Author: Vidya Saras

Economy / October 4, 2024 New regulations are designed to expand the number of employees entitled to overtime. But the conservative courts have other ideas. Edit Ad Policy Then–Vice President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the White House on the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act.(Christy Bowe / ImageCatcher News Service / Corbis via Getty Images) Zach Barber had known for years that he could easily find a better job. Despite his working full-time, money could be scarce. Once, with his bank account at zero, he was left eating nothing but canned food. But he believed in his…

The German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche once said that “invisible threads are the strongest ties.” One could think of “invisible threads” as tying together related objects, like the homes on a delivery driver’s route, or more nebulous entities, such as transactions in a financial network or users in a social network.Computer scientist Julian Shun studies these types of multifaceted but often invisible connections using graphs, where objects are represented as points, or vertices, and relationships between them are modeled by line segments, or edges.Shun, a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, designs graph algorithms…

The bug, with a severity rating of CVSS 9.8 out of 10, can be used to read any files, including passwords and other secrets. “The typical attack strategy is to steal your secret crypt key from app/etc/env.php and use that to modify your CMS blocks via the Magento API,” Sansec said. “Then, attackers inject malicious Javascript to steal your customer’s data.” Combined with another bug (CVE-2024-2961), attackers can also run code directly on customers’ servers and use that to install backdoors, the cybersecurity firm added. Versions of Magento and Adobe Commerce vulnerable to a CosmicSting attack include 2.4.7 and earlier,…

Meta just announced its own media-focused AI model, called Movie Gen, that can be used to generate realistic video and audioclips.The company shared multiple 10-second clips generated with Movie Gen, including a Moo Deng-esque baby hippo swimming around, to demonstrate its capabilities. While the tool is not yet available for use, this Movie Gen announcement comes shortly after its Meta Connect event, which showcased new and refreshed hardware and the latest version of its large language model, Llama 3.2.Going beyond the generation of straightforward text-to-video clips, the Movie Gen model can make targeted edits to an existing clip, like adding…

Warner Bros. Pictures This article contains spoilers for “Joker: Folie à Deux.” If you’ve been paying attention recently, you may have noticed that pop culture is experiencing a very weird moment when it comes to sex. 25-odd-years after the proliferation of the internet, we’re now several generations into people having easy, rapid, and fairly anonymous access to sexually explicit material, to the point where an average experience using X (the app formerly known as Twitter) involves seeing pictures and/or videos of nudity and explicit sex acts, whether a user is seeking…

Private firms paused hiring or firing staff in September on falling demand for goods and services, reflecting the impact of a softening economy plagued by depressed money circulation. The Stanbic Kenya Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), based on feedback from about 400 panellists, suggests companies kept staff numbers unstable in anticipation of a pick-up in sales as living costs pressures show signs of easing. This came on the back of layoffs in August due to economic uncertainty that followed months of deadly youth-led anti-government demos against higher taxation and poor governance. “Adjusted for seasonal influences, the Employment Index posted on the…

A person carries bags of fresh water after filling up from a tanker at a distribution site in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on Wednesday in Asheville, N.C. Jeff Roberson/AP hide caption toggle caption Jeff Roberson/AP An estimated tens of thousands of people in and around Asheville, N.C., are still without running water, six days after the tropical storm Helene. The faucets ran dry in Alana Ramo’s home last Friday after the storm swept through. She resorted to creek water and rainwater. “We [were] going around the house labeling buckets as ‘flush only’ or ‘tap water not filtered’ and then…

Companies keep rolling out AI features that boil down various kinds of text. They’re making us dumber.

Cool and inspiring code demos we’ve featured in our newsletter over the past few weeks. We’ve been spotlighting some fun, cool, and wonderfully weird code experiments in our recent newsletters, so we decided to round them all up in one place. Featuring nice animations, GSAP magic, and WebGL/Three.js goodness, these demos are exactly the kind of playful and creative stuff we love to share. If you enjoy this collection and want more of the same, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get fresh demos and frontend news delivered straight to your inbox twice a week: The Collective: Fuel…

Air pollution from satellites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere could become the world’s next big environmental problem — but the tricky form of contamination seems to evade the reach of both international space treaties and Earth-focused environmental laws. So, some researchers are suggesting a solution: Maybe chemicals produced during satellite reentries should be incorporated in the 1987 Montreal Protocol which bans certain substances that can harm our planet’s protective ozone layer. Satellites have been burning in Earth’s atmosphere since the beginning of the space age, but for decades, nobody really paid much attention to the issue. That changed when the era…