www.euronews.com
Spain is slipping into a desert climate, according to a new study into the relationship between global heating and drought. The Mediterranean country is clearly on the frontlines of climate change in Europe. Now researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona have delved deeper into its climate vitals. By 2050, they predict that rainfall will decrease by up to 20 per cent compared to current levels. This would tip Spain from a temperate Mediterranean climate into a steppe- or even desert-like one, as per the Köppen system which divides the world into five different climate zones based on plant growth. “The warming process resulting from climate change has been very pronounced in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands, representing a true hotspot,” the researchers write.
www.theguardian.com
Almost 90% of Norway’s mainland kittiwakes have disappeared in the past four decades, as numbers of other seabird species also continue to fall. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of seabirds on the Norwegian mainland dropped by almost a third, according to the Norwegian Environment Agency. “This is quite dramatic, but it is also one of the bird groups that have done most poorly when you look globally,” says Signe Christensen-Dalsgaard, a seabird ecologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Seabirds are important to life on land: they bring nutrients from the sea to the coast through their guano. They are reliant on the ocean for food, so the fact they are struggling suggests other marine species are in trouble. “It’s a quite strong signal that something is not right in the ocean,” says Christensen-Dalsgaard.
www.theguardian.com
Superbugs will kill more than 39 million people before 2050 with older people particularly at risk, according to a new global analysis. While deaths linked to drug resistance are declining among very young children, driven by improvements in vaccination and hygiene, the study found the opposite trend for their grandparents. By the middle of the century, 1.91 million people a year are forecast to die worldwide directly because of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – in which bacteria evolve so that the drugs usually used to fight them no longer work – up from 1.14 million in 2021. AMR will play some role in 8.2 million deaths annually, up from 4.71 million. The study, [published in the Lancet](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01867-1/fulltext) was conducted by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) Project and is the first global analysis of AMR trends over time. Researchers used data from 204 countries and territories to produce estimates of deaths from 1990 to 2021, and forecasts running through to 2050. They also found millions of deaths worldwide could be averted via better prevention of infections and improved access to healthcare, as well as the creation of new antibiotics. The study’s author, Dr Mohsen Naghavi, at the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics (IHME), said: “Antimicrobial medicines are one of the cornerstones of modern healthcare, and increasing resistance to them is a major cause for concern. “These findings highlight that AMR has been a significant global health threat for decades and that this threat is growing,” he said.
www.bbc.com
A firefighter has died during a flood rescue in Austria and one person has drowned in Poland, as torrential rain caused by Storm Boris continues to wreak havoc across Central and Eastern Europe. The Austrian province surrounding Vienna has been declared a disaster area, with its leaders speaking of "an unprecedented extreme situation". In Romania, where four people were killed on Saturday, the prime minister says two others are missing, while several remain unaccounted for in the Czech Republic. The floods caused by Storm Boris proved deadly in Romania on Saturday, where four people were killed during floods in the south-eastern region of Galati. "We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences," Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said on Saturday. Extreme precipitation is becoming more likely in Europe, as across much of the world, due to climate change. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can lead to heavier rainfall. Storm Boris has already brought extreme amounts of rain across central and eastern Europe, with more torrential downpours in the forecast through until at least the end of Monday. Some of the highest rainfall totals so far have been in the Czech Republic. At Lysa Hora in the mountains in the west of the country, 288mm of rain has fallen since Thursday. This is around three months’ worth of rain in just three days.
edition.cnn.com
There isn’t much green in the Sahara Desert, but after an unusual influx of rain, the color can be seen from space creeping into parts of one of the driest places in the world. Satellites recently captured plant life blooming in parts of the typically arid southern Sahara after storms moved there when they shouldn’t. It has also caused catastrophic flooding. Rainfall north of the equator in Africa typically increases from July through September as the West African Monsoon kicks into gear. The phenomenon is marked by an increase in stormy weather that erupts when moist, tropical air from near the equator meets hot, dry air from the northern portion of the continent. The focus for this stormy weather – known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone – shifts north of the equator in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months. Much of it sags south of the equator during the Southern Hemisphere’s warm months. But since at least mid-July, this zone has shifted farther north than it typically should, sending storms into the southern Sahara, including portions of Niger, Chad, Sudan and even as far north as Libya, according to data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. And this weather shift also affecting [Atlantic hurricane season](https://www.necn.com/weather/stories-weather/hurricane-season-september-update/3330860/) this year. The situation can be complex because we don't know if these weather shifts will also affect the weather in other regions.
www.theguardian.com
www.phoronix.com
The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.
arstechnica.com
Google is under investigation by Europe’s privacy watchdog over its processing of personal data in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models, as regulators ramp up their scrutiny of Big Tech’s AI ambitions. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, said it had launched a statutory inquiry into the tech giant’s Pathways Language Model 2, or PaLM 2. PaLM 2 was launched in May 2023 and predates Google’s latest Gemini models, which power its AI products. Gemini, which was launched in December of the same year, is now the core model behind its text and image-generation offering. The inquiry will assess whether the company has breached its obligations under GDPR on the processing of the personal data of citizens of the EU and European Economic Area. Under the framework, companies must conduct a data protection impact assessment before embarking on handling such information when the nature of the way it is used is likely to pose a high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals.
www.newsweek.com
Recently surfaced North Korean footage has captured the North Korean government's crackdown on citizens, including teenagers, for consuming banned South Korean media. The footage, obtained by South Korean production company KBS Media, shows a public denunciation session where a group of young girls, including a 16-year-old student, are publicly humiliated and arrested for the offense. Pyongyang maintains tight control over the flow of information within its borders, forbidding citizens from accessing foreign music, films, and TV series. Those caught violating these restrictions face severe penalties, including public shaming, imprisonment, and in some cases, execution.
Technology
Android apps are blocking sideloading and forcing Google Play versions instead
lemmee_in 7 days ago • 94%
This is just Google's clever way of not removing the sideloading feature from their OS.
They let app developers to prevent users from using sideloaded app.
This way they can avoid antitrust lawsuits.
Technology
Android apps are blocking sideloading and forcing Google Play versions instead
lemmee_in 1 week ago • 96%
Google : "You don't own your phone, we own you."
abcnews.go.com
Three rapidly growing Southern California wildfires have burned more than 100,000 acres in less than a week and continued to threaten homes in multiple communities as the state mobilized an all-hands-on-deck response to bolster front-line fire crews battling the raging flames. Fueled by a punishing heat wave and fanned by gusting winds, the biggest blaze is the Bridge Fire, which ignited Sunday in the Angeles National Forest about 31 miles east of downtown Los Angeles and exploded overnight from about 4,000 acres on Tuesday to nearly 48,000 acres by Wednesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fire remained out of control with 0% containment after spreading across Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Authorities issued widespread evacuation orders as the fire tore through the towns of Wrightwood and Mt Baldy, destroying at least 33 homes, several cabins, and racing through a ski resort. At least 33 homes in Wrightwood and Mt. Baldy have been destroyed and another 2,500 structures in the area are being threatened by the fire, according to Cal Fire.
arstechnica.com
You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you're using a custom version of Android that doesn't include Google's Play Store. Alternately, the app might be experimental, under development, or perhaps no longer maintained and offered by its developer. Until now, the existence of sideload-ready APKs on the web was something that seemed to be tolerated, if warned against, by Google. This quiet standstill is being shaken up by a new feature in Google's Play Integrity API. As reported by Android Authority, developer tools to push "remediation" dialogs during sideloading debuted at Google's I/O conference in May, have begun showing up on users' phones. Sideloaders of apps from the British shop Tesco, fandom app BeyBlade X, and ChatGPT have reported "Get this app from Play" prompts, which cannot be worked around. An Android gaming handheld user encountered a similarly worded prompt from Diablo Immortal on their device three months ago. Google's Play Integrity API is how apps have previously blocked access when loaded onto phones that are in some way modified from a stock OS with all Google Play integrations intact. Recently, a popular two-factor authentication app blocked access on rooted phones, including the security-minded GrapheneOS. Apps can call the Play Integrity API and get back an "integrity verdict," relaying if the phone has a "trustworthy" software environment, has Google Play Protect enabled, and passes other software checks. Graphene has questioned the veracity of Google's Integrity API and SafetyNet Attestation systems, recommending instead standard Android hardware attestation. Rahman notes that apps do not have to take an all-or-nothing approach to integrity checking. Rather than block installation entirely, apps could call on the API only during sensitive actions, issuing a warning there. But not having a Play Store connection can also deprive developers of metrics, allow for installation on incompatible devices (and resulting bad reviews), and, of course, open the door to paid app piracy.
www.telegraph.co.uk
A group of wild otters viciously attacked a woman jogging in an inner-city park in Malaysia. Mariasella Harun, 40, was chased and mauled by eight of the mammals on Wednesday morning in Tanjung Aru, in the northern Sabah state of Borneo island. A graphic video of the aftermath showed the victim huddled on a pavement with deep gashes visible on her arms, as blood streaked her temple, T-shirt and leggings. Another clip captured the bevy of otters – each as big as a small dog, with slick dark hair – charging across a car park moments before the attack. It is the latest in a series of incidents involving humans and otters in the area. A man was recently taken to hospital after another unprovoked attack. Otter attacks are increasing across the whole of South-East Asia, according to wildlife authorities. Despite their somewhat cuddly appearance, otters have teeth and jaws that are strong enough to crack open shellfish. They can weigh up to 14kg and grow up to 4ft, including their tail.
www.france24.com
Vietnam has for days been battling landslides and floods caused by Super Typhoon Yagi the most powerful storm in 30 years, has also brought destructive floods to northern areas of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Which swept Vietnam over the weekend and has left more than 150 people dead according to preliminary estimates. The Red River in Hanoi reached its highest level in 20 years on Wednesday, forcing residents to trudge through waist-deep brown water as they retrieved possessions from flooded homes. Others fashioned makeshift boats from whatever materials they could find. "This was the worst flooding I have witnessed," said Nguyen Tran Van, 41, who has lived near the Red River in the Vietnamese capital for 15 years. A landslide smashed into the remote mountain village of Lang Nu in Lao Cai province, levelling it to a flat expanse of mud and rocks, strewn with debris and laced by streams. State media said at least 30 people had been killed in the village, with another 65 still missing. Vietnamese state media said the toll from Yagi -- the strongest storm to hit northern Vietnam in 30 years -- had risen to 155 across the country, with 141 missing. It was not clear whether that total includes victims of Tuesday's landslide, where access remained difficult and internet was cut off, reports said.
www.theguardian.com
A full bag of Cheetos, discarded by a subterranean visitor to the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico, has led the US National Park Service to issue a warning that discarded food could have a “huge impact” on the cave’s delicate and at-risk ecosystem. “At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” the park said in its post about the garbage that was recently discovered there, threatening the balance of the unique cave system environment. “The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” officials wrote. “Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.”
www.techspot.com
Opening statements before District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia start later today. The BBC notes that the Justice Department plans to argue that Google's parent company, Alphabet, illegally operates a monopoly in the online advertising market. However, Alphabet denies the allegations, claiming that its success is due to the "effectiveness" of its services. The Justice Department claims Google established its monopoly through the anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller ad-tech rivals and even bullying website publishers into using its ad products. Google is also said to have unethically controlled key businesses in each part of the advertising supply chain, thereby driving up ad rates for advertisers while reducing the payouts to website owners. Pointing out Google's systematic abuse of the online ad business, the DoJ will ask the court to break up the company's ad-tech monopoly. The agency believes a breakup would create new opportunities for Google's smaller competitors and incentivize new players to enter the market. It will also be better for both advertisers and publishers.
abcnews.go.com
The commission's punished the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service to the detriment of competitors. It was one of three multibillion-euro fines that the commission imposed on Google in the previous decade as Brussels started ramping up its crackdown on the tech industry. “We are disappointed with the decision of the Court, which relates to a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement. The company said it made changes in 2017 to comply with the commission’s decision requiring it to treat competitors equally. It started holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid for alongside other comparison shopping services. “Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” Google said. European consumer group BEUC hailed the court's decision, saying it shows how the bloc's competition law “remains highly relevant" in digital markets. "Google harmed millions of European consumers by ensuring that rival comparison shopping services were virtually invisible," director general Agustín Reyna said. “Google’s illegal practices prevented consumers from accessing potentially cheaper prices and useful product information from rival comparison shopping services on all sorts of products, from clothes to washing machines.” Google is still appealing the other two EU antitrust penalties, which involved its Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising platform. The company was dealt a setback in the Android case when the EU General Court upheld the commission's 4.125 billion euro fine in a 2022 decision. Its initial appeal against a 1.49 billion euro fine in the AdSense case has yet to be decided.
india.mongabay.com
- Plasticulture, the application of synthetic polymer-based technologies in agriculture, has found wide ranging uses, making it an integral part of food production today. - Agricultural plastics are single-use or short-lived, and have been found to be a major source of micro and nanoplastics in the soil, which can have a long term impact on our health and environment. - Experts suggest that it is time to recognise the chemical and ecotoxicological aspects of agri plastics and developed more sustainable alternatives.
www.channelnewsasia.com
Thailand will distribute 145 billion baht (US$4.2 billion) of its "digital wallet" handout programme earlier than scheduled to support vulnerable groups, a deputy finance minister said on Monday (Sep 9), stressing the need for short-term economic stimulus. In remarks during a budget debate in the Senate, Julapun Amornvivat said the government has prepared 450 billion baht (US$13.29 billion) in total for its signature handout programme, which seeks to stimulate economic activity by transferring 10,000 baht to 50 million Thais to spend in their localities. The measure, which was scheduled for rollout in the last quarter of this year, is the cornerstone of Thailand's plans to jumpstart Southeast Asia's second-largest economy, which grew 2.3 per cent in the second quarter. The handout scheme has been criticised by economists including two former central bank governors as fiscally irresponsible. The government rejects that, but has struggled to find sources of funding. It insists the policy is necessary to energise the economy, which the central bank expects to grow just 2.6 per cent this year, up from 1.9 per cent in 2023 and far adrift of most regional peers.
www.yahoo.com
More than a thousand Brazilian municipalities were on alert Thursday due to very low humidity -- in some cases comparable to that of the Sahara desert -- as the country is gripped by a historic drought that has fueled major wildfires. Flames reached a protected forest on the outskirts of the capital Brasilia, which was enveloped in smoke for the second time in two weeks, and where it has not rained in 130 days. The National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) said in a report that Brasilia, as well as the southeast with its highly populated states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, were among the worst affected by a "relative humidity of less than 12 percent." This was a "very dangerous" situation due to the "great risk of forest fires," the government agency said. Such low humidity also impacts residents' health and can cause pulmonary disease or headaches. 
www.theguardian.com
It was the talk of the town. After the authorities sought to break a long-running heatwave in Chongqing by using cloud-seeding missiles to artificially bring rain, the Chinese megacity was blasted by an unusual weather event – an underwear storm. Termed “the 9/2 Chongqing underwear crisis”, an unexpected windstorm on Monday brought gusts of up to 76mph (122km/h), scattering people’s laundry from balconies on the city’s high-rises. Douyin, China’s sister app to TikTok, was filled with videos of pants and bras flying through the skies, landing in the street and snagging on trees. “I just went out and it suddenly started to rain heavily and underwear fell from the sky,” one resident, Ethele, posted on the social media platform Weibo. “Who’s going to compensate me for my emotional damage?” joked one person who lost their brand new Calvin Klein set. Another countered: “It’s actually quite romantic. You might even pick up your crush’s underwear while taking a walk on the street.” One man bereft of his underwear said he was “laughing like crazy” but the rain storm in Chongqing had now turned him into a “lifelong introvert”.
www.theguardian.com
Six years ago, as officials at the Netherlands’ Calvijn College began considering whether to ban phones from their schools, the idea left some students aghast. “We were asked whether we thought we were living in the 1800s,” said Jan Bakker, the chair of the college, whose students range in age from 12 to 18 years. While the majority backed the idea, about 20% of the parents, teachers and students surveyed were staunchly opposed. Some were parents who worried about not being able to get hold of their children during the day, while a handful of teachers argued it would be better to embrace new technologies rather than shun them. Still, school officials pushed forward. “Walking through the corridors and the school yard, you would see all the children were on their smartphones. Conversations were missing, the table tennis tables were empty,” said Bakker. “Basically we were losing the social culture.”
www.theregister.com
Google recently rewrote the firmware for protected virtual machines in its Android Virtualization Framework using the Rust programming language and wants you to do the same, assuming you deal with firmware. In a write-up on Thursday, Android engineers Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier dig into the technical details of replacing legacy C and C++ code with Rust. "You'll see how easy it is to boost security with drop-in Rust replacements, and we'll even demonstrate how the Rust toolchain can handle specialized bare-metal targets," said Lozano and Maier. Easy is not a term commonly heard with regard to a programming language known for its steep learning curve. Nor is it easy to get C and C++ developers to see the world with Rust-tinted lenses. Just last week, one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux project - created to work Rust code into the C-based Linux kernel - stepped down, citing resistance from Linux kernel developers. "Here's the thing, you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust," said a Linux kernel contributor during a lively discussion earlier this year at a conference.
www.economist.com
THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels. Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer. Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest. Archive https://archive.is/qnsl5
www.tomshardware.com
A U.S. grand jury has formally charged 52-year-old Michael Smith with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering after allegedly buying AI-generated music, posting them on streaming platforms, and then using thousands of bots to stream his posts. This act allowed him to earn millions of dollars in royalties from 2017 through 2024. According to the unsealed indictment from the Justice Department, Mr. Smith claimed in February 2024 that his “existing music has generated at this point over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019.” This meant he made approximately $2.4 million annually by buying AI-generated tracks, uploading them on various streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, and creating bots that allowed his tracks to gain millions of fake streams. With royalty payments often falling at less than one cent per stream, Mr. Smith likely garnered over 240 million streams yearly, most of them through bots. The music industry, in general, prohibits artificially boosting streams as it will negatively impact artists and musicians, where the money that the streaming company should pay them is funneled into accounts that use bots to increase the listening count of their tracks artificially. The act is similar to the payola scandal in the 1950s, where DJs and radio stations received money from publishers to give their songs more airtime, artificially inflating their popularity to drive record and album sales. The only difference today is that radio stations have since been replaced by streaming platforms, DJs by user accounts, and artists by AI.
www.newsweek.com
"The Chinese gangs taught me how to make my profile look credible, gain followers and post regularly. After finishing my training, I started identifying my victims through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Line," said Narin, a 20-year-old from northern Thailand. This wasn't just an isolated incident but part of a troubling trend. Thailand leads Asia in scam calls and text messaging, with a staggering 78.8 million incidents reported since last year, according to the country's Office of the National Economic and Social Development Council. Now, the gangs, often led by Chinese masterminds, are expanding into the U.S. and appear to be ensnaring more Americans. In 2023, U.S. authorities issued a stark warning about the growing danger of Americans being trafficked into scam syndicates in Southeast Asia. The seriousness of the situation became evident in December 2023, when the Department of Justice announced the indictment of four individuals based in the United States. These individuals were accused of laundering over $80 million in profits from scam operations. To warn others, Narin, an ex-scammer, told Newsweek about his journey into the dark underbelly of cybercrime. In Thailand, he traveled from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai before crossing the border into Tachileik, Myanmar. From there, he was transported to Laukkai, a Myanmar border city notorious for call center scams. Recruited by friends of friends, he trusted them out of desperation for money. But once in Myanmar, he quickly realized the true nature of the operation. Fearful for his safety, Narin felt trapped and couldn't leave.
www.independent.co.uk
Rogue puppy dealers are using Facebook and Instagram to trade across Europe, often selling animals with fashionable mutilations such as cropped ears, an investigation has found. Analysis of hundreds of posts found that trade is rife in underage pets and dogs bred with exaggerated features including excessive skin folds, which cause dermatitis, and very short muzzles, which leave animals struggling to breathe. The craze for such puppies has allowed breeders to cash in using social media, where pets are easily advertised despite rules curbing the sale of live animals. Sellers easily evade the social media giants’ guidelines by using code words, and emojis and hashtags with secret meanings, according to a report by the Four Paws global animal-welfare organisation. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, says it removes adverts that breach its rules as soon as it becomes aware of them. But the report says the platforms are hot spots for cruel and unethical puppy sellers. Underage puppies for sale are often bred in poor conditions and transported illegally across borders from eastern Europe, according to the investigators.
www.nbcnewyork.com
- The prospect of water wars is a long-running and active debate, with everyone from high-ranking U.N. officials to renowned hydro-politics experts voicing their concern about the perceived risks. - Growing competition for water in already arid areas, alongside the compounding effect of climate change, has led to a flurry of water-related headlines in recent months. - Francis Galgano, an associate professor at the department of geography and the environment at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, identified nine international river basins as potential flashpoints.
www.severe-weather.eu
A unique rainfall event is currently unfolding across the Sahara desert, one of the driest places on Earth. The amount of rainfall might not seem large by normal standards, but a large part of the Sahara will get well over 500% of normal monthly rainfall in September. It’s not very often that the Sahara desert experiences these rainfall events. They are very rare, less than once per decade on average, but they are usually a sign that something is changing in the Earth’s weather system, indicating an unusual state of the Atmosphere as we head into Autumn and Winter. Video source from x/twitter https://x.com/MohanadElbalal/status/1831388228651565398 I don't know what to say to the future climate of the earth, as I watched on youtube Hainan was hit by super typhoon Yagi at 240 km/h, and currently over Hanoi at 200 km/h
www.bbc.com
Two people have died in the Japanese city of Yokohama after a teenage girl jumped to her death from a shopping centre, hitting a pedestrian below. The 17-year-old high school student jumped from a building in a crowded shopping district, hitting a 32-year-old woman who was out with her friends on Saturday evening. The two were immediately taken to hospital around 18:00 local time (09:00 GMT), where the girl died an hour later. The woman also died soon after. It's not clear why she might have killed herself, though more people under the age of 18 in Japan kill themselves on 1 September - just ahead of the new school term - than on any other day, according to official statistics. Last year, 513 children took their own lives in Japan, with “school problems” cited as the most common factor.
www.businessinsider.com
Notorious for a hardworking culture, Japan launched an initiative to help people cut back. But three years into the effort, the country is having a hard time coaxing people to take a four-day workweek. Japanese lawmakers first proposed a shorter work week in 2021. The guidelines aimed to encourage staff retention and cut the number of workers falling ill or dying from overwork in an economy already suffering from a huge labor shortage. The guidelines also included overtime limits and paid annual leave. However, the initiative has had a slow start: According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, only about 8% of companies in Japan allow employees to take three or more days off a week. It's not just companies — employees are hesitant, too. Electronics manufacturer Panasonic, one of Japan's largest companies, opted into the effort in early 2022. Over two years in, only 150 of its 63,000 eligible employees have chosen to take up four-day schedules, a representative of the company told the Associated Press. Other major companies to introduce a four-day workweek include Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing, electronics giant Hitachi, and financial firm Mizuho. About 85% of employers report giving workers the usual two days off a week. Much of the reluctance to take an extra day off boils down to a culture of workers putting companies before themselves, including pressure to appear like team players and hard workers. This intense culture stems from Japan's postwar era, where, in an effort to boost the economy, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida enlisted major corporations to offer their employees lifelong job security, asking only that workers repay them with loyalty.
truthout.org
A 41-year-old man in New Hampshire died last week after contracting a rare mosquito-borne illness called eastern equine encephalitis virus, also known as EEE or “triple E.” It was New Hampshire’s first human case of the disease in a decade. Four other human EEE infections have been reported this year in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Though this outbreak is small and triple E does not pose a risk to most people living in the United States, public health officials and researchers alike are concerned about the threat the deadly virus poses to the public, both this year and in future summers. There is no known cure for the disease, which can cause severe flu-like symptoms and seizures in humans 4 to 10 days after exposure and kills between 30 and 40 percent of the people it infects. Half of the people who survive a triple E infection are left with permanent neurological damage. Because of EEE’s high mortality rate, state officials have begun spraying insecticide in Massachusetts, where 10 communities have been designated “critical” or “high risk” for triple E. Towns in the state shuttered their parks from dusk to dawn and warned people to stay inside after 6 p.m., when mosquitoes are most active. Like West Nile virus, another mosquito-borne illness that poses a risk to people in the U.S. every summer, triple E is constrained by environmental factors that are changing rapidly as the planet warms. That’s because mosquitoes thrive in the hotter, wetter conditions that climate change is producing.
www.telegraph.co.uk
An Italian man has said he kept his dead mother’s remains in a freezer to cover up her death and continue to collect her pension. Sandro Mallus told police he put the body of Rosanna Pilloni, 78, in the family’s chest freezer after she passed away at home in the small town of Sarroch, near Cagliari in Sardinia, in January last year. He made the admission after police began investigating concerns from neighbours that the woman hadn’t been seen for months. According to local media, Mr Mallus continued shopping as if he was buying for two people, maintaining the pretence that his mother was alive. Police are due to carry out a post mortem examination on Monday and have not ruled out the possibility Pilloni was killed, something Mr Mallus denies. “My mother died of natural causes,’’ Mr Mallus told the newspaper, L’Unione Sarda. “I would never have harmed her. “When I discovered her body I was desperate. I had no money for the funeral, so I locked her in there.”
www.bbc.com
Almost 40,000 people died alone in their homes in Japan during the first half of 2024, a report by the country’s police shows. Of that number, nearly 4,000 people were discovered more than a month after they died, and 130 bodies went unmissed for a year before they were found, according to the National Police Agency. Japan currently has the world’s oldest population, according to the United Nations. The agency hopes its report will shed light on the country's growing issue of vast numbers of its aging population who live, and die, alone. Taken from the first half of 2024, the National Police Agency data shows that a total of 37,227 people living alone were found dead at home, with those aged 65 and over accounting for more than 70%. While an estimated 40% of people who died alone at home were found within a day, the police report found that nearly 3,939 bodies were discovered more than a month after death, and 130 had lain unnoticed for at least a year before discovery.
www.asahi.com
Yoshinoya Holdings Co. is hoping that its customers don't bury their heads in the sand but give a new exotic meat offering on the menu a try. The operator of the popular “gyudon” beef bowl chain announced on Aug. 28 that it has begun offering an ostrich rice bowl. Ostrich is known for its high-protein, low-fat and low-calorie meat. Yoshinoya is positioning ostrich as its fourth meat offering, following beef, pork and chicken. The company said this is also part of its effort to diversify ingredients and continue offering healthy and satisfying meals. As a first step, the bowl with thigh and fillet ostrich meat prepared in a roast beef style on rice is being sold at around 400 of Yoshinoya’s cafe-style stores, called “Cooking and Comfort,” across the country. The dish is priced at 1,683 yen ($11.60) including tax.
news.sky.com
An Austrian surgeon allegedly let his teenage daughter drill a hole in a patient's skull. Following a forestry accident in January, a 33-year-old man was flown by air ambulance to Graz University Hospital, Styria, southeastern Austria, with serious head injuries, according to Kronen Zeitung, an Austrian newspaper. He needed emergency surgery, but the doctor allegedly let his 13-year-old daughter take part in operating on him. The newspaper reported that she even drilled a hole in the patient's skull. While the operation was said to have gone off without issue, the patient is still unable to work and investigations by the Graz public prosecutor's officer against the entire surgical team are continuing. It wasn't until April that an anonymous complaint was logged to the public prosecutor's office about the allegations, the newspaper reported. The alleged victim initially learned about the case in the media before later being told by authorities he was a witness in an investigation.
www.dw.com
Eighty percent of German businesses reported being hit by data or IT theft, industrial espionage or sabotage in the last 12 months, with 45% of companies tracing cyberattacks or other acts of industrial spying to China, a survey showed on Wednesday. The survey by Bitkom, a trade association for Germany's IT sector, also saw Russia being blamed for 39% of attacks. That figure, however, is down from a previous 46%, while the statistic for China is three percentage points more than in the last survey in 2023. The survey estimated that the German economy had suffered damage of up to €267 billion ($297 billion) in the last 12 months from acts of industrial espionage, including cybercrime. That figure is up 29% from the year before.
www.ibtimes.co.uk
A Swedish financial services firm specialising in direct payments, pay-after-delivery options, and instalment plans is preparing to reduce its workforce by nearly 50 per cent as artificial intelligence automation becomes more prevalent. Klarna, a buy-now, pay-later company, has reduced its workforce by over 1,000 employees in the past year, partially attributed to the increased use of artificial intelligence. The company plans to implement further job cuts, resulting in a reduction of nearly 2,000 positions. Klarna's current employee count decreased from approximately 5,000 to 3,800 compared to last year. A company spokesperson stated that the number of employees is expected to decrease to approximately 2,000 in the coming years, although they did not provide a specific timeline. In Klarna's interim financial report released on Tuesday, the company attributed the job cuts to its increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, enabling it to reduce its human workforce. Klarna claims that its AI-powered chatbot can handle the workload previously managed by 700 full-time customer service agents. The company has reduced the average resolution time for customer service inquiries from 11 minutes to two while maintaining consistent customer satisfaction ratings compared to human agents.
www.asahi.com
Nissan Motor Co. said it has developed a new type of paint that significantly reduces the temperature inside vehicles parked in direct sunlight. The surface of a car coated with the innovative material remains up to 12 degrees cooler than that of a vehicle with standard paint, tests showed. The company said the coating material can help rein in the temperature rise not only on the car's body but also in the vehicle when exposed to direct sunlight.
arstechnica.com
Indian IT firm Infosys has been accused of being “exploitative” after allegedly sending job offers to thousands of engineering graduates but still not onboarding any of them after as long as two years. The recent graduates have reportedly been told they must do repeated, unpaid training in order to remain eligible to work at Infosys. Last week, the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), an Indian advocacy group for IT workers, sent a letter [[PDF](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Infosys.pdf)], shared by The Register, to Mansukh Mandaviya, India’s Minster of Labor and Employment. It requested that the Indian government intervene “to prevent exploitation of young IT graduates by Infosys." The letter signed by NITES president Harpreet Singh Saluja claimed that NITES received “multiple” complaints from recent engineering graduates “who have been subjected to unprofessional and exploitative practices” from Infosys after being hired for system engineer and digital specialist engineer roles. According to NITES, Infosys sent these people offer letters as early as April 22, 2022, after engaging in a college recruitment effort from 2022–2023 but never onboarded the graduates. NITES has previously said that “over 2,000 recruits” are affected. NITES claims the people sent job offers were asked to participate in an unpaid, virtual “pre-training” that took place from July 1, 2024, until July 24, 2024. Infosys' HR team reportedly told the recent graduates at that time that onboarding plans would be finalized by August 19 or September 2. But things didn’t go as anticipated, NITES’ letter claimed, leaving the would-be hires with “immense frustration, anxiety, and uncertainty.”
www.telegraph.co.uk
An 88-year-old Italian woman who got lost in a forest while looking for mushrooms survived for four days by drinking rainwater from puddles, reciting the rosary and talking to a fox. Giuseppina Bardelli ventured into the mountains near her home in the village of Maccagno con Pino e Veddasca, on the border with Switzerland, taking a path that she had walked many times before. She was with her 57-year-old son, Sergio, but they became separated once they got to the woods. “She lost her orientation, and she wandered off the path that she has known for more than 40 years,” Roberto, her other son, said. She went missing last Wednesday, August 21, and it was not until four days later that she was found by rescuers. “She drank rainwater that she found in puddles,” Roberto told Corriere della Sera newspaper. “At night she slept under trees, using vegetation to cover herself.” She also befriended a wild fox that came sniffing around her out of curiosity. “The fox approached her several times. They sort of became friends. And every evening she recited the rosary. She knew that every day could be her last,” her son said.
Androidlemmee_in 1 month ago • 92%
Organic Maps :
No Ads ✅
No Telemetry ✅
Google :
Does it make us money? ❌
Technology
Ecovacs home robots can be hacked to spy on their owners, researchers say
lemmee_in 1 month ago • 100%
I don't even have a smart tv, I don't want anything other than my phone and laptop connected to the internet.
Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse
A critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents could collapse as early as the 2030s, new research suggests
lemmee_in 2 months ago • 100%
That's the problem there's no common consensus from scientists. What is happening right now is similar to the scenario from The Day After Tomorrow, scientists debate and offer their theories.
from phys.org today
Not the day after tomorrow: Why we can't predict the timing of climate tipping points
A study published in Science Advances reveals that uncertainties are currently too large to accurately predict exact tipping times for critical Earth system components like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), polar ice sheets, or tropical rainforests.
These tipping events, which might unfold in response to human-caused global warming, are characterized by rapid, irreversible climate changes with potentially catastrophic consequences. However, as the study shows, predicting when these events will occur is more difficult than previously thought.
Climate scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) have identified three primary sources of uncertainty.
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-day-tomorrow-climate.html
Also as Rahmstof said.
“There’s now five papers, basically, that suggested it could well happen in this century, or even before the middle of the century,” Rahmstof said. “My overall assessment is now that the risk of us passing the tipping point in this century is probably even greater than 50%.”
While the advances in AMOC research have been swift and the models that try to predict its collapse have advanced at lightning speed, they are still not without issues.
This research gap means the predictions could underestimate how soon or fast a collapse would happen.
Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse
A critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents could collapse as early as the 2030s, new research suggests
lemmee_in 2 months ago • 100%
Technology
LAPD warns residents after spike in burglaries using Wi-Fi jammers that disable security cameras, smart doorbells
lemmee_in 2 months ago • 100%
You can create and set up telegram bots for your own use
Fuck AI
Sam Altman says instead of Universal Basic Income, there should be Universal Basic Compute, where everybody gets a slice of GPT-7's compute
lemmee_in 2 months ago • 100%
That's what AI companies want, you don't have a job and they pay you with UBI in Compute Coins, so you can spend by using their digital wallet (Altman has Worldcoin).
This is just an Utopia world for the rich and a Dystopia world for most of us.
Fuck AI
Sam Altman says instead of Universal Basic Income, there should be Universal Basic Compute, where everybody gets a slice of GPT-7's compute
lemmee_in 2 months ago • 100%
I think, what Altman means by Compute is the same as something like Credit Points or Coins. Which you can use to pay bills, rent, buy groceries, etc.
This is just an excuse from a billionaire to not give you UBI in cash and prefer to use Coins from their digital system and buy their products.
Fuck AI
Sam Altman says instead of Universal Basic Income, there should be Universal Basic Compute, where everybody gets a slice of GPT-7's compute
lemmee_in 2 months ago • 100%
Fuck AI
AI and ads, Google's two favorite things, take targeted marketing to creepy new heights
lemmee_in 3 months ago • 100%
wow, I have no idea. Thanks
TIL
Technology
AMD has preemptively dropped support for Windows 10 on its new Ryzen AI 300 Series chips
lemmee_in 3 months ago • 83%
According to this article, regarding Intel Alder Lake
Intel's Thread Director technology is the key here. This hardware-based technology uses a trained AI model to identify different types of workloads at the chip level. It then provides that enhanced telemetry data to Windows 11 via a Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) built into the chip. The operating system then uses that data to help assure that threads are scheduled to either the P- or E-cores in an optimized and intelligent manner.
However, while Windows 11 exploits Thread Director's full feature set, Windows 10 does not. Due to optimizations for Intel's Lakefield chips, Windows 10 is aware of hybrid topologies, meaning it knows the difference between the performance and efficiency of the different core types. Still, it doesn't have access to the thread-specific telemetry provided by Intel's hardware-based solution.
As a result, threads can and will land on the incorrect cores under some circumstances, which Intel says will result in run-to-run variability in benchmarks. It will also impact the chips during normal use, too. Intel says the difference amounts to a few percentage points of performance and that the chips still provide an "awesome" user experience. We'll have to see how that works in the real world to assess the impact.
Intel also says that users can assign the priority of background tasks through the standard Windows settings, but these global settings apply to all programs. So it remains to be seen if that will have a meaningful impact on performance variability in Windows 10.
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-shares-alder-lake-pricing-specs-and-gaming-performance/4
so, it's still works but not optimized for some apps. Probably this will be the same with AMD's latest CPU.
privacylemmee_in 3 months ago • 100%
NO MEANS NO, MICROSOFT!
I don't want sonething like Recall, Copilot, Notepad.AI, Paint.AI baked into the OS
Fedigrow
[Update: community is created !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz] !A new place for !dataisbeautiful that is not lemmy.ml nor lemmy.world?
lemmee_in 3 months ago • 100%
Can we have c/hmmm other than in LW?
Technology
Windows 10 is EOL in October 2025
lemmee_in 4 months ago • 75%
They really want us to use Copilot AI, so that they can pushed more paying subscribers such as corpos and govts to use the service.
More money for microsucks, less jobs available to us
Programmer Humor
when google bought datasets from reddit
lemmee_in 4 months ago • 100%
I'm glad it wasn't us (lemmy users)
Meta (lemm.ee)
Welcome to lemm.ee!
lemmee_in 9 months ago • 100%
What do you mean? lemm.ee is blocking threads https://lemm.ee/instances
You can also check federation status of other fediverse instances with Threads