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A Slashdot reader writes: Denmark plans to cull its entire population of roughly 15 million minks in farms after the animals spread a mutation of the coronavirus to humans. The country's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said at a press conference Wednesday that the mutated virus could spread to other countries and it "may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine." âoeWe have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well,â she said. The mutated virus was found in a dozen people who got infected by minks. Half of the 783 human Covid-19 cases in northern Denmark "are related to mink," Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said. Mike Ryan, the head of the emergencies program for the World Health Organization, has called for scientific investigations of the "complex, complex issue" of people outside of China infecting minks, which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans. Kare Molbak, a director at the research center Statens Serum Institut, said the worst-case scenario would be "a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark." "That's why we have to take this extremely seriously," Molbak said. There are between 15 million and 17 million minks in Denmark, one of the world's main mink fur exporters. According to government estimates, culling the country's mink population could cost up to $785 million. National police head Thorkild Fogde urged that 'it should happen as soon as possible."

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Amazon.com is launching air cargo operations in Europe, the online retailer's first such expansion outside of the U.S. as it looks to bring more freight operations in-house. From a report: Amazon Air will run a 20,000-square-meter regional air hub at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany, with two branded Boeing Co. 737-800 freighters flown by ASL Airlines, the company said in a statement. The facility will employ 200 people. Operating its own aircraft will let the world's largest e-commerce company offer "more flexible delivery options," Amazon said. The company unveiled the air cargo service in 2016, reducing its reliance on United Parcel Service and FedEx.

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Gaming hardware makers have been diversifying their laptops recently, and Razer is the latest to join that trend. From a report: The company is announcing the Razer Book 13 today, which it's calling a "hyper focused productivity laptop." It's not just a subtler version of a Blade laptop, either. The emphasis on productivity means Razer also strove to include a generous array of ports, as well as interesting lighting features that could help highlight keyboard shortcuts. The Book 13 is also the company's first Intel Evo-certified notebook, meaning it meets certain requirements for performance, battery life and wake time. As its name indicates, the Book 13 has a 13.4-inch IPS display that comes in touch or nontouch configurations. If you opt for the matte nontouch version, you'll only get Full HD+ resolution, while the touch models also come in UHD+ (3,840 x 2,400). The touchscreens are also covered in Gorilla Glass for better durability and you can add an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare. All configurations feature a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is new to Razer's family of laptops and lets you see more on the screen at once than older 16:9 devices. The Book 13 also houses a 720p webcam in its slim bezels, and it's Windows Hello-compatible. There isn't a fingerprint scanner here, though. That's understandable -- Razer's already crammed a lot into the Book 13, which is impressive for a device thatâ(TM)s 0.6 inches thick and weighs 2.95 pounds. Plus, despite that sharp profile, the company managed to offer two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, a USB-A socket (at USB 3.2 speeds), a microSD card reader, a 3.5mm audio jack and an HDMI 2.0 slot. [...] The slim, lightweight package is something Razer fans are already accustomed to, and they'll also appreciate some other familiar features. The most prominent of these is Razer Chroma integration which allows users to customize the colors of individual buttons on the keyboard. Starts at $1,199. Pre-order starts today, with shipping to be followed later this month.

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Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission. From a report: If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free cycle. The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat. Recently, Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands has become the first business in the world to put this process to work at an industrial scale. The company has been working with the Metal Power Consortium and researchers at TU Eindhoven to install a cyclical iron fuel system at its Brewery Bavaria that's capable of providing all the heat necessary for some 15 million glasses of beer a year.

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For his monthly intention in November, Pope Francis prayed that AI will be beneficial for humanity. From a report: It's up for debate whether the development of automation and AI will ultimately be good for humankind, and it can't hurt to have a little divine intervention on our side. What he's saying: "We pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind," reads Francis' intention for November, which is published each month by the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. Background: This isn't the first time Francis has ventured into the fraught territory of AI ethics and alignment. In February, the Vatican hosted executives from IBM and Microsoft for a summit on "human-centered" ways of designing AI. They formulated the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," which called for AI to be designed with a focus on the good of the environment and "our common and shared home and of its human inhabitants."

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GitHub has denied rumors today of getting hacked after a mysterious entity shared what they claimed to be the source code of the GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise portals. From a report: The "supposed" source code was leaked via a commit to GitHub's DMCA section. The commit was also faked to look like it originated from GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. But in a message posted on YCombinator's Hacker News portal, Friedman denied that it was him and that GitHub got hacked in any way. Friedman said the "leaked source code" didn't cover all of GitHub's code but only the GitHub Enterprise Server product. This is a version of GitHub Enterprise that companies can run on their own on-premise servers in case they need to store source code locally for security reasons but still want to benefit from GitHub Enterprise features. Friedman said this source code had already leaked months before due to its own error when GitHub engineers accidentally "shipped an un-stripped/obfuscated tarball of our GitHub Enterprise Server source code to some customers."

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Owners of iPhones and iPads will soon be able to play Fortnite again, via a cloud service, the BBC has discovered. From a report: Nvidia has developed a version of its GeForce cloud gaming service that runs in the mobile web browser Safari. Apple will not get a cut of virtual items sold within the battle royale fighting title when played this way. Apple is embroiled in a legal fight with Fortnite's developer Epic, which led the iPhone-maker to remove the game from its iOS App Store. Epic has claimed that the 30% commission Apple charges on in-app gaming purchases is anti-competitive. But Apple has accused Epic of wanting a "free ride". The case is due to go to trial in May and could take years to be resolved. Papers filed in the case indicate that Fortnite had 116 million users on iOS, 73 million of whom only played it via Apple's operating system. Unlike Android, Apple does not allow games or other apps to be loaded on to its phones or tablets via app stores other than its own. But it does not restrict which third-party services can run within Safari or other web browsers available via its store.

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Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp passed the whopping milestone of 100 billion messages sent per day, but not everyone wants those chats to stick around forever. Now, Facebook's wildly popular messaging app with 2 billion users is adding a feature to give people more control on how their words and pictures live within the app. From today, messages -- including photos and videos -- can now be marked to disappear after 7 days. From a report: Disappearing messages are being rolled out globally across Android and iOS starting today, WhatsApp said. While it's starting with a 7 day lifespan, it is already looking at playing around with the time limits. "We will keep an eye on feedback about how people are using it and liking it and see if it needs adjusting in the future," a spokesperson said. "For now we are starting with seven days, because it feels like a nice balance between the utility you need for global text based conversations and the feeling of things not sticking around forever." And just to be clear, the 7-day limit will exist regardless of whether the message gets read or not. (The disappearing message clock starts counting when the message is sent, as it does on other apps like Telegram.)

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The U.S. reported 103,087 new daily coronavirus infections on Wednesday, setting a single-day record for cases, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. From a report: This is the first time the U.S. has reported over 100,000 new cases in a single day -- a reminder of the high stakes of the election as votes continue to be tabulated. Wednesday's record comes a day after Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Ohio set their own state records as voters went to the polls. The state of play: The U.S. set its previous daily record for cases -- 97,000 -- on Oct. 30. The COVID Tracking Project recorded 1,116 new deaths and 2,802 new hospitalizations over the past 24-hour stretch.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Documents obtained by TorrentFreak dated September reveal the MPA, acting through legal representatives, attempting to pressure individuals who they believe are important at [anime site Nyaa] and could have the ability to shut the site down. Information suggests that several people in North America, Europe, and Australia have all received similar correspondence. The letters allege massive copyright infringement via the Nyaa site and include a sample of copyrighted works, to which the MPA's members hold the rights, that were allegedly infringed via the platform. The MPA clearly states that none of its cited members (Disney, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, Warner Bros, and Netflix, in addition to Amazon) have granted their permission for the works to be made available via Nyaa or the BitTorrent network(s) that underpin it. As a result, "significant, irreparable damage" has already been caused to the copyright owners by the site's activities. While emailed threats are still a common anti-piracy strategy, we are informed that at least two of the individuals were personally served with legal documents at their homes. Others were served with similar documents via regular mail. We are currently unable to determine exactly how many people were served in total. At the moment the suggestion is around five but that may not be the full picture. What we do know is that some or all stand accused of being part of the mysterious 'Anime Cartel' supposedly behind Nyaa. "With immediate effect, recipients have been told to take all necessary steps to ensure that Nyaa is completely shut down," the report adds. "The MPA also wants to take control of the site's domain -- Nyaa.si -- a common tactic in other anti-piracy actions. Overall, recipients are warned that they must cease-and-desist any and all of their activities related to the site, including making available the copyrighted works of the MPA's members." "In addition to receiving settlements, it appears that the MPA also wants information on the Nyaa service and its operations. The MPA also wants the rights to the Nyaa site and any technologies connected to it, wherever the recipient has the ability to transfer those rights. The MPA also demands that those entering into a settlement agreement should never infringe its members' rights again."

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One year after its first 1.0 release, Brave says it has hit the milestone of 20.5 million active monthly users. "At the same time last year, the browser had 8.7 million active monthly users, and of the 20 million monthly users, 7 million are daily users, which represents more than a doubling of last year's 3 million," reports ZDNet. "Brave added that since Apple allowed browsers other than its own to be the default option on iOS, it has seen its iOS user base increase by a third." From the report: One of the touted features of the browser is that it hates ads, and will go out of its way to block them, unless users decide to see Brave-powered advertisements. To that end, Brave has hit "2 billion ad confirmation events" and completed 2,215 campaigns from over 460 companies. The browser maker says its users have a click-through rate of 9%, way and away outstripping industry averages. The browser also has its own cryptocurrency, Basic Attention Tokens, that users use to "tip" content creators. Thus far, 26 million of the tokens have been sent to creators. At the time of writing, the blockchain-based token is trading for just under 18 cents, meaning $4.6 million has been sent from users.

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Anonymouse Cowtard writes: When you're holding millions in bets on the favorite, you don't take the decision to payout lightly. Betting agencies are often good barometers for political polls, but Sportsbet has been stung before. They incorrectly paid out on bets for the Labor Party in Australia to win two days before the election was held, assuming a victory would come to the polling leaders. That party lost. According to Bloomberg, "Sportsbet has decided to pay out early on Joe Biden to be elected as the U.S President even with the official result still not known, according to a statement. The online bookmaker has deemed Biden's lead as 'unassailable' after CNN projected Michigan would go to the Democrats and that he holds the ascendancy in Nevada and Arizona. Sportsbet has paid out over 100,000 bets to punters who backed Biden."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The United States officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement on Wednesday, casting the stakes of the still-undecided presidential election in planetary terms. With the completion of the formal withdrawal process, which Trump began in June 2017, the U.S. became the only country in the world not to participate in the global effort to fight the climate crisis. Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a hoax and rolled back dozens of environmental regulations designed to protect the environment and stave off climate change, decided to exit the international agreement early in his term. But because the accord didn't allow countries to begin the formal withdrawal process until three years after it went into effect, the yearlong process officially began on November 4, 2019. Joe Biden has promised to reenter the climate accord on the first day of his presidency. The process of rejoining would take just 30 days, enabling the country to be readmitted as a party as soon as February 19, 2021. The agreement, named for the city where the United Nations Conference of Parties struck it in 2015, aims to limit the global temperature rise to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. President Barack Obama pushed hard for the agreement, which his administration officially entered in September 2016. That year was the warmest year on record, although 2020 may soon top it. During the past four years, the Earth's temperature has continued to soar and unprecedented wildfires, flooding, droughts, sea level rise, and scorching temperatures have beset the world.

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A billion dollars worth of bitcoins linked to the shuttered darknet market Silk Road has changed hands for the first time in seven years, prompting renewed speculation about the fate of the illicit fortune. The Guardian reports: Almost 70,000 bitcoins stored in the account which, like all bitcoin wallets, is visible to the public, had lain untouched since April 2013. The website was shut down by an FBI raid six months after they were deposited, and they have not moved since. Late on Tuesday night, however, the full amount less a $12 transaction fee was transferred to a new bitcoin address, records show. "Through blockchain analysis we can determine that these funds likely originated from the Silk Road," said Tom Robinson, chief scientist at the cryptocurrency analysts Elliptic. "They left the Silk Road's wallet back on 6 May 2012 when they were worth around $350,000 and then remained dormant for nearly a year, before being moved ... in April 2013." From there, the funds have lain dormant. After the marketplace was shut down in late 2013, its founder and boss, 36-year-old San Franciscan Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to a double life sentence plus 40 years without possibility of parole. The FBI managed to seize 174,000 bitcoins, then worth about $100m, but an estimated 450,000 earned by the marketplace remain unaccounted for. Robinson says it is unclear who moved the money. "The movement of these bitcoins today, now worth around $955 million, may represent Ulbricht or a Silk Road vendor moving their funds," he said. "However, it seems unlikely that Ulbricht would be able to conduct a bitcoin transaction from prison." One possibility is that an individual or group has managed to "crack" the wallet, effectively guessing its password and stealing the funds. A file that some claimed was an encrypted bitcoin wallet containing the keys to the funds has been circulated in cryptocurrency communities for the past year, and -- if it is what it was claimed to be -- then a combination of brute computing power and good luck could have successfully decrypted the wallet.

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According to Phoronix, a Dell privacy driver is is being prepared for the Linux kernel. From the report: Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. These new Dell privacy buttons are basically hardware kill switches for the microphone and web camera video stream. The Dell privacy driver sent out on Tuesday for the Linux kernel is about manipulating the relevant LEDs and tracking the status of the hardware-based controls where as the actual toggling of the audio/video support is handled by the hardware. The Dell privacy driver in its current form is talked about for the camera and microphone support but the patch does also note a "PRIVACY_SCREEN_STATUS" bit as well. Presumably they will be extending this privacy driver as well for privacy screen handling around reducing the horizontal/vertical viewing angles of the display. The dell-privacy Linux driver in its initial form can be found via the kernel mailing list. It's great seeing Dell working on this driver punctually for Linux ahead of their next-gen laptops.

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Two weeks ago the RIAA asked GitHub to remove the open-source stream-ripper software youtube-dl. This request wasn't well-received by developers, many of whom retaliated by posting copies of the code. Yesterday, things went from bad to worse when a user with the name 'FuckTheRIAA' uploaded three MP3s of the songs the RIAA mentioned in its takedown notice. TorrentFreak reports: A few hours ago we spotted a new GitHub user named 'FuckTheRIAA' who uploaded a copy of youtube-dl as well as a 'FuckTheRIAA' repository that includes three songs. These songs from Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, and Icona Pop, were not chosen randomly. The same tracks were mentioned in the RIAA's original takedown request, as the YouTube videos were highlighted in the youtube-dl code. This is yet another example that shows how the RIAA's takedown request has actually made things worse for the music group, at least for now. After nearly a day the three MP3 files are still available on GitHub. [I]t seems likely that it will send another DMCA takedown request to remove the tracks from GitHub. Whether the RIAA will also file takedown notices to remove all of the new youtube-dl forks has yet to be seen. For now, its takedown efforts have only made things worse, so they may let things cool down for a while first while exploring other options.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: GrowDiaries, an online community where marijuana growers can blog about their plants and interact with other farmers, has suffered a security breach in September this year. The breach occurred after the company left two Kibana apps exposed on the internet without administrative passwords. Kibana apps are normally used by a company's IT and development staff, as the app allows programmers to manage Elasticsearch databases via a simple web-based visual interface. Due to its native features, securing Kibana apps is just as important as securing the databases themselves. But in a report published today on LinkedIn, Bob Diachenko, a security researcher known for discovering and reporting unsecured databases, said GrowDiaries failed to secure two of its Kibana apps, which appear to have been left exposed online without a password since September 22, 2020. Diachenko says these two Kibana apps granted attackers access to two sets of Elasticsearch databases, with one storing 1.4 million user records and the second holding more than two million user data points. The first exposed usernames, email addresses, and IP addresses, while the second database also exposed user articles posted on the GrowDiaries site and users' account passwords. While the passwords were stored in a hashed format, Diachenko said the format was MD5, a hashing function known to be insecure and crackable (allowing threat actors to determine the cleartext version of each password). The company secured its infrastructure five days after Diachenko reported the exposed Kibana apps on October 10. It's unknown if someone else accessed the databases to download user data.

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Virgin Hyperloop One announced its plan to build a $500 million certification center to advance its vision of the future of high-speed transportation in West Virginia. The state will serve as a locus for testing, developing, and validating the technology that underpins the still-theoretical hyperloop system. The Verge reports: There is no fully functional hyperloop in the world, and it has never been tested with human passengers. But the federal government has recently laid out the framework for regulating the hyperloop, giving hope to companies like Virgin Hyperloop One that it may eventually break ground on a full-sized operational hyperloop system. To do so, it will still need to raise millions of dollars in funding, acquire the enormous tracks of land, and certify that the hyperloop can be operated safely. Which is all to say, the hyperloop is still very far off. The certification center is a first step toward that goal, said Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, which acquired Hyperloop One in 2017. "The Hyperloop Certification Center is the start of the hyperloop journey for West Virginia, for the United States, and for the world," Branson said in a statement. "We're one step closer to making hyperloop travel a reality for people everywhere." [...] Virgin Hyperloop One is seeking to build its first hyperloop system not in the US, but in India. Its project in the western district of Maharashtra aims to become the first system certified as safe for human passengers. Officials there have named the company and its partners as the originators of the multibillion-dollar infrastructure project.

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The Supreme Court in New Zealand ruled that file-sharing site mogul Kim Dotcom can be returned to the U.S. to face copyright charges -- but has also overturned another lower court's decision granting him the right to appeal. The BBC reports: The court ruled that Kim Dotcom and his three co-accused were liable for extradition on 12 of the 13 counts the FBI is seeking to charge them with. But it also ruled that the Court of Appeal had erred in dismissing judicial review requests from Mr Dotcom, and granted him the right to continue with them. The FBI alleges that Megaupload facilitated copyright infringement on a huge scale, but Mr Dotcom's lawyers argue that the website was never meant to encourage copyright breaches. If he is extradited, he faces a lengthy jail term. Dotcom tweeted a statement from his lawyers which read: "For the Dotcom team, and especially for Kim and his family, it is a mixed bag." "There is no final determination that he is to go to the United States. However, the court has not accepted our important copyright argument and in our view has made significant determinations that will have an immediate and chilling impact on the internet."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This weekend, Intel released preliminary information on its newest laptop part -- the Xe Max discrete GPU, which functions alongside and in tandem with Tiger Lake's integrated Iris Xe GPU. We first heard about Xe Max at Acer's Next 2020 launch event, where it was listed as a part of the upcoming Swift 3x laptop -- which will only be available in China. The new GPU will also be available in the Asus VivoBook Flip TP470 and the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1. During an extended product briefing, Intel stressed to us that the Xe Max beats Nvidia's entry-level MX 350 chipset in just about every conceivable metric. In another year, this would have been exciting -- but the Xe Max is only slated to appear in systems that feature Tiger Lake processors, whose Iris Xe integrated GPUs already handily outperform the Nvidia MX 350 in both Intel's tests and our own. The confusion here largely springs from mainstream consumer expectations of a GPU versus what Intel's doing with the Xe Max. Our GPU tests largely revolve around gaming, using 3DMark's well-known benchmark suite, which includes gaming, fps-focused tests such as Time Spy and Night Raid. Intel's expectations for the Xe Max instead revolve, almost entirely, around content creation with a side of machine learning and video encoding. Xe Max is, roughly speaking, the same 96 Execution Unit (EU) GPU to be found in the Tiger Lake i7-1185G7 CPU we've tested already this year -- the major difference, beyond not being on-die with the CPU, is a higher clock rate, dedicated RAM, and separate TDP budget. Tiger Lake's Iris Xe has a peak clock rate of 1.35GHz, and it shares the CPU's TDP constraints. Iris Xe Max has its own 25W TDP and a higher peak clock rate of 1.65GHz. It also has its own 4GiB of dedicated RAM -- though that RAM is the same LPDDR4X-4266 that Tiger Lake itself uses, which is something of a first for discrete graphics and might lead to better power efficiency.

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