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"It's taken over 50 years, but the solution to the Zodiac Killer's cipher has been found," writes Slashdot reader quonset. CNN reports: Dubbed the "340 cipher," the message was unraveled by a trio of code breakers -- David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician. The Zodiac Killer is most known for leaving a trail of five unsolved murders between 1968 and 1969. He was never caught, but he gained notoriety by writing letters to police and local media up until 1974, sometimes in code, boasting of the killings. Bloody bits of clothing were included with his letters as proof of his actions. He claims he killed as many as 37 people. Oranchak detailed the process for cracking the cipher on his website and in a YouTube video, where he used a specifically developed decryption software and a bit of luck to finally make the connection. The team used a unique program to sift through 650,000 variations of the message. In one, a couple of words appeared. "We got really lucky and found one that had part of the answer, but it wasn't obvious," Oranchak said, explaining that they then had to handpick their way through to decipher the rest of the message. The only disappointing part, Oranchak said, is that the missive contained no personally identifying information. Oranchak holds out no hope for solving the two remaining ciphers. He described the mission as "almost hopeless," as both are very short, with thousands of different names and phrases that could fit.

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Christopher Nolan isn't too happy with Warner Bros' decision to send all 17 of its films slated for release in 2021 to HBO Max on the same day they're released. Nolan, whose blockbuster movies for Warner Bros have made billions, called HBO Max "the worst streaming service," adding that this shift in Hollywood is "a sign of great danger for the people who work in the movie industry." NPR reports: Nolan was asked whether the move to streaming is really about the pandemic or something bigger — Netflix had more 2020 Oscar nominations than any other studio. "There is this idea that that's been sort of put forward a lot, that the pandemic is sort of accelerating a trend that was already happening," he said. "But 2019 was the biggest year ever for movies financially. That doesn't suit the narrative that the tech companies or the big corporations kind of want to put out there right now. "But the reality is there was enormous success in 2019 and 2018 wasn't bad either. If you're asking where moviegoing is going, I think the long-term health of the movie business depends on people's desire to get together and experience a story together. And I don't see any signs that that's going anywhere anytime soon." Would you agree with Nolan, or do you applaud Warner Bros' embrace of streaming?

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Friday night America's Food and Drug Administration finally authorized Pfizer and BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in the United States, reports CNN. The Verge calls it "a landmark moment in the fight to suppress a virus that has killed nearly 300,000 people in the United States and sickened tens of millions around the world." The vaccine is authorized in the U.S. for people over the age of 16. It was found to be 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials. "That is extraordinary," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a press conference at the end of November. It's far better than experts had dared hope for. The FDA was prepared to authorize a vaccine as long as it was at least 50 percent effective. "We were shocked," Pfizer's chief executive officer, Albert Bourla, told The New York Times. "We couldn't believe it." The shot appears to protect people against the most severe forms of the disease. It is also highly effective in people over the age of 65, who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Scientists will continue to monitor the vaccine after it's deployed to see how well it works in the real world.... The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine has already been authorized by regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Bahrain. The authorizations of this vaccine, which have come less than a year after development began, shatter the record for the fastest vaccine developed. The record was previously held by the mumps vaccine, which took four years.

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Earlier this week, Florida state police raided the home of Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who ran the state's coronavirus dashboard until she was fired in June. "Jones has alleged in a whistleblower lawsuit that her firing was in retaliation for her refusal to manipulate data to make the state's COVID-19 outbreak last spring appear less severe," reports Yahoo News. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis angrily defended the handling of the search warrant, saying: "Obviously, she has issues." From the report: Later, when another reporter asked about Monday's incident -- a recording of which was made by Jones and went viral on social media, drawing widespread outrage -- DeSantis grew visibly irritated. "It was not a raid," the governor said, at one point thrusting a finger and raising his voice at the reporter who asked about the Jones case. "They went, they followed protocol." He said the Gestapo comparison was especially offensive. In keeping with his Trumpian approach to politics, DeSantis also denounced the "fever swamps" of the internet -- his apparent term for mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post -- for turning Jones into a "darling" of, presumably, anti-Trump progressives. ("He threw me into the public spotlight," Jones told Yahoo News in response to that accusation. "I never wanted it.") Officers executed a search warrant on Jones's home on Monday morning, after knocking on her door for several minutes before she opened it and came outside with her hands up. Jones has said she wanted to settle her children before acknowledging the officers. It is not clear why the officers drew their weapons to go inside. They left with laptops and cellphones, which were being sought as part of an investigation into a Nov. 10 message sent to Florida Department of Health employees, encouraging them to resist DeSantis. State authorities allege that digital fingerprints indicate that Jones, who now runs a coronavirus dashboard of her own, was behind the message. Jones denies she was the author and maintains she did not have the means to access the department's emergency notification system, through which the note was sent. Users on Reddit have discovered that the emergency system would have been easy to access, and that anyone else -- not just Jones -- could have accessed the system and sent the Nov. 10 message with relative ease.

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On Thursday, Google announced a new setting that lets people limit the alcohol- and gambling-related ads they come across. Gizmodo reports: Per the announcement, the feature will first roll out for YouTube ads in the U.S., before globally expanding to ads across YouTube and Google search in "early 2021." Countries that already have legal limitations on ads in these sorts of categories -- like say, Norway or Sweden -- won't see any change in their policies as a result, Google added. Up until this point, people who saw one of these ads had the option to "mute" them, which would keep that specific ad from cropping up across Google's properties, or any of the countless web publishers that Google partners with. On top of that, it also kept users from seeing any ads that Google deemed "similar" to the ad in question, either because they looked the same, or were from the same advertiser. This new feature, Google explained, is an "extra step" that puts more choice in the user's hands. In reality, though, it's closer to something of a half-step. Google doesn't quite qualify what it means by "limiting" these ads in the blog post, but it's safe to assume that some will still slip through. That means Google could still pocket the money made from an addict being served ads for a substance or behavior they're trying to avoid, but the numbers will be "significantly reduced," according to the company. "While our intent is to be able to block all ads from a given category, there are certain ads that can be difficult to categorize," a Google spokesperson said in an email, giving the example of an ad for an airline featuring a flight attendant serving champagne. "We want to be fully transparent so we're using 'see fewer ads' rather than 'see no ads' or 'block ads' to appropriately set expectations that while significantly reduced, people may still see ads related to a selected category," the spokesperson added. "But of course, we'll continue to work to get as close as possible to blocking all ads within a selected category."

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Norman Abramson, one of the pioneers behind wireless networks, has died at 88. The cause was skin cancer that had metastasized to his lungs, his son, Mark, said. The New York Times reports: Professor Abramson's project at the University of Hawaii was originally designed to transmit data to schools on the far-flung Hawaiian islands by means of a radio channel. But the solution he and his group devised in the late 1960s and early '70s would prove widely applicable; some of their technology is still in use in today's smartphones, satellites and home WiFi networks. The technology they created allowed many digital devices to send and receive data over that shared radio channel. It was a simple approach that did not require complex scheduling of when each packet of data would be sent. If a data packet was not received, it was simply sent again. The approach was a departure from telecommunications practices at the time, but it worked. The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet. "The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated," said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On Wednesday, a Facebook data scientist departed the social networking company after a two-year stint, leaving a farewell note for their colleagues to ponder. As part of a team focused on "Violence and Incitement," they had dealt with some of the worst content on Facebook, and they were proud of their work at the company. Despite this, they said Facebook was simply not doing enough. "With so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more sisyphean than it already is," the employee wrote in their "badge post," a traditional farewell note for any departing Facebook employee. "It also makes it embarrassing to work here." Using internal Facebook data and projections to support their points, the data scientist said in their post that roughly 1 of every 1,000 pieces of content -- or 5 million of the 5 billion pieces of content posted to the social network daily -- violates the company's rules on hate speech. More stunning, they estimated using the company's own figures that, even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was "deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook." (After this article was published, Facebook VP of integrity Guy Rosen disputed the calculation, saying it "incorrectly compares views and content." The employee addressed this in their post and said it did not change the conclusion.) The sentiments expressed in the badge post are hardly new. Since May, a number of Facebook employees have quit, saying they were ashamed of the impact the company was having on the world or worried that the company's inaction in moderating hate and misinformation had led to political interference, division, and bloodshed. Another employee was fired for documenting instances of preferential treatment of influential conservative pages that repeatedly spread false information. But in just the past few weeks, at least four people involved in critical integrity work related to reducing violence and incitement, crafting policy to reduce hate speech, and tracking content that breaks Facebook's rules have left the company. In farewell posts obtained by BuzzFeed News, each person expressed concerns about the company's approach to handling US political content and hate speech, and called out Facebook leadership for its unwillingness to be more proactive about reducing hate, incitement, and false content. In the wake of the 2020 US Election, Facebook's "election integrity" team, which was charged with "helping to protect the democratic process" and reducing "the spread of viral information and fake accounts," was recently disbanded as a stand-alone unit. Company leadership also reportedly shot down a proposal from the company's integrity teams to throttle the distribution of false and misleading election content from prominent political accounts, like President Donald Trump's.

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Big tech firms such as Google and Facebook will face fines of up to 6% of turnover if they do not do more to tackle illegal content and reveal more about advertising on their platforms under draft European Union rules. Reuters reports: The EU's tough line, which is due to be announced next week, comes amid growing regulatory scrutiny worldwide of tech giants and their control of data and access to their platforms. EU digital chief Thierry Breton, who has stressed that large companies should bear more responsibility, will present the draft rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) on Dec. 15. The Commission document on the DSA seen by Reuters defines very large online platforms as those with more than 45 million users, equivalent to 10% of the EU population. Additional obligations imposed on very large platforms are necessary to address public policy concerns and the systemic risks posed by their services, the document said. The tech giants will have to do more to tackle illegal content such as hate speech and child sexual abuse material, misuse of their platforms that impinges on fundamental rights and intentional manipulation of platforms, such as using bots to influence elections and public health. The companies will be required to publish details of their online advertisers and show the parameters used by their algorithms to suggest and rank information. Independent auditors will monitor compliance, with EU countries enforcing the rules.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: At first glance, big corporations appear to be protecting great swaths of U.S. forests in the fight against climate change. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has paid almost $1 million to preserve forestland in eastern Pennsylvania. Forty miles away, Walt Disney has spent hundreds of thousands to keep the city of Bethlehem, Pa., from aggressively harvesting a forest that surrounds its reservoirs. Across the state line in New York, investment giant BlackRock has paid thousands to the city of Albany to refrain from cutting trees around its reservoirs. JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock tout these projects as an important mechanism for slashing their own large carbon footprints. By funding the preservation of carbon-absorbing forests, the companies say, they're offsetting the carbon-producing impact of their global operations. But in all of those cases, the land was never threatened; the trees were already part of well-preserved forests. Rather than dramatically change their operations -- JPMorgan executives continue to jet around the globe, Disney's cruise ships still burn oil, and BlackRock's office buildings gobble up electricity -- the corporations are working with the Nature Conservancy, the world's largest environmental group, to employ far-fetched logic to help absolve them of their climate sins. By taking credit for saving well-protected land, these companies are reducing nowhere near the pollution that they claim. [...]

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Oracle said on Friday it's moving its headquarters from the Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. CNBC reports: "Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas. We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work," a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC. A bulk of employees can choose their office location, or continue to work from home part time or full time, the company said. "In addition, we will continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world, including those in the United States such as Redwood City, Austin, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington, among others, and we expect to add other locations over time," Oracle said. "By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees' quality of life and quality of output." Oracle is one of Silicon Valley's older success stories, founded in Santa Clara in 1977. It moved into its current headquarters in 1989. Several of the buildings on its campus there are constructed in the shape of a squat cylinder, which is the classic symbol in computer systems design for a database, the product on which Oracle built its empire.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk says the biggest problem with corporate America today is that too many business school graduates are running the show. "I think that there might be too many MBAs running companies," Musk said Tuesday at the WSJ CEO Summit. This "MBA-ization of America," isn't great, Musk said, especially when it comes to product innovation. Big corporate CEOs often get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of their mission, which is to create "awesome" products or services, according to Musk. "There should be more focus on the product or service itself, less time on board meetings, less time on financials." "A company has no value in itself. It only has value to the degree that is [an] effective allocator of resources to create business services that are of a greater value than the costs of the inputs," Musk said. This thing they call "profit," Musk added, "should just mean over time that the value of the output is worth more than the inputs." Musk said the biggest mistake he has made as a leader of both Tesla and SpaceX was spending too much time in meetings looking at PowerPoints and spreadsheets, instead of being out on the factory floor. "When I go spend time on the factory floor or really using the cars or thinking about the rockets...that's where things have gone better," Musk said at the WSJ summit. He finds that if he is engrossed in the details of the issues, it boosts morale and his team is "more energized." Musk urged CEOs to "get out there on the goddamn front line and show them that you care, and that you're not just in some plush office somewhere."

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New submitter Arthur, KBE writes: Harrison Ford will be grabbing his whip and ramming on his hat for a fifth "Indiana Jones" movie, Disney has confirmed -- a mere 41 years after the first installment, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," was released. Disney said in a tweet on Friday that the movie would be produced by its production arm Lucasfilm and released in July 2022, and that "Indy himself, Harrison Ford, will be back to continue his iconic character's journey." The entertainment giant also confirmed the news in an investor presentation, saying the movie was currently in "pre-production." There had been mounting speculation that a new movie was in the works. In February, Ford told Ellen DeGeneres in an appearance on her talk show that production on a new Indiana Jones movie would begin this year. "It's going to be fun. I am excited," he said on the show. "They're great fun to make." The last film from the franchise was 2008's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which came almost 20 years after the third movie, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," which was released in 1989.

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cusco shares a blog post from Amazon: As part of our efforts to continue supporting the future workforce, we are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to people from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge, in more than 200 countries and territories. We will provide training opportunities through existing AWS-designed programs, as well as develop new courses to meet a wide variety of schedules and learning goals. The training ranges from self-paced online courses -- designed to help individuals update their technical skills -- to intensive upskilling programs that can lead to new jobs in the technology industry.

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The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will open up access to more data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Under an updated policy, data will be released around five years after it's collected and CERN hopes to release the full dataset publicly "by the close of the experiment concerned." Core LHC collaborators ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb all endorsed the move. From a report: CERN will make level 3 data available, which will allow anyone to conduct "high-quality analysis" on information obtained from Large Hadron Collider experiments. Level 3 relates to "calibrated reconstructed data with the level of detail useful for algorithmic, performance and physics studies," according to CERN. The organization won't release raw data, however. The open data policy states that it's "not practically possible to make the full raw dataset from the LHC experiments usable in a meaningful way outside its collaborations." That's because of the complexity of the data, software and metadata and access issues to the vast troves of stored information, among other factors. LHC collaborators don't have general access to the raw data either. Instead, the assembly of level 3 data "is performed centrally."

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Gardeners in Hampshire, a county in southeast England, were weeding their yard in April when they found 63 gold coins and one silver coin from King Henry VIII's reign in the 16th century, with four of the coins inscribed with the initials of the king's wives Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. From a report: The archaeological find was one of more than 47,000 in England and Wales that were reported this year, amid an increase in backyard gardening during coronavirus lockdowns, the British Museum said on Wednesday. In another discovery, in Milton Keynes, a town northwest of London, gardeners found 50 solid gold South African Krugerrand coins that were minted in the 1970s during apartheid. The news of the archaeological finds came as the British government said last week that it planned to broaden its definition of what constitutes a treasure so that more rare artifacts -- not just ones made of gold or silver, or that were more than 300 years old -- could be preserved for display in museums rather than sold to private collectors. In Britain, many historical objects that are found and believed to be from the 18th century or earlier must by law be reported to local officials for review. If the object meets the government's definition of treasure, national or local museums have the option to acquire it and pay a reward, equivalent to the market value of the object, that is split between the finder and the landowner. Since 1997, the law in most of Britain has defined as treasure, and thus protected, objects that are made of gold or silver and are more than 300 years old, from before mass production began with the Industrial Revolution. But as the growing popularity of metal detecting as a hobby meant that more historical objects were being found, museums have missed out on items of archaeological significance that did not fall within the law's definition, including Bronze Age axes, Iron Age caldrons, and medieval weapons and jewelry.

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Apple has started building its own cellular modem for future devices, a move that would replace components from Qualcomm, Apple's top chip executive told staff on Thursday. From a report: Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, made the disclosure in a town hall meeting with Apple employees, according to people familiar with the comments. "This year, we kicked off the development of our first internal cellular modem which will enable another key strategic transition," he said. "Long-term strategic investments like these are a critical part of enabling our products and making sure we have a rich pipeline of innovative technologies for our future." A cellular modem is one of the most important parts of a smartphone, enabling phone calls and connection to the internet via cellular networks. Srouji said the $1 billion acquisition of Intel's modem business in 2019 helped Apple build a team of hardware and software engineers to develop its own cellular modem.

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What are some good movies and TV shows that you watched this year? You do not have to narrow down your selection to titles that came out this year, but feel free to give one a shotout.

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The success of Nintendo's diminutive gadget led to a flurry of copycats, from a tiny Commodore 64 to a miniaturised Sony PlayStation. Some were good; many were flawed, with the play experience only being surface deep. Fortunately, some companies wanted to go further than fashioning yet another miniature plug-and-play TV console. From a report: One, the ZX Spectrum Next, brought into being a machine from an alternate universe in which Sinclair was never sold to Amstrad and instead built a computer to take on the might of the Amiga and Atari ST. Two other companies headed further back into gaming's past and set themselves an equally ambitious challenge: recreating the exciting, noisy, visually arresting classic cabinets you once found in arcades. "I always saw them as more than just a game, with their unique shapes, art, sounds and lights acting together to lure money from your pocket," explains Matt Precious, managing partner at Quarter Arcades creators Numskull Designs. "I was disappointed you couldn't purchase models of these machines during a time when physical items like LPs were booming in an increasingly sterile world of digital downloads." Quarter Arcades was subsequently born as a project "trying to capture a piece of gaming history" in quarter-scale cabinets. The machines are in exact scale, including the controls, and play the original arcade ROMs. But look closer and there's an obsessive level of detail: the rough texture of the control panel art; mimicking an original cab's acoustics by careful speaker positioning; recreating the Space Invaders 'Pepper's ghost' illusion effect where graphics 'float' above an illuminated backdrop -- all realised by dismantling and reverse-engineering original cabs.

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EU member states have agreed to strengthen their target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, in line with their long-term goal of net zero carbon by 2050. From a report: The EU made a commitment on Friday to cut carbon by 55% in the EU by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, after member states wrangled into the early morning as Poland held out for concessions. "Today's agreement puts us on a clear path to climate neutrality in 2050," said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission. While member states rejected the stiffer carbon cuts of 60% that the EU parliament had called for, the plan puts the EU ahead of most of the world's major economies on tackling the climate crisis. Campaigners said the EU could have gone further. Sebastian Mang, Greenpeace's EU policy adviser, said: "Governments will no doubt call it historic, but the evidence shows this deal is only a small improvement on the emissions cuts the EU is already expected to achieve. It shows that political convenience takes precedence over climate science, and that most politicians are still afraid to take on big polluters."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: More recent Nvidia graphics cards have a proprietary feature called Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and while it's often been touted as a powerful new rendering tool, the results have sometimes been underwhelming. Some of this is down to the oddly mixed-message around how DLSS was rolled-out: it only works on more recent Nvidia cards that are still near the cutting edge of PC graphics hardware⦠but DLSS is designed to render images at lower resolutions but display them as if they were rendered natively at a higher resolution. If you had just gotten a new Nvidia card and were excited to see what kind of framerates and detail levels it could sustain, what DLSS actually did sounded counterintuitive. Even games like Control, whose support of DLSS was especially praised, left me scratching my head about why I would want to use the feature. On my 4K TV, Control looked and ran identically well with and without DLSS, so why wouldn't I just max-out my native graphics settings instead rather than use a fancy upscaler? Intellectually, I understood the DLSS could produce similarly great looking images without taxing my hardware as much, but I neither fully believed it, nor had I seen a game where the performance gain was meaningful. Cyberpunk 2077 converted me. DLSS is a miracle, and without it there's probably no way I would ever have been happy with my graphics settings or the game's performance. I have a pretty powerful video card, an RTX 2080 TI, but my CPU is an old i5 overclocked to about 3.9 GHz and it's a definite bottleneck on a lot of games. Without DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 was very hard to get running smoothly. The busiest street scenes would look fine if I were in a static position, but a quick pan with my mouse would cause the whole world to stutter. If I was walking around Night City, I would get routine slow-downs. Likewise, sneaking around and picking off guards during encounters was all well and good but the minute the bullets started flying, with grenades exploding everywhere and positions changing rapidly, my framerate would crater to the point where the game verged on unplayable. To handle these peaks of activity, I had to lower my detail settings way below what I wanted, and what my hardware could support for about 80 percent of my time with the game. Without DLSS, I never found a balance I was totally happy with. The game neither looked particularly great, nor did it run very well. DLSS basically solved this problem for me. With it active, I could run Cyberpunk at max settings, with stable framerates in all but the busiest scenes.

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