An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Imagine being able to see the components of a potentially dangerous situation in live 3D and in fine detail without even having to survey the area,' says Brian Goddin, from the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center public affairs, in a video produced by the military. [...] Putting lidar on drones and on ground robots gives the military a way to map the interior of a building with a machine. With that lidar data transmitted to the computers in a command center, or even just the tablet of an operator sitting outside the building, a human can see what the robot sees, and direct the robot accordingly. (In the civilian world, lidar sensors are commonly used on self-driving cars as one tool for the vehicles to perceive the world around them.) Goddin's presentation, released online December 9, 2021, shows lidar mounted on Spot, the Boston Dynamics dog-shaped robot. Ghost Robotics Q-UGV machines, also dog-shaped and sensor-rich, have been used to patrol the perimeter of Tyndall AFB, making Spot the second breed (or brand) of robot dog to serve the needs of the base.

While all of this mapping at Tyndall is happening in the wake of Hurricane Michael, creating a virtual 3D model of the buildings as they stand can guide future repair. Such a virtual model is a useful tool for regular maintenance and repair, and it provides a record of a prior state should disaster strike again. Such techniques could also allow better investigations of failure after the fact. By comparing lidar scans of downed or wrecked craft to those before launch, and to surviving aircraft that made it back from a fight, the Air Force could understand how to better make more durable craft. Scanning a wrecked plane with lidar also lets rescue workers and recovery teams know if and how they should act to save pilots and passengers, suggested Javier Rodriguez, a technician stationed at Tyndall.

According to journalist Liam Robertson, Nintendo had plans to release a Game Boy accessory called the PageBoy that would've used radio transmission technology "to let Game Boy Color owners search for information and read international news, game magazines, weather reports, sports scores, and even, most ambitiously, watch live television," reports Kotaku. "This tech would also allow users to contact and message other PageBoy owners. This radio transmission technology at the time was heavily used by pagers, which is actually where the PageBoy name came from." From the report: In a video out [yesterday], Roberston revealed a whole bunch of details and images of the proposed device for the first time. [...] Roberston spoke to some folks who worked on the PageBoy project with Nintendo about the device and how it came to be and what ultimately killed it before it saw the light of day. According to those involved, after a meeting with Nintendo of America in 1999, the company was excited about the potential for the PageBoy, and for the next three years, Nintendo worked with Wizard -- a group created to help manage the device -- to see if this add-on could actually be created and if it would end up being profitable.

While Nintendo was impressed by many of PageBoy's features, including the ability to send images using the Game Boy camera and even the potential for Nintendo to send live videos to PageBoy owners via the radio transmission tech, it ran into a major roadblock. The device relied on radio networks that only existed in a select few parts of the world, like the United States, greatly limiting the device's customer base. According to Robertson, he was told that Nintendo believed the key to Game Boy's success was how universal the hardware was, allowing users around the world to play the same games with the same features. So, because of this, Nintendo reportedly canceled the project in July 2002. However, as pointed out by Roberston, many of the ideas proposed by Wizard for the PageBoy would end up becoming a reality in the years that followed.

Apple has reportedly hired Andrea Schubert, Meta's communications and public relations lead for its augmented reality (AR) products, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter. The Verge reports: Schubert's LinkedIn page indicates that she's been working for Meta for nearly six years. "Meta, with Oculus, has been the market leader in headsets, so such a hire makes sense as Apple nears its launch," Gurman explains. On both Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, Meta's Oculus Quest 2 was one of the top-selling products. Not to mention that Meta's Oculus app topped the App Store in the US on Christmas Day, and became the number one free app on the Google Play store today, a potential sign that a significant amount of people received the headset as a gift this holiday. According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company's AR headset could launch sometime in 2022, featuring 8K displays and "Mac-level" computing power. It may also cost a whopping $3,000 and be geared largely for developers at launch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Growing tensions between Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple lie behind the death of the Internet Association (IA), the nine-year-old lobby group that was Big Tech's voice in Washington, according to insiders and industry observers. The Washington-based group, which dubbed itself the "unified" voice of the internet industry, will shut at the end of the year after both Microsoft and Uber, among others, pulled their financial support, leaving an insurmountable funding gap. "Our industry has undergone tremendous growth and change," it said in a statement, adding that its closure was "in line with this evolution." The closure is a sign of the increasingly different policy objectives of its Big Tech members, said observers, with Microsoft in particular looking to distance itself from its Silicon Valley peers.

"Microsoft has realized that it doesn't want to be associated with Google, Facebook and Amazon," said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly campaign group. "It's really, really simple." A number of smaller tech companies had also become frustrated that their priorities were at odds with Big Tech's agenda. "This org could've saved itself years ago by kicking out everyone with a market cap greater than $500 billion," tweeted Luther Lowe, Yelp's head of public policy. Yelp left the association in 2019. "I made this suggestion to the leadership a few years ago, but it was shot down, so we quit."

Despite being the second most valuable US technology group, Microsoft has been able to dodge the latest focus on antitrust in Congress. Unlike the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, Microsoft's Satya Nadella was left out of the blockbuster congressional hearing in July 2020 that saw the others summoned for a lengthy grilling. Microsoft has also not yet been the focus of any action announced by President Joe Biden's reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission. The company, which went through lengthy antitrust scrutiny in the early 2000s that led it to the brink of being broken up, now boasts about a more collaborative approach with regulators. Lynn said Microsoft was keen to distance itself from its rivals because "they've been through the wringer. They don't want to have their emails read, they don't want to have to go through discovery."

Customer support has become a crowded battlefield in enterprise technology as software vendors from Microsoft to Salesforce rush to arm organizations with tools to create one-stop service centers. From a report: The attention is revitalizing the call center, a once-backwater unit that has long suffered from high turnover rates and minimal corporate investment. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Twilio and Genesys Cloud Services are among the companies that see the call center as a critical part of efforts to transform the consumer base from a sea of faceless pocketbooks to potentially millions of unique personas. It's viewed as a way to improve customer service and bolster brand loyalty at a time when businesses are increasingly worried about churn.

Zoom Video Communications was prepared to fork over $14.7 billion in stock to buy Five9 to gain a foothold in the contact center industry. But Five9 shareholders ultimately thought the price was too low and turned down the deal, a testament to just how much the sector is expected to grow in the coming years. "Instead of being a cost center, it's a lifetime value driver," said Vasili Triant, chief operating officer at UJET, a closely held San Francisco-based call center cloud software provider. As a result, "this space has drawn a lot of attention. Companies need to improve experience. Because of that, a lot of money has flown into it. When money flows into it, people see a huge opportunity."

Historically, customer support software was viewed as a money pit -- systems that were necessary to help field consumer complaints or inquiries but produced little return on investment. Many businesses simply wanted to pick a product, deploy it and forget about it. As a result, the market was fragmented between just a handful of top vendors, including Genesys, Cisco Systems and Avaya. But as more companies move those systems to the internet, that mindset is undergoing a seismic shift. For the last several years, the focus has been on helping call center agents provide better customer support and cut down on service times. That has meant taking steps like consolidating different applications onto a single desktop interface, alleviating the need for agents to toggle between different tabs to view customer data stored in various places.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Motorola Razr was part of the first wave of foldable phones back in 2019, being the first to offer a clamshell form factor akin to the classic Razr feature phones. Motorola would follow up with the Razr 5G in late 2020, but Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip line had stolen its thunder by then. Now, Lenovo executive Chen Jin has revealed on Weibo that a third-generation Motorola Razr foldable is in the works. According to machine translation, the new foldable phone will have improved power, a tweaked interface, and a better appearance. It also seems like the phone could launch in China first.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an effort to restrict access to pirated ROMs illegally made available for its Switch console, Nintendo has obtained a UK High Court injunction against six internet service providers. Targeted against ROM portals with NSW2U and NSWROM branding, the two-year blocking order requires BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk and others to block the sites after they failed to respond to infringement complaints.

The California attorney general and 12 state officials have filed a lawsuit against Walmart, saying it allegedly illegally disposed of electronic and hazardous waste, compromising local landfills. From a report: California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleges in a statement the company violated state environmental laws with their practices, and the waste included materials like lithium and alkaline batteries, insect killer sprays, aerosol cans, LED lightbulbs, and more. State investigators conducted 58 inspections across 13 counties from 2015 to 2021 and said they found classified hazardous and medical waste in each store's trash compactors, as well as customer information that should have been rendered indecipherable. The California DOJ estimates that Walmart's unlawfully disposed waste totals 159,600 pounds or more than 1 million items each year. "We have met with the state numerous times to walk them through our industry-leading hazardous waste compliance programs in an effort to avoid litigation, but instead, they filed this unjustified lawsuit," Walmart spokesperson Randy Hargrove said in a statement. "The state is demanding a level of compliance regarding waste disposal from our stores of common house-hold products and other items that goes beyond what is required by law. We intend to defend this company."

For a sector historically known for its fast-forward pace of innovation, consumer technology sure did a lot of backpedaling this year. From a report: The Nasdaq CTA Internet Index is in the red this year compared with a return of more than 27% for the S&P 500. Cathie Wood's famed ARK Innovation ETF, more than 30% of which was invested in information technology as of Sept. 30, has seen its net asset value decline 21% this year, underperforming the S&P by nearly 49 percentage points. She isn't alone. If you invested in enough tech stocks this year, you probably got burned by a few of them.

Select lowlights include fitness-equipment company Peloton Interactive, down nearly 75% this year; social-commerce company Poshmark, down almost 82%; and education-tech company Chegg, down 66%. At certain points, the number of names blowing up simultaneously was dizzying: Chegg, Peloton, Zillow Group and Vimeo all took nosedives around their most-recent earnings reports, collectively erasing some $26.3 billion in market value in a single week last month. A big part of the problem was the huge run logged in stay-at-home stocks in the latter half of last year. Many of tech's 2020 darlings became duds simply by virtue of the fact that they appreciated too much too quickly. In the end, the numbers couldn't keep pace.

Ms. Wood, at least, is sticking with the strategy that failed her this year. She said in a Bloomberg interview earlier this month that she expects it to yield "a compound annual rate of return of roughly 40% over the next five years," emphasizing, "That's a quadrupling." But investors shouldn't expect all of this year's dips to lead to easy dunks next year. Zillow, for example, is down over 50% in the year to date, and while its future without iBuying looks to be a much more steadily profitable business, the online real-estate company is still worth more than twice as much today as it was in early 2019, when it went big into the automated home-flipping business. If the tech sector has to earn its gains next year, many of its stocks still face an uphill battle.

Powerful CEOs worry about their job security as much as the rest of us do -- in fact, maybe even more. From a report: An eye-popping 72% of CEOs are worried about losing their jobs due to the disruptions facing their industries, according to a new report out today from the global consulting firm AlixPartners. That figure jumped 20 percentage points compared to just a year ago, when 52% of CEOs told AlixPartners they were anxious about job security.

The frenetic pace of change in businesses and the world has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic -- leading to a spike in CEO anxiety. 94% of executives say their business models need to change within the next three years -- but 57% fear their company isn't adapting fast enough.

Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li said Jidu Auto would start mass production of its first "robot" electric vehicles (EV) in 2023. From a report: Jidu, an electric vehicle venture between China's tech giant Baidu and Chinese automaker Geely, would make EVs that are of the autonomous Level-four, which needs no human intervention, Li said at Baidu's annual developers' conference on Monday.

Edward O. Wilson, a U.S. naturalist dubbed the "modern-day Darwin" died on Sunday at the age of 92 in Massachusetts, his foundation said in a statement. From a report: Alongside British naturalist David Attenborough, Wilson was considered one of the world's leading authorities on natural history and conservation. Wilson's Half-Earth Project calls for protecting half the planet's land and sea so there are enough diverse and well-connected ecosystems to reverse the course of species extinction, which is happening at a rate not seen in 10 million years. The United Nations has urged countries to commit to conserving 30% of their land and water -- almost double the area now under some form of protection - by 2030, a target known as "30 by 30" and inspired in part by Wilson.

Born in the southern U.S. state of Alabama, Wilson's trajectory as an entomologist, someone who studies insects, was set at the age of 10, when he spent hours in the woods collecting bugs and butterflies. He went on to spend 70 years as a scientist at Harvard University, putting in time as a professor and curator in entomology. Through his career, Wilson discovered more than 400 species of ants. He said one of his greatest achievements was working out how ants communicate danger and food trails, for example, by emitting chemicals.

Politico reports: When Ford announced that starting in 2023 its cars and trucks would come with Google Maps, Assistant and Play Store preinstalled, CEO Jim Farley called the partnership between his iconic U.S. automaker and the search giant a chance to "reinvent" the automobile — making it an office-on-wheels, with more connectivity than any phone or laptop. "We were spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions every year, keeping up with basically a generic experience that was not competitive to your cellphone," Farley crowed on CNBC, announcing the six-year deal with the tech giant.... But many tech-industry watchdogs looked at the Ford-Google car of the future with different eyes. They fear that tech companies will soon be doing to cars what they did to phones: Tying their exclusive operating systems to specific products to force out competitors and dominate a huge swath of the global economy.

Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver's seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley's help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once. Now, having missed the boat as the tech giants cornered the market on smartphones, some policymakers and regulators believe the battle over connected cars represents a chance to block potential monopolies before they form.

State attorneys general who sued Google in 2020 for monopolizing online search highlighted concerns about the company's move into autonomous cars in their federal antitrust complaint. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU's competition authority has opened a probe into Google's contracts related to connected cars... While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so. "These companies have an amount of data on us that they shouldn't have, and they have a history of not using it in responsible ways," said Katharine Trendacosta of the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They have a history of going back on promises they have made about that data."

She cited Google's pledge during the DoubleClick acquisition in 2008 — which it later reneged on — not to combine data from its consumer products with that from its advertising services.
The article quotes Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, who last December complained that "When smartphones took off, Google made sure they controlled search on Apple's iPhone. They are doing the same thing on voice and connected cars. It's a similar playbook." And an executive at an automotive supplier that competes with Google tells Politico that Google is already "corralling everything through their system and controls what information is released downstream."

And Jim Heffner, a vice president at Cox Automotive Mobility, adds that "The ride is no longer the point. Data is the cornerstone. ... Apple and Google and others want to be at the epicenter of that."

A Forbes associate editor covering privacy, cybercrime, and security/surveillance reports on a recently-revealed search warrant.

Instead of investigating a photo, it asked Google to provide information on a suspect who allegedly owned graphic illegal cartoons involving children: That kind of content is potentially illegal to own under U.S. law and can be detected by Google's anti-child sexual material (CSAM) systems, a fact not previously discussed in the public domain, the warrant reveals.... Google also uses machine learning tools to look at files and analyze them for any sign they're of abused children....

As per its legal requirements, Google handed information on what it found, as well as the IP addresses used to access the images, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which then passed on the findings to the DHS Homeland Security Investigations unit. Investigators used the IP addresses provided by Google to identify the suspect as the alleged owner of the cartoons, and searched his Google account, receiving back information on emails to and from the defendant. It appears the suspect may actually be a known artist. As no charges have been filed, Forbes isn't publishing his name, but the man identified in the warrant had won several small Midwest art competitions, and one artwork from the 1990s had been mentioned in a major West Coast newspaper...

Google, meanwhile, has in recent years released transparency reports showing how many times it reports issues to NCMEC. The figures reveal a disturbing trend. In the first six months of 2021, it found more than 3.4 million pieces of potentially illegal content in 410,000 separate reports. That was up from 2.9 million in 365,000 reports in the last six months of 2020, and well over double that from January to June 2020, when 1.5 million pieces of CSAM material were discovered and reported to NCMEC in 180,000 reports...

As Google doesn't end-to-end encrypt its communications tools like Gmail or its file storage tech like Drive, it's still possible for the tech company to scan for illegal content. And as it has no plans to introduce those features, law enforcement can still rely on Google to warn NCMEC when abuse happens on its servers. Whether the majority of users will want Google to scan people's accounts so it can help find child abusers, or have improved privacy with end-to-end encryption instead, the Mountain View, California-based business will have to struggle with that balance in perpetuity. The same goes for any one of its rivals.

"Almost 5,000 flights were canceled across the world over Christmas weekend," reports NBC News, "as holiday travel plans were brought to a halt amid the rapidly spreading omicron variant of Covid-19." About 2,800 global flights were canceled on Christmas Day alone, according to flight tracker FlightAware, with some airline companies citing the spread of the new variant as the cause for the disruption...

Several major airlines, including United, Delta and Alaska, said they had been forced to cancel hundreds of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day flights after the omicron variant infected employees and crew members. United said some of its 210 cancellations Saturday were also a result of close contact situations.

With some time on their hands, long-time Slashdot reader shanen began exploring the question: How many files does my Windows 10 computer have?

But then they realized "It would also be interesting to compare the weirdness on other OSes..." Here are the two data points in front of me:

(1) Using the right click on properties for all of the top-level folders on the drive (including the so-called hidden folders), it quickly determined that there are a few hundred thousand files in those folders (and a few hundred thousand subfolders). That's already ridiculous, but the expected par these days. The largest project I have on the machine only has about 3,000 files, and that one goes back many years... (My largest database only has about 5,000 records, but it's just a few files.)

(2) However, I also decided to take a look with Microsoft's malicious software removal tool and got a completely different answer. For twisted grins, I had invoked the full scan. It's still running a day later and has already passed 10 million files. Really? The progress bar indicates about 80% finished? WTF?

Obviously there is some kind of disagreement about the nature of "file" here. I could only think of one crazy explanation, but my router answered "No, the computer is not checking all of the files on the Internet." So I've already asked the specific question in three-letter form, but the broader question is about the explosive, perhaps even cancerous, "population growth" of files these days.
Maybe we can all solve this mystery together. So use the comments to share your own answers and insights.

How many files are on your computer?

Slashdot reader Tesseractic comes bearing gifts — specifically, news of "a new image format that is lossless, gives much faster encodes, faster decodes and roughly comparable compression compared to what's in use today."

Quite OK Image format (or QOI) is the brainchild of developer Dominic Szablewski, who complains current image formats like PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4 "burst with complexity at the seams," the Register reports: "Every tiny aspect screams 'design by consortium'," he added, going on to lament the fact that most common codecs are old, closed, and "require huge libraries, are compute hungry and difficult to work with." Szablewski thought he could do better and appears to have achieved that objective by cooking up some code, floating it on GitHub, and paying attention to the 500-plus comments it generated.

While Szablewski admits that QOI will not compress images as well as an optimized PNG encoder, he claims it "losslessy compresses images to a similar size of PNG, while offering 20x-50x faster encoding and 3x-4x faster decoding." Most importantly, to Szablewski, the reference en-/decoder fits in about 300 lines of C and the file format spec requires is just one page long.

"In the last few weeks QOI implementations for lot of different languages and libraries popped up," Szablewski wrote on his blog, with Zig, Rust,Go, TypeScript, Haskell, Ä, Python, C#, Elixir, Swift, Java, and Pascal among the options.

Nasa's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has successfully extended its 4-metre boom arm to assume its operational configuration. From a report: Launched on 9 December atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, IXPE is a space observatory designed to study X-rays from black holes, neutron stars and other exotic celestial objects. To bring X-rays into focus requires a long telescope because mirrors cannot bend the highly energetic rays by large amounts. Instead they have to be coaxed into focus with a device called a grazing incidence telescope. IXPE has three of these. Each sits on the end of the boom arm and directs light into the instruments in the body of the spacecraft. By measuring the polarisation of the X-rays, IXPE will reveal information about the magnetic environment of their targets. At launch the spacecraft was roughly cubic, about 1-metre long on each side, with the 4-metre-long boom arm folded into a canister 0.3 metres in length. This allowed the IXPE to fit into the nose cone of the rocket. On 15 December, the spacecraft extended the boom. Mission personnel are now working to commission the telescope, ready for science observations to begin in the new year.

Vaclav Smil, writing at IEEE Spectrum: There is a fundamental difference between what can be designed and built and what makes sense. History provides a lesson in the shape of record-setting behemoths that have never since been equaled. The Egyptian pyramids started small, and in just a few generations, some 4,500 years ago, there came Khufu's enormous pyramid, which nobody has ever tried to surpass. Shipbuilders in ancient Greece kept on expanding the size of their oared vessels until they built, during the third century BCE, a tessarakonteres, with 4,000 oarsmen. That vessel was too heavy, too ponderous, and therefore a naval failure. And architect Filippo Brunelleschi's vast cupola for Florence's Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, built without scaffolding and finished in 1436, was never replicated.

The modern era has no shortage of such obvious overshoots. The boom in oil consumption following the Second World War led to ever-larger oil tankers, with sizes rising from 50,000 to 100,000 and 250,000 deadweight tonnes (dwt). Seven tankers exceeded 500,000 dwt, but their lives were short, and nobody has built a million-dwt tanker. Technically, it would have been possible, but such a ship would not fit through the Suez or Panama canals, and its draft would limit its operation to just a few ports. The economy-class-only configuration of the Airbus A380 airliner was certified to carry up to 853 passengers, but it has not been a success. In 2021, just 16 years after it entered service, the last plane was delivered, a very truncated lifespan. Compare it with the hardly puny Boeing 747, which will see its final delivery in 2022, 53 years after the plane's first flight, an almost human longevity. Clearly, the 747 was the right-sized record-breaker. [...] Depending on where you stand you might see all of this either as an admirable quest for new horizons (a quintessential human striving) or irrational and wasteful overreach (a quintessential human hubris).

A Russian court fined Alphabet's Google 7.2 billion rubles ($98 million) and Meta Platforms 2 billion rubles Friday for failing to remove banned content, the largest such penalties yet, as the authorities escalate a crackdown on foreign technology companies. From a report: The fines were due to the companies' repeated failure to comply with orders to take down content and based on a percentage of their annual earnings in Russia, the federal communications watchdog said in a statement. Google and Meta could face more fines if they don't remove the material, it said.

Google is studying the ruling and then will determine its next steps, the company's press service in Moscow said in a statement. Russia has stepped up its confrontation with foreign social media and internet companies this year in what the government calls a campaign to uphold its digital sovereignty. Regulators have levied fines and slowed content in a bid to force companies including Google and Twitter to delete posts encouraging unauthorized protests and other material deemed illegal.