The recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology in UK has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country. From a report: In a move critics have dubbed an "outrageous conflict of interest," Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joined Facewatch as a non-executive director. Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, with Companies House records showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November.

Campaigners claim this might mean he was negotiating his Facewatch contract while in post, and have urged the advisory committee on business appointments to investigate if it may have "compromised his work in public office." It is understood that the committee is currently considering the issue. Facewatch uses biometric cameras to check faces against a watch list and, despite widespread concern over the technology, has received backing from the Home Office, and has already been introduced in hundreds of high-street shops and supermarkets.

"The machines in the facility waft air towards a water-based solvent," reports the Times of London, "which carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into. An electrical current then separates those compounds from the solvent, creating a pure stream of CO2."

More details from Sky News: The UK's first-ever direct air capture plant has been turned on to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into jet fuel. The machine, developed by Mission Zero Technologies in partnership with the University of Sheffield, will run on solar power to recover 50 tonnes of CO2 from the air per year and turn it into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)...

Aviation accounts for about 2% of the world's emissions and Ihab Ahmed, research associate from the University of Sheffield, said the fuel has the capacity to massively reduce the impact of aviation on the environment — and is an important step towards the government's ambitious target to increase the use of SAF to at least 10% by 2030.
America opened its first carbon-capture facility in November in a warehouse in California. While the carbon isn't converted into sustainable air fuel, it can capture a maximum of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT: The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the world's first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder. The new medicine, called Casgevy, is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. Its authorization is a scientific triumph for the technology that can efficiently and precisely repair DNA mutations -- ushering in a new era of genetic medicines for inherited diseases.

In a clinical trial, Casgevy was shown to eliminate recurrent episodes of debilitating pain caused by sickle cell, which afflicts approximately 100,000 people in the U.S., a vast majority of whom are Black. The therapy, whose scientific name is exa-cel, is described as a potential cure because the genetic fix enabled by CRISPR is designed to last a lifetime, although confirmation will require years of follow-up. The FDA decision comes three weeks after regulators in the U.K. were the first to clear the drug. Approval in the European Union is expected next year. The FDA is also expected to rule on exa-cel as a treatment for beta thalassemia, another inherited blood disorder, by March 30.

The FDA on Friday also approved another sickle cell treatment, a gene therapy from Bluebird Bio called Lyfgenia. Patients will now have the option of two cutting-edge therapies that provide potentially curative benefits. Scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna published their first CRISPR paper just over a decade ago. In 2020, the research won the pair a Nobel Prize. Reflecting on the approval of Casgevy, Charpentier told STAT via email that she was "excited and pleased" for what it means for patients and their families.

Amazon sued what it called an international ring of thieves who swiped millions of dollars in merchandise from the company through a series of refund scams that included buying products on Amazon and seeking refunds without returning the goods. From a report: An organization called REKK advertised its refund services on social media sites, including Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court in the state of Washington.

The lawsuit names REKK and nearly 30 people from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants in the scheme, which involved hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees to approve reimbursements. REKK charged customers, who wanted to get pricey items like MacBook Pro laptops and car tires without paying for them, a commission based on the value of the purchase. "The defendants' scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund," Amazon said in its lawsuit.

The biggest UK mobile phone operators could face total damages of $4.15 billion following class-action claims that they allegedly charged 5 million existing customers "loyalty penalties" over a 16-year period. From a report: Claimant lawyers say they filed court documents at the Competition Appeals Tribunal against Vodafone, EE, Three UK and O2 last week. The claims accuse the phone companies of overcharging on as many as 28.2 million contracts by not reducing the amount customers had to pay after their minimum terms expired, despite them having effectively paid off their mobile devices.

The claim consists of individual lawsuits against each company, with damages sought of up to $1.76 billion from Vodafone, up to $1.38 billion from EE, up to $637.8 million from Three, and up to $322 million from O2. Claimant lawyers at Charles Lyndon, a law firm, estimate that up to 4.8 million people could be affected. If the case is successful, someone who held a contract with one of the mobile operators could receiveÂup to $2,293. The claims are on an "opt-out" basis, which means all qualifying customers will be automatically included in the claim unless they make a choice not to join.

Data breaches and ransomware attacks are getting worse. Some 2.6 billion personal records have been exposed in data breaches over the past two years and that number continues to grow, according to a new report commissioned by Apple. From a report: Apple says the escalating intrusions, combined with increases in ransomware means the tech industry needs to move toward greater use of encryption. According to the report, prepared by MIT professor emeritus Stuart E. Madnick:

1. Data breaches in the US through the first nine months of the year are already 20% higher than for all of 2022.
2. Nearly 70 percent more ransomware attacks were reported through September 2023, than in the first three quarters of 2022.
3. Americans and those in the UK topped the list of those most targeted in ransomware attacks in 2023, followed by Canada and Australia. Those four countries accounted for nearly 70% of reported ransomware attacks.
4. One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

The UK's antitrust watchdog is considering whether Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership should be called in for a merger probe. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Friday it was seeking views from interested parties to comment on whether the two firms recent collaboration could result in competition issues in the UK. The move from the UK watchdog comes less than two months since it eventually approved Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI, having invested $13 billion into the startup so far. The software giant has incorporated several of OpenAI's products into its suite of enterprise tools, and the startup spends considerable amounts on Microsoft's cloud services. The CMA said it will look at whether the the balance of power between the two firms has fundamentally shifted to give one side more control or influence over the other. When asked to comment on the CMA's move a spokesperson at the European Commission said the regulator had been "following very closely the situation of control over OpenAI."

The UK accused Russia's main intelligence agency of seeking to hack the emails of British politicians and officials in an attempt to interfere in its democratic processes. From a report: "They have been targeting high-profile individuals and entities with a clear intent: using information they obtained to meddle in British politics," Foreign Office minister Leo Docherty told the House of Commons on Thursday. The intrusions include targeting personal email accounts and impersonation attempts against universities and media organizations, according to Docherty. Civil servants and journalists have also been targeted by Russia's Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, he said.

In November, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre warned that Russian and other state-sponsored hackers posed an "enduring and significant threat" to the country. The agency said that Russia was one of the most prolific state actors in cybercrime, and had dedicated substantial resources to conducting hacking operations internationally.

Launched in the Nordics, BeneLux, Ireland, and the UK, the ads insist that HP printers are "made to be less hated." From a report: Which may come as news to HP's long-suffering users who still, for whatever reason, need to brand mushed-up trees with corporate nonsense despite this alleged digital age. The three ads run touch upon a spectrum of negative emotions that will be highly relatable to those who have ever tried to print something at home or work -- sorrow, anger, despair -- and all end with extreme and cathartic human-on-printer violence.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sellafield, Europe's most hazardous nuclear site, has a worsening leak from a huge silo of radioactive waste that could pose a risk to the public, the Guardian can reveal. Concerns over safety at the crumbling building, as well as cracks in a reservoir of toxic sludge known as B30, have caused diplomatic tensions with countries including the US, Norway and Ireland, which fear Sellafield has failed to get a grip of the problems. The leak of radioactive liquid from one of the "highest nuclear hazards in the UK" -- a decaying building at the vast Cumbrian site known as the Magnox swarf storage Silo (MSSS) -- is likely to continue to 2050. That could have "potentially significant consequences" if it gathers pace, risking contaminating groundwater, according to an official document. Cracks have also developed in the concrete and asphalt skin covering the huge pond containing decades of nuclear sludge, part of a catalogue of safety problems at the site. These concerns have emerged in Nuclear Leaks, a year-long Guardian investigation into problems spanning cyber hacking, radioactive contamination and toxic workplace culture at the vast nuclear dump. "We are proud of our safety record at Sellafield and we are always striving to improve," said a Sellafield spokesperson in a statement. "The nature of our site means that until we complete our mission, our highest hazard facilities will always pose a risk. We continuously measure and report on nuclear, radiological, and conventional safety. Employees are empowered to raise issues and challenge when things aren't right."

Amazon has told Britain's antitrust authority its rival Microsoft uses business practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market, the second major company to criticise the U.S. tech giant's operations. From a report: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the country's cloud computing industry in October, following a referral from media regulator Ofcom that highlighted Amazon and Microsoft's dominance of the market.

In a letter published on the CMA's website on Tuesday, Amazon said changes to Microsoft's terms of services had made it difficult for customers to switch to alternative cloud providers, or run competitors' services alongside. "To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said. "This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla's Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the 'fox's auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government's many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a "2% rule" from its British counterpart: "... we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov." (Firefox's market share was 2.2%, per the traffic for the previous ninety days.)

[...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling:

1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore.
2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.

Jon Porter reports via The Verge: UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users' ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act. Although the law gives sites the choice of how they keep out underage users, the regulator is publishing a list of measures they'll be able to use to comply. These include having a bank or mobile network confirm that a user is at least 18 years old (with that user's consent) or asking a user to supply valid details for a credit card that's only available to people who are 18 and older. The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year's time.

Ofcom lists six age verification methods in today's draft guidelines. As well as turning to banks, mobile networks, and credit cards, other suggested measures include asking users to upload photo ID like a driver's license or passport, or for sites to use "facial age estimation" technology to analyze a person's face to determine that they've turned 18. Simply asking a site visitor to declare that they're an adult won't be considered strict enough. Once the duties come into force, pornography sites will be able to choose from Ofcom's approaches or implement their own age verification measures so long as they're deemed to hit the "highly effective" bar demanded by the Online Safety Act. The regulator will work with larger sites directly and keep tabs on smaller sites by listening to complaints, monitoring media coverage, and working with frontline services. Noncompliance with the Online Safety Act can be punished with fines of up to [$22.7 million] or 10 percent of global revenue (whichever is higher).

The guidelines being announced today will eventually apply to pornography sites both big and small so long as the content has been "published or displayed on an online service by the provider of the service." In other words, they're designed for professionally made pornography, rather than the kinds of user-generated content found on sites like OnlyFans. That's a tricky distinction when the two kinds often sit together side by side on the largest tube sites. But Ofcom will be opening a consultation on rules for user-generated content, search engines, and social media sites in the new year, and Whitehead suggests that the both sets of rules will come into effect at around the same time.

The UK's most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, the Guardian can reveal. From the report: The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found. The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first detected as far back as 2015, when experts realised sleeper malware -- software that can lurk and be used to spy or attack systems -- had been embedded in Sellafield's computer networks.

It is still not known if the malware has been eradicated. It may mean some of Sellafield's most sensitive activities, such as moving radioactive waste, monitoring for leaks of dangerous material and checking for fires, have been compromised. Sources suggest it is likely foreign hackers have accessed the highest echelons of confidential material at the site, which sprawls across 6 sq km (2 sq miles) on the Cumbrian coast and is one of the most hazardous in the world.

The free open-source text editor Notepad++ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, the blog OMG! Ubuntu reported this week, "with a new release filled with some neat new features." In Notepad++ 8.6 (the 238th release since 2003, for those keeping count) the Windows-based code tool [which can also be used on Linux] adds to its extensive feature set with an improved multi-edit feature.

A few 3rd-party Notepad++ plugins have offered similar functionality for a while, including BetterMultiSelection. And a bug report requesting to ability to "transform the column mode to multi-caret on HOME/END/Arrow keys" led to this native addition.
Their blog post includes an animated GIF of Notepad++ multi-edit in action.

"You can install Notepad++ on Ubuntu straight from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app (it's a Snap Store). Alternatively, install the Windows build via WINE/CrossOver or, if you got the l33t skillz, build it by hand, from source."

Today is the 20th anniversary of its last flight of the supersonic Concorde aircraft. It was faster than the speed of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h).

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph: As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound." Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds — were in pursuit of the same goal.

It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn't run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft — including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union.
The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4.

The Telegraph adds: With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn't entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something — or someone — at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. "We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn't have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters," Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union's competing effort did.

"There was one chap working there... He used to stay behind, he'd do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs..." Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man — he thinks his name was George — was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. "It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought... 'Ah'."

Paul Kunert reports via The Register: Adobe's $20 billion buy of web-first design collaboration start-up Figma will harm software developers if it goes ahead as proposed, according to a provisional ruling on the merger by Britain's competition regulator. The Competition and Markets Authority launched a deeper investigation of the tie-up in July when it classified Figma as an "emerging threat to Adobe." Now in the latest twist, the regulator says it found the merger would eliminate one of two major players in three software sub-markets: product design; image editing; and illustration.

Figma's tools are used by well-known businesses that are key to the success of the digital economy, the CMA reckons, including Airbnb, Patagonia and Vodafone. Approving the acquisition "would remove the constraint Adobe exerts on Figma through its product design software, AdobeXD." The CMA adds in its report: "The inquiry group also provisionally concluded that Adobe abandoned development of new product design software which could have competed even more closely with Figma and, given the timing of the decision, did this as a consequence of the merger. "This supports the CMA's concern that this proposed deal would likely reduce innovation and the development of competitive new products." Some software developers are worried that Adobe would up the price of Figma's subsciption post merger, something Figma denied would happen.

As for image editing and illustration software, the "threat posed" by Figma has fueled product development of Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator applications, including web versions, and this dynamic would be altered by the merger. "This competition would be lost as a result of the transaction, harming designers and creative agencies who might have used these new tools or relied on future updates," the CMA's report adds. The nature of the ruling is provisions., and the CMA will now consult of them and consider potential remedies "which could include blocking the deal outright."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new era of medical discoveries, treatments and cures is on the horizon, researchers say, following the announcement that an unprecedented trove of genetic information is to be made available to scientists. Health researchers from around the world can now apply to study the whole genomes of half a million people enrolled in UK Biobank, a biomedical research project that has compiled detailed health and lifestyle records on individuals since it began 20 years ago. The move on Thursday amounts to the largest number of whole-genome sequences ever released for medical research. The sequences will be used with UK Biobank's records and other data to delve deeply into the genetics of everything -- from people's risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions, to individuals' sleep and exercise patterns.

Researchers believe the new data will allow them to calculate people's individual risk scores for a raft of cancers and other diseases, and so work out who could benefit most from early screening. They should also gain a deeper understanding of serious genetic conditions such as Huntington's and motor neurone disease, which have often been studied in small numbers of severely affected patients. Health experts from academia, the government, industry and charities can apply for access though they have to be approved and study the genomes through a protected database stripped of identifying details such as names, addresses, birth dates, and GP information. "Until 2021 scientists could study only about 1% of the DNA of UK Biobank volunteers -- the fraction that encodes proteins," notes the report. "Since then, whole genomes have been released for 200,000 participants, but work continued to sequence all of the 500,000 volunteers."

"With that number of whole genomes in hand, researchers will be able to find much rarer genes which drive diseases, including those that behave like switches and turn other genes on and off."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster's name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed especially for that computer. Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms. BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS. Desktop versions of the programming environment feature a BASIC editor that has syntax coloring for ease of use, along with luxury features like search and replace that weren't always available at the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, the smartphone versions feature a simplified interface designed to work better in a touchscreen environment.

It's weird to see, but BBC Basic can actually do some interesting stuff given the power of modern hardware. It can address up to 256 MB of memory, and work with far more advanced graphical assets than would ever have been possible on the original BBC Micro. If you honed your programming skills on that old metal, you might be impressed with what they can achieve with BBC Basic in a new, more powerful context.

The first transatlantic flight by a commercial airliner fully powered by "sustainable" jet fuel has taken off from London Heathrow. From a report: Tuesday's Virgin Atlantic flight, partly funded by the UK government, has been hailed by the aviation industry and ministers as a demonstration of the potential to significantly cut net carbon emissions from flying, although scientists and environmental groups are extremely sceptical. Airlines have previously flown on a blend of up to 50% of alternative fuels, called sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and flight VS100 is operating under special dispensation with no paying passengers, using fuel made mostly from tallow and other waste products.

One of those onboard, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, said: "Today's 100% SAF-powered flight shows how we can decarbonise transport both now and in the future, cutting lifecycle emissions by 70% and inspiring the next generation of solutions." Rishi Sunak said the flight was "a major milestone towards making air travel more environmentally friendly and decarbonising our skies." Virgin Atlantic said the flight to New York would show that SAF was a safe replacement for normal kerosene jet fuel. The Virgin Atlantic founder and president, Sir Richard Branson, also onboard, said: "The world will always assume something can't be done, until you do it."