"Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it."

That's a U.S. presidential candidate, speaking yesterday in North Carolina to warn that the practice "is anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices."

Ironically, it's a problem caused by technology that's impacting some of America's major tech-industry cities. Investopedia reports: Harris proposed a slate of policies aimed at curbing the high cost of housing, which many economists have traced to a long-standing shortage. The affordability situation for both renters and first-time buyers took a turn for the worse starting in 2020 when home prices and rents rose sharply. Harris's plan called for the construction of 3 million new houses to close the gap between how many homes exist in the country, and how many are needed, with the aim of evening out supply and demand and putting downward pressure on prices. This would be accomplished by offering tax incentives to builders for constructing starter homes, by funding local construction, and by cutting bureaucratic red tape that slows down construction projects. Harris would also help buyers out directly, through the first-time buyer credit.

For renters, Harris said she would crack down on companies that own many apartments, who she said have "colluded" to raise rents using pricing algorithms. She also called for a law blocking large investors from buying houses to rent out, a practice she said was driving up prices by competing with individual private buyers. Harris's focus on corporate crackdowns extended to the food business, where she called for a "federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries," without going into specifics about what exact behavior the ban would target.
Investopedia reminds readers that the executive branch is just one of three branches of the U.S. government: Should Harris win the 2024 election and become president, her ideas are still not guaranteed to be implemented, since many would require the support of Congress. Lawmakers are currently divided with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Democrats in control of the Senate.

"We're testing a few new ways to plan and manage your presence on Threads," announced top Threads/Instagram executive Adam Mosseri, promising their 200 million-plus users "enhanced insights to help you better understand your followers and how posts perform, and the ability to save multiple drafts with scheduling coming soon."

Axios reports: Helping creators avoid burnout has become a growing focus for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in July that the company's new generative AI tools can alleviate certain tasks like communicating with followers. Thursday's announcement was positioned as helping both businesses and creators — suggesting that Meta is ramping up plans to start monetizing Threads, which could be as early as this year.

"A new front has opened in the longstanding debate over how fast the universe is expanding," writes Science magazine: For years astronomers have argued over a gulf between the expansion rate as measured from galaxies in the local universe and as calculated from studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Bang. The disparity was so large and persistent that some astronomers thought the standard theory of the universe might have to be tweaked. But over the past week, results from NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope orbiting observatory suggest the problem may be more mundane: some systematic error in the strategies used to measure the distance to nearby galaxies.

"The evidence based on these data does not suggest the need for additional physics," says Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who leads [the Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program, or CCHP] that calculated the expansion rate from JWST data using three different galactic distance measurements and released the results on the arXiv preprint server. (The papers have not yet been peer reviewed.) The methods disagreed about the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, or H0, and two were close to the CMB prediction.
Specifically, the team used JWST to measure the distance to 10 local galaxies using three stars with a predictable brightness: Cepheids, the brightest red giant stars, and carbon stars. Science notes that the last two methods "agreed to about 1%, but differed from the Cepheid-based distance by 2.5% to 4%." Combining all three methods the team derived a value "just shy of 70 km/s per Mpc," according to the article — leading the University of Chicago's Freedman to say "There's something systematic in the measurements. Until we can establish unambiguously where the issue lies in the nearby universe, we can't be claiming that there's additional physics in the distant universe."

But the controversy continues, according to Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University (leader of a team of Hubble Constant researchers known as SH0ES). Riess points out that other teams have used JWST to measure distances with all three methods separately and have come up with values closer to the original SH0ES result. He also questions why CCHP excluded data from telescopes other than JWST. "I don't see a compelling justification for excluding the data they do," he says.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

Wednesday GitHub "broke itself," reports the Register, writing that "the Microsoft-owned code-hosting outfit says it made a change involving its database infrastructure, which sparked a global outage of its various services."

Or, as the Verge puts it, GitHub experienced "some major issues" which apparently lasted for 36 minutes: When we first published this story, navigating to the main GitHub website showed an error message that said "no server is currently available to service your request," but the website was working again soon after. (The error message also featured an image of an angry unicorn.) GitHub's report of the incident also listed problems with things like pull requests, GitHub Pages, Copilot, and the GitHub API.
GitHub attributed the downtime to "an erroneous configuration change rolled out to all GitHub.com databases that impacted the ability of the database to respond to health check pings from the routing service. As a result, the routing service could not detect healthy databases to route application traffic to. This led to widespread impact on GitHub.com starting at 23:02 UTC." (Downdetector showed "more than 10,000 user reports of problems," according to the Verge, "and that the problems were reported quite suddenly.")

GitHub's incident report adds that "Given the severity of this incident, follow-up items are the highest priority work for teams at this time." To prevent recurrence we are implementing additional guardrails in our database change management process. We are also prioritizing several repair items such as faster rollback functionality and more resilience to dependency failures.

In his new memoir, Imminent, former senior intelligence official Luis Elizondo claims that a supersecret program has been retrieving technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin for decades, warning that these phenomena could pose a serious national security threat or even an existential threat to humanity. The New York Times reports: Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Elizondo's disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.

Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.

Citizen scientists from NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project discovered a hypervelocity object, CWISE J1249, moving fast enough to escape the Milky Way. "This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or less than that of a small star," reports NASA's Science Editorial Team, suggesting the object may have originated from a binary star system or a globular cluster. From the report: A few years ago, longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden spotted a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, marching across their screens in the WISE images. Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These citizen scientists are now co-authors on the team's study about this discovery published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (a pre-print version is available here). CWISE J1249 is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it also stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn't steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.

Ordinary brown dwarfs are not that rare. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have discovered more than 4,000 of them! But none of the others are known to be on their way out of the galaxy. This new object has yet another unique property. Data obtained with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii, show that it has much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy. Why does this object move at such high speed? One hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion. Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Safety advocates have been touting the potential of technology that allows vehicles to communicate wirelessly for years. So far, the rollout has been slow and uneven. Now the U.S. Department of Transportation is releasing a roadmap it hopes will speed up deployment of that technology -- and save thousands of lives in the process. "This is proven technology that works," Shailen Bhatt, head of the Federal Highway Administration, said at an event Friday to mark the release of the deployment plan (PDF) for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. Users could send and receive frequent messages to and from each other, continuously sharing information about speed, position, and road conditions -- even in situations with poor visibility, including around corners or in dense fog or heavy rain. [...]

Despite enthusiasm from safety advocates and federal regulators, the technology has faced a bumpy rollout. During the Obama administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed making the technology mandatory on cars and light trucks. But the agency later dropped that idea during the Trump administration. The deployment of V2X has been "hampered by regulatory uncertainty," said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group that represents automakers. But he's optimistic that the new plan will help. "This is the reset button," Bozzella said at Friday's announcement. "This deployment plan is a big deal. It is a crucial piece of this V2X puzzle." The plan lays out some goals and targets for the new technology. In the short-term, the plan aims to have V2X infrastructure in place on 20% of the National Highway System by 2028, and for 25% of the nation's largest metro areas to have V2X enabled at signalized intersections. V2X technology still faces some daunting questions, including how to pay for the rollout of critical infrastructure and how to protect connected vehicles from cyberattack. But safety advocates say it's past time to find the answers.

BleepingComputer's Ionut Ilascu reports: Background check service National Public Data confirms that hackers breached its systems after threat actors leaked a stolen database with millions of social security numbers and other sensitive personal information. The company states that the breached data may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers (SSNs), and postal addresses.

In the statement disclosing the security incident, National Public Data says that "the information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es)." The company acknowledges the "leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024" and believes the breach is associated with a threat actor "that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023." NPD says they investigated the incident, cooperated with law enforcement, and reviewed the potentially affected records. If significant developments occur, the company "will try to notify" the impacted individuals.

The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) fined T-Mobile $60 million, its largest penalty ever, for failing to prevent and report unauthorized access to sensitive data tied to violations of a mitigation agreement from its 2020 merger with Sprint. "The size of the fine, and CFIUS's unprecedented decision to make it public, show the committee is taking a more muscular approach to enforcement as it seeks to deter future violations," reports Reuters. From the report: T-Mobile said in a statement that it experienced technical issues during its post-merger integration with Sprint that affected "information shared from a small number of law enforcement information requests." It stressed that the data never left the law enforcement community, was reported "in a timely manner" and was "quickly addressed." The failure of T-Mobile to report the incidents promptly delayed CFIUS' efforts to investigate and mitigate any potential harm to U.S. national security, they added, without providing further details. "The $60 million penalty announcement highlights the committee's commitment to ramping up CFIUS enforcement by holding companies accountable when they fail to comply with their obligations," one of the U.S. officials said, adding that transparency around enforcement actions incentivizes other companies to comply with their obligations.

The Dubai Court of First Instance has declared that cryptocurrency can be used as a legal form of salary under employment contracts. CoinTelegraph reports: Irina Heaver, a partner at UAE law firm NeosLegal, explained that the ruling in case number 1739 of 2024 shows a shift from the court's earlier stance in 2023, where a similar claim was denied because the crypto involved lacked precise valuation. Heaver believes this shows a "progressive approach" to integrating digital currencies into the country's legal and economic framework. Heaver said that the case involved an employee who filed a lawsuit claiming that the employer had not paid their wages, wrongful termination compensation and other benefits. The worker's employment contract stipulated a monthly salary in fiat and 5,250 in EcoWatt tokens. The dispute stems from the employer's inability to pay the tokens portion of the employee's salary in six months.

In 2023, the court acknowledged the inclusion of the EcoWatts tokens in the contract. Still, it did not enforce the payment in crypto, as the employee failed to provide a clear method for valuing the currency in fiat terms. "This decision reflected a traditional viewpoint, emphasizing the need for concrete evidence when dealing with unconventional payment forms," Heaver said. However, the lawyer said that in 2024, the court "took a step forward," ruling in favor of the employee and ordering the payment of the crypto salary as per the employment contract without converting it into fiat. Heaver added that the court's reliance on the UAE Civil Transactions Law and Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 in both judgments shows the consistent application of legal principles in wage determination.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anova, a company that sells smart sous vide cookers, is getting backlash from customers after announcing that it will soon charge a subscription fee for the device's companion app. Anova was founded in 2013 and sells sous vide immersion circulators. Its current third-generation Precision Cooker 3.0 has an MSRP of $200. Anova also sells a $149 model and a $400 version that targets professionals. It debuted the free Anova Culinary App in 2014. In a blog post on Thursday, Anova CEO and cofounder Stephen Svajian announced that starting on August 21, people who sign up to use the Anova Culinary App with the cooking devices will have to pay $2 per month, or $10 per year. The app does various things depending on the paired cooker, but it typically offers sous vide cooking guides, cooking notifications, and the ability to view, save, bookmark, and share recipes. The subscription fee will only apply to people who make an account after August 21. Those who downloaded the app and made an account before August 21 won't have to pay. But everyone will have to make an account; some people have been using the app without one until now.

"You helped us build Anova, and our intent is that you will be grandfathered in forever," Svajian wrote. According to Svajian, the subscription fees are necessary so Anova can "continue delivering the exceptional service and innovative recipes" and "maintain and enhance the app, ensuring it remains a valuable resource." As Digital Trends pointed out, the announcement follows an Anova statement saying it will no longer let users remotely control their kitchen gadgets via Bluetooth starting on September 28, 2025. This means that remote control via the app will only be possible for models offering and using Wi-Fi connectivity. Owners of affected devices will no longer be able to access their device via the Anova app, get notifications, or use status monitoring. Users will still be able to manually set the time, temperature, and timer via the device itself.

IKEA is expanding its stock-counting drone system to operate alongside workers in the U.S., starting with its Perryville, Maryland distribution center. The Verge reports: The Verity-branded drones also come with a new AI-powered system that allows them to fly around warehouses 24/7. That means they'll now operate alongside human workers, helping to count inventory as well as identify if something's in the wrong spot. Previously, the drones only flew during nonoperational hours. Parag Parekh, the chief digital officer for Ikea retail, says in the press release that flights are prescheduled and that the drones use a "custom indoor positioning system to navigate higher levels of storage locations." They also have an obstacle detection system that allows them to reroute their paths to avoid collisions. Ikea is also working on several upgrades for the drones, including the ability to inspect unit loads and racks.

So far, Ikea's fleet consists of more than 250 drones operating across 73 warehouses in nine countries. Ikea first launched its drone system in partnership with Verity in 2021 and expanded it to more locations throughout Europe last year. Now, Ikea plans on bringing its AI-upgraded drones to more distribution centers in Europe and North America, which the company says will help "reduce the ergonomic strain on [human] co-workers, allowing them to focus on lighter and more interesting tasks."

A federal judge blocked the launch of Venu, a sports streaming joint venture by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, due to concerns it would substantially lessen competition and harm FuboTV. Variety reports: Fubo launched in 2015 as a start-up focused on streaming sports programming. [...] Venu, expected to launch in late August ahead of the start of the NFL's coming fall season and priced at an initial price tag of $42.99 per month, was to carry all of the sports offerings of ESPN, Fox Sports 1 and 2, and TNT for a price that is seen as more than a regional sports network but less than a full programming package available via YouTube TV or Hulu + Live TV. The three parent companies are targeting a new generation of consumers who disdain the high costs of traditional cable packages are more at home with signing up for streaming venues that are relatively easy to get in and out of based on the availability of favorite entertainment programs or sporting events.

Judge Garnett found that once Venu launches, FuboTV would face "a swift exodus" of large numbers of subscribers, and indicated she felt "that Fubo's bankruptcy and delisting of the company's stock will likely soon follow. These are quintessential harms that money cannot adequately repair." Fubo alleged that Venu's launch "will cause it to lose approximately 300,000 to 400,000 (or nearly 30%) of its subscribers, suffer a significant decline in its ability to attract new subscribers, lose between $75 and $95 million in revenue, and be transformed into a penny stock awaiting delisting from the New York Stock Exchange, all before year-end 2024," the judge said in her decision. "We respectfully disagree with the court's ruling and are appealing it," Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement. "We believe that Fubo's arguments are wrong on the facts and the law, and that Fubo has failed to prove it is legally entitled to a preliminary injunction. Venu Sports is a pro-competitive option that aims to enhance consumer choice by reaching a segment of viewers who currently are not served by existing subscription options."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Artificial intelligence company OpenAI said Friday that an Iranian group had used its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content to be posted on websites and social media (Warning: source is paywalled; alternative source) seemingly aimed at stirring up polarization among American voters in the presidential election. The sites and social media accounts that OpenAI discovered posted articles and opinions made with help from ChatGPT on topics including the conflict in Gaza and the Olympic Games. They also posted material about the U.S. presidential election, spreading misinformation and writing critically about both candidates, a company report said. Some appeared on sites that Microsoft last week said were used by Iran to post fake news articles intended to amp up political division in the United States, OpenAI said.

The AI company banned the ChatGPT accounts associated with the Iranian efforts and said their posts had not gained widespread attention from social media users. OpenAI found "a dozen" accounts on X and one on Instagram that it linked to the Iranian operation and said all appeared to have been taken down after it notified those social media companies. Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI's intelligence and investigations team, said the activity was the first case of the company detecting an operation that had the U.S. election as a primary target. "Even though it doesn't seem to have reached people, it's an important reminder, we all need to stay alert but stay calm," he said.

Eric Schmidt, at a recent talk where he also talked -- and then walked back the comment -- on Google's work-culture: If TikTok is banned, here's what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: "Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines."

That's the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

So, in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor -- and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody's music -- what you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content.

And do not quote me.

Jimmy Miller, programmer and co-host of the future of coding podcast, writes in a blog: When I started programming as a kid, I didn't know people were paid to program. Even as I graduated high school, I assumed that the world of "professional development" looked quite different from the code I wrote in my spare time. When I lucked my way into my first software job, I quickly learned just how wrong and how right I had been. My first job was a trial by fire, to this day, that codebase remains the worst and the best codebase I ever had the pleasure of working in. While the codebase will forever remain locked by proprietary walls of that particular company, I hope I can share with you some of its most fun and scary stories.

[...] Every morning at 7:15 the employees table was dropped. All the data completely gone. Then a csv from adp was uploaded into the table. During this time you couldn't login to the system. Sometimes this process failed. But this wasn't the end of the process. The data needed to be replicated to headquarters. So an email was sent to a man, who every day would push a button to copy the data.

[...] But what is a database without a codebase. And what a magnificent codebase it was. When I joined everything was in Team Foundation Server. If you aren't familiar, this was a Microsoft-made centralized source control system. The main codebase I worked in was half VB, half C#. It ran on IIS and used session state for everything. What did this mean in practice? If you navigated to a page via Path A or Path B you'd see very different things on that page. But to describe this codebase as merely half VB, half C# would be to do it a disservice. Every javascript framework that existed at the time was checked into this repository. Typically, with some custom changes the author believed needed to be made. Most notably, knockout, backbone, and marionette. But of course, there was a smattering of jquery and jquery plugins.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Traffic along some of Seattle's stop-and-go streets is running a little smoother after Google tested out a new machine-learning system to optimize stoplight timing at five intersections. The company launched this test as part of its Green Light pilot program in 2023 in Seattle and a dozen other cities, including some notoriously congested places such as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Kolkata, India. Across these test sites, local traffic engineers use Green Light's suggestions -- based on artificial intelligence and Google Maps data -- to adjust stoplight timing. Google intends for these changes to curb waiting at lights while increasing vehicle flow across busy throughways and intersections -- and, ultimately, to reduce greenhouse gases.

"We have seen positive results," says Mariam Ali, a Seattle Department of Transportation spokesperson. Green Light has provided "specific, actionable recommendations," she adds, and it has identified bottlenecks (and confirmed known ones) within the traffic system.

Managing the movement of vehicles through urban streets requires lots of time, money and consideration of factors such as pedestrian safety and truck routes. Google's foray into the field is one of many ongoing attempts to modernize traffic engineering by incorporating GPS app data, connected cars and artificial intelligence. Preliminary data suggest the system could reduce stops by up to 30 percent and emissions at intersections by up to 10 percent as a result of reduced idling, according to Google's 2024 Environmental Report. The company plans to expand to more cities soon. The newfangled stoplight system doesn't come close to replacing human decision-making in traffic engineering, however, and it may not be the sustainability solution Google claims it is.

The San Francisco City Attorney's office is suing 16 of the most frequently visited AI-powered "undressing" websites, often used to create nude deepfakes of women and girls without their consent. From a report: The landmark lawsuit, announced at a press conference by City Attorney David Chiu, says that the targeted websites were collectively visited over 200 million times in the first six months of 2024 alone.

The offending websites allow users to upload images of real, fully clothed people, which are then digitally "undressed" with AI tools that simulate nudity. One of these websites, which wasn't identified within the complaint, reportedly advertises: "Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates, when you can just use [the redacted website] to get her nudes."

America's top colleges and finance-industry recruiters have long had their eye on teenage whiz-kids who compete in a prestigious high-school math contest. Now, allegations of cheating are threatening to disrupt it. WSJ: Online leaks of tests for the country's best-known math contest -- the 74-year-old American Mathematics Competition -- are upsetting students who have spent years preparing for the exams. Ahead of the coming school year and test season, angry parents and math coaches have pushed the contest's administrator to tighten controls. The incident is the latest byproduct of a high-pressure college-admissions race that can lead students to look for any edge to get ahead.

[...] As early as elementary school, students interested in flexing their math knowledge beyond what is taught in school can participate in math clubs and competitions. Each year, more than 300,000 students through high school participate in the AMC's first round of multiple-choice tests. Several thousand top performers are invited to sit for a higher-level test, and from there, around 600 compete in national "math olympiads." The top six math students in the nation then represent the U.S. internationally; the U.S. won its ninth International Mathematical Olympiad title this summer.

Murmurs about cheating in the AMC have circulated for a few years, participants say, but reached critical levels during the past school year. The entirety of exams at each level of the competition were available online hours or days before students sat for the tests, a spokeswoman for the Mathematical Association of America confirmed. Testing sites in the U.S. and abroad receive the questions online early to give proctors time to print them out for the in-person exams.

Security researcher Bill Demirkapi unveiled a massive trove of leaked developer secrets and website vulnerabilities at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas. Using unconventional data sources, Demirkapi identified over 15,000 exposed secrets, including credentials for Nebraska's Supreme Court IT systems and Stanford University's Slack channels.

The researcher also discovered 66,000 websites with dangling subdomain issues, making them vulnerable to attacks. Among the affected sites was a New York Times development domain. Demirkapi's tack involved scanning VirusTotal's database and passive DNS replication data to identify vulnerabilities at scale. He developed an automated method to revoke exposed secrets, working with companies like OpenAI to implement self-service deactivation of compromised API keys.