Meta To Close Threads In Turkey To Comply With Injunction

Meta plans to “temporarily” shut down Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction prohibiting data sharing with Instagram. TechCrunch reports: The Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), known as Rekabet Kurumu, noted on March 18 that its investigations found that Meta was abusing its dominant market position by combining the data of users who create Threads profiles with that of their Instagram account — without giving users the choice to opt in. […] In the buildup to April 29, everyone using Threads in Turkey will receive a notification about the impending closure, and they will be given a choice to either delete or deactivate their profile. The latter of these options means a user’s profile can be resurrected when and if Threads is available in the country again. “We disagree with the interim order, we believe we are in compliance with all Turkish legal requirements, and we will appeal,” Meta wrote in the blog post today. “The TCA’s interim order leaves us with no choice but to temporarily shut down Threads in Turkiye. We will continue to constructively engage with the TCA and hope to bring Threads back to people in Turkiye as quickly as possible.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe Premiere Pro Is Getting Generative AI Video Tools

Adobe is using its Firefly machine learning model to bring generative AI video tools to Premiere Pro. “These new Firefly tools — alongside some proposed third-party integrations with Runway, Pika Labs, and OpenAI’s Sora models — will allow Premiere Pro users to generate video and add or remove objects using text prompts (just like Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature) and extend the length of video clips,” reports The Verge. From the report: Unlike many of Adobe’s previous Firefly-related announcements, no release date — beta or otherwise — has been established for the company’s new video generation tools, only that they’ll roll out “this year.” And while the creative software giant showcased what its own video model is currently capable of in an early video demo, its plans to integrate Premiere Pro with AI models from other providers isn’t a certainty. Adobe instead calls the third-party AI integrations in its video preview an “early exploration” of what these may look like “in the future.” The idea is to provide Premiere Pro users with more choice, according to Adobe, allowing them to use models like Pika to extend shots or Sora or Runway AI when generating B-roll for their projects. Adobe also says its Content Credentials labels can be applied to these generated clips to identify which AI models have been used to generate them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN Reporter ‘Still Haunted’ By Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster

After nearly 11 years as CNN’s space correspondent, Miles O’Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia:

As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci called me into our live truck, and said, “You got to look at this.” It was kind of a grainy image of what looked like a puff of smoke, as if someone dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it broke open. We played it over and over again, and it did not look good at all. The giant orange fuel tank was filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so it was enveloped in insulating foam. A big piece of the foam had broken away near a strut called the “bipod,” striking the leading edge of the orbiter’s left wing. It was made of reinforced carbon to protect the aluminum structure of the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entry from space.

I reached out to some of my sources inside the shuttle program. Everyone had seen it, of course, but the people I spoke with cautioned me not to worry. The foam was very light, and it had fallen off on earlier missions and nothing of concern had happened as a result… I wish I hadn’t taken my eye off the ball. Space was my beat, and I was uniquely positioned to put this concerning event into the public domain. Like NASA’s leadership, I went through a process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay. But I had this sinking feeling. It didn’t feel right. A spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour — much faster than a rifle bullet — is enveloped in a glowing inferno of plasma…

[As it returned to earth 16 days later] the communication between the ground and the orbiter became non-routine. Producers in the control room realized the gravity of the situation, and we cut to a commercial break to get me off the couch. As I was making my way across the newsroom, I started heaving. I knew in an instant that they were all gone. There was no survivable scenario. I was sickened. It was like a body blow. Somehow I got my act together and started talking. I felt like it was my responsibility to mention the foam strike, to get the information out there to the public. About an hour after Columbia had disintegrated, I shared with a huge global audience what I knew… “That bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing.”

During the mission, I could have easily done a story about the foam strike, spreading the word that some NASA engineers believed there may be some reason for concern. What if I had done that? It might have made a difference.

“A rescue mission would not have been impossible,” the article concludes, “and I feel certain that if NASA managers saw that gaping hole in Columbia’s wing, they would’ve tried.
“We will never know for sure, but I do know how so many of us on the ground failed to do our jobs during that mission. It still haunts me.”

CNN broadcasts the last two episodes of its four-part series Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST). CNN’s web site offers a “preview” of its live TV offerings here.
The news episodes (along with past episodes) will also be available on-demand starting Monday — “for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps.” It’s also available for purchase on Amazon Prime.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America’s Legal System May Be ‘Closing In’ on Regulating Cryptocurrencies

A business columnist at the Los Angeles Times notes Sam Bankman-Fried’s judge issued another ruling “that may have a more far-reaching effect on the crypto business.

U.S. Judge Failla “cleared the Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with its lawsuit alleging that the giant crypto broker and exchange Coinbase has been dealing in securities without a license.”

What’s important about Failla’s ruling is that she dismissed out of hand Coinbase’s argument, which is that cryptocurrencies are novel assets that don’t fall within the SEC’s jurisdiction — in short, they’re not “securities.” Crypto promoters have been making the same argument in court and the halls of Congress, where they’re urging that the lawmakers craft an entirely new regulatory structure for crypto — preferably one less rigorous than the existing rules and regulations promulgated by the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission…

Failla saw through that argument without breaking a sweat. “The ‘crypto’ nomenclature may be of recent vintage,” she wrote, “but the challenged transactions fall comfortably within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly eighty years….” Since Congress hasn’t enacted regulations specifically aimed at crypto, Coinbase said, the SEC’s lawsuit should be dismissed. The judge’s opinion of that argument was withering. “While certainly sizable and important,” she wrote, “the cryptocurrency industry ‘falls far short of being a “portion of the American economy” bearing vast economic and political significance….'”

Failla’s ruling followed another in New York federal court in which a judge deemed crypto to be securities. In that case, Judge Edgardo Ramos refused to dismiss SEC charges against Gemini Trust Co., a crypto trading outfit run by Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, and the crypto lender Genesis Global Capital. The SEC charged that a scheme in which Gemini pooled customers’ crypto assets and lent them to Genesis while promising the customers high interest returns is an unregistered security. The SEC case, like that against Coinbase, will proceed….

The hangover from March continued into this month. On April 5, a federal jury in New York found Terraform Labs and its chief executive and major shareholder, Do Kwon, liable in what the SEC termed “a massive crypto fraud….” The value of UST fell in effect to zero, the SEC said, “wiping out over $40 billion of total market value … and sending shock waves through the crypto asset community.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Struggling Movie Exhibitors Beg Studios For More Movies – and Not Just Blockbusters

Movie exhibitors still face “serious risks,” the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday:
Attendance was on the decline even before the pandemic shuttered theaters, thanks to changing consumer habits and competition for people’s time and money from other entertainment options. The industry has demonstrated an over-reliance on Imax-friendly studio action tent poles, when theater chains need a deep and diverse roster of movies in order to thrive… It remains to be seen whether the global box office will ever get back to the $40 billion-plus days of 2019 and earlier years. A clearer picture will emerge in 2025 when the writers’ and actors’ strikes are further in the past. But overall, there’s a strong case that moviegoing has proved to be relatively sturdy despite persistent difficulties.
Which brings us to this year’s CinemaCon convention, where multiplex operators heard from Hollywood studios teasing upcoming blockbusters like Joker: Folie à Deux, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Transformers One, and Deadpool & Wolverine.

Exhibitors pleaded with the major studios to release more films of varying budgets on the big screen, while studios made the case that their upcoming slates are robust enough to keep them in business… Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada is expected to total about $8.5 billion, which is down from $9 billion in 2023 and a far cry from the pre-pandemic yearly tallies that nearly reached $12 billion… Though a fuller release schedule is expected for 2025, talk of budget cuts, greater industry consolidation and corporate mergers has forced exhibitors to prepare for the possibility of a near future with fewer studios making fewer movies….

As the domestic film business has been thrown into turmoil in recent years, Japanese cinema and faith-based content have been two of movie theaters’ saving graces. Industry leaders kicked off CinemaCon on Tuesday by singing the praises of Sony-owned anime distributor Crunchyroll’s hits — including the latest “Demon Slayer” installment. Mitchel Berger, senior vice president of global commerce at Crunchyroll, said Tuesday that the global anime business generated $14 billion a decade ago and is projected to generate $37 billion next year. “Anime is red hot right now,” Berger said. “Fans have known about it for years, but now everyone else is catching up and recognizing that it’s a cultural, economic force to be reckoned with…. ” Another type of product buoying the exhibition industry right now is faith-based programming, shepherded in large part by “Sound of Freedom” distributor Angel Studios…

Theater owners urged studio executives at CinemaCon to put more films in theaters — and not just big-budget tent poles timed for summer movie season and holiday weekends… “Whenever we have a [blockbuster] film — whether it be ‘Barbie’ or ‘Super Mario’ … records are set,” added Bill Barstow, co-founder of ACX Cinemas in Nebraska. “But we just don’t have enough of them.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Could a New Charge Double the Service-life of Li-Ion Batteries?

“An improved charging protocol might help lithium-ion batteries to last much longer,” writes Science Daily:

The best commercial lithium-ion batteries…have a service life of up to eight years. Batteries are usually charged with a constant current flow. But is this really the most favorable method? A new study by Prof. Philipp Adelhelm’s group at HZB and Humboldt-University Berlin answers this question clearly with “no.” [In collaboration with teams including the Technical University of Berlin.]

Part of the battery tests were carried out at Aalborg University. The batteries were either charged conventionally with constant current (CC) or with a new charging protocol with pulsed current (PC). Post-mortem analyses revealed clear differences after several charging cycles: In the CC samples, the solid electrolyte interface (SEI) at the anode was significantly thicker, which impaired the capacity… PC-charging led to a thinner SEI interface and fewer structural changes in the electrode materials.

The study is published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials and analyzes the effect of the charging protocol on the service time of the battery, according to the article. “The frequency of the pulsed current counts…”

“Doubling the life of your EV’s battery or even your smartphone’s battery is no small thing,” says Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data Collected by the US Justice Department Exposed in Consultant’s Breach

DOJ-Collected Information Exposed In Data Breach Affecting 340,000
Information Collected

An anonymous reader shared this report from Security Week:

Economic analysis and litigation support firm Greylock McKinnon Associates, Inc. (GMA) is notifying over 340,000 individuals that their personal and medical information was compromised in a year-old data breach. The incident was detected on May 30, 2023, but it took the firm roughly eight months to investigate and determine what type of information was compromised and to identify the impacted individuals.

According to GMA’s notification letter to the affected individuals, a copy of which was submitted to the Maine Attorney General’s Office, both personal and Medicare information was compromised in the data breach… “This information may have included your name, date of birth, address, Medicare Health Insurance Claim Number (which contains a Social Security number associated with a member) and some medical information and/or health insurance information,” the notification letter reads.

The compromised data, GMA says, was obtained by the US Department of Justice “as part of a civil litigation matter”. More than 340,000 individuals were affected by the data breach, the company told the Maine Attorney General’s Office. The impacted individuals, however, are “not the subject of this investigation or the associated litigation matters”, the company tells the affected individuals.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will America’s Next Soldiers Be Machines?

Foreign Policy magazine visits a U.S. military training exercise that pitted Lt. Isaac McCurdy and his platoon of infantry troops against machines with camera lenses for eyes and sheet metal for skin:

Driving on eight screeching wheels and carrying enough firepower on their truck beds to fill a small arms depot, a handful of U.S. Army robots stormed through the battlefield of the fictional city of Ujen. The robots shot up houses where the opposition force hid. Drones that had been loitering over the battlefield for hours hovered above McCurdy and his team and dropped “bombs” — foam footballs, in this case — right on top of them, a perfectly placed artillery shot. Robot dogs, with sensors for heads, searched houses to make sure they were clear.

“If you see the whites of someone’s eyes or their sunglasses, [and] you shoot back at that, they’re going to have a human response,” McCurdy said. “If it’s a robot pulling up, shooting something that’s bigger than you can carry yourself, and it’s not going to just die when you shoot a center mass, it’s a very different feeling.”

In the United States’ next major war, the Army’s brass is hoping that robots will be the ones taking the first punch, doing the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs that killed hundreds — likely thousands — of the more than 7,000 U.S. service members who died during two decades of wars in the Middle East. The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training… [Several] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won’t be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams.
The robots haven’t been tested with live ammunition yet — or in colder temperatures, the magazine notes. (And at one point in the exercise, “Army officials jammed themselves, and a swarm of drones dropped out of the sky.) But the U.S. Army is “considering a proposal to add a platoon of robots, the equivalent of 20 to 50 human soldiers, to its armored brigade combat team.”

Six generals and several colonels watched the exercise, according to the article, which notes that the ultimate goal isn’t to replace all human soldiers. “The point is to get the advantage before China or Russia do.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Calpine’s California Battery Plant Is Among World’s Largest

Calpine’s billion-dolllar Nova Power Bank near Los Angeles will be among the largest in the world when it comes online later this year. According to Reuters, the plant is built on the site of a failed gas-fired power plant and “will be able to power about 680,000 homes for up to four hours when charged.” From the report: The 680-megawatt lithium-ion battery bank is big even for California, which boasts about 55% of the nation’s power storage capacity, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Calpine will bring online 620 MW of the bank in two phases this year starting in the summer and open the remaining 60 MW in 2025. […] Calpine, best known in the state for its fleet of gas plants, has about 2,000 MW of battery capacity under development. California was a pioneer in mandating that its utilities begin procuring energy storage more than a decade ago. The state is expected to need about 50 gigawatts of battery storage to meet its 2045 goal of getting all of its power from carbon-free sources, up from about 7 GW today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists Discover First Nitrogen-Fixing Organelle

In two recent papers, an international team of scientists describes the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell, which the researchers are calling a nitroplast. Phys.Org reports: The discovery of the organelle involved a bit of luck and decades of work. In 1998, Jonathan Zehr, a UC Santa Cruz distinguished professor of marine sciences, found a short DNA sequence of what appeared to be from an unknown nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium in Pacific Ocean seawater. Zehr and colleagues spent years studying the mystery organism, which they called UCYN-A. At the same time, Kyoko Hagino, a paleontologist at Kochi University in Japan, was painstakingly trying to culture a marine alga. It turned out to be the host organism for UCYN-A. It took her over 300 sampling expeditions and more than a decade, but Hagino eventually successfully grew the alga in culture, allowing other researchers to begin studying UCYN-A and its marine alga host together in the lab. For years, the scientists considered UCYN-A an endosymbiont that was closely associated with an alga. But the two recent papers suggest that UCYN-A has co-evolved with its host past symbiosis and now fits criteria for an organelle.

In a paper published in Cell in March 2024, Zehr and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona and the University of Rhode Island show that the size ratio between UCYN-A and their algal hosts is similar across different species of the marine haptophyte algae Braarudosphaera bigelowii. The researchers use a model to demonstrate that the growth of the host cell and UCYN-A are controlled by the exchange of nutrients. Their metabolisms are linked. This synchronization in growth rates led the researchers to call UCYN-A “organelle-like.” “That’s exactly what happens with organelles,” said Zehr. “If you look at the mitochondria and the chloroplast, it’s the same thing: they scale with the cell.”

But the scientists did not confidently call UCYN-A an organelle until confirming other lines of evidence. In the cover article of the journal Science, published today, Zehr, Coale, Kendra Turk-Kubo and Wing Kwan Esther Mak from UC Santa Cruz, and collaborators from the University of California, San Francisco, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Taiwan Ocean University, and Kochi University in Japan show that UCYN-A imports proteins from its host cells. “That’s one of the hallmarks of something moving from an endosymbiont to an organelle,” said Zehr. “They start throwing away pieces of DNA, and their genomes get smaller and smaller, and they start depending on the mother cell for those gene products — or the protein itself — to be transported into the cell.”

Coale worked on the proteomics for the study. He compared the proteins found within isolated UCYN-A with those found in the entire algal host cell. He found that the host cell makes proteins and labels them with a specific amino acid sequence, which tells the cell to send them to the nitroplast. The nitroplast then imports the proteins and uses them. Coale identified the function of some of the proteins, and they fill gaps in certain pathways within UCYN-A. “It’s kind of like this magical jigsaw puzzle that actually fits together and works,” said Zehr. In the same paper, researchers from UCSF show that UCYN-A replicates in synchrony with the alga cell and is inherited like other organelles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.