentenced last week at the Court in Vibourg. In common with similar prosecutions recently, he received a suspended conditional sentence of 60 days’ probation, 80 hours of community service, and confiscation of his computer equipment. The case against the DanishBytes user began with a Rights Alliance investigation and a referral to the police. As part of his sentence, the man must pay the anti-piracy group DKK 5,000 (US$600) in compensation but Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund is focused on the deterrent effect of another successful prosecution.

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Snap Demands Employees Work In Office 80% of the Time Starting Early Next Year

Snapchat’s parent company is asking workers to return to the office 80% of the time, or the equivalent of four days a week, beginning early next year, in the latest sign of tech employees receiving less flexibility nearly three years after the pandemic took hold and amid a wave of industry cost cutting. CNN reports: “After working remotely for so long we’re excited to get everyone back together next year with our new 80/20 hybrid model,” a spokesperson for Snap (SNAP) confirmed to CNN in a statement Tuesday. “We believe that being together in person, while retaining flexibility for our team members, will enhance our ability to deliver on our strategic priorities of growing our community, driving revenue growth, and leading in [augmented reality].” The new policy will take effect at the end of February.

News of Snap’s stricter in-office policy was first reported by Bloomberg, which cited an internal memo from CEO Evan Spiegel telling employees they may have to “sacrifice” some amount of “individual convenience” but it will benefit “our collective success.”

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BlockFi Sues FTX’s Bankman-Fried Over Shares In Robinhood

Newly-bankrupt crypto lending platform BlockFi has filed a lawsuit against Sam Bankman-Fried’s holding company Emergent Fidelity Technologies seeking his shares in Robinhood that were pledged as collateral earlier in November. CoinTelegraph reports: The suit was filed on Nov. 28 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey just hours after BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the same court. As per the filing, BlockFi is demanding Emergent turnover collateral as part of a Nov. 9 pledge agreement that saw Emergent agree to a payment schedule with BlockFi that it has allegedly failed to pay.

BlockFi names the collateral as “including certain shares of common stock.” In May, Bankman-Fried acquired a 7.6% stake in the online brokerage firm Robinhood, buying a total of $648 million in Robinhood shares through his Emergent investment company.

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UK Ditches Ban On ‘Legal But Harmful’ Online Content In Favor of Free Speech

Britain will not force tech giants to remove content that is “legal but harmful” from their platforms after campaigners and lawmakers raised concerns that the move could curtail free speech, the government said on Monday. Reuters reports: Online safety laws would instead focus on the protection of children and on ensuring companies removed content that was illegal or prohibited in their terms of service, it said, adding that it would not specify what legal content should be censored. Platform owners, such as Facebook-owner Meta and Twitter, would be banned from removing or restricting user-generated content, or suspending or banning users, where there is no breach of their terms of service or the law, it said.

The government had previously said social media companies could be fined up to 10% of turnover or 18 million pounds ($22 million) if they failed to stamp out harmful content such as abuse even if it fell below the criminal threshold, while senior managers could also face criminal action. The proposed legislation, which had already been beset by delays and rows before the latest version, would remove state influence on how private companies managed legal speech, the government said. It would also avoid the risk of platforms taking down legitimate posts to avoid sanctions. […]

The revised Online Safety Bill, which returns to parliament next month, puts the onus on tech companies to take down material in breach of their own terms of service and to enforce their user age limits to stop children circumventing authentication methods, the government said. If users were likely to encounter controversial content such as the glorification of eating disorders, racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny not meeting the criminal threshold, the platform would have to offer tools to help adult users avoid it, it said. Only if platforms failed to uphold their own rules or remove criminal content could a fine of up to 10% of annual turnover apply. Britain said late on Saturday that a new criminal offense of assisting or encouraging self-harm online would be included in the bill.

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Media Groups Urge US To Drop Julian Assange Charges

The US government must drop its prosecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange because it is undermining press freedom, according to the media organizations that first helped him publish leaked diplomatic cables. The Guardian reports: Twelve years ago today, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais collaborated to release excerpts from 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the “Cablegate” leak. The material, leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning, exposed the inner workings of US diplomacy around the world. The editors and publishers of the media organizations that first published those revelations have come together to publicly oppose plans to charge Assange under a law designed to prosecute first world war spies. “Publishing is not a crime,” they said, saying the prosecution is a direct attack on media freedom.

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Linux Kernel Gets More Infrastructure for Rust, Increasing Interest in the Language

Linux 6.1 (released last month) included what Linus Torvalds described as “initial Rust scaffolding,” remembers this update from SD Times But now, “work has already been done since the 6.1 release to add more infrastructure for Rust in the kernel, though still none of the code interacts with any C code.”

And there’s still no actual Rust code in Linux:

“You need to get all those things that can make sure that Rust can compile, and you can do the debugging and all these things,” explained Joel Marcey, director of advocacy and operations for the Rust Foundation, “and make sure that the memory safety is there and all that sort of stuff. And that has to happen first before you can actually write any real code in Rust for the Linux kernel itself.”

Marcey explained that Linux is going to be doing this inclusion very piecemeal, with lots of little integrations here and there over time so they can see how it is working. “I would imagine that over the next year, you’re going to see more small incremental changes to the kernel with Rust, but as people are seeing that it’s actually kind of working out, you’ll be able to maybe, for example, write Linux drivers or whatever with Rust,” said Marcey….

According to Bec Rumbul, executive director of the Rust Foundation, Rust being added to the kernel is an “enormous vote of confidence in the Rust programming language.” She explained that in the past other languages have been planned to make it into the kernel and ended up not getting put in. “I think having someone with the kind of intellectual gravity of Linus Torvalds saying ‘No, it’s going in there,’ that kind of says an awful lot about how reliable Rust already is and how much potential there is for the future as well,” she said.

Rumbul believes that there will be an increased interest in the language, which is still relatively new (It first made its debut in 2010) compared to some of the other languages out there to choose from. “I suspect that because Rust is now in the kernel, and it’s just being talked about much … more widely, that it will seem like an attractive prospect to a lot of people that are looking to develop their skills and their knowledge,” she said. Rumbul hopes people will also be inspired to participate in the language as contributors and maintainers, because those are some of the less popular roles within open source, but are extremely critical to the health of a language, she explained.
The Rust Foundation also launched a new security team in September to ensure best practices (including a dedicated security engineer). Their first initiative will be a security audit and threat modeling exercises.

“We want to basically shore up,” Rust operations director Marcey tells SD Times, “to ensure that Rust itself is actually as secure as we always say it is.”

In this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 86.73% of developers said they love Rust.

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Will Made-in-China EV’s Bring New Competition for Automakers?

The Washington Post reports:
China is already a huge manufacturer of electric vehicles for its own market, and it is increasingly making EVs for overseas buyers, too. Made-in-China EVs are hitting U.S. dealerships and European auto shows, providing new competition to Western and Japanese automakers that have long dominated the global vehicle market.
Examples from the article:
Polestar 2, from “an automaker headquartered in Sweden and controlled by Chinese billionaire Li Shufu… The company says it will start manufacturing its next model, the Polestar 3, in the United States in 2024.”Nio ET7, “an EV company founded in Shanghai by entrepreneur William Li. The company is selling its ET7 sedan in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and has said it aims to enter the U.S. market in 2025.”China’s largest automaker, the state-owned SAIC, “bought the British MG brand in the early 2000s and is now selling several electric MG models in Europe.”

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A Light-powered Catalyst Could Be Key For Hydrogen Economy

“Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy,” the University announced this week.

“Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel….”

The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth’s atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn’t require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs….

“This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants,” said Peter Nordlander, also a Rice co-author.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story (via Phys.org.

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Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control

Hackaday writes
According to [Venn Stone], technical producer over at Linux GameCast, the Sony a5000 is still a solid option for those looking to shoot 1080p video despite being released back in 2014. But while the camera is lightweight and affordable, it does have some annoying quirks — namely an overlay on the HDMI output (as seen in the image above) that can’t be turned off using the camera’s normal configuration menu. But as it so happens, using some open source tools and the venerable telnet, you can actually log into the camera’s operating system and fiddle with its settings directly.

A grassroots tool for unlocking Sony cameras apparently also unlocks developer options — including a telnet server on its WiFi interface. (There’s a video of the whole procedure on Linux Gamecast Weekly’s web site.)

Venn Stone (the podcast’s technical producer/engineer) is apparently also a long-time Slashdot reader — and also describes himself on the podcast as “not a fan of articial software limitations.”

And he calls this telnet-enabled tweak “the most hack-y thing I’ve done in recent memory” — even creating a playlist of 1990s hacker music to more fully enjoy the moment.

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