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As part of a team exploring Utah's Great Salt Lake, climate researcher Melissa Cobo "discovered more disturbing evidence that dried-out lakes are a significant source of carbon dioxide emissions," reports the Washington Post. But more disturbingly, they write that this source of emissions "has not been included in the official accounting of how much carbon the world is releasing into the warming atmosphere." In a new study in the journal One Earth, the researchers calculated that 4.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were released from the drying bed of the Great Salt Lake in 2020, the year Cobo and others collected the samples. This would amount to about a 7 percent increase in Utah's human-caused emissions, the authors found. While other researchers have documented carbon emissions from dried-out lakes — including the Aral Sea in Central Asia — [climate change museum curator Soren] Brothers said that his study tried to calculate what part of

Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a report from The Verge: Early termination fees are "a bit like heroin for Adobe," according to an Adobe executive quoted in the FTC's newly unredacted complaint against the company for allegedly hiding fees and making it too hard to cancel Creative Cloud. "There is absolutely no way to kill off ETF or talk about it more obviously" in the order flow without "taking a big business hit," this executive said. That's the big reveal in the unredacted complaint, which also contains previously unseen allegations that Adobe was internally aware of studies showing its order and cancellation flows were too complicated and customers were unhappy with surprise early termination fees. In response to the quote, Adobe's general counsel and chief trust officer, Dana Rao, said that he was "disappointed in the way they're continuing to take comments out of context from non-executive employees from years ago to make their case." Rao added that the person quote

Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: Boeing Starliner is apparently still stuck at the ISS, six weeks longer than planned due to engine troubles. The root cause seems to be overheating. NASA is still hopeful that they can bring the two astronauts back on the Starliner, but if not apparently there is a SpaceX Dragon craft docked at the station that can get them home. This is another in a long list of high profile failures by Boeing. This comes after a series of failures in their popular commercial aircraft including undocumented flight system modifications causing crashes of the 737 MAX, doors blowing out in mid-flight, and parts falling off the aircraft. The latter decimated a Toyota in a populated area."I think we're starting to close in on those final pieces of flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely, and that's our primary focus right now," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program. "Our prime option is to complete the mission," Stich said

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back. The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and talk between the surface to space but says that laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios. "ISS astronauts, cosmonauts, and unwelcomed commercial space-flight visitors can now watch their favorite porn in real-time, adding some life to a boring zero-G existence," adds joshuark. "Ralph Kramden, when contacted by Ouiji board, simply spelled out 'Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way to prove it: "copyright traps" developed by a team at Imperial College London, pieces of hidden text that allow writers and publishers to subtly mark their work in order to later detect whether it has been used in AI models or not. The idea is similar to traps that have been used by copyright holders throughout history -- strategies like including fake locations on a map or fake words in a dictionary. [...] The code to generate and detect traps is currently available on GitHub, but the team also intends to build a tool that allows people to generate and insert copyright traps themselves. "There is a complete lack of transparency in terms of wh

Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google Workspace account, and leverage that to impersonate a domain holder at third-party services that allow logins through Google's "Sign in with Google" feature. [...] Google Workspace offers a free trial that people can use to access services like Google Docs, but other services such as Gmail are only available to Workspace users who can validate control over the domain name associated with their email address. The weakness Google fixed allowed attackers to bypass this validation process. Google emphasized that none of the affected domains had previously been associated with Workspace accounts or services. "The tactic here was to create a specifically-constructed request by a bad actor to circumvent email verification during the signup process," [said Anu Yamunan, director of abuse and safety protections at

On Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison ruled that cellphone searches at the border are "nonroutine" and require probable cause and a warrant, likening them to more invasive searches due to their heavy privacy impact. As reported by Reason, this decision closes the loophole in the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have exploited. Courts have previously ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine warrantless searches for contraband at the border. From the report: Although the interests of stopping contraband are "undoubtedly served when the government searches the luggage or pockets of a person crossing the border carrying objects that can only be introduced to this country by being physically moved across its borders, the extent to which those interests are served when the government searches data stored on a person's cell phone is far less clear," the judge declared. Morrison noted that "

Nvidia's new R555 Linux driver series has significantly improved their open-source GPU kernel driver modules, achieving near parity with their proprietary drivers. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: The NVIDIA open-source kernel driver modules shipped by their driver installer and also available via their GitHub repository are in great shape. With the R555 series the support and performance is basically at parity of their open-source kernel modules compared to their proprietary kernel drivers. [...] Across a range of different GPU-accelerated creator workloads, the performance of the open-source NVIDIA kernel modules matched that of the proprietary driver. No loss in performance going the open-source kernel driver route. Across various professional graphics workloads, both the NVIDIA RTX A2000 and A4000 graphics cards were also achieving the same performance whether on the open-source MIT/GPLv2 driver or using NVIDIA's classic proprietary driver. Across all of the tests I carried ou

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards. That knowledge nugget became important as the firm tried to figure out how to respond to the mess CrowdStrike created, which at Grant Thornton Australia threw hundreds of PCs and no fewer than 100 servers into the doomloop that CrowdStrike's shoddy testing software made possible. [...] The firm had the BitLocker keys for all its PCs, so Woltz and colleagues wrote a script that turned them into barcodes that were displayed on a locked-down management server's desktop. The script would be given a hostname and generate the necessary barcode and LAPS password to restore the machine. Woltz went to an office supplies store and acquired an off-the-shelf barcode

US presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced during his keynote Friday at the Bitcoin Conference that he would direct the US government to buy Bitcoin until the size of its Bitcoin reserves matched its gold reserves. At current prices, that equates to $615 billion worth of gold. RFK Jr. said: "I will sign an executive order directing the US Treasury to purchase 550 Bitcoin daily until the US has built a reserve of at least 4,000,000 Bitcoins and a position of dominance that no other country will be able to usurp." 4 million Bitcoin is 19% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist.