Technology

snydeq writes: CSO Online's Evan Schuman reports on a design flaw in Microsoft Authenticator that causes it to often overwrite authentication accounts when a user adds a new one via QR scan. "But because of the way the resulting lockout happens, the user is not likely to realize the issue resides with Microsoft Authenticator. Instead, the company issuing the authentication is considered the culprit, resulting in wasted corporate helpdesk hours trying to fix an issue not of that company's making." Schuman writes: "The core of the problem? Microsoft Authenticator will overwrite an account with the same username. Given the prominent use of email addresses for usernames, most users' apps share the same username. Google Authenticator and just about every other authenticator app add the name of the issuer -- such as a bank or a car company -- to avoid this issue. Microsoft only uses the username." The flaw appears to have been in place since Authenticator was released in 2016. Users have complained about this issue in the past to no avail. In its two correspondences with Schuman, Microsoft first laid blame on users, then on issuers. Several IT experts confirmed the flaw, with one saying, "It's possible that this problem occurs more often than anyone realizes because [users] don't realize what the cause is. If you haven't picked an authentication app, why would you pick Microsoft?"

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Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed a bill into law that will significantly curb the penalties companies could face for improperly collecting and using fingerprints and other biometric data from workers and consumers. From a report: The bill passed by the legislature in May and signed by Pritzker, a Democrat, on Friday amends the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) so that companies can be held liable only for a single violation per person, rather than for each time biometric data is allegedly misused. The amendments will dramatically limit companies' exposure in BIPA cases and could discourage plaintiffs' lawyers from filing many lawsuits in the first place, management-side lawyers said. "By limiting statutory damages to a single recovery per individual ... companies in most instances will no longer face the prospect of potentially annihilative damages awards that greatly outpace any privacy harms," David Oberly, of counsel at Baker Donelson in Washington, D.C., said before the bill was signed. BIPA, a 2008 law, requires companies to obtain permission before collecting fingerprints, retinal scans and other biometric information from workers and consumers. The law imposes penalties of $1,000 per violation and $5,000 for reckless or intentional violations.

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Reeling from security and optics issues, Microsoft appears to be trying to correct its story. An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft made it clear earlier this year that it was planning to make security its top priority, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. Starting today, the software giant is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews. Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft's chief people officer, has outlined what the company expects of employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. "Everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority," says Hogan. "When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else." A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses. "Delivering impact for the Security Core Priority will be a key input for managers in determining impact and recommending rewards," Microsoft is telling employees in an internal Microsoft FAQ on its new policy. Microsoft has now placed security as one of its key priorities alongside diversity and inclusion. Both are now required to be part of performance conversations -- internally called a "Connect" -- for every employee, alongside priorities that are agreed upon between employees and their managers.

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Nvidia scraped videos from YouTube, Netflix and other online platforms to compile training data for its AI products, 404 Media reported Monday, citing internal documents. The tech giant used this content to develop various AI projects, including its Omniverse 3D world generator and self-driving car systems, the report said. Some employees expressed concerns about potential legal issues surrounding the use of such content, the report said, adding that the management assured them of executive-level approval. Nvidia defended its actions, asserting they were "in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of copyright law" and emphasizing that copyright protects specific expressions rather than facts or ideas.

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Elon Musk has reignited his legal battle against OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, by filing a new lawsuit in a California federal court. The suit, which revives a six-year-old dispute, accuses OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of breaching the company's founding principles by prioritizing commercial interests over public benefit. Musk's complaint alleges that OpenAI's multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft contradicts the original mission to develop AI responsibly for humanity's benefit. The lawsuit describes the alleged betrayal in dramatic terms, claiming "perfidy and deceit... of Shakespearean proportions." OpenAI has not yet commented on the new filing. In response to Musk's previous lawsuit, which was withdrawn seven weeks ago, the company stated its commitment to building safe artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

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CrowdStrike says that it isn't to blame for Delta Air Lines' dayslong meltdown following the tech outage caused by the cybersecurity company, and that it isn't responsible for all of the money that the carrier says it lost. From a report: In a letter responding to the airline's recent public comments and hiring of a prominent lawyer, CrowdStrike said Delta's threats of a lawsuit have contributed to a "misleading narrative" that the cybersecurity company was responsible for the airline's tech decisions and response to the outage. "Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions -- swiftly, transparently, and constructively -- while Delta did not," wrote Michael Carlinsky, an attorney at law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. The letter to Delta's legal team Sunday evening is the latest move in a growing conflict between the cybersecurity firm and the airline, which was thrown into several days of disarray following the outage. Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian said in an interview on CNBC last week that the outage cost the airline about $500 million, including lost revenue and compensation costs. The airline has alerted CrowdStrike and Microsoft that it is planning to pursue legal claims to recover its losses, and has hired litigation firm Boies Schiller Flexner to assist, according to a memo Bastian sent to Delta employees last week. CrowdStrike said Sunday that its liability is contractually capped at an amount in the "single-digit millions."

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Charles Schwab and other retail brokerage users reported outages as a global stocks selloff surged when trading in the US market opened on Monday. From a report: More than 14,000 users reported an outage at Schwab at 9:50 a.m. in New York, according to the website Downdetector. The outage comes at a time when global financial markets are experiencing a significant downturn as a widespread sell-off intensified following Friday's disappointing US employment data, which heightened concerns about a potential recession in the world's largest economy. The turbulence was particularly pronounced in Asian markets, with Japanese stocks leading the decline, while cryptocurrencies, oil prices, and European equities also suffered losses. The volatility spread to the US, where stocks plummeted at the opening bell, and the yield curve briefly inverted as investors increased their bets on imminent Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.

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OpenAI has developed a sophisticated anticheating tool for detecting AI-generated content, particularly essays and research papers, but has refrained from releasing it due to internal debates and ethical considerations, according to WSJ. This tool, which has been ready for deployment for approximately a year, utilizes a watermarking technique that subtly alters token selection in ChatGPT's output, creating an imperceptible pattern detectable only by OpenAI's technology. While boasting a 99.9% effectiveness rate for substantial AI-generated text, concerns persist regarding potential workarounds and the challenge of determining appropriate access to the detection tool, as well as its potential impact on non-native English speakers and the broader AI ecosystem.

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A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette." [T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there. Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...." Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page. In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit. Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notse that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours... "For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."

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This week America's Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against the former CEO of the startup social media site "IRL" The BBC reports: IRL — which was once considered a potential rival to Facebook — took its name from its intention to get its online users to meet up in real life. However, the initial optimism evaporated after it emerged most of IRL's users were bots, with the platform shutting in 2023... The SEC says it believes [CEO Abraham] Shafi raised about $170m by portraying IRL as the new success story in the social media world. It alleges he told investors that IRL had attracted the vast majority its supposed 12 million users through organic growth. In reality, it argues, IRL was spending millions of dollars on advertisements which offered incentives to prospective users to download the IRL app. That expenditure, it is alleged, was subsequently hidden in the company's books. IRL received multiple rounds of venture capital financing, eventually reaching "unicorn status" with a $1.17 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. But it shut down in 2023 "after an internal investigation by the company's board found that 95% of the app's users were 'automated or from bots'." TechCrunch notes it's the second time in the same week — and at least the fourth time in the past several months — that the SEC has charged a venture-backed founder on allegations of fraud... Earlier this week, the SEC charged BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji with fraud and unregistered offering of securities, claiming he used his pseudonymous online identity "DiamondHands" to avoid regulatory scrutiny while he raised over $257 million in cryptocurrency. BitClout, a buzzy crypto startup, was backed by high-profile VCs such as a16z, Sequoia, Chamath Palihapitiya's Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital. In June, the SEC charged Ilit Raz, CEO and founder of the now-shuttered AI recruitment startup Joonko, with defrauding investors of at least $21 million. The agency alleged Raz made false and misleading statements about the quantity and quality of Joonko's customers, the number of candidates on its platform and the startup's revenue. The agency has also gone after venture firms in recent months. In May, the SEC charged Robert Scott Murray and his firm Trillium Capital LLC with a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the stock price of Getty Images Holdings Inc. by announcing a phony offer by Trillium to purchase Getty Images.

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America's Defense Department has launched a project "that aims to develop machine-learning tools that can automate the conversion of legacy C code into Rust," reports the Register — with an online event already scheduled later this month for those planning to submit proposals: The reason to do so is memory safety. Memory safety bugs, such buffer overflows, account for the majority of major vulnerabilities in large codebases. And DARPA's hope [that's the Defense Department's R&D agency] is that AI models can help with the programming language translation, in order to make software more secure. "You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is 'here's some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,' cut, paste, and something comes out, and it's often very good, but not always," said Dan Wallach, DARPA program manager for TRACTOR, in a statement. "The research challenge is to dramatically improve the automated translation from C to Rust, particularly for program constructs with the most relevance...." DARPA's characterization of the situation suggests the verdict on C and C++ has already been rendered. "After more than two decades of grappling with memory safety issues in C and C++, the software engineering community has reached a consensus," the research agency said, pointing to the Office of the National Cyber Director's call to do more to make software more secure. "Relying on bug-finding tools is not enough...." Peter Morales, CEO of Code Metal, a company that just raised $16.5 million to focus on transpiling code for edge hardware, told The Register the DARPA project is promising and well-timed. "I think [TRACTOR] is very sound in terms of the viability of getting there and I think it will have a pretty big impact in the cybersecurity space where memory safety is already a pretty big conversation," he said. DARPA's statement had an ambitious headline: "Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities Once and For All." "Rust forces the programmer to get things right," said DARPA project manager Wallach. "It can feel constraining to deal with all the rules it forces, but when you acclimate to them, the rules give you freedom. They're like guardrails; once you realize they're there to protect you, you'll become free to focus on more important things." Code Metal's Morales called the project "a DARPA-hard problem," noting the daunting number of edge cases that might come up. And even DARPA's program manager conceded to the Register that "some things like the Linux kernel are explicitly out of scope, because they've got technical issues where Rust wouldn't fit." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam for sharing the news.

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In 2006 MySpace reportedly became America's most-visited web site — passing both Google and Yahoo Mail. So what happened? TribLive reports: The co-founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580 million in 2005, and that company sold it to the online advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake in 2011, which later became the ad tech firm Viant, according to SlashGear. Viant was bought by Time in 2016, which was acquired by Meredith Corporation at the end of 2017, according to The Guardian. Meredith then sold Myspace to Viant Technology LLC, which currently operates the platform, SlashGear said. During its time under Timberlake, Myspace morphed from a social media platfrom and turned over a new leaf as a music discovery site, SlashGear reported. The once booming online atmosphere has turned into a ghost town, according to The Guardian. Despite the number of people on Myspace dwindling, a handful of devoted users remains. The glory days of MySpace drew this bittersweet remembrance from TechRadar: Not everyone on the TechRadar team looks back on those early MySpace years fondly, with our US editor in chief Lance Ulanoff recalling that it "it was like peoples' brains had been turned inside out and whatever didn't stick, dropped onto the page and was represented as a GIF". Many of us do, though, remember picking our Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible.

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Late Friday Elon Musk appeared on Lex Fridman's podcast for a special eight-hour episode about Neuralink. It's already been viewed 1,702,036 times on YouTube — and resulted in this report from Reuters: Neuralink has successfully implanted in a second patient its device designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone, according to the startup's owner Elon Musk... [Musk] gave few details about the second participant beyond saying the person had a spinal cord injury similar to the first patient, who was paralyzed in a diving accident. Musk said 400 of the implant's electrodes on the second patient's brain are working. Neuralink on its website states that its implant uses 1,024 electrodes... Musk said he expects Neuralink to provide the implants to eight more patients this year as part of its clinical trials. Neuralink's device "has allowed the first patient to play video games, browse the internet, post on social media and move a cursor on his laptop," according to the article: The first patient, Noland Arbaugh, was also interviewed on the podcast, along with three Neuralink executives, who gave details about how the implant and the robot-led surgery work. Before Arbaugh received his implant in January, he used a computer by employing a stick in his mouth to tap the screen of a tablet device. Arbaugh said with the implant he now can merely think about what he wants to happen on the computer screen, and the device makes it happen... Arbaugh has improved on his previous world record for the speed at which he can control a cursor with thoughts alone "with only roughly 10, 15% of the electrodes working," Musk said on the podcast. Fridman said his interview with Musk was "the longest podcast I've ever done," calling their conversation "fascinating, super technical, and wide-ranging... I loved every minute of it."

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix: The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July... Notable new software work includes getting the Simple HTTP Server running as the first web (HTTP) server for the platform. Simple HTTP Server itself is written in Rust as well. There is also an ongoing effort to bring the Apache HTTP server to Redox OS too. Another app milestone is the wget program now working on Redox OS. There's also been more work on getting the COSMIC desktop apps working on Redox OS, build system improvements, and other changes.

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America's Senate "overwhelmingly passed major online safety reforms to protect children on social media, reports the Guardian. "But with ongoing pushback from the tech industry and freedom of speech organizations, the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House." "It's a terrible idea to let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online," freedom of speech group the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of the Senate's passage of Kosa... Advocates of Kosa reject these critiques, noting the bill has been revised to address many of those concerns — including shifting enforcement from attorneys general to the federal trade commission and focusing the "duty of care" provisions on product design features of the site or app rather than content specifically. A number of major LGBTQ+ groups dropped their opposition to the legislation following these changes, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and the Trevor Project. After passing the Senate this week, the bill has now moved onto the House, which is on a six-week summer recess until September. Proponents are now directing their efforts towards House legislators to turn the bill into law. Joe Biden has indicated he would sign it if it passes. In a statement Tuesday encouraging the House to pass the legislation, the US president said: "We need action by Congress to protect our kids online and hold big tech accountable for the national experiment they are running on our children for profit...." House speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has expressed support for moving forward on Kosa and passing legislation this Congress, but it's unclear if he will bring the bill up in the House immediately. Some experts say the bill is unlikely to be passed in the House in the form passed by the Senate. "Given the concerns about potential censorship and the possibility of minors' lacking access to vital information, pausing KOSA makes eminent sense," said Gautam Hans, associate clinical professor of law and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell Law School. He added that the House may put forward its own similar legislation instead, or modify KOSA to further address some of these concerns. The political news site Punchbowl News also noted this potentially significant quote: A House GOP leadership aide told us this about KOSA: "We've heard concerns across our Conference and the Senate bill cannot be brought up in its current form." TechDirt argues that "Senator Rand Paul's really excellent letter laying out the reasons he couldn't support the bill may have had an impact." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the news.

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Seattle is the smartest city in America, with Miami and then Austin close behind. That's according to a promotional study from smart-building tools company ProptechOS. Newsweek reports: The evaluation of tech infrastructure and connectivity was based on several factors, including the number of free Wi-Fi hot spots, the quantity and density of AI and IoT companies, average broadband download speeds, median 5G coverage per network provider, and the number of airports. Meanwhile, green infrastructure was assessed based on air quality, measured by exposure to PM2.5, tiny particles in the air that can harm health. Other factors include 10-year changes in tree coverage, both loss and gain; the number of electric vehicle charging points and their density per 100,000 people; and the number of LEED-certified green buildings. The tech job market was evaluated on the number of tech jobs advertised per 100,000 people. Seattle came in first after assessing 16 key indicators across connectivity/infrastructure, sustainability, and tech jobs — "boasting 34 artificial intelligence companies and 13 Internet of Things companies per 100,000 residents." In terms of sustainability, Seattle has enhanced its tree coverage by 13,700 hectares from 2010 to 2020 and has established the equivalent of 10 electric vehicle charging points per 100,000 residents. Seattle has edged out last year's top city, Austin, to claim the title of the smartest city in the U.S., with an overall score of 75.7 out of 100. Miami wasn't far behind, achieving a score of 75.4. However, Austin still came out on top for smart city infrastructure, scoring 86.2 out of 100. This is attributed to its high broadband download speed of 275.60 Mbps — well above the U.S. average of 217.14 Mbps — and its concentration of 337 AI companies, or 35 per 100,000 people. You can see the full listings here. The article notes that the same study also ranked Paris as the smartest city in Europe — slipping ahead of London — thanks to Paris's 99.5% 5G coverage, plus "the second-highest number of AI companies in Europe and the third-highest number of free Wi-Fi hot spots. Paris is also recognized for its traffic management systems, which monitor noise levels and air quality." Newsweek also shares this statement from ProptechOS's founder/chief ecosystem officer. "Advancements in smart cities and future technologies such as next-generation wireless communication and AI are expected to reduce environmental impacts and enhance living standards." In April CNBC reported on an alternate list of the smartest cities in the world, created from research by the World Competitiveness Center. It defined smart cities as "an urban setting that applies technology to enhance the benefits and diminish the shortcomings of urbanization for its citizens." And CNBC reported that based on the list, "Smart cities in Europe and Asia are gaining ground globally while North American cities have fallen down the ranks... Of the top 10 smart cities on the list, seven were in Europe." Here are the top 10 smart cities, according to the 2024 Smart City Index. - Zurich, Switzerland - Oslo, Norway - Canberra, Australia - Geneva, Switzerland - Singapore - Copenhagen, Denmark - Lausanne, Switzerland - London, England - Helsinki, Finland - Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Notably, for the first time since the index's inception in 2019, there is an absence of North American cities in the top 20... The highest ranking U.S. city this year is New York City which ranked 34th, followed by Boston at 36th and Washington DC, coming in at 50th place.

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A new type of antibiotic "targets bacteria in two ways," writes SciTechDaily, which "could make it 100 million times harder for bacteria to develop resistance, according to recent research from the University of Illinois Chicago." Their experiments demonstrate that [a class of synthetic drugs called] macrolones can work two different ways — either by interfering with protein production or corrupting DNA structure. Because bacteria would need to implement defenses to both attacks simultaneously, the researchers calculated that drug resistance is nearly impossible. "The beauty of this antibiotic is that it kills through two different targets in bacteria," said Alexander Mankin, distinguished professor of pharmaceutical sciences at UIC. "If the antibiotic hits both targets at the same concentration, then the bacteria lose their ability to become resistant via the acquisition of random mutations in any of the two targets." Macrolones are synthetic antibiotics that combine the structures of two widely used antibiotics with different mechanisms. Macrolides, such as erythromycin, block the ribosome, the protein manufacturing factories of the cell. Fluoroquinolones, such as ciprofloxacin, target a bacteria-specific enzyme called DNA gyrase.... "The main outcome from all of this work is the understanding of how we need to go forward," Mankin said. "And the understanding that we're giving to chemists is that you need to optimize these macrolones to hit both targets." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a new open-source software tool called Dioptra for testing the resilience of machine learning models to various types of attacks. "Key features that are new from the alpha release include a new web-based front end, user authentication, and provenance tracking of all the elements of an experiment, which enables reproducibility and verification of results," a NIST spokesperson told SC Media: Previous NIST research identified three main categories of attacks against machine learning algorithms: evasion, poisoning and oracle. Evasion attacks aim to trigger an inaccurate model response by manipulating the data input (for example, by adding noise), poisoning attacks aim to impede the model's accuracy by altering its training data, leading to incorrect associations, and oracle attacks aim to "reverse engineer" the model to gain information about its training dataset or parameters, according to NIST. The free platform enables users to determine to what degree attacks in the three categories mentioned will affect model performance and can also be used to gauge the use of various defenses such as data sanitization or more robust training methods. The open-source testbed has a modular design to support experimentation with different combinations of factors such as different models, training datasets, attack tactics and defenses. The newly released 1.0.0 version of Dioptra comes with a number of features to maximize its accessibility to first-party model developers, second-party model users or purchasers, third-party model testers or auditors, and researchers in the ML field alike. Along with its modular architecture design and user-friendly web interface, Dioptra 1.0.0 is also extensible and interoperable with Python plugins that add functionality... Dioptra tracks experiment histories, including inputs and resource snapshots that support traceable and reproducible testing, which can unveil insights that lead to more effective model development and defenses. NIST also published final versions of three "guidance" documents, according to the article. "The first tackles 12 unique risks of generative AI along with more than 200 recommended actions to help manage these risks. The second outlines Secure Software Development Practices for Generative AI and Dual-Use Foundation Models, and the third provides a plan for global cooperation in the development of AI standards." Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: [I]t might be worth spending more to get a panel that converts more of the incoming sunlight to electricity, since it allows you to get more out of the price paid to get each panel installed. But silicon panels are already pushing up against physical limits on efficiency. Which means our best chance for a major boost in panel efficiency may be to combine silicon with an additional photovoltaic material. Right now, most of the focus is on pairing silicon with a class of materials called perovskites. Perovskite crystals can be layered on top of silicon, creating a panel with two materials that absorb different areas of the spectrum — plus, perovskites can be made from relatively cheap raw materials. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to make perovskites that are both high-efficiency and last for the decades that the silicon portion will. Lots of labs are attempting to change that, though. And two of them reported some progress this week, including a perovskite/silicon system that achieved 34 percent efficiency. One team of researchers "sent a sample to a European test lab, which came out with an efficiency of 33.7 percent," Ars Technica notes. "The researchers have a few ideas that should boost this to 35 percent, but didn't attempt them for this paper. "For comparison, the maximum efficiency for silicon alone is in the area of 27 percent, so that represents a very significant boost and is one of the highest perovskite/silicon combinations ever reported."

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"Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap," writes Decrypt.co. "Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it" on America's Security and Exchange Commission "in a novel lawsuit — and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again." Over and again, the SEC has sued cherry-picked NFT projects it says qualify as unregistered securities — but never once has the regulator defined what types of NFT projects are legal and which are not, casting a chill over the nascent industry... [In 2019] Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn't a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye — not then, and not after several more self-incriminating correspondences from the professor. But in due time, the agency began vigorously pursuing, and suing, NFT projects. So 10 months ago, Jonathan Mann — who writes a new song every day and shares it online — crafted a song titled "This Song is A Security." As a seller of NFTs himself, Mann wrote the song "to fight back against the SEC, and defend his right — plus the rights of other artists like him — to earn revenue," according to the article: Frye, who'd practically been salivating for such an opportunity for half a decade, was a natural fit.... In the lawsuit filed against the SEC in Louisiana earlier this week, they challenged the SEC's standing to regulate their NFT-backed artworks as securities, and demanded the agency declare that their respective art projects do not constitute illegal, unregistered securities offerings. More from the International Business Times: The complaint asked the court to clarify whether the SEC should regulate art and whether artists were supposed to "register" their artworks before selling the pieces to the general public. The complaint also asked whether artists should be "forced to make public disclosures about the 'risks' of buying their art," and whether artists should be "required to comply" with federal securities laws... The Blockchain Association, a collective crypto group that includes some of the biggest digital asset firms, asserted that the SEC has no authority over NFT art. "We support the plaintiffs in their quest for legal clarity," the group said. In an interview with Slashdot, Mann says he started his "Song a Day" project almost 17 years ago (when he was 26 years old) — and his interest in NFTs is sincere: "Over the years, I've always sought a way to make Song A Day sustainable financially, through video contests, conference gigs, ad revenue, royalties, Patreon and more. "When I came across NFTs in 2017, they didn't have a name. We just called them 'digital collectibles'. For the last 2+ years, NFTs have become that self-sustaining model for my work. "I know most people believe NFTs are a joke at best and actively harmful at worst. Even most people in the crypto community have given up on them. Despite all that, I still believe they're worth pursuing. "Collecting an NFT from an artist you love is the most direct way to support them. There's no multinational corporation, no payment processor, and no venture capitalists between you and the artist you want to support." Slashdot also tracked down the SEC's Office of Public Affairs, and got an official response from SEC public affairs specialist Ryan White. Slashdot: The suit argues that the SEC's approach "threatens the livelihoods of artists and creators that are simply experimenting with a novel, fast-growing technology," and seeks guidance in the face of a "credible threat of enforcement". Is the SEC going to respond to this lawsuit? And if you don't have an answer at this time, can you give me a general comment on the issues and concerns being raised? SEC Public Affairs Specialist Ryan White: We would decline comment. Decrypt.co points out that the lawsuit "has no guarantee of offering some conclusive end to the NFT regulation question... That may only come with concrete legislation or a judgment by the Supreme Court." But Mann's song still makes a very public show out of their concerns — with Mann even releasing a follow-up song titled "I'm Suing the SEC." (Its music video mixes together wacky clips of Mila Kunis's Stoner Cats and Fonzie jumping a shark with footage of NFT critics like Elizabeth Warren and SEC chairman Gary Gensler.) And an earlier song also used auto-tune to transform Gensler's remarks about cryptocurrencies into the chorus of a song titled "Hucksters, Fraudsters, Scam Artists, Ponzi Schemes". Mann later auctioned an NFT of the song — for over $3,000 in Ethereum.

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