Google changed its rules around how product-review sites appear in its search engine. In the process, it devastated a once-lucrative corner [non-paywalled source] of the news media world. From a report: Sites including CNN Underscored and Forbes Vetted offer tips on everything from mattresses and knife sets to savings accounts, making money when users click on links and buy products.

They depend on Google to drive much of their traffic, and therefore revenue. But over the past year, Google created stricter rules that dinged certain sites that farm out articles to freelancers, among other things. The goal, Google has said, was to give users higher-quality search results. The outcome was a crisis for some sites. Traffic for Forbes Advisor, a personal-finance recommendation site, fell 83% in January from the same month the year before, according to data firm Similarweb.

CNN Underscored and Buy Side from WSJ, which is operated by Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, were both down by more than 25% in that period. Time magazine's Time Stamped and the Associated Press's AP Buyline, powered by Taboola Turnkey Commerce, ended their efforts in recent months. Taboola closed the commerce operation.

PAjamian writes: Two years ago Red Hat announced an end to its public source code availability. This caused a great deal of outcry from the Enterprise Linux community at large. Since then many have waited for a statement from the Free Software Foundation concerning their stance on the matter. Now, nearly two years later the FSF has finally responded to questions regarding their stance on the issue with the following statement:

When asked if the FSF would be willing to intervene on behalf of the community they had this to say:

Following is the full text of my original email to them and their response:

Subject: Statement about recent changes in source code distribution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Date: 2023-07-16 00:39:51

> Hi,
>
> I'm a user of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux and other Linux
> distributions in the RHEL ecosystem. I am also involved in the EL
> (Enterprise Linux) community which is being affected by the statements
> and changes in policy made by Red Hat at
> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream and
> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-
> response-gitcentosorg-changes
> (note there are many many more links and posts about this issue which
> I
> believe you are likely already aware of). While a few of these
> questions are answered more directly by the license FAQ some of them
> are
> not and there are a not insignificant number of people who would very
> much appreciate a public statement from the FSF that answers these
> questions directly.
>
> Can you please comment or release a statement about the Free Software
> Foundation's position on this issue? Specifically:
>

Thank you for writing in with your questions. My apologies for the delay, but we are a small team with limited resources and can be challenging keeping up with all the emails we receive.

Generally, we don't agree with what Red Hat is doing. Whether it constitutes a violation of the GPL would require legal analysis and the FSF does not give legal advice. However, as the stewards of the GNU GPL we can speak how it is intended to be applied and Red Hat's approach is certainly contrary to the spirit of the GPL. This is unfortunate, because we would expect such flagship organizations to drive the movement forward.

> Is Red Hat's removal of sources from git.centos.org a violation of the
> GPL and various other Free Software licenses for the various programs
> distributed under RHEL?
>
> Is Red Hat's distribution of source RPMs to their customers under
> their
> subscriber agreement sufficient to satisfy the above mentioned
> licenses?
>
> Is it a violation if Red Hat terminates a subscription early because
> their customer exercised their rights under the GPL and other Free
> Software licenses to redistribute the RHEL sources or create
> derivative
> works from them?
>
> Is it a violation if Red Hat refuses to renew a subscription that has
> expired because a customer exercised their rights to redistribute or
> create derivative works?
>
> A number of the programs distributed with RHEL are copyrighted by the
> FSF, some examples being bash, emacs, GNU core utilities, gcc, gnupg
> and
> glibc. Given that the FSF has standing to act in this matter would
> the
> FSF be willing to intervene on behalf of the community in order to get
> Red Hat to correct any of the above issues?
>

As of today, we are not aware of any issue with Red Hat's new policy that we could pursue on legal grounds. However, if you do find a violation, please [follow these instructions][0] and send a report to <license-violation@gnu.org>.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html

If you are interested in something more specific on this, the Software Freedom Conservancy [published an article about the RHEL][1] situation and hosted a [panel at their conference in 2023][2]. These cover the situation fairly thoroughly.

[1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
[2]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jul/19/rhel-panel-fossy-2023/

Google has begun internal testing of a new "AI Mode" for its search engine, powered by its Gemini 2.0 AI model, according to a company email seen by technology news site 9to5Google. The feature, which appears alongside existing filters like Images and News, creates a chatbot-like interface for handling complex queries and follow-up questions.

It generates detailed responses with web links displayed in a card format on the right side of the screen. AI Mode targets exploratory searches such as product comparisons and how-to questions that traditional search results may not effectively address. The company is currently testing the feature with U.S.-based employees, with CEO Sundar Pichai indicating a possible launch this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The website of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, whose chatbot became the most downloaded app in the United States, has computer code that could send some user login information to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company that has been barred from operating in the United States, security researchers say. The web login page of DeepSeek's chatbot contains heavily obfuscated computer script that when deciphered shows connections to computer infrastructure owned by China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company. The code appears to be part of the account creation and user login process for DeepSeek.

In its privacy policy, DeepSeek acknowledged storing data on servers inside the People's Republic of China. But its chatbot appears more directly tied to the Chinese state than previously known through the link revealed by researchers to China Mobile. The U.S. has claimed there are close ties between China Mobile and the Chinese military as justification for placing limited sanctions on the company. [...] The code linking DeepSeek to one of China's leading mobile phone providers was first discovered by Feroot Security, a Canadian cybersecurity company, which shared its findings with The Associated Press. The AP took Feroot's findings to a second set of computer experts, who independently confirmed that China Mobile code is present. Neither Feroot nor the other researchers observed data transferred to China Mobile when testing logins in North America, but they could not rule out that data for some users was being transferred to the Chinese telecom.

The analysis only applies to the web version of DeepSeek. They did not analyze the mobile version, which remains one of the most downloaded pieces of software on both the Apple and the Google app stores. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission unanimously denied China Mobile authority to operate in the United States in 2019, citing "substantial" national security concerns about links between the company and the Chinese state. In 2021, the Biden administration also issued sanctions limiting the ability of Americans to invest in China Mobile after the Pentagon linked it to the Chinese military. "It's mindboggling that we are unknowingly allowing China to survey Americans and we're doing nothing about it," said Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of Feroot. "It's hard to believe that something like this was accidental. There are so many unusual things to this. You know that saying 'Where there's smoke, there's fire'? In this instance, there's a lot of smoke," Tsarynny said.

Further reading: Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time For People Who Download DeepSeek

Tom's Hardware reports: Facebook's heavy-handed censorship of Linux groups and topics was "in error," the social media juggernaut has admitted. Responding to reports earlier this week, sparked by the curious censorship of the eminently wholesome DistroWatch, Facebook contacted PCMag to say that it had made a mistake and that the underlying issue had been rectified.

"This enforcement was in error and has since been addressed. Discussions of Linux are allowed on our services," said a Meta rep to PCMag. That is the full extent of the statement reproduced by the source... Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has appealed against the Community Standards-triggered ban shortly after it noticed it was in effect (January 19). PCMag received the Facebook admission of error on January 28. The latest statement from DistroWatch, which now prefers posting on Mastodon, indicates that Facebook has lifted the DistroWatch links ban.
More details from PCMag: Meta didn't say what caused the crackdown in the first place. But the company has been revamping some of its content moderation and plans to replace its fact-checking methodology with a user-driven Community Notes, similar to X. "We're also going to change how we enforce our policies to reduce the kind of mistakes that account for the vast majority of the censorship on our platforms," the company said earlier this month, in another irony.

"Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn't have been," Meta added in the same post.

SC World reports: A new phishing scam targeting mobile devices was observed using a "never-before-seen" obfuscation method to hide links to spoofed United States Postal Service (USPS) pages inside PDF files, [mobile security company] Zimperium reported Monday.

The method manipulates elements of the Portable Document Format (PDF) to make clickable URLs appear invisible to both the user and mobile security systems, which would normally extract links from PDFs by searching for the "/URI" tag. "Our researchers verified that this method enabled known malicious URLs within PDF files to bypass detection by several endpoint security solutions. In contrast, the same URLs were detected when the standard /URI tag was used," Zimperium Malware Researcher Fernando Ortega wrote in a blog post.

The attackers send the malicious PDFs via SMS text messages under the guise of providing instructions to retrieve a USPS package that failed to deliver... The phishing websites first displays a form for the victim provide their mailing address, email address and telephone number, and then asks for credit card information to pay a $0.30 "service fee" for redelivery of the supposed package... Zimperium identified more than 20 versions of the malicious PDF files and 630 phishing pages associated with the scam operation. The phishing pages were also found to support 50 languages, suggestion international targeting and possible use of a phishing kit.
"Users' trust in the PDF file format and the limited ability of mobile users to view information about a file prior to opening it increase the risk of such phishing campaigns, Zimperium noted."

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

Google users have discovered that adding curse words to search queries disables the company's AI-powered overview feature. While Google's Gemini AI system typically avoids profanity, inserting expletives into search terms bypasses AI summaries and delivers traditional web results instead. Users can also disable AI overviews by adding "-ai" or other text strings after a minus sign to their queries.

More than 8,000 of the world's most-cited scientists have at least one retraction, according to a database that links retractions to top-cited papers. From a report: An analysis of the database, published in PLOS Biology on 30 January, attempts to map the scale of retractions and understand how they manifest. "Not every retraction is a sign of misconduct," says John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University in California, who led the study. "But it is important to have a bird's eye view, across all scientific fields, [of] people who are most influential in science."

Retracted papers had a higher number of self-citations than did non-retracted papers. And papers with higher co-authorship numbers were more likely to be retracted than those with fewer co-authors. [...] In the study, the authors split the most-cited scientists into two groups. The first featured the 217,097 authors who were among the top 2% most-cited in their fields over their careers. The second group comprised the 223,152 scientists who made up the top 2% for citation impact in 2023, the most recent year for which there were data. The authors found that 8,747 (4%) of the most highly cited researchers in 2023 had at least one retraction during their career, as did 7,083 (3.3%) of the researchers who were most-cited over their careers.

Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.

If you're wondering if there might be something specific to DistroWatch.com, something on the site that the owners/operators perhaps don't even know about, for example, then it seems pretty safe to rule out such a possibility. Reports show that "multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed." However, we tested a few other Facebook posts with mentions of Linux, and they didn't get blocked immediately. Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has tried to appeal against the Community Standards-triggered ban. However, they say that a Facebook representative said that Linux topics would remain on the cybersecurity filter. The DistroWatch writer subsequently got their Facebook account locked... DistroWatch points out the irony at play here: "Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers."

UPDATE: Facebook has admited they made a mistake and stopped blocking the posts.

Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).

Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach."

Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
When Gates' school got a (DEC) PDP-8 — which cost $8,500 — "For a challenge, I decided I would try to write a version of the Basic programming language for the new computer..." And Gates remembers a long hike where "I silently honed my code" for its formula evaluator: I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever written...

By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8 had reclaimed it. I never finished my Basic project. But the code I wrote on that hike, my formula evaluator — and its beauty — stayed with me. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a Basic language for it; we had a head start.
Gates typed his code from that hike, "and with that planted the seed of what would become one of the world's largest companies and the beginning of a new industry."

Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work." And he remembers his teenaged years as "intensely driven by the love of what I was learning, accruing expertise just when it was needed: at the dawn of the personal computer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source "tar pit" to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed "offensively" as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies' resources.

"It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself -- the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself," Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media. "Of course, these crawlers are massively scaled, and are downloading links from large swathes of the internet at any given time," they added. "But they are still consuming resources, spinning around doing nothing helpful, unless they find a way to detect that they are stuck in this loop." You can try Nepenthes via this link (it loads slowly and links endlessly on purpose).

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from 404 Media's Jason Koebler: If it wasn't already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon's ActivityPub and Bluesky's AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon -- which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug -- but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I'm just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn't mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky's growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it's going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat. "This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk's X, Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become," concludes Koebler. "It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms' relevance and importance doesn't necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it."

Further reading: 'The Tech Oligarchy Arrives' (The Atlantic)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In 'piracy' associated circles, Z-Library has one of the most followed Telegram channels of all. The shadow library's official channel amassed over 630,000 subscribers over the years, who were among the first to read site announcements and other key updates. Z-Library previously had some of its messages removed due to copyright infringement. While it didn't upload or directly link to infringing material on Telegram, rightsholders allegedly complained about the links that were posted to the Z-Library website. In response, Z-Library chose to no longer include links to its own homepage on Telegram. Instead, it referred users to Wikipedia and Reddit, where the links were still available. The same copyright awareness was visible at Anna's Archive, a popular shadow library search engine. This channel was also careful not to post direct links to infringing material. After all, sharing or uploading copyrighted books would undoubtedly lead to trouble.

Despite the reported caution, the channels of both Z-Library and Anna's Archive are no longer accessible today. Messages posted by these accounts were purged "due to copyright infringement", as shown below. Telegram didn't limit its action to removing posts; the channels are now entirely inaccessible. Those trying to access the channels in the Telegram app receive a pop-up message stating they are "unavailable due to copyright infringement." The simultaneous removal of both channels suggests they are linked to the same complaint or decision. The specific complaint and alleged copyright infringements remain unclear.

Pixelfed has launched its mobile app for iOS and Android, solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Instagram. The move also comes at a pivotal moment, as a potential Supreme Court ban on TikTok could drive users to explore other social media platforms. Pixelfed is ad-free, open source, decentralized, defaults to chronological feeds and doesn't share user data with third parties. Engadget reports: The platform launched in 2018, but was only available on the web or through third-party app clients. The Android app debuted on January 9 and the iOS app released today. Creator Daniel Supernault posted on Mastodon Monday evening that the platform had 11,000 users join over the preceding 24 hours and that more than 78,000 posts have been shared to Pixelfed to date. The platform runs on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers several other decentralized social networks in the fediverse, such as Mastodon and Flipboard. The iOS and Android apps are available at their respective links.

Further reading: Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open-source Instagram competitor, labeling them as "spam" on Facebook and removing them immediately. 404 Media reports: Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week. Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted. Pixelfed has seen a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced it is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across its platforms.

Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a "declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces." The open source charter contains sections titled "right to privacy," "freedom from surveillance," "safeguards against hate speech," "strong protections for vulnerable communities," and "data portability and user agency."

"Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project," Supernault wrote on Mastodon. "Pixelfed is for the people, period."

Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know."

The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia's mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these users' paths using "knowledge networks" of connected information, which depict how closely one search topic (a node in the network) is related to another. Beyond just mapping the connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures. In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that "in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus." The researchers also analyzed topics of interest, ranging from physics to visual arts, for busybodies compared with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, more recently confirmed, were excluded. Editor note: This article was published on December 24, 2024, based on a study published in October, 2024.

Plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles for training. They further accuse the company of concealing its actions by stripping copyright information and torrenting the data. TechCrunch reports: In newly unredacted documents filed (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta's testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of a data set called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a "links aggregator," provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.

According to Meta's testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs' counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta's Llama models despite concerns within Meta's AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a "data set we know to be pirated," and flagging that its use "may undermine [Meta's] negotiating position with regulators." The filing also cites a memo to Meta AI decision-makers noting that after "escalation to MZ," Meta's AI team "[was] approved to use LibGen." (MZ, here, is rather obvious shorthand for "Mark Zuckerberg.")

The details seemingly line up with reporting from The New York Times last April, which suggested that Meta cut corners to gather data for its AI. At one point, Meta was hiring contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of books and considering buying the publisher Simon & Schuster, according to the Times. But the company's execs determined that it would take too long to negotiate licenses and reasoned that fair use was a solid defense. The filing Wednesday contains new accusations, like that Meta might've tried to conceal its alleged infringement by stripping the LibGen data of attribution.

Research from Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University reveals a concerning correlation between micro and nanoplastic (MNP) concentrations in damaged human tissues and various health conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, and cancer. Phys.Org reports: In the study, "Mapping micro(nano)plastics in various organ systems: Their emerging links to human diseases?" published in TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, investigators collected 61 available research articles for MNP detection in human tissues, plus 840 articles on MNP toxicological mechanisms. Data came from spectroscopy, microscopy, and pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry investigations to identify polymer types in different tissues. Toxicological studies employed cell models and animal experiments to examine oxidative stress, inflammatory responses, and related signaling pathways.

The studies documented particles detected in skin, arteries, veins, thrombi, bone marrow, testes, semen, uterus, and placenta. MNPs were found in the digestive system, from saliva to feces, liver, and gallstones. Within the respiratory system, MNPs were everywhere, including lung tissue, with microscopic fibers common in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and sputum. Positive correlations emerged between particle abundance and specific disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, cervical cancer, and uterine fibroids. Toxicological tests showed possible MNP-triggered oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammatory responses, and apoptosis in various cell types, along with organ-level concerns like neurodegenerative disease onset when crossing the blood-brain barrier.

A critically important signal in the metadata discovered by the researchers was that measured levels of MNPs tended to be higher in tissues with lesions than in non-lesioned tissues. These included inflamed intestines, fibrotic lungs, or cancerous growths, suggesting a potential link between MNP buildup and local pathology. There is an intriguing "what came first, the chicken or the egg" problem with lesions having higher concentrations of MNPs. [...] In the case of "what came first, the lesion or the microplastic," it is possible that MNPs contribute to inflammation, oxidative stress, and cellular damage, which can cause or worsen tissue lesions. But it is also possible that these lesions accumulate more MNPs in already damaged tissue areas. While the current findings do not provide a direct cause-and-effect relationship, they offer good targets for further study.

Tom's Hardware reports that NATO is developing an advanced system to address the growing number of undersea cable disruptions observed in recent years. Known as HEIST (Hybrid Space-Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications), the project is designed to significantly enhance the resilience of undersea communication networks. HEIST will enable damage detection with an accuracy of one meter, facilitate rapid data rerouting through satellite networks when disruptions occur, and establish open-source protocols to foster global collaboration. From the report: Satellites are the primary backups to undersea cables, but their bandwidth is far behind physical connections. For example, Google's latest fiber-optic lines can hit 340 terabits per second. In contrast, the frequency used by most satellites -- 12 to 18GHz -- can only handle about 5 gigabits per second or about 0.0015% of the maximum throughput of Google's fiber connection.

Work is underway to upgrade satellites from radio transmissions to lasers, increasing the speed by about 40 times to 200 Gbps. Starlink already uses this technology to communicate between its satellites, while Amazon is also developing it for its own Project Kuiper. However, it still faces challenges, like poor visibility and targeting precision between the satellite and ground station.

Because this is a major NATO project, the alliance plans to open-source part of the process. Making it public would allow anyone interested to find holes and make many iterations. Gregory Falco, the NATO Country Director for HEIST, believes that this is the fastest way for the project to achieve its goals and help prevent any catastrophic loss of data transmission in case of deliberate attacks against these underwater infrastructures in international waters.

Saturday France connected a new nuclear reactor to its grid "for the first time in a quarter century..." reports Bloomberg, "adding low-carbon electricity supply at a time when a sputtering economy has made demand sluggish." The Flamanville-3 reactor — the first such addition since Civaux 2 was connected in 1999 — will join EDF's fleet of 56 reactors in France, which generate more than two-thirds of the country's electricity and are the backbone of western Europe's power system. When fully ramped up, the new unit will provide a stable source of supply, which can be particularly useful during peak hours in the winter. Increased nuclear output will also curb the use of gas-fired power stations.

France is set for record power exports in 2024 as local demand remains subdued and it keeps adding renewable capacity. Better generation from EDF's nuclear fleet is also helping keep a lid on wholesale prices, partly reversing bill increases caused by Europe's energy crisis. The Flamanville-3 reactor in the country's northwest adds 1.6 gigawatts of output, raising France overall atomic capacity to about 63 gigawatts...

Since construction started in 2007, its budget — excluding finance costs — has quadrupled to an estimated €13.2 billion ($13.9 billion). The yearslong saga has created lasting doubts about the French nuclear industry's ability to build reactors on time and on schedule — a crucial issue as it prepares to build at least six large plants in the country. EDF's ongoing work on two similar reactors in the UK has also suffered repeated delays and cost overruns, complicating the British government's effort to raise funds for the construction of another pair of EPRs.