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2023-06-22 03:30:00

**Microsoft Says Its Weird New Particle Could Improve Quantum Computers**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Microsoft researchers have made a controversial claim that they have seen evidence of an elusive particle that could solve some of the biggest headaches in quantum computing, but some experts are questioning the discovery. Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, but current iterations can be prone to error. "What the field needs is a new kind of qubit," says Chetan Nayak at Microsoft Quantum. He and his colleagues say they have taken a significant step towards building qubits from quasiparticles, which are not true particles but collective vibrations that can emerge when particles like electrons act together. The quasiparticles in question are called Majorana zero modes, which act as their own antiparticle and have a charge and energy that equate to zero. That makes them resilient to disturbances -- so they could make unprecedentedly reliable qubits -- but also makes them notoriously hard to find. The Microsoft researchers say devices they built exhibited behaviors consistent with Majorana zero modes. The main components of each device were an extremely thin semiconducting wire and a piece of superconducting aluminum.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has claimed to have found Majorana zero modes. A 2018 paper by a different group of researchers at the company was retracted from the scientific journal Nature in 2021 after it didn't hold up to scrutiny. At the time, Sergey Frolovat the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and his colleagues found that imperfections in the semiconductor wire could produce quantum effects easily mistaken for Majorana zero modes. "To see Majorana zero modes, the wire must be like a very long, very even road with no bumps. If there is any disorder in the wire, electrons can get stuck on these imperfections and assume quantum states that mimic Majorana zero modes," says Frolov. In the new experiment, the team used a more complex test called the topological gap protocol. To pass the test, a device must simultaneously show signatures of Majorana zero modes at each end of the wire, and also show that the electrons are in an energy range where a special kind of superconductivity emerges. "Rather than look for one particular simple signature of Majorana zero modes, we looked for a mosaic of signatures," says Nayak. The researchers tested this protocol on hundreds of computer simulations of devices, which considered any impurities in the wires, before using it on experimental data. Nayak says they calculated that for any device that passed the topological gap protocol, the probability of there not actually being a Majorana zero mode within it was less than 8 per cent.
Not all researchers in the field are convinced.Henry Leggat the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues recently published a set of calculations showing that this test can be fooled by impurities in the wires. "The topological gap protocol as currently implemented is certainly not loophole free," he says. Frolov says that a few details imply that what seem to be Majorana zero modes would be revealed as an effect of disorder if the experiment were repeated with even more sensitive measurements. These include small differences between measurements for the left and right edges of the wire, as well as the measurements of electrons' energies -- the same energies can be indicative of emerging Majorana zero modes or of dirt trapping the electrons. Anton Akhmerovat the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands says that for him, the new experiment is not viable evidence that Majorana zero modes have been detected until another team of researchers reproduces it. But this may be difficult as some details of how Microsoft's devices were manufactured have not been published on account of being trade secrets, he says.
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2023-06-22 01:25:00

**Intel's New Font For Low-Vision Developers Is Causing Design Drama For Coders**
Elissaveta M. Brandon writes via Fast Company: There's a new font in town -- and it's already causing rifts on Reddit. The font is called Intel One Mono, and as its name implies, it was designed by tech giant Intel, together with New York-based type design practice Frere-Jones Type and marketing agency VMLY&R. It joins a group of monospaced fonts designed primarily for developers -- think JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, and Consolas. By definition, monospaced fonts consist of characters that have the same width and occupy the same horizontal space, making it easy for coders and programmers to tell the difference between long strings of characters. But here's where Intel One Mono stands out: it was designed with and for low-vision developers. (It's free to download on GitHub and will soon be available on Google Fonts, too.)
To ensure the font was legible and readable to its target audience, the team ran more than a dozen "live testing sessions" with visually impaired developers who were asked to write code using Intel One Mono. \[...\] Some of the feedback the designers received was particularly surprising. For example, some people were struggling to tell apart a capital "M" from a capital "N," most likely because both letters have two vertical stems and some diagonals in between, which can be confusing. To make the letters more legible, the designers sloped the vertical stems on the "M" so it looks close to an inverted W. "The point at which the two diagonals meet in the middle gets shifted up to make it clearly a V shape in the middle, and then the two verticals get flared out a little bit to give it slightly more differentiable shape from the capital N," says Fred Shallcrass, a type designer at Frere-Jones Type.
Similar challenges kept coming back with the "x" and the "y" which people struggled to distinguish, and the "e" and the "c." In every instance, the designers meticulously tweaked the letters to make them highly distinctive, resulting in a fairly idiosyncratic font where every glyph is as different as possible from the other -- all the way down to the curly brackets, which can best be described as extra curly. This brings us to that Reddit rift. "This font would be great were it not for those curly braces," one person wrote. "For someone that hates fonts sometimes because of curly brackets not being clear and evident, I'm officially switching to this font set because of the curly brackets," wrote another. The developers were equally torn, but the designers stand by them. "Part of our thinking in negotiating those responses is that reinforcing the identity of any shape is not just amplifying what is unique about that letter, but also making it clearly not some other letter, so foreclosing any confusion," says Tobias Frere-Jones, the founder and lead designer at his eponymous studio. "If there's a thing the curly braces do, which is that extra back and forth movement, the parentheses don't do that, the brackets don't do that, therefore these ought to do a lot of that."
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2023-06-22 00:02:00

**Google's New Standard For ChromeOS: 'Chromebook X'**
Google is launching the "Chromebook X" program, aiming to differentiate high-quality laptops and tablets from standard Chromebooks by improving hardware specifications and adding exclusive features such as enhanced video conferencing capabilities and unique wallpapers. Chromebook X devices, expected to be priced between $350 and $500, will provide users with an elevated experience beyond the basic functionality of traditional Chromebooks. The devices are anticipated to be available in stores by the end of the year, coinciding with the release of ChromeOS version 115 or newer. 9to5Google reports: For the past few months, Google has been preparing new branding for above average devices from various Chromebook makers. Notably, we haven't yet seen any signs of Google making a Chromebook X device of its own, which is honestly a shame considering how long it's been since a Pixelbook has been released. The Chromebook X brand, which could change before launch, will appear somewhere on a laptop/tablet's chassis, with a mark that could be as simple as an "X" next to the usual "Chromebook" logo. There should also be a special boot screen instead of the standard "chromeOS" logo that's shown on all machines today.
Aside from the added "X," what actually sets a Chromebook X apart from other devices is the hardware inside. Specifically, Google appears to require a certain amount of RAM, a good-quality camera for video conferencing, and a (presumably) higher-end display. Beyond that, Google has so far made specific preparations for Chromebook X models to be built on four types of processors from Intel and AMD (though newer generations will likely also be included): AMD Zen 2+ (Skyrim), AMD Zen 3 (Guybrush), and Intel Core 12th Gen (Brya & Nissa).
To further differentiate Chromebook X models from low-end Chromebooks, Google is also preparing an exclusive set of features. As mentioned, one of the key focuses of Chromebook X is video conferencing, with Google requiring an up-to-spec camera. Complementing that hardware, Google is bringing unique features like Live Caption (adding generated captions to video calls), a built-in portrait blur effect, and "voice isolation." Earlier this year, we reported that ChromeOS was readying a set of "Time Of Day" wallpapers and screen savers that would change in appearance throughout the day, particularly to match the sunrise and sunset. We now know that these are going to be exclusive to Chromebook X devices. To ensure that those wallpapers only appear on Chromebook X and can't be forcibly enabled, Google is preparing a system it calls "feature management." At the moment, feature management is only used to check whether to enable Chromebook X exclusives. Based on that, some other exclusive features of Chromebook X include: Support for up to 16 virtual desks; "Pinned" (available offline) files from Google Drive; and A revamped retail demo mode.
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2023-06-21 23:20:00

**An AT&T-Backed Cellular Satellite Company Sent a 4G LTE Signal From Space**
According to AST SpaceMobile, the company managed to successfully transmit a 4G LTE signal from space that was picked up by "everyday, off-the-shelf smartphones." Next, AST will try and transmit a 5G connection via its BlueWalker 3 (BW3) satellite. The Verge reports: Testing was conducted in Hawaii on AT&T's spectrum using Nokia RAN technology, and the signal, which was beamed from AST's satellite in low Earth orbit, reached speeds of up to 10.3Mbps. That's fast enough for some video streaming, general internet use, and more ordinary cell phone usage. AST's testing followed a recent April test by the same company, where it was able to route an audio call between a Samsung Galaxy S22 in Texas to an iPhone in Japan via satellite.
The BW3 is a massive commercial communication array at 693 square feet -- about the size of a two- or three-car garage -- and the largest ever deployed in low Earth orbit, says AST's release. It operates using the same 3GPP standard found in ground-based cell networks. The achievement is "an important step toward AST SpaceMobile's goal of bringing broadband services to parts of the world where cellular coverage is either unreliable or simply does not exist today," according to AST's chairman and CEO, Abel Avellan, who said this would allow users to text and call, browse the internet, download files, and even stream video using a signal beamed from space.
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2023-06-21 22:40:00

**Reddit Ousted Mods After Subreddits Filled With Porn To Protest API Pricing Scheme**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After threatening to do so last week, Reddit has now removed the moderators of some of the subreddits that were protesting Reddit's new API pricing scheme. Some of these subreddits have new mods in the protesters' place, while other affected subreddits have been left unmoderated. Still others, oddly, saw their moderators reinstated. Reddit claims the moves are a response to mods breaking its Moderator Code of Conduct by allowing "not safe for work" (NSFW) content in previously "safe for work" subreddits. However, moderators who spoke to Ars Technica believe Reddit's actions are designed to silence their protests over the new fees.
Various Reddit moderators reached out to Ars Technica this week, informing us that mods for r/Celebrities, r/InterestInGasFuck\_, r/mildlyinteresting, r/self, r/ShittyLifeProTips, and r/TIHI have been removed. Other subreddits are reportedly affected, too, including r/toyota, r/garmin, and r/IllegalLifeProTips. All of the communities recently started allowing NSFW content as a form of API pricing protest. Reddit can't sell ads on NSFW content, and Redditors have accused the company of covertly switching some subreddits back to SFW.
As of this writing, some of the subreddits whose mods were removed remain unmoderated. Other subreddits have new mods. One example, r/Celebrities, has already seen resistance from community members, claiming the new mods "don't represent" them and that these mods weren't active in the community before the protests. Meanwhile, the feeling around the general mod community is one of disgust, while some are seriously considering abandoning their volunteer posts or have already done so. "We put up with a lot as Reddit mods—death threats, doxing, sorting through lewd and even illegal material (that Reddit continually ignores)—and deserve to be treated with basic respect," a Reddit moderator, who asked to be referred to only as Jess for privacy reasons, said regarding the removal of some mods. The mod has started erasing their account and has resigned as a moderator. "I have no desire to be associated with a company that conducts itself in such a manner," Jess said. Confusingly, the moderators of some of the subreddits, including r/mildlyinteresting, were restored. Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement: "It's not OK to show people NSFW content when they don't want to see it. In line with our Moderator Code of Conduct, we'll remove moderators and restrict communities where moderators are engaging in malicious conduct, like allowing rule-violating behavior or encouraging the submission of sexually explicit content in previously safe-for-work spaces."
He added that mods "incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct."
Ars notes that replacing Reddit moderators isn't so simple. "The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually, and as detailed on the r/hentai subreddit, the work mods do is both complex and extensive," reports Ars. "Reddit itself calculated that manual mod removals represented 30.9 percent of content removed in 2022. Reddit would be a different website, one perhaps incapable of functioning, without the tens of thousands of volunteers it uses to keep content safe, enjoyable, relevant, and valuable. Relying on volunteers saves the unprofitable company plenty of money."
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2023-06-21 22:00:00

**US Reading and Math Scores Drop To Lowest Level In Decades**
The average test scores for 13-year-old students in the U.S. have decreased in reading and math since 2020, reaching the lowest levels in decades, with more significant declines in math. NPR reports: The average scores, from tests given last fall, declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in math, compared with tests given in the 2019-2020 school year, and are the lowest in decades. The declines in reading were more pronounced for lower performing students, but dropped across all percentiles. The math scores were even more disappointing. On a scale of 500 points, the declines ranged from 6 to 8 points for middle and high performing students, to 12 to 14 points for low performing students.
The math results also showed widening gaps based on gender and race. Scores decreased by 11 points for female students over 2020 results, compared with a 7-point decrease for male students. Among Black students, math scores declined 13 points, while white students had a 6-point drop. Compared with the 35-point gap between Black and white students in 2020, the disparity widened to 42 points.
While the scores show a drop from the pre-pandemic years, the results also show that there are other factors at work. The decline is even more substantial when compared with scores of a decade ago: The average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics. The Education Department says plans are underway to address the learning loss. \[...\] The latest results are from the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment, traditionally administered every four years by the National Center for Education Statistics.
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2023-06-21 21:20:00

**Dropbox's AI Tools Can Help You Find Your Stuff -- From Everywhere On the Internet**
Dropbox is introducing two new AI-powered services into its platform. One is a tool for summarizing and querying documents, while the other is a universal search engine that can access your files in Dropbox but also across the entire web. "It's called Dash and comes from Dropbox's 2021 acquisition of a company called Command E," reports The Verge. From the report: The idea behind Dash, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston tells me, is that your stuff isn't all files and folders anymore, and so Dropbox can't be, either. "What used to be 100 files or icons on your desktop," he says, "is now 100 tabs in your browser, with your Google Docs and your Airtables and Figmas and everything else." All the tools are better, but they resist useful organization. "So you're just like, okay, I think someone sent that to me. Was it in an email? Was it Slack? Was it a text? Maybe it was pasted in the Zoom chat during the meeting." Dash aims to be the "Google for your personal stuff" app that so many others have tried and failed to pull off.
The Dash app comes in two parts. There's a desktop app, which you can invoke from anywhere with the CMD-E keyboard shortcut, that acts as a universal search for everything on your device and in all your connected apps. (If you've ever used an app like Raycast or Alfred as a launcher, Dash will look very familiar.) There's also a browser extension, which offers the same search but also turns your new tab page into a curated list of your stuff. One section of the Dash start page might include the docs Dropbox thinks you'll need for the meeting starting in five minutes; another might pull together a bunch of similar documents you've been working on recently into what Dropbox calls a "Stack." You can also create your own stacks, and as you create files and even browse the internet, Dash will suggest files and links you might add. \[...\]
As of today, Dropbox AI available to all Pro customers and a few teams, and there's a waitlist to get into the Dash beta as well. The next phase for Dropbox, Houston says, is to learn what people want and how they use the products. He says he's happy to be somewhat conservative at first in the name of not making huge mistakes -- you really can't have an AI hallucinating information out of your most sensitive work docs -- but he sees this stuff getting better fast.
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2023-06-21 20:40:00

**US Approves Chicken Made From Cultivated Cells, the Nation's First 'Lab-Grown' Meat**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer "lab-grown" meat to the nation's restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves. The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn't come from slaughtered animals -- what's now being referred to as "cell-cultivated" or "cultured" meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates. The companies received approvals for federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the U.S. The action came months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed that products from both companies are safe to eat. A manufacturing company called Joinn Biologics, which works with Good Meat, was also cleared to make the products.
Cultivated meat is grown in steel tanks, using cells that come from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells. In Upside's case, it comes out in large sheets that are then formed into shapes like chicken cutlets and sausages. Good Meat, which already sells cultivated meat in Singapore, the first country to allow it, turns masses of chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays. But don't look for this novel meat in U.S. grocery stores anytime soon. Cultivated chicken is much more expensive than meat from whole, farmed birds and cannot yet be produced on the scale of traditional meat, said Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California Berkeley. The companies plan to serve the new food first in exclusive restaurants: Upside has partnered with a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Good Meat dishes will be served at a Washington, D.C., restaurant run by chef and owner Jose Andres.
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2023-06-21 18:15:00

**Google Accuses Microsoft of Anticompetitive Cloud Practices in Complaint To FTC**
After years of publicly alleging that Microsoft used its dominant position in enterprise software to push customers toward Microsoft's cloud services, Google on Tuesday formally filed a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which has been examining such issues, according to a copy of the document reviewed by The Information. From the report: Microsoft used the licensing terms in its Office 365 productivity software to lock customers into separate contracts with its Azure cloud server business, Google's complaint said. Microsoft is the second largest cloud provider after Amazon, and Google is a distant third. Google previously complained about Microsoft's cloud licensing practices to European regulators. Under pressure, last year Microsoft agreed to change its licensing practices in the region to make it more affordable for Azure customers to use additional cloud providers, but the changes didn't apply to U.S. customers.
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2023-06-21 17:20:00

**Camera Review Site DPReview Finds a Buyer, Avoids Shutdown by Amazon**
ArsTechnica says: Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site was shutting down. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that. But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now.
A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing. Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team\[s\]" were being acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.
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2023-06-21 16:47:00

**FTC Sues Amazon for Inducing Users To Subscribe To Prime**
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sued Amazon for illegally inducing consumers to sign up for its Prime service and then hindering them from canceling the subscription, the most aggressive action against the company to date by the agency's chair, Lina Khan. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, argues that Amazon had used design tactics on its website known as "dark patterns" to nudge people into subscribing to Prime, the F.T.C. said in a release. And when consumers wanted to cancel, they had to go through a byzantine process to do so.
"Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money," Ms. Khan said in a statement. The lawsuit was the first time that the F.T.C. has taken Amazon to court under Ms. Khan, who rose to fame with a viral critique of the company and who is ramping up scrutiny of the e-commerce giant. Ms. Khan has said the power that big tech companies have over online commerce requires regulators to be far more aggressive and has begun taking actions against them./i.
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2023-06-21 16:06:00

**Secret Invasion's Opening Credits Scene is AI-Made**
An anonymous reader shares a report: The world of Secret Invasion is decidedly sketchy. With thousands of shapeshifting Skrulls on Earth, you can't trust what you think you're seeing. One second, you're looking at Nick Fury or an esteemed world leader; the next, you see their face morph into something (or someone) else entirely. This is a description of the plot of the new Marvel Cinematic Universe show on Disney Plus (as well as its comic book counterpart), which follows Nick Fury as he uncovers -- what else? -- a secret invasion by the Skrull population on Earth. But the concept of shape-shifting is also seen in the series' very different approach to its opening credits, which look like a sort of watercolor rendering of the key players and themes of Secret Invasion.
As we see a sort of jittery and ominous sequence of the Skrull green taking over more and more of the world, it looks a lot like if an AI was prompted with the concept of "Skrull cubism" -- which, actually, isn't that far off of what it is. As director and executive producer Ali Selim tells Polygon, the intro sequence was designed by Method Studios using artificial intelligence, something he thinks plays with the very themes of the show. "When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it -- it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?" Selim says. Like many people, Selim says he doesn't "really understand" how the artificial intelligence works, but was fascinated with the ways in which the AI could translate the sense of foreboding he wanted for the series. "We would talk to them about ideas and themes and words, and then the computer would go off and do something. And then we could change it a little bit by using words, and it would change."
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2023-06-21 15:24:00

**Ant Developing Large Language Model Technology**
Jack Ma-backed Ant Group is developing large-language model technology that will power ChatGPT-style services, joining a list of Chinese companies seeking to win an edge in next-generation artificial intelligence. From a report: The project known as "Zhen Yi" is being created by a dedicated unit and will deploy in-house research. An Ant spokesperson confirmed the news which was first reported by Chinastarmarket.cn Ant is racing against companies including its affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu and SenseTime. Their efforts mirror developments in US where Alphabet's Google and Microsoft are exploring generative AI, which can create original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts.
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2023-06-21 15:00:00

**Musk Says Looking Ahead To Tesla and Starlink India Debut**
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk says the firm is looking to invest in India and bring the electric carmaker to the country "as soon as humanly possible." From a report: Musk said he had a "very good" conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday and is hopeful that they will be able to "announce something in the not too distant future." The dialog comes at a time when Tesla and New Delhi have revived talks about incentives to bring the carmaker to the South Asian market. SpaceX representatives have also revived conversations with the telecom ministry in India in recent weeks for setting up satellite internet service Starlink in the country, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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2023-06-21 14:12:00

**EA Sports and EA Games Splitting Apart in Internal Shakeup**
Electronic Arts is undergoing a major internal shakeup, announcing today in a message from CEO Andrew Wilson that it is realigning its major studios and its leadership structure in an effort to "empower our creative teams." From a report: The reorganization includes splitting EA Games and EA Sports, with the former being renamed "EA Entertainment" in a signal that EA intends to expand beyond games where possible. "We're building the future of interactive entertainment on a foundation of legendary franchises and innovative new experiences, which represents massive opportunities for growth," Wilson wrote in a message announcing the news.
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2023-06-16 17:32:00

**EU Votes To Bring Back Replaceable Phone Batteries**
What's old is new again, at least in the European Union. The European Parliament recently voted in favor of new legislation that would overhaul the entire battery life cycle, from design to end-of-life, which includes important caveats for smartphone users. From a report: Among the many changes, the new rules would require batteries in consumer devices like smartphones to be easily removable and replaceable. That's far from the case today with most phones, but that wasn't always the case.
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2023-06-16 16:53:00

**New Google Lawsuit Aims To Curb Fake Business Reviews**
Alphabet's Google on Friday sued a Los Angeles man and his companies in San Jose, California federal court, claiming he created hundreds of fake business listings on its platforms and sold them to real businesses to lure in unsuspecting customers. From a report: Fake reviews have been a recurring problem on internet commerce sites. Google said in a statement that it filed the lawsuit against Ethan QiQi Hu to "help put an end to these types of malicious schemes." Google's lawsuit said Hu creates sham businesses that appear in its search engine and Google Maps, using an "elaborate set of props" to verify them on video calls with the tech giant's agents. The lawsuit said Hu keeps a tool bench as a prop to verify fraudulent listings for garage repair, tree cutting and plumbing, and essential oils for verifying fake aromatherapy and reiki therapy businesses. Google said Hu buys thousands of fake positive reviews to make the businesses appear legitimate. He then allegedly sells the profiles as "leads" to real businesses in the same fields, which receive contacts from potential customers who reach out to the fake businesses.
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2023-06-16 16:11:00

**$930 Million in Grants Announced in Biden's Effort To Expand Internet Access**
The massive federal effort to expand internet access to every home in the U.S. took a major step forward on Friday with the announcement of $930 million in grants to shore up connections in remote parts of Alaska, rural Texas and dozens of other places where significant gaps in connectivity persist. From a report: The so-called middle mile grants, announced by the Department of Commerce, are meant to create large-scale networks that will enable retail broadband providers to link subscribers to the internet. Department officials likened the role of the middle mile -- the midsection of the infrastructure necessary to enable internet access, composed of high-capacity fiber lines carrying huge amounts of data at very high speeds -- to how the interstate highway system forged connections between communities. "These networks are the workhorses carrying large amounts of data over very long distances," said Mitch Landrieu, the White House's infrastructure coordinator, in a media Zoom call. "They're the ones that are bridging the gap between the larger networks and the last mile connections, from tribal lands to underserved rural and remote areas to essential institutions like hospitals, schools, libraries and major businesses."
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2023-06-16 15:26:00

**Reddit Says It Won't Force Subreddits Back Open**
Reddit is pledging it will respect the subreddit blackout where thousands of subreddits are currently staying dark -- but it's not clear the company actually will. From a report: "We are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally reopening communities," reads a line from a "Reddit API Fact Sheet" that the company shared with The Verge alongside our full Reddit CEO interview. But that word "unilaterally" may be doing a awful lot of work -- because Reddit has apparently given itself a framework and justification to eject the moderators who support a blackout, replacing them with those who would re-open the sub. On Reddit, the ModCodeofConduct account has informed moderators that it will replace inactive moderators with active ones, even if they all agree to "stop moderating." That Reddit admin suggests that it breaks Rule 4 of Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct and is nothing new -- even though Rule 4 says nothing of the sort.
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2023-06-16 14:51:00

**SEO Arms Race Has Left Google and the Web Drowning in Garbage Text**
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Search's dominance has created a cottage industry of SEO professionals who promise to share their lucrative tricks to climb to the top of search results. From YouTubers to firms peddling proprietary tools, SEO hustlers propagate a never-ending stream of marketing content that floods Search. Some companies sell tools that allow marketers to mass-produce and distribute blog posts, press releases, and even robot-narrated podcast materials, with the purpose of creating backlinks -- a signal that Google uses to rank content in Search. Small businesses must decide if they'll try to learn SEO practices themselves or pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a marketing firm do it for them.
While other platforms are still nowhere close to overtaking Search, entrepreneurs like Dziura, who sells feminist gifts, are taking note of how people are (or aren't) using Google. Now, any retailer, big or small, can add more text to their website without a team of copywriters, and given AI's tendency to generate falsehoods, there's even less guarantee that what consumers are reading is real. It's why people append "reddit" to the end of searches -- they want an actual answer or opinion, not one mediated by a search ranking algorithm. Dziura specifically notes the trend of young people using TikTok for Google-able things and has seen shoppers flocking to TikTok, Reels, or live shopping events. People like videos and product shots with hands holding items. If shoppers want candid shots and videos of products, Dziura will give them that.
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2023-06-16 14:02:00

**Xi Tells Gates China Is Willing To Engage in Tech Cooperation**
President Xi Jinping said China is willing to work with the world on technology innovation and global challenges including pandemic prevention during a meeting with American billionaire Bill Gates. From a report: "You are the first American friend I've met in Beijing this year," Xi told the Microsoft co-founder on Friday, according to state broadcaster China Central Television. "I've always said that the foundation of China-US ties lies among the people," the Chinese leader added. "We always pin our hopes on American people and hope the two peoples can continue to be friendly." China's top diplomat Wang Yi and Foreign Secretary Qin Gang attended the meeting. Xi's sit down with Gates raises expectations for the Chinese leader to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken who is set to visit Beijing on a two-day trip from Sunday. That rescheduled visit aims to reset ties between the world's largest economies, after a spat over an alleged Chinese spy balloon derailed high-level exchanges earlier this year.
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2023-06-16 13:00:00

**Intel To Start Shipping a Quantum Processor**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel does a lot of things, but it's mostly noted for making and shipping a lot of processors, many of which have been named after bodies of water. So, saying that the company is set to start sending out a processor called Tunnel Falls would seem unsurprising if it weren't for some key details. Among them: The processor's functional units are qubits, and you shouldn't expect to be able to pick one up on New Egg. Ever. Tunnel Falls appears to be named after a waterfall near Intel's Oregon facility, where the company's quantum research team does much of its work. It's a 12-qubit chip, which places it well behind the qubit count of many of Intel's competitors -- all of which are making processors available via cloud services. But Jim Clarke, who heads Intel's quantum efforts, said these differences were due to the company's distinct approach to developing quantum computers.
Intel, in contrast, is attempting to build silicon-based qubits that can benefit from the developments that most of the rest of the company is working on. The company hopes to "ride the coattails of what the CMOS industry has been doing for years," Clarke said in a call with the press and analysts. The goal, according to Clarke, is to make sure the answer to "what do we have to change from our silicon chip in order to make it?" is "as little as possible." The qubits are based on quantum dots, structures that are smaller than the wavelength of an electron in the material. Quantum dots can be used to trap individual electrons, and the properties of the electron can then be addressed to store quantum information. Intel uses its fabrication expertise to craft the quantum dot and create all the neighboring features needed to set and read its state and perform manipulations.
However, Clarke said there are different ways of encoding a qubit in a quantum dot (Loss-DiVincenzo, singlet-triplet, and exchange-only, for those curious). This gets at another key difference with Intel's efforts: While most of its competitors are focused solely on fostering a software developer community, Intel is simultaneously trying to develop a community that will help it improve its hardware. (For software developers, the company also released a software developer kit.) To help get this community going, Intel will send Tunnel Falls processors out to a few universities: The Universities of Maryland, Rochester, Wisconsin, and Sandia National Lab will be the first to receive the new chip, and the company is interested in signing up others. The hope is that researchers at these sites will help Intel characterize sources of error and which forms of qubits provide the best performance. "Overall, Intel has made a daring choice for its quantum strategy," concludes Ars' John Timmer. "Electron-based qubits have been more difficult to work with than many other technologies because they tend to have shorter life spans before they decohere and lose the information they should be holding. Intel is counting on rapid iteration, a large manufacturing capacity, and a large community to help it figure out how to overcome this. But testing quantum computing chips and understanding why their qubits sometimes go wrong is not an easy process; it requires highly specialized refrigeration hardware that takes roughly a day to get the chips down to a temperature where they can be used."
"The company seems to be doing what it needs to overcome that bottleneck, but it's likely to need more than three universities to sign up if the strategy is going to work."
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2023-06-16 10:00:00

**Microsoft Teams Integration Is Being Removed From Windows 11**
Microsoft is removing its built-in Microsoft Teams client in Windows 11. "The Chat functionality will be replaced with the more flexible free version of Microsoft Teams that's also available as an app for Windows 10," reports The Verge. The changes were announced in a new Windows 11 test build this week. From the report: The original Teams integration in Windows 11, named Chat, was deeply woven into the operating system. Enabled by default, the Chat app was pinned to the taskbar and you'd have to dig into Settings to remove it. Chat offers consumers a way to use Microsoft Teams to contact friends and family. It was weirdly limited to just consumers though, making it useless for the vast majority of Microsoft Teams users that use the work version of the app. Windows 11 users could also end up with two confusing versions of Teams installed to handle work calls and personal ones.
Up until today, Microsoft had been continually adding new features to Chat inside Windows 11, with improved video calling features in October and Discord-like communities and an AI art tool earlier this month. The built-in Chat functionality in Windows 11 was based on the Microsoft Teams 2.0 client, which served as the foundation for the new Microsoft Teams app that's rolling out to businesses at the moment.
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2023-06-16 07:00:00

**EU Votes To Ban AI In Biometric Surveillance, Require Disclosure From AI Systems**
European Union officials have voted in favor of stricter regulations on artificial intelligence, including a ban on AI use in biometric surveillance and a requirement for AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT to disclose when content is generated by AI. Ars Technica reports: On Wednesday, European Union officials voted to implement stricter proposed regulations concerning AI, according to Reuters. The updated draft of the "AI Act" law includes a ban on the use of AI in biometric surveillance and requires systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT to reveal when content has been generated by AI. While the draft is still non-binding, it gives a strong indication of how EU regulators are thinking about AI. The new changes to the European Commission's proposed law -- which have not yet been finalized -- intend to shield EU citizens from potential threats linked to machine learning technology.
The new draft of the AI Act includes a provision that would ban companies from scraping biometric data (such as user photos) from social media for facial recognition training purposes. News of firms like Clearview AI using this practice to create facial recognition systems drew severe criticism from privacy advocates in 2020. However, Reuters reports that this rule might be a source of contention with some EU countries who oppose a blanket ban on AI in biometric surveillance. The new EU draft also imposes disclosure and transparency measures on generative AI. Image synthesis services like Midjourney would be required to disclose AI-generated content to help people identify synthesized images. The bill would also require that generative AI companies provide summaries of copyrighted material scraped and utilized in the training of each system. While the publishing industry backs this proposal, according to The New York Times, tech developers argue against its technical feasibility.
Additionally, creators of generative AI systems would be required to implement safeguards to prevent the generation of illegal content, and companies working on "high-risk applications" must assess their potential impact on fundamental rights and the environment. The current draft of the EU law designates AI systems that could influence voters and elections as "high-risk." It also classifies systems used by social media platforms with over 45 million users under the same category, thus encompassing platforms like Meta and Twitter. \[...\] Experts say that after considerable debate over the new rules among EU member nations, a final version of the AI Act isn't expected until later this year.
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2023-06-16 03:30:00

**World's Largest Fusion Project Is In Big Trouble, New Documents Reveal**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: It could be a new world record, although no one involved wants to talk about it. In the south of France, a collaboration among 35 countries has been birthing one of the largest and most ambitious scientific experiments ever conceived: the giant fusion power machine known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). But the only record ITER seems certain to set doesn't involve "burning" plasma at temperatures 10 times higher than that of the sun's core, keeping this "artificial star" ablaze and generating net energy for seconds at a time or any of fusion energy's other spectacular and myriad prerequisites. Instead ITER is on the verge of a record-setting disaster as accumulated schedule slips and budget overruns threaten to make it the most delayed -- and most cost-inflated -- science project in history.
The ITER project formally began in 2006, when its international partners agreed to fund an estimated \[$6.3 billion\], 10-year plan that would have seen ITER come online in 2016. The most recent official cost estimate stands at more than \[$22 billion\], with ITER nominally turning on scarcely two years from now. Documents recently obtained via a lawsuit, however, imply that these figures are woefully outdated: ITER is not just facing several years' worth of additional delays but also a growing internal recognition that the project's remaining technical challenges are poised to send budgets spiraling even further out of control and successful operation ever further into the future.
The documents, drafted a year ago for a private meeting of the ITER Council, ITER's governing body, show that at the time, the project was bracing for a three-year delay -- a doubling of internal estimates prepared just six months earlier. And in the year since those documents were written, the already grim news out of ITER has unfortunately only gotten worse. Yet no one within the ITER Organization has been able to provide estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses expected to result from them. Nor has anyone at the U.S. Department of Energy, which is in charge of the nation's contributions to ITER, been able to do so. When contacted for this story, DOE officials did not respond to any questions by the time of publication.
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2023-06-16 01:00:00

**Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit 'Was Never Designed To Support Third-Party Apps'**
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says he is refusing to undo the company's decision to increase prices for third-party app developers, despite thousands of subreddits pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted in protest. "It's a startling change for many members of the Reddit community, but it's one that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tells The Verge that he's fine with making," writes The Verge's Jay Peters. "Those third-party apps, in his eyes, aren't adding much value to the platform." From the report: "So the vast majority of the uses of the API -- not \[third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit\] -- the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That's what the API is for," Huffman says. "It was never designed to support third-party apps." According to Huffman, he "let it exist," and "I should take the blame for that because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time." Huffman now takes issue with the third-party apps that are building a business on top of his own. "I didn't know -- and this is my fault -- the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities."
I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don't add value to Reddit. "Not as much as they take," he says. "No way." "They need to pay for this. That is fair. What our peers have done is banned them entirely. And we said no, you know what, we believe in free markets. You need to cover your costs," he says. Apollo developer Christian Selig recently did the math for us on The Vergecast, though, and suggested that covering Reddit's asking price with only 30 days' notice would have been nigh-impossible.
Huffman didn't have an answer for why the deadline was so short, beyond wanting there to be a deadline. "We're perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us, including figuring out what the transition period will look like. But I think a deadline forces people, us included, to negotiate that." I also asked if Huffman truly believes that the blackouts haven't impacted his decision-making around the API pricing changes at all. "In this case? That's true," says Huffman. "That's our business decision, and we're not undoing that business decision."
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2023-06-16 00:20:00

**Alphabet Selling Google Domains Assets To Squarespace**
Alphabet is winding down its Google Domains business and selling its assets to Squarespace, according to a statement Thursday. From a report: Squarespace is acquiring the assets associated with the business for about $180 million, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked to not be identified because the financial details of the transaction aren't public. The assets include "10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers," according to the statement, confirming a Bloomberg News report. "We are exceptionally proud to be chosen to serve the customers of the Google Domains business," Anthony Casalena, founder and chief executive officer of Squarespace, said in the statement. "Domains are a critical part of web infrastructure and an essential piece of every business's online presence."
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2023-06-15 23:40:00

**Mercedes Is Adding ChatGPT To Its Infotainment System**
Mercedes is adding OpenAI's ChatGPT to its MBUX infotainment system. "U.S. owners of models that use MBUX will be able to opt into a beta program starting tomorrow, June 16, activating ChatGPT functionality," reports TechCrunch. "This will enable the highly versatile large language model to augment the car's conversation skills. You can join up simply by telling your car 'Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program.'" From the report: Mercedes describes the capabilities thusly: "Users will experience a voice assistant that not only accepts natural voice commands but can also conduct conversations. Soon, participants who ask the Voice Assistant for details about their destination, to suggest a new dinner recipe, or to answer a complex question, will receive a more comprehensive answer -- while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road."
If you're worried about privacy, you should be. Although Mercedes loudly expresses its concern over user data, it's clear that it retains and uses your conversations: "The voice command data collected is stored in the Mercedes-Benz Intelligent Cloud, where it is anonymized and analyzed. Mercedes-Benz developers will gain helpful insights into specific requests, enabling them to set precise priorities in the further development of voice control. Findings from the beta program will be used to further improve the intuitive voice assistant and to define the rollout strategy for large language models in more markets and languages."
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2023-06-15 23:00:00

**Recipient of Europe's Largest Ever Seed Round Doesn't Even Have a Product**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The French recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't have a product and was founded four weeks ago. The few employees it has only started work in the last few days. All the same, Mistral AI hoovered up \[$113 million\] from lead investor Lightspeed Venture Partners with contributions from Eric Schmidt, French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, and state-backed investment bank Bpifrance. The clue as to why the Paris-based startup is now valued at \[$259 million\] could be as simple as its name. New AI companies in the US inhaled as much as $25 billion from venture capitalists in the first three months of 2023, and with the artificial intelligence bubble centered on the States, Europe has yet to respond in kind.
There is also the small matter of personnel. Mistral AI chief exec Arthur Mensch used to be a researcher with Google DeepMind and founded the new company with Meta alumni Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample. Presumably these credentials, combined with the promise of a homegrown European AI, are all it takes for investors to part with millions these days. Lightspeed partner Antoine Moyroud sure seems to think so. He told the Financial Times "There's a pool of 80 to 100 people globally who have the level of experience they have. Right now, for better or for worse, the capital requirements in compute and top-tier talent make \[launching an AI startup\] quite a capital-intensive game."
The promise of Mistral as it stands four weeks after it first emerged blinking in the daylight is another "large language model." That's it. This is the same type of technology that underpins OpenAI's ChatGPT -- a neural network of tens of million to billions of parameters trained on large quantities of unlabeled text using self-supervised learning or semi-supervised learning. That is all we know of the untold riches held in the minds of Mistral's power trio. Its website, a minimalist single-page affair, says little other than: "We're assembling a world-class team to develop the best generative AI models." It also provides an email address, asking for candidates with "a strong background as a researcher, software engineer or product developer in AI."
Mensch said: "There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor." Tech investment tracker Dealroom.co pegged the seed round as Europe's largest, which is indicative of the hope that AI will positively transform entire industries by taking humans out of the equation -- computer programs don't eat, sleep or unionize. So while venture capitalists are feeling FOMO and paying high prices to get a foot in the door of the latest tech gold rush, Europe is also pretty desperate, with only $4 billion stuffed into AI businesses this year compared to $25 billion in the United States. \[...\] Now you don't even need a product, or even the promise of something groundbreaking, just a handsome CV and "AI" in the company name. What we on the outside do know, however, is that at least one person on the Mistral team knows some HTML.
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2023-06-15 22:20:00

**Video Ads Are Coming To All Your Uber Apps**
According to the Wall Street Journal, Uber plans to introduce full-length video ads across a variety of its platforms for the first time this week. Insider reports: Riders will encounter ads that are up to 90 seconds long on Uber's app while waiting for pickup and during rides. Similar to New York City taxis, which introduced TV screens in 2007, select Uber cars will have tablets that auto-play ads as well, the WSJ reported. Video ads will also be incorporated across Uber Eats and Drizly, an alcohol delivery service acquired by Uber for over $1 billion in 2021, the WSJ reported. On Uber Eats, ads will display while customers wait for their deliveries, and on Drizly, ads will play on search results pages.
While this development is not exactly out of the blue -- Uber announced it would launch an advertising division to connect brands with customers in October -- the move to begin implementing them so swiftly shows how serious the company is about its goal of growing its advertising business to more than $1 billion in sales by 2024. Part of Uber's pitch to brands is its cache of user data. The company has information on where its users go, how often they travel to their destinations, and how long they spend in the car. "We have two minutes of your attention," Mark Grether, vice president and general manager of Uber Technologies' advertising division, told the WSJ. "We know where you are, we know where you are going to, we know what you have eaten."
Grether added that Uber can use all of that data "to then basically target a video ad towards you."
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2023-05-16 10:00:00

**'Dream Glove' Boosts Creativity During Sleep**
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Is there something about dreaming that enhances our creativity? Or is it just sleep itself? Scientists say they're closer to an answer, thanks to an unusual study that used an electronic glove to guide people's dreams while they slumbered. To conduct the work, researchers invited 50 volunteers, mostly students and professors, to either stay awake or take a nap in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those in the nap group laid down with an eye mask, while wearing a Dormio, a glovelike device with sensors that measure heart rate and muscle tone changes to track sleep stages. A computer linked to the device relayed audio cues to inspire the wearers to dream about specific subjects -- a process called "targeted dream incubation."
Overall, volunteers who dreamt about trees scored 78% higher on the creativity metrics than those who stayed awake just observing their thoughts and 63% higher than those who stayed awake thinking about trees. Participants who napped without hearing the prompt still got a creativity boost, but those who dreamed about trees still performed 48% better than them. The researchers also noticed that the volunteers used the content of their dreams to answer the tests. The person who dreamed that their limbs were made of old wood wrote a story about an oak king with a wood body, for example. The person who dreamed of becoming bigger than trees, meanwhile, listed "toothpick for a giant" as an alternative use for a tree. The research was published in Scientific Reports.
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2023-05-08 21:22:00

**Facebook Has 3 Billion Users. Many of Them Are Old.**
Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. \[...\] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.
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2023-05-08 20:40:00

**Nintendo, Ticked by Zelda Leaks, Does a DMCA Run on Switch Emulation Tools**
Perhaps woken by news of its next premier first-party title already looking really impressive on emulators, Nintendo has moved to take down key tools for emulating and unlocking Switch consoles, including one that lets Switch owners grab keys from their own device. From a report: Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick, a tool (along with Lockpick\_RCM) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick\_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material.
Nintendo's takedown request (RTF file) notes that the Switch contains "multiple technological protection measures" that allow the Switch to play only "legitimate Nintendo video game files." Lockpick tools, combined with a modified Switch, let users grab the cryptographic keys from their own Switch and use them on "systems without Nintendo's Console TPMs" to play "pirated versions of Nintendo's copyright-protected game software." GitHub typically allows repositories with DMCA strikes filed against them to remain open while their maintainers argue their case. Still, it was an effective move. Seeing Nintendo's move on Lockpick, a popular Switch emulator on Android, Skyline, called it quits over the weekend, at least as a public-facing tool you can easily download to your phone. In a Discord post (since removed, along with the Discord itself), developer "Mark" wrote that "the risks associated with a potential legal case are too high for us to ignore, and we cannot continue knowing that we may be in violation of copyright law."
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2023-05-08 20:01:00

**Apple Fails To Revive Copyright Case Over iPhone iOS Simulator**
Apple failed to revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium over its software that simulates the iPhone's iOS operating systems, letting security researchers to identify flaws in the software. From a report: The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium's CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law's fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. Apple argued that Corellium's software was "wholesale copying and reproduction" of iOS and served as a market substitute for its own security research products. Corellium countered that its copying of Apple's computer code and app icons was only for the purposes of security research and was sufficiently "transformative" under the fair use standard. The three-judge panel largely agreed with Corellium, finding that CORSEC "furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems" and that iOS "is functional operating software that falls outside copyright's core."
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2023-05-08 19:20:00

**Gene Editing Makes Bacteria-killing Viruses Even More Deadly**
An anonymous reader shares a report: Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug -- SNIPR001 -- is currently in clinical trials. The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream.
The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15-20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections. The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance. After testing the ability of these eight engineered phages to kill the E. coli panel alone and in combination, they decided that a group of four of them was the most effective, naming the mixture SNIPR001. But four engineered phages do not make a drug; the team confirmed that SNIPR001 remains stable for five months in storage and that it does not affect any other gut bacteria.
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2023-05-08 18:40:00

**Microsoft Could Cram More Ads Into Windows 11 - This Time in the Settings App**
Windows 11's Settings panel has been seen with a number of adverts in test builds of the OS, in what's becoming a sadly familiar theme for preview builds of late. From a report: As spotted by German tech site Deskmodder, this was flagged up by a respected source for Microsoft leaks, Albacore, on Twitter. Albacore shared some screenshots of the new home page for the Settings app, as uncovered by digging into a Windows 11 preview from the Canary channel (the earliest test builds). The first screen grab (on the left in the above tweet) shows an ad for Microsoft 365 at the top of the panel, telling users what they get with the service and that they can try it for free (for a trial period). Under that, there's a prompt to 'finish setting up your account,' which refers to completing the setup of your Microsoft Account. The other screenshots also have prompts relating to the Microsoft Account, this time urging users to sign into the account, one of which is shown on the Settings home page and another in the Accounts section. In the latter, users are told to 'Sign in to get the most out of Windows.'
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2023-05-02 00:45:00

**Spotify Tries To Win Indie Authors By Cutting Audiobook Fees**
In an effort to appeal to indie authors, Spotify's Findaway audiobook seller "will no longer take a 20 percent cut of royalties for titles sold on its DIY Voices platform -- so long as the sales are made on Spotify," reports The Verge. From the report: In a company blog post published on Monday, Findaway said that it would "pass on cost-saving efficiencies" from its integration with the streaming service. While it's free for authors to upload their audiobooks onto Findaway's Voices platform, the company normally uses an 80/20 pricing structure -- where Findaway takes a 20 percent fee on all royalties earned. But that fee comes after sales platforms take their own 50 percent cut on the list price. So under the old revenue split, an author who sold a $10 audiobook would have to give $5 to Spotify and $1 to Findaway. But moving forward, that same author will no longer have to pay the $1 distribution fee to Findaway when a sale is made through Spotify.
The margins on audiobooks are exceptionally high, much to the chagrin of the authors. For example, Audible takes 75 percent of retail sales (though it'll only take 60 percent with an exclusivity contract). Many authors share royalties with their narrators and have to pay production fees -- meaning they get an even smaller share of royalties. The move by Spotify and Findaway is likely a bid to draw more indie authors from Audible, which is currently its biggest competitor. But Spotify's audiobooks business -- which it launched last fall -- still has a long way to go. Unlike music or podcasts, most audiobooks on Spotify must be purchased individually, and sales are restricted to its web version. Even CEO Daniel Ek admitted that the current process of buying an audiobook through Spotify is "pretty horrible." "We at Spotify are just at the beginning of our journey supporting independent authors -- we have many plans for how to help authors expand their reach, maximize revenue, and ultimately build a strong audiobooks business," said Audiobook's communications chief, Laura Pezzini.
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2023-05-02 00:02:00

**Report: FAA Overruled Engineers, Let Boing Max Keep Flying**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog. The inspector general of the Transportation Department said in a new report that FAA officials wanted to sort out raw data about the two crashes, and held off grounding the plane despite growing international pressure. The inspector general's office said that it reviewed emails and interviewed FAA officials. The investigation "revealed that individual engineers at the Seattle (office) recommended grounding the airplane while the accident was being investigated based on what they perceived as similarities between the accidents."
One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow. An FAA official said the analysis "suggested that there was a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days" if no changes were made to the planes. "However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data," the report said. FAA officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the agency's Seattle office opted not to ground the plane. "Instead, they waited for more detailed data to arrive," the watchdog said in the report, which was made public Friday.
The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia and was followed by the second in March 2019 in Ethiopia. In all, 346 people died. The FAA was the last major aviation regulator to ground the Max -- three days after the second crash. The FAA did not let the planes fly again until late 2020, after Boeing altered a flight-control system that autonomously pointed the plane's nose down before both crashes. The inspector general's office said the FAA's caution on grounding the Max fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data -- an explanation that agency officials offered at the time. Still, the watchdog recommended that FAA document how key and urgent safety decisions are made and make several other changes in how it analyzes crashes.
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2023-05-01 23:20:00

**IBM To Pause Hiring In Plan To Replace 7,800 Jobs With AI**
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.
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2023-05-01 22:40:00

**Microsoft To Take On Apple Silicon With Custom ARM Chips**
According to Windows Latest, Microsoft is working on new ARM chips to compete against Apple Silicon. "I have also spotted some job listings that suggest the company is building its own Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices" writes Mayank Parmar. "Additionally, I understand that Microsoft is optimizing Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture." From the report: These developments coincide with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, which has a special version optimized for silicon and designed to leverage AI capabilities. The job listings (most of them have now been taken down) describe positions related to custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, high-bandwidth designs. This suggests that Microsoft is building its own ARM-based chips, aiming to compete with Apple's M chips lineup in terms of performance and efficiency.
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2023-05-01 22:00:00

**A Brain Scanner Combined With an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse Into Your Thoughts**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn't a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can't look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner. But gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. This technology could help people who can't speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery.
Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. "There's a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought," said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study's lead author, during a press briefing. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as "a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity."
The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn't construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one's internal mental processes. \[...\] The model misses a lot about the stories it decodes. It struggles with grammatical features such as pronouns. It can't decipher proper nouns such as names and places, and sometimes it just gets things wrong altogether. But it achieves a high level of accuracy, compared with past methods. Between 72 and 82 percent of the time in the stories, the decoder was more accurate at decoding their meaning than would be expected from random chance. Here's an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: "i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness." The model went on to decode: "i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn't see anything and looked up again i saw nothing."
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
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2023-05-01 18:00:00

**AI Chatbots Have Been Used To Create Dozens of News Content Farms**
The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. From a report:The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names like News Live 79 and Daily Business Post, while others share lifestyle tips, celebrity news or publish sponsored content. But none disclose they're populated using AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and potentially Alphabet's Google Bard, which can generate detailed text based on simple user prompts. Many of the websites began publishing this year as the AI tools began to be widely used by the public.
In several instances, NewsGuard documented how the chatbots generated falsehoods for published pieces. In April alone, a website called CelebritiesDeaths.com published an article titled, "Biden dead. Harris acting President, address 9 a.m." Another concocted facts about the life and works of an architect as part of a falsified obituary. And a site called TNewsNetwork published an unverified story about the deaths of thousands of soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war, based on a YouTube video. The majority of the sites appear to be content farms -- low-quality websites run by anonymous sources that churn-out posts to bring in advertising. The websites are based all over the world and are published in several languages, including English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai, NewsGuard said in its report.
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2023-05-01 17:20:00

**'Super Mario Bros. Movie' Tops $1 Billion Globally, Highest-Grosser Ever For a Film Based on a Video Game**
"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office. From a report: As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It's only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following "Spider-Man: No Way Home," "Top Gun: Maverick," "Jurassic World Dominion" and "Avatar: The Way of Water."
"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" opened in theaters on April 5 and generated a towering $204 million in its first five days of release, notching the biggest opening weekend of the year and the second-biggest debut ever for an animated movie. Since then, it has become the highest grossing movie domestically and globally of 2023, as well as the highest-grosser ever for a film based on a video game. Those records are especially encouraging because the last time that Mario and Luigi graced the big screen, in 1993's disastrous live-action "Super Mario Bros," became a legendary example of Hollywood's inability to adapt video games.
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2023-05-01 16:40:00

**Satellite Data Reveal 20,000 Previously Unknown Deep-Sea Mountains**
The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That's in part because their craggy walls -- formed from volcanic activity -- provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They're like "stirring rods in the ocean," says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar. But that's an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. "There are a lot of gaps." So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world's oceans, to take a census of seamounts. The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth's gravitational field at that spot. "There's an extra gravitational attraction," Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.
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2023-05-01 16:00:00

**Geoffrey Hinton, the 'Godfather of AI', Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead**
For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. From a report: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry's biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life's work.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. Dr. Hinton's journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech's biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity. "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Dr. Hinton said.
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2023-05-01 14:40:00

**ChatGPT Will See You Now: Doctors Using AI To Answer Patient Questions**
Pilot program aims to see if AI will cut time that medical staff spend replying to online inquiries. From a report: Behind every physician's medical advice is a wealth of knowledge, but soon, patients across the country might get advice from a different source: artificial intelligence. In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI's "GPT" generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients' online inquiries. UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool.
Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. "It gives the human touch that we would," Dr. Millen said. There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.
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2023-05-01 13:09:00

**JPMorgan Snaps Up First Republic's Assets in US Auction**
JPMorgan said on Monday it will buy most of First Republic Bank's assets after regulators seized the troubled lender at the weekend, marking the third failure of a major U.S. bank in two months. From a report: Under the deal, which came after an auction, JPMorgan will pay $10.6 billion to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) for most of the assets of the San Francisco-based bank, whose failure is the largest since Washington Mutual in 2008. JPMorgan, already the biggest bank in the United States, has also entered into a loss-share agreement with the FDIC on single family, residential and commercial loans it bought, but will not take First Republic Bank's corporate debt or preferred stock. The deal allows for an orderly failure of First Republic and avoids regulators having to insure all the bank's deposits, as they had to do when two others collapsed in March. First Republic disclosed last week that it had suffered more than $100 billion in outflows in the first quarter and was exploring options, increasing stress in the banking sector.
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2023-05-01 11:34:00

**Researchers Build World's First Wooden Transistor**
An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum:
Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material.
"It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'"
Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure — lignin — was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer...
Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.
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2023-05-01 07:44:00

**Are Public Wifi and Phone Chargers Actually Safe?**
The Washington Post's "Tech Friend" newsletter suggests some "tech fears you can stop worrying about." And it starts by reasuring readers, "You're fine using the WiFi in a coffee shop, hotel or airport.
"Yes, it is safe," said Chester Wisniewski, a digital security specialist with the firm Sophos. Five or 10 years ago, it wasn't secure to use the shared WiFi in a coffee shop or another place outside your home. But now, most websites and apps scramble whatever you do online. That makes it tough for crooks to snoop on you when you're connected to public WiFi. It's not impossible, but criminals have easier targets.
Even Wisniewski, whose job involves sensitive information, said he connected to the WiFi at the airport and hotel on a recent business trip. He plans to use the WiFi at a conference in Las Vegas attended by the world's best computer hackers. Wisniewski generally does not use an extra layer of security called a VPN, although your company might require it. He avoids using WiFi in China.
You should be wary of public WiFi if you know you're a target of government surveillance or other snooping. But you are probably not Edward Snowden or Brad Pitt... For nearly all of us and nearly all of the time, you can use public WiFi without stress.
The newsletter also suggests we stop worrying about public phone chargers. ("Security experts told me that 'juice jacking' is extremely unlikely... Don't worry about the phone chargers unless you know you're being targeted by criminals or spies.")
Beyond that, "Focus your energy on digital security measures that really matter" — things like using strong and unique passwords for online accounts. ("This is a pain. Do it anyway.") And it calls two-factor authentication possibly the single best thing you can do to protect yourself online.
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2023-05-01 04:59:00

**The People Turning Time Into a Currency**
The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'."
Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins.
"We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person." TimeRepublik is today based in both Lugano, Switzerland and New York, and says it has more than 100,000 users around the world. It makes money by selling the service to companies who then offer it to their staff via their internal websites.
The concept of time banking has been around since the 19th Century. Mr Donati says that he wanted to bring it to a younger, and more digitally-savvy audience.
The first version of TimeRepublik launched in Switzerland in 2012, according to the BBC, though the site expanded internationally "in the past couple of years."
One user told the BBC that with monetary expectations out of the way, "you really get to the core of things and you discover something, I think, that's greater and sort of priceless."
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2023-05-01 02:03:00

**'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety**
Phoronix reports:
With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security.
"\[B\]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project:
It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safety vulnerabilities. It's hard to imagine software that's much more critical than sudo and su.
This work is being done by a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf with generous support from Amazon Web Services. The work plan is viewable here. The GitHub repository is here.
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2023-05-01 00:03:00

**Google Has More Powerful AI, Says Engineer Fired Over Sentience Claims**
Remember that Google engineer/AI ethicist who was fired last summer after claiming their LaMDA LLM had become sentient?
In a new interview with Futurism, Blake Lemoine now says the "best way forward" for humankind's future relationship with AI is "understanding that we are dealing with intelligent artifacts. There's a chance that — and I believe it is the case — that they have feelings and they can suffer and they can experience joy, and humans should at least keep that in mind when interacting with them." (Although earlier in the interview, Lemoine concedes "Is there a chance that people, myself included, are projecting properties onto these systems that they don't have? Yes. But it's not the same kind of thing as someone who's talking to their doll.")
But he also thinks there's a lot of research happening inside corporations, adding that "The only thing that has changed from two years ago to now is that the fast movement is visible to the public." For example, Lemoine says Google almost released its AI-powered Bard chatbot last fall, but "in part because of some of the safety concerns I raised, they deleted it... I don't think they're being pushed around by OpenAI. I think that's just a media narrative. I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something."
"\[Google\] still has far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it — making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing...
"And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal — not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it. That's the one that I was like, "you know this thing, this thing's awake." And they haven't let the public play with that one yet. But Bard is kind of a simplified version of that, so it still has a lot of the kind of liveliness of that model...
"\[W\]hat it comes down to is that we aren't spending enough time on transparency or model understandability. I'm of the opinion that we could be using the scientific investigative tools that psychology has come up with to understand human cognition, both to understand existing AI systems and to develop ones that are more easily controllable and understandable."
So how will AI and humans will coexist? "Over the past year, I've been leaning more and more towards we're not ready for this, as people," Lemoine says toward the end of the interview. "We have not yet sufficiently answered questions about human rights — throwing nonhuman entities into the mix needlessly complicates things at this point in history."
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2023-04-30 21:55:00

**Russian Forces Suffer Radiation Sickness After Digging Trenches and Fishing in Chernobyl**
The Independent reports:
Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed.
Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. But the occupiers who, as one resident put it to The Times, "understood the risks" but were "just thick", installed themselves in the forest, reportedly carved out trenches, fished in the reactor's cooling channel — flush with catfish — and shot animals, leaving them dead on the roads...
In the years after the incident, teams of men were sent to dig up the contaminated topsoil and bury it below ground in the Red Forest — named after the colour the trees turned as a result of the catastrophe... Vladimir Putin's men reportedly set up camp within a six-mile radius of reactor No 4, and dug defensive positions into the poisonous ground below the surface.
On 1 April, as Ukrainian troops mounted counterattacks from Kyiv, the last of the occupiers withdrew, leaving behind piles of rubbish. Russian soldiers stationed in the forest have since been struck down with radiation sickness, diplomats have confirmed. Symptoms can start within an hour of exposure and can last for several months, often resulting in death.
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2023-04-30 20:34:00

**Chess has a New World Champion: China's Ding Liren**
The Guardian reports:
The Magnus Carlsen era is over. Ding Liren becomes China's first world chess champion. The country now can boast the men's and women's titleholders: an unthinkable outcome during the Cultural Revolution when it was banned as a game of the decadent West.
After 14 games which ended in a 7-7 draw, the championship was decided by four "rapid chess" games — with just 25 minutes on each players clock, and 10 seconds added after each move. Reuters reports that the competition was still tied after three games, but in the final match 30-year-old Ding capitalized on mistakes and "time management" issues by Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Ding's triumph means China holds both the men's and women's world titles, with current women's champion Ju Wenjun set to defend her title against compatriot Lei Tingjie in July... Ding had leveled the score in the regular portion of the match with a dramatic win in game 12, despite several critical moments — including a purported leak of his own preparation. The Chinese grandmaster takes the crown from five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who defeated Nepomniachtchi in 2021 but announced in July he would not defend the title again this year...
\[Ding\] had only been invited to the tournament at the last minute to replace Russia's Sergey Karjakin, whom the international chess federation banned for his vocal support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ding ranks third in the FIDE rating list behind Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi.
It's the second straight world-championship defeat for Nepomniachtchi, the Guardian reports:
"I guess I had every chance," the Russian world No 2 says. "I had so many promising positions and probably should have tried to finish everything in the classical portion. ... Once it went to a tiebreak, of course it's always some sort of lottery, especially after 14 games \[of classical chess\]. Probably my opponent made less mistakes, so that's it."
Ding wins €1.1 million, The Guardian reports — also sharing this larger story:
"I started to learn chess from four years old," Ding says. "I spent 26 years playing, analyzing, trying to improve my chess ability with many different ways, with different changing methods. with many new ways of training."
He continues: "I think I did everything. Sometimes I thought I was addicted to chess, because sometimes without tournaments I was not so happy. Sometimes I struggled to find other hobbies to make me happy. This match reflects the deepness of my soul."
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2023-04-30 19:34:00

**Droids for Space? Startup Plans Satellites With Robotic Arms For Repairs and Collecting Space Junk**
The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk:
"Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road," said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. "That's what we're doing in space." Grimmett's tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It's building "orbots" — satellites with robotic arms that can fly right up to a disabled satellite and fix it. Or these orbots could use their arms to collect orbiting rubble left behind by hundreds of previous launches — dangerous junk that's become a hazard to celestial navigation...
Rogue Space aims to catch up fast, with help from Small Business Technology Transfer funds from the SpaceWERX Orbital Prime initiative. Created by the U.S. Space Force, Orbital Prime seeks to build up U.S. private-sector firms that can protect national security by maintaining military satellites and clearing hazardous space debris.
Its first 10-pound, proof-of-concept satellite will launch later this year, the article points out, "to test sensors and software to confirm the system can identify and track other satellites." But "the real excitement will begin later this year" when the company launches a prototype that's four times larger that will "use maneuvering thrusters to test the extremely precise navigation needed to approach a satellite."
And then in late 2024 or early 2025 the company will launch its 660-pound satellite "with robotic arms for fixing other satellites or for dragging debris to a lower orbit, where it will fall back to Earth."
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2023-04-30 18:34:00

**Ben & Jerry's Cofounder Launches Nonprofit Cannabis Line**
The "Ben" in Ben & Jerry's "has gone from ice cream to cannabis with a social mission," reports the Chicago Tribune:
Ben Cohen has started Ben's Best Blnz, a nonprofit cannabis line with a stated mission of helping to right the wrongs of the war on drugs. The company says on its website that 80% of its profits will go to grants for Black cannabis entrepreneurs while the rest will be equally divided between the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and the national Last Prisoner Project, which is working to free people incarcerated for cannabis offenses...
Ben's Best Blnz, or B3, says it licenses its formulas, packaging, trademarks, and marketing materials to for-profit businesses that pay a royalty. After expenses are deducted, the royalties are donated to the cause.
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2023-04-30 17:34:00

**Transition to EVs Cited as More Automakers Reduce Workforces**
This February Ford cut 3,800 jobs, according to CNN, "citing difficult economic conditions and its major push toward electric vehicles... The veteran automaker said the layoffs were primarily triggered by its transition to electric vehicles, and a reduction in 'vehicle complexity.'"
Then in March GM also "unexpectedly cut several hundred jobs to help it trim costs and form a top-tier workforce to guide its transition to an all-electric car company," according to the Detroit Free Press — while later also announcing buyouts to try to "accelerate attrition." A spokesperson explained that GM wanted "to reduce vehicle complexity and expand the use of shared systems between its internal combustion engine and future electric vehicle programs."
Up next is Stellantis, the multinational automotive giant formed when Fiat-Chrysler merged with PSA Group in 2021. It's now "trying to cut its workforce to trim expenses and stay competitive," reports the Associated Press, "as the industry makes the long and costly transition to electric vehicles."
Stellantis on Wednesday said it's offering buyouts to groups of white-collar and unionized employees in the U.S., as well as hourly workers in Canada. The cuts are "in response to today's increasingly competitive global market conditions and the necessary shift to electrification," the company said in a prepared statement.
Stellantis said it's looking to reduce its hourly workforce by about 3,500, but wouldn't say how many salaried employees it's targeting. The company has about 56,000 workers in the U.S., and about 33,000 of them could get the offers. Of those, 31,000 are blue-collar workers and 2,500 salaried employees. The company has another 8,000 union workers in Canada, but it would not say how many will get offers...
The offers follow Ford and General Motors, which have trimmed their workforces in the past year through buyout offers. About 5,000 white-collar workers took General Motors up on offers to leave the company this year. Ford cut about 3,000 contract and full-time salaried workers last summer, giving them severance packages.
The article adds that Shawn Fain, the new president of the United Auto Workers union, has told reporters "that he's unhappy with all three companies" over attempts to unionize "new joint-venture factories that will make battery cells for future electric vehicles."
The Detroit Free Press has specifics:
He said, for instance, that the wages are lower at the GM and LG Energy Solution Ultium Cells joint venture in Ohio compared with other auto production jobs even though the work is potentially dangerous and requires significant training... The EV transformation is crucial for the future of the industry and its workers, and the union expects its members not to "get lost in the transition," Fain said, noting that jobs are needed "that raise people up, not take us back."
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2023-04-30 16:34:00

**OpenAI CTO Says AI Systems Should 'Absolutely' Be Regulated**
Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Mira Murati, CTO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems should be "absolutely" be regulated. In a recent interview, Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards. "We've done some work on that in the past couple of years with large language model developers in aligning on some basic safety standards for deployment of these models," Murati said. "But I think a lot more needs to happen. Government regulators should certainly be very involved."
Murati specifically discussed OpenAI's approach to AGI with "human-level capability."
OpenAI's specific vision around it is to build it safely and figure out how to build it in a way that's aligned with human intentions, so that the AI systems are doing the things that we want them to do, and that it maximally benefits as many people out there as possible, ideally everyone.
Q: Is there a path between products like GPT-4 and AGI?
A: We're far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system. Our path to getting there has a couple of important vectors. From a research standpoint, we're trying to build systems that have a robust understanding of the world similarly to how we do as humans. Systems like GPT-3 initially were trained only on text data, but our world is not only made of text, so we have images as well and then we started introducing other modalities.
The other angle has been scaling these systems to increase their generality. With GPT-4, we're dealing with a much more capable system, specifically from the angle of reasoning about things. This capability is key. If the model is smart enough to understand an ambiguous direction or a high-level direction, then you can figure out how to make it follow this direction. But if it doesn't even understand that high-level goal or high-level direction, it's much harder to align it. It's not enough to build this technology in a vacuum in a lab. We really need this contact with reality, with the real world, to see where are the weaknesses, where are the breakage points, and try to do so in a way that's controlled and low risk and get as much feedback as possible.
Q: What safety measures do you take?
A: We think about interventions at each stage. We redact certain data from the initial training on the model. With DALL-E, we wanted to reduce harmful bias issues we were seeing... In the model training, with ChatGPT in particular, we did reinforcement learning with human feedback to help the model get more aligned with human preferences. Basically what we're trying to do is amplify what's considered good behavior and then de-amplify what's considered bad behavior.
One final quote from the interview: "Designing safety mechanisms in complex systems is hard... The safety mechanisms and coordination mechanisms in these AI systems and any complex technological system \[are\] difficult and require a lot of thought, exploration and coordination among players."
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2023-04-30 15:34:00

**Linux Foundation Announces DentOS 3.0, an Open Source Network OS for Disaggregated Networks**
This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software are simplified. DENT unites silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals to enable the transition to disaggregated networks."
Or, as the Linux Foundation, the operating system provides "a flexible and customizable platform for network administrators to manage their networks."
DENT provides access to open source-based switches at a lower cost and with more flexibility compared to proprietary switches with locked ecosystems. Network wiring closets in many facilities--including retail stores, warehousing, remote locations, enterprises, and small and mid-sized businesses--are often small, requiring a compact solution for network management. Additionally, staff expertise may be limited, and branch-office switches from leading suppliers can require costly contracts. DENT can be easily deployed on white-box hardware in small spaces, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for network management. As a result, DENT deployment can significantly enhance network management in a wide range of environments, providing greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability...
DentOS enables Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology to connect and manage thousands of devices like cameras, sensors, entry and exit gates, and access points on the network edge.
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2023-04-30 14:34:00

**Facebook Advertisers Angry About Major Glitch That Temporarily Spiked Prices**
Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work."
Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.
The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong.
A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram).
But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising — with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems:
Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC...
For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems...
Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said...
Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...
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2023-04-30 11:34:00

**AI Coding Competition Pits GPT-4 Against Bard, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bing, and Claude+**
HackerNoon tested five AI bots on coding problems from Leetcode.com — GPT-4, GitHub Co-Pilot, Bard, Bing, and Claude+.
There's some interesting commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each one -- and of course, the code that they ultimately output. The final results?
\[GPT-4's submission\] passes all tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 8% on memory. GPT-4 is highly versatile in generating code for various programming languages and applications. Some of the caveats are that it takes much longer to get a response. API usage is also a lot more expensive and costs could ramp up quickly. Overall it got the answer right and passed the test.
\[Bing's submission\] passed all the tests. It beat 47% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory. This code looks a lot simpler than what GPT-4 generated. It beat GPT-4 on memory and it used less code! Bing seems to have the most efficient code so far, however, it gave a very short explanation of how it solved it. Nonetheless, best so far.
But both Bard and Claude+ failed the submission test (badly), while GitHub Copilot "passes all the tests. It scored better than 30% of submissions on runtime and 37% on memory."
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2023-04-30 07:34:00

**China's Mars Rover Discovers Signs of Recent Water in Martian Sand Dunes**
The Associated Press reports that "water may be more widespread and recent on Mars than previously thought, based on observations of Martian sand dunes by China's rover." A paper published in Science suggests thin films of water appeared on sand dunes sometime between 1.4 million years ago and as recently as 400,000 years ago — or perhaps even sooner:
The finding highlights new, potentially fertile areas in the warmer regions of Mars where conditions might be suitable for life to exist, though more study is needed...
Before the Zhurong rover fell silent, it observed salt-rich dunes with cracks and crusts, which researchers said likely were mixed with melting morning frost or snow as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago... Conditions during that period were similar to now on Mars, with rivers and lakes dried up and no longer flowing as they did billions of years earlier...
The rover did not directly detect any water in the form of frost or ice. But Qin said computer simulations and observations by other spacecraft at Mars indicate that even nowadays at certain times of year, conditions could be suitable for water to appear... Small pockets of water from thawing frost or snow, mixed with salt, likely resulted in the small cracks, hard crusty surfaces, loose particles and other dune features like depressions and ridges, the Chinese scientists said.
Space.com explains exactly how the discovery was confirmed:
The laser-induced breakdown spectrometer (MarSCoDe) instrument onboard the rover zapped sand grains into millimeter-sized particles. Their chemical makeup revealed hydrated minerals like sulfates, silica, iron oxide and chlorides... Researchers say water vapor traveled from Martian poles to lower latitudes like Zhurong's spot a few million years ago, when the planet's polar ice caps released high amounts of water vapor, thanks to a different tilt that had Mars' poles pointed more directly toward the sun. Frigid temperatures on the wobbling planet condensed the drifting vapor and dropped it as snow far from the poles, according to the latest study.
Mars' tilt changes over a 124,000-year cycle, so "this offers a replenishing mechanism for vapor in the atmosphere to form frost or snow at low latitudes where the Zhurong rover has landed," Qin told Space.com. But "no water ice was detected by any instrument on the Zhurong rover." Instead, in the same way that salting roads on Earth melts icy patches during storms, salts in Martian sand dunes warmed the fallen snow and thawed it enough to form saltwater. The process also formed minerals such as silica and ferric oxides, which Zhurong spotted, researchers say. The saltwater, however, didn't stay around for long. Temperatures on Mars swing wildly and spike in the mornings between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., so the saltwater evaporated and left behind salt and other newly formed minerals that later seeped between the dune's sand grains, cementing them to form a crust, according to the study...
"The phenomenon was documented at one site, but it should be applicable to a fairly large fraction of Mars' surface at similar latitudes," Manasvi Lingam, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the Florida Institute of Technology who wasn't involved in the new research, told Space.com.
Since the rover found water activity on (and in) salty Martian dunes, the researchers now suggest future missions search for salt-tolerant microbes , and are raising the possibility of "extant life on Mars."
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2023-04-30 04:34:00

**Microsoft is Now Supporting Right-to-Repair Legislation**
Microsoft's headquarters are in the state of Washington — and this year when the state legislature considered a right-to-repair bill, Microsoft showed its support.
The nonprofit "climate solutions" site Grist reports that the committee considering that bill received an email from Microsoft's senior director of government affairs, saying that the bill "fairly balances the interests of manufacturers, customers, and independent repair shops and in doing so will provide more options for consumer device repair."
The Fair Repair Act stalled out a week later due to opposition from all three Republicans on the committee and Senator Lisa Wellman, a Democrat and former Apple executive. (Apple frequently lobbies against right-to-repair bills, and during a hearing, Wellman defended the iPhone maker's position that it is already doing enough on repair.) But despite the bill's failure to launch this year, repair advocates say Microsoft's support — a notable first for a major U.S. tech company — is bringing other manufacturers to the table to negotiate the details of other right-to-repair bills for the first time.
"We are in the middle of more conversations with manufacturers being way more cooperative than before," Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group's right-to-repair campaign, told Grist. "And I think Microsoft's leadership and willingness to be first created that opportunity...."
Like other consumer tech giants, Microsoft has historically fought right-to-repair bills while restricting access to spare parts, tools, and repair documentation to its network of "authorized" repair partners. In 2019, the company even helped kill a repair bill in Washington state. But in recent years the company has started changing its tune on the issue. In 2021, following pressure from shareholders, Microsoft agreed to take steps to facilitate the repair of its devices — a first for a U.S. company. Microsoft followed through on the agreement by expanding access to spare parts and service tools, including through a partnership with the repair guide site iFixit. The tech giant also commissioned a study that found repairing Microsoft products instead of replacing them can dramatically reduce both waste and carbon emissions. Microsoft has also started engaging more cooperatively with lawmakers over right-to-repair bills. In late 2021 and 2022, the company met with legislators in both Washington and New York to discuss each state's respective right-to-repair bill. In both cases, lawmakers and advocates involved in the bill negotiations described the meetings as productive...
When Washington lawmakers revived their right-to-repair bill for the 2023 legislative cycle, Microsoft once again came to the negotiating table. From state senator and bill sponsor Joe Nguyen's perspective, Microsoft's view was, "We see this coming, we'd rather be part of the conversation than outside. And we want to make sure it is done in a thoughtful way." Proctor, whose organization was also involved in negotiating the Washington bill, said that Microsoft had a few specific requests, including that the bill require repair shops to possess a third-party technical certification and carry insurance. It was also important to Microsoft that the bill only cover products manufactured after the bill's implementation date, and that manufacturers be required to provide the public only the same parts and documents that their authorized repair providers already receive. Some of the company's requests, Proctor said, were "tough" for advocates to concede on. "But we did, because we thought what they were doing was in good faith."
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2023-04-30 02:16:00

**Can OpenAI Trademark 'GPT'?**
"ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT are a mere sampling of the many outfits to apply for trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in recent months," notes TechCrunch, exploring the issue of whether OpenAI can actually trademark the phrase 'GPT'...
Little wonder that after applying in late December for a trademark for "GPT," which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," OpenAI last month petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the "myriad infringements and counterfeit apps" beginning to spring into existence. Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was dismissed last week... Given the rest of the queue in which OpenAI finds itself, that means a decision could take up to five more months, says Jefferson Scher, a partner in the intellectual property group of Carr & Ferrell and chair of the firm's trademark practice group. Even then, the outcome isn't assured, Scher explains... \[H\]elpful, says Scher, is the fact that OpenAI has been using "GPT" for years, having released its original Generative Pre-trained Transformer model, or GPT-1, back in October 2018...
Even if a USPTO examiner has no problem with OpenAI's application, it will be moved afterward to a so-called opposition period, where other market participants can argue why the agency should deny the "GPT" trademark. Scher describes what would follow this way: In the case of OpenAI, an opposer would challenge Open AI's position that "GPT" is proprietary and that the public perceives it as such instead of perceiving the acronym to pertain to generative AI more broadly...
It all begs the question of why the company didn't move to protect "GPT" sooner. Here, Scher speculates that the company was "probably caught off guard" by its own success... Another wrinkle here is that OpenAI may soon be so famous that its renown becomes a dominant factor, says Scher. While one doesn't need to be famous to secure a trademark, once an outfit is widely enough recognized, it receives protection that extends far beyond its sphere. Rolex is too famous a trademark to be used on anything else, for instance.
Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the article.
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2023-04-29 22:53:00

**Red Hat's 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an Apartment-Based Startup**
For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.
In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market.
"How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.
"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."
Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. \[Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.\] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."
Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."
But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."
Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies."
By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.
In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.
"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.
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2023-04-29 21:53:00

**Six Months Later, Poker Player Garrett Adelstein Still Thinks He Was Cheated**
In October professional poker player Garrett Adelstein lost to a relative newcomer. Last month 15,000 viewers tuned in for his first new public interview, Poker News reports. Adelstein "reiterated his confidence that he was cheated," and said he will not fund the $135,000 the newcomer gave hiim as a peace offering.
\[Newcomer Robbi Jade Lew\] denied cheating and Hustler's third-party investigation concluded there was "no evidence of wrongdoing." Early in the two-hour interview, Polk asked his guest if he still feels the same about what went down on that memorable evening. "In essence, I stand completely by the statement I made. I think it's extremely likely that I was cheated," the high-stakes pro responded... Adelstein said that Lew "has a lot of balls" to return to live-stream poker after, as he claims, cheating him out of a massive pot...
Over the past six months, numerous poker fans have called for Adelstein to return \[the $135,000\] to, as they believe, its rightful owner. He instead donated it to a charity. But still many believe the right decision is for him to give it back to Lew. Polk asked him if he would do so. "No, I will not be refunding Robbi the money, period. I am extremely confident I was cheated in this hand," Adelstein defiantly stated. Adelstein then pleaded with those who are on "Team Robbi" to put themselves in his shoes and and think about how they'd react if they felt they were cheated at the poker table.
The next week — on April 1st — Poker News jokingly reported that Robbi Jade Lew had published a new book titled If I Did It..
The April Fool's day satire quotes Robbi Jade Lew as saying "I thought it would be fun to write a book about how I would have cheated if I'd actually done it. Which I didn't...."
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2023-04-29 20:34:00

**Report: Apple's AI and 'Siri' Efforts Hindered by Caution, Dysfunction**
The Information reports:
Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT... For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there.
They'd left Apple last fall because "they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs...according to two people familiar with their thinking... They're now working on Google's efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people."
MacRumors summarizes the article this way. "Siri and Apple's use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information's Wayne Ma."
The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered âOESiriâOE and the company's AI technologies. Apple's virtual assistant is apparently "widely derided" inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. By 2018, the team working on âOESiriâOE had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant."
SiriâOE's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse âOESiriâOE's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about âOESiriâOE coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a waste of time and money..." Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give âOESiriâOE the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple's uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing âOESiriâOE, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant's functions to be performed on-device.
Cook and other senior executives requested changes to âOESiriâOE to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers âOESiriâOE's responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from âOESiriâOE to push users directly to Apple's website instead. âOESiriâOE engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. Engineers claim to have spent months persuading âOESiriâOE designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up âOESiriâOE to answer the huge number of questions asked by users.
Similarly, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a âOESiriâOE answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted âOESiriâOE to appear "all-knowing."
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2023-04-29 19:34:00

**Long-time Slashdot Reader Announces Open Source, Java-Based, Full-Stack Web Development Framework**
Long-time software engineer Blake1024 (Slashdot reader #846,727) writes:
We are thrilled to announce the release of Kiss v2.0, a comprehensive, Java-based, open-source, full-stack web development framework... Kiss v2.0 provides an even more seamless, out-of-the-box experience, including pre-configured front-end and back-end components... Key Features:
\\* Custom HTML controls\* RESTful web services\* Microservices architecture\* Built-in authentication\* SQL API integration\* Robust reporting capabilities Kiss utilizes microservices, allowing developers to work on a running system without the need for rebuilds, redeploys, or server reboots... Production systems can be updated without any downtime. With proven success in commercial applications, Kiss v2.0 is ready for prime time. It's not a beta, but a reliable solution for your web development needs.
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2023-04-29 18:34:00

**84 Amazon Delivery Drivers Just Won a $30 an Hour Union Contract**
CNBC reports that 84 Amazon delivery drivers at a California facility "joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union said Monday, in a win for labor organizers that have long sought to gain a foothold at the e-retailer."
An anonymous reader shared this follow-up report from Vox:
\[T\]hey unanimously ratified the contract, which will bring their wages from around $20 currently to $30 by September and would allow them to refuse to do deliveries they consider unsafe. But that victory is a bit complicated... They wear Amazon vests and drive Amazon-branded vehicles, have schedules dictated by Amazon, and can even be fired by Amazon. But they're technically employed by Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), one of approximately 3,000 delivery contract companies that make up Amazon's extensive delivery network. BTS voluntarily recognized the union after a majority of workers signed union authorization cards and negotiated the union contract.
Amazon has told Vox that its contract with BTS, which exclusively delivers for Amazon, was terminated "well before" workers notified the tech giant Monday, but that the contract hasn't expired yet. The union said that the delivery people are still working for Amazon and that the contract goes through October, when it typically would auto-renew. What happens next depends on Amazon, the workers, and the interpretation of outdated US labor law... At the crux of the delivery driver issue is whether Amazon controls enough of what the workers do to be considered a joint employer. "If Amazon is able to get away with ignoring the workers' decision and hiding behind the subcontractor relationships, then I'm afraid we'll have yet another story of the failure of American labor law," said Benjamin Sachs, a labor professor at Harvard Law School. "If this leads to a recognition that these drivers are Amazon employees, joint employees, then this could be massively important."
One element of note: These workers organized in California, which has a lower bar for who is considered an employee, and by extension, who enjoys union protections... Another element that the National Labor Relations Board will likely have to decide is whether Amazon terminated the contract with BTS in order to avoid working with a union, something that would be illegal if they were considered employees.
The article also notes that elsewhere, 50 YouTube contractors also voted to unionize this week.
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2023-04-29 17:34:00

**NASA Seeks 'Citizen Scientists' to Listen to Space Noises**
"Earth's magnetic environment is filled with a symphony of sound that we cannot hear," NASA wrote this month. When solar winds approach earth, "it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves... a cacophonous operetta portraying the dramatic relationship between Earth and the Sun."
So NASA is now announcing "a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP — or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas " that has "turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes..." Or, as the Washington Post puts it, "NASA wants your help listening in on the universe."
From NASA's news release:
In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth's magnetic "harp" — its magnetosphere — as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth's magnetosphere. "THEMIS can sample the whole harp," said Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. "And it's been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data."
The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds... Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a "reverse harp" — frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated...
"Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos," said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. "We're hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that's the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit."
To start exploring these sounds, visit the HARP website.
"Think listening to years' worth of wave patterns is a job for artificial intelligence? Think again," writes the Washington Post.
In a news release, HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London says humans are often better at listening than machines. "The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool," Archer says. "We're essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms."
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2023-04-29 16:34:00

**Lyft Demands Employees Return to Office in September**
"Since the pandemic began, Lyft employees have been able to work remotely," notes the New York Times, "logging into videoconferences from their homes and dispersing across the country like many other tech workers. Last year, the company made that policy official, telling staff that work would be 'fully flexible' and subleasing floors of its offices in San Francisco and elsewhere."
No longer. On Friday, David Risher, the company's new chief executive, told employees in an all-hands meeting that they would be required to come back into the office at least three days a week, starting this fall. \[Although the Times adds later that "People will be allowed to work remotely for one month each year, and those living far from offices would not be required to come in."\]
It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling ride-hailing company since starting this month, and it came just a day after he laid off 26 percent of Lyft's work force.
"Things just move faster when you're face to face," Mr. Risher said in an interview. Remote work in the tech industry, he said, had come at a cost, leading to isolation and eroding culture. "There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem."
The decision, combined with the layoffs and other changes, signals the beginning of a new chapter at Lyft. It could also be an indication that some tech companies — particularly firms that are struggling — may be changing their minds on flexibility about where employees work. Nudges toward working in the office could soon turn into demands, as they have at companies like Disney and Apple...
Lyft also planned to tell employees that it would reduce their stock grants this year, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Risher "said the cost savings from the layoffs would go toward lower prices for riders and higher earnings for drivers," the Times adds, noting that last month Lyft's two founders said they'd step down after disappointing financial results. (Lyft's stock price closed Friday at $10.25 — down from a peak of $78.)
Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor and organizational psychologist, suggests another possible motivation to the Times: executives worried about financial stress "feel compelled to increase their own illusion of control."
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2023-04-29 15:34:00

**Another Open Source Alternative to ChatGPT Released by Hugging Face**
Earlier this week TechCrunch reported that just like Stability AI, startup Hugging Face "has released an open source alternative to OpenAI's viral AI-powered chabot, ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat."
Available to test through a web interface and to integrate with existing apps and services via Hugging Face's API, HuggingChat can handle many of the tasks ChatGPT can, like writing code, drafting emails and composing rap lyrics. The AI model driving HuggingChat was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION — the German nonprofit responsible for creating the dataset with which Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI model, was trained.
Open Assistant aims to replicate ChatGPT, but the group — made up mostly of volunteers — has broader ambitions than that. "We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone," Open Assistant writes on its GitHub page. "And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware..."
HuggingChat joins a growing family of open source alternatives to ChatGPT. Just last week, Stability AI released StableLM, a set of models that can generate code and text given basic instructions.
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2023-04-29 14:34:00

**System76 Plans Its Own Open Hardware Laptop, and a New Desktop Environment Written in Rust**
Linux Magazine argues that System76's Pop!\_OS offers "something rare: a commercial distribution that was integrated into the hardware, with utilities designed specifically for System76 computers and keyboards."
The only other example of an integrated commercial distro of which I am aware is Purism, a company in the same niche... With hardware and software coming from the same source — what business calls vertical integration — distributions like System76/Pop!\_OS offer Linux users their first experiences with what Windows and macOS users have always enjoyed — to say nothing of the closest they can currently get to open hardware. Could Linux be finally becoming mainstream at last?
They interviewed System76 CEO Carl Richell (along with a marketing director and media relations manager), who remembered how System76 was actually founded in Carl's basement around 2005:
He wanted to show the world how far Linux and open source software had come by delivering it preinstalled on high-quality computers backed by caring, knowledgeable customer support. Carl felt that making Linux computers that highlight the work of the community would be a great way to introduce the broader public to open source technology and its potential...
LM: What other hardware might System76 offer in the future?
S76: We are in the research and development process of designing our own in-house laptop. We'll eventually refresh our Meerkat mini desktop with a new Thelio-style aesthetic. That project will start sometime after our first in-house laptops start shipping. \[In addition,\] Launch keyboards and the System76 Keyboard Configurator work on macOS and Windows! We've also prepared ISO layouts for most Launch models but don't have a time frame for release.
LM: What are you willing to say at this point about the company's future directions?
S76: We're developing COSMIC DE — a desktop environment written in Rust — as well as a prototype for an open hardware laptop manufactured in-house. Finally, Nebula, a line of computer cases based on Thelio desktops will be arriving in the coming months.
My favorite line from the interview? "Seeing a flat sheet of aluminum transformed into a beautiful desktop is strikingly rewarding."
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2023-04-29 10:00:00

**California Passes 1st-In-Nation Emission Rules For Trains**
California has approved a groundbreaking rule to cut greenhouse gas emissions by limiting rail pollution, banning locomotives over 23 years old by 2030, increasing the use of zero-emissions technology for freight transportation, and imposing restrictions on idling. The Associated Press reports: The rule will ban locomotive engines more than 23 years old by 2030 and increase the use of zero-emissions technology to transport freight from ports and throughout railyards. It would also ban locomotives in the state from idling longer than 30 minutes if they are equipped with an automatic shutoff. The standards would also reduce chemicals that contribute to smog. They could improve air quality near railyards and ports.
The transportation sector contributed the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But rail only accounts for about 2% of those emissions. Other states can sign on to try to adopt the California rule if it gets the OK from the Biden administration. The rule is the most ambitious of its kind in the country. "The locomotive rule has the power to change the course of history for Californians who have suffered from train pollution for far too long, and it is my hope that our federal regulators follow California's lead," said Yasmine Agelidis, a lawyer with environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, in a statement.
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2023-04-29 07:00:00

**Nuke-Launching AI Would Be Illegal Under Proposed US Law**
A group of Senators on Wednesday announced bipartisan legislation that seeks to prevent an AI system from making nuclear launch decisions. "The Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act would prohibit the use of federal funds for launching any nuclear weapon by an automated system without 'meaningful human control,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: The new bill builds on existing US Department of Defense policy, which states that in all cases, "the United States will maintain a human 'in the loop' for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment." The new bill aims to codify the Defense Department principle into law, and it also follows the recommendation of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which called for the US to affirm its policy that only human beings can authorize the employment of nuclear weapons.
"While US military use of AI can be appropriate for enhancing national security purposes, use of AI for deploying nuclear weapons without a human chain of command and control is reckless, dangerous, and should be prohibited," Buck said in a statement. "I am proud to co-sponsor this legislation to ensure that human beings, not machines, have the final say over the most critical and sensitive military decisions."
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2023-04-29 03:30:00

**The DOJ Detected the SolarWinds Hack 6 Months Earlier Than First Disclosed**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Department of Justice, Mandiant, and Microsoft stumbled upon the SolarWinds breach six months earlier than previously reported, WIRED has learned, but were unaware of the significance of what they had found. The breach, publicly announced in December 2020, involved Russian hackers compromising the software maker SolarWinds and inserting a backdoor into software served to about 18,000 of its customers. That tainted software went on to infect at least nine US federal agencies, among them the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms including Microsoft, Mandiant, Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks. The hackers had been in these various networks for between four and nine months before the campaign was exposed by Mandiant.
WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months earlier, in late May 2020 -- but the scale and significance of the breach wasn't immediately apparent. Suspicions were triggered when the department detected unusual traffic emanating from one of its servers that was running a trial version of the Orion software suite made by SolarWinds, according to sources familiar with the incident. The software, used by system administrators to manage and configure networks, was communicating externally with an unfamiliar system on the internet. The DOJ asked the security firm Mandiant to help determine whether the server had been hacked. It also engaged Microsoft, though it's not clear why the software maker was also brought onto the investigation.
It's not known what division of the DOJ experienced the breach, but representatives from the Justice Management Division and the US Trustee Program participated in discussions about the incident. The Trustee Program oversees the administration of bankruptcy cases and private trustees. The Management Division advises DOJ managers on budget and personnel management, ethics, procurement, and security. Investigators suspected the hackers had breached the DOJ server directly, possibly by exploiting a vulnerability in the Orion software. They reached out to SolarWinds to assist with the inquiry, but the company's engineers were unable to find a vulnerability in their code. In July 2020, with the mystery still unresolved, communication between investigators and SolarWinds stopped. A month later, the DOJ purchased the Orion system, suggesting that the department was satisfied that there was no further threat posed by the Orion suite, the sources say. According to WIRED, the DOJ said it "notified the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) about the breach at the time it occurred -- though a US National Security Agency spokesperson expressed frustration that the agency was not also notified."
"But in December 2020, when the public learned that a number of federal agencies were compromised in the SolarWinds campaign -- the DOJ among them -- neither the DOJ nor CISA revealed to the public that the operation had unknowingly been found months earlier. The DOJ initially said its chief information officer had discovered the breach on December 24."
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2023-04-29 02:02:00

**Why There's No Room For Suburbs In Open-World Games**
VICE's Ade Adeniji booted up The Crew 2, GTA V, GTA San Andreas, Saints Row, and Watch Dogs 2, and noticed a interesting pattern: there are no suburbs to be seen. "We are transported to major cities and vast countrysides, but nothing that really speaks to the in between -- to the suburbs," writes Adeniji. "\[H\]ow can open world games leave out a space that we fundamentally see as Americana? Is this about design choices and constraints, or does it speak to something deeper about how we really view American suburbs -- and how desperately we want to escape them?" Here's an excerpt from the report: I figured I would first take my suburbia question to someone who has been creating games since the early 1970s. Don Daglow, pioneer of the MMORPG genre with Neverwinter Nights, broke down his answer into three parts: scale, visual interest, and stereotypes. In terms of scale, suburbs typically have lots of smaller, more repetitive environmental elements when compared to cities. Think strip malls and identical homes versus the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. "Big objects in the environment create vertical movement opportunities as well as horizontal movement in 3D spaces. You can support superhero skills, think Spider Man, and jumping, think early Assassins Creed." Daglow said. "Godzilla never attacked a small suburb on the rail line north of Tokyo. Why would he waste his time there when there's so much more to chomp downtown?"
Lazlow Jones, voice of GTA III's Chatterbox FM and a longtime director, writer, and producer at Rockstar Games, agreed. But Rockstar itself made a gradual progression from the chaotic cities of GTA to the open natural worlds of Red Dead. Then the company brought the two together in GTA V. "When I was at Rockstar, we started off focusing on open world games set in urban areas because it gave us great density," Lazlow began. "But over the years we expanded to rural environments while keeping them interesting and engaging." \[...\] Carly Kocurek, who teaches in the Game Design and Experiential Media program at Illinois Tech, says suburbs operate in the realm of "perceived beigeness" making it hard to imagine them as settings for the kinds of stories and worlds we see most often in open world games. To the extent that suburbia does show up strongly, these spaces often serve as a starting or transition point for a character, akin to maybe the first 10 minutes of a film, or the movie's midpoint.
There are other design reasons why suburbs don't feature prominently in video games and why sparse areas away from intriguing points of interest are often the first to get cut. "You're really trying to compress a massive space in real life, into a virtual space which is actually really small. It's like taking something and cutting it down by 10x," explained Will Harris, who led the open world design team at Light Speed LA. Harris says that in world building, one of the first steps is thinking about defining features. What makes Chicago, for instance, feel different than Washington D.C.? Huge landmarks immediately orient us in a specific space and differentiate it from others. And woe unto you if you do try to architect suburbs in large numbers. Developers could try to build out distinct houses, began Erik Villarreal, an environmental artist at Visual Concepts/2K. "But this requires a developer to create homes that stand out from each other, which can be time consuming and tie up a lot of resources," he said. Harris adds that there are only so many mechanics in sandbox gameplay and design. He calls the suburbs "interstitial spaces." But the larger these spaces become, the more unwieldy, and the more quickly the player realizes that these spaces are superficial. We've all had the frustrating experience in gaming where we reach a certain part of a map, but then discover there's nothing actually to do there. "So the Staten Island kit gets vaporized. We trim the fat." Harris says.
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2023-04-29 01:25:00

**Washington Passes Law Requiring Consent Before Companies Collect Health Data**
Yesterday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the My Health, My Data bill into law, requiring companies to receive a user's explicit consent before they can collect, share, or sell their health data. When the law comes into effect in March 2024, users will have the right to withdraw consent at any time and have their data deleted. The Verge reports: The law should help shield users' health data from the companies and organizations not included under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which prevents certain medical providers from disclosing "individually identifiable" health information without consent. The HIPAA Privacy Rule doesn't cover many of the health apps and sites that collect medical data, allowing them to freely collect and sell this information to advertisers.
Under Washington's new law, which comes into effect in March 2024, medical apps and sites must ask a user for permission to collect their health data in a nondeceptive manner that "openly communicates a consumer's freely given, informed, opt-in, voluntary, specific, and unambiguous written consent." The site and apps must also disclose what kind of data they plan to collect and if they plan to sell it. Additionally, the bill will block medical providers from using geofencing to collect location information about the patients that visit the facility.
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2023-04-29 00:45:00

**ChatGPT Back in Italy After Meeting Watchdog Demands**
ChatGPT's maker said Friday that the artificial intelligence chatbot is available again in Italy after the company met the demands of regulators who temporarily blocked it over privacy concerns. From a report: OpenAI said it fulfilled a raft of conditions that the Italian data protection authority wanted satisfied by an April 30 deadline to have the ban on the AI software lifted. "ChatGPT is available again to our users in Italy," San Francisco-based OpenAI said by email. "We are excited to welcome them back, and we remain dedicated to protecting their privacy."
Last month, Italian watchdog, known as Garante, ordered OpenAI to temporarily stop processing Italian users' personal information while it investigated a possible data breach. The authority said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but emphasized the importance of following the European Union's strict data privacy rules. OpenAI said it "addressed or clarified the issues" raised by the watchdog. The measures include adding information on its website about how it collects and uses data used to train the algorithms that power ChatGPT, giving European Union users a new form they can use to object to having their data used for training, and adding a tool to verify users' ages when signing up.
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2023-04-29 00:02:00

**Tencent Cloud Announces Deepfakes-As-a-Service For $145**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Tencent Cloud has announced it's offering a digital human production platform -- essentially Deepfakes-as-a-Service (DFaaS). According to Chinese media and confirmed to The Reg by Tencent, the service needs just three minutes of live-action video and 100 spoken sentences -- and a $145 fee -- to create a high-definition digital human. Gestating the creation requires just 24 hours. Making people hasn't been that quick since Eden.
The digital characters are available in half bodies or full bodies, and the service is available in both Chinese and English. Some aspects, like background and tone, are customizable. The videos avoid the flat intonation and single speech rhythm that plagues traditional acoustic models by using an in-house small-sample timbre customization technology that relies on deep learning acoustic models and neural network vocoders. \[...\] Tencent offers five styles for its digital humans: 3D realistic, 3D semi-realistic, 3D cartoon, 2D real person, and 2D cartoon. Customized Q&As can be created for the digital human, turning them into a type of deepfaked chatbot.
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2023-04-28 23:20:00

**Sony Closes In On 40 Million PS5s Sold**
Sony says it sold a total of 38.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles, according to the company's latest earnings release. In the first three months of the year, it shipped 6.3 million units -- "more than triple what the company shipped in the same quarter the previous year (2 million)," reports The Verge. From the report: On the software side things were more mixed, Bloomberg notes. Revenue from game software was up overall, but units shipped fell from 70.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 68 million in the same quarter of 2022. PlayStation Network monthly active users were up slightly from 106 million to 108 million, but the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers were flat at 47.4 million.
This disparity partly reflects the lack of major first-party games releases in the quarter. But there are also concerns that the PS5's earlier hardware supply issues are having a knock on effect on software sales and subscriptions, which are important if the company wants to build a "virtuous cycle" of mutually reinforcing console and game sales. CNBC notes that the company reported an operating profit of a record 1.21 trillion yen (around $8.9 billion) for the year, with revenue in the quarter rising 35 percent to 3.06 trillion yen (around $22.5 billion).
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2023-04-28 22:40:00

**Chinese Hackers Outnumber FBI Cyber Staff 50 To 1, Bureau Director Says**
According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chinese hackers vastly outnumber U.S. cyber intelligence staff "by at least 50 to 1." CNBC reports: "To give you a sense of what we're up against, if each one of the FBI's cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI Cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1," Wray said in prepared remarks for a budget hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. The disclosure highlights the massive scale of cyber threats the U.S. is facing, particularly from China. Wray said the country has "a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations -- big or small -- combined."
The agency is requesting about $63 million to help it beef up its cyber staff with 192 new positions. Wray said this would also help the FBI put more cyber staff in field offices to be closer to where victims of cyber crimes actually are.
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2023-04-28 22:02:00

**Daimler Is Setting Up a $650 Million Charging Network For Commercial EVs**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a new fast-charging network coming to North America. It's called Greenlane, and it's a $650 million joint venture between Daimler, NextEra Energy Resources, and a BlackRock investment fund. But it's unlikely you'll recharge your passenger EV at a Greenlane site any time soon -- this new network is being designed specifically for medium- and heavy-duty commercial EVs. \[...\] Based on the company's renderings, Greenlane's sites will be much more comfortable for big rigs. The first of these sites will be in Southern California, and Greenlane says it will build out a network along critical freight routes on the East and West Coasts, as well as in Texas. To begin with, the company will focus on commercial EV recharging, but refueling infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cell EVs will follow. In time, Greenlane plans to add chargers for passenger (or light-duty) EVs. "Greenlane is designed to begin to tackle one of the greatest hurdles to the trucking industry's decarbonization -- infrastructure," said John O'Leary, Daimler Trucks North America's president and CEO.
"The nation's fleets can only transform with the critical catalyst of publicly accessible charging designed to meet the needs for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. Together with our strong partners, BlackRock and NextEra Energy Resources, we are launching Greenlane to address the unique demands of the industry, support our mutual customers, and provide a dual benefit to all electric vehicle drivers who will be able to utilize this new network. We're excited to take this next step and look forward to sharing more of Greenlane's plans in the future," O'Leary said.
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2023-04-28 21:23:00

**Key Radar Antenna Stuck On Europe's Jupiter-Bound Spacecraft**
The European Space Agency appears to have a slight problem: a critical antenna is jammed on their Jupiter-bound spacecraft launched two weeks ago. From the Associated Press: The 52-foot (16-meter) radar antenna on Juice unfolded only one-third of the way following liftoff, according to the space agency. Engineers suspect a tiny pin may be protruding. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft's engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose. If that doesn't work, they said they have plenty of time to solve the problem.
Juice, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won't reach the giant planet until 2031. It's taking a roundabout path to get there, including gravity-assist flybys of Earth and our moon, and Venus. The radar antenna is needed to peer beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life, a major goal of the nearly $1.8 billion mission. Its targets include Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.
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2023-04-28 20:41:00

**Zimbabwe Will Issue Gold-Backed Digital Tokens From Next Month**
Zimbabwe's central bank plans to sell a gold-backed digital currency to the public from May 8 in another attempt to stabilize its tumbling currency and offer an alternative to the US dollar. From a report: The tokens, to be sold through banks in local and foreign currency at a 20% margin above the interbank mid-rate, will be introduced in two phases, central bank governor John Mangudya, said in an emailed statement on Friday. The currency will initially be used for investment and then for transactions. "The issuance of the gold backed digital tokens is meant to expand the value-preserving instruments available in the economy and enhance the divisibility of the investment instruments and widen their access and usage by the public," Mangudya said. This year, Zimbabwe's local currency has declined 35% against the US dollar, which superseded it as the preferred currency for transactions. The central bank has been building gold reserves and acquiring other precious minerals since the introduction of a policy in 2022 that compels miners to pay part of their royalties in cash and metal. It's banking on the stash to help it with the latest plan.
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2023-04-28 20:01:00

**China Ramps Up Coal Power Despite Carbon Neutral Pledges**
Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents. From a report: The approvals, analysed by Greenpeace, reveal that between January and March this year, at least 20.45 gigawatts of coal power was approved, up from 8.63GW in the same period in 2022. In the whole of 2021, 18GW of coal was approved. A Chinese Communist party (CCP) five-year plan from 2016 had placed a heavy emphasis on reducing the use of coal and developing clean energy sources. In 2020 Xi Jinping, China's leader, pledged that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. This prompted an era of reduced coal power approvals as local governments sought to keep their local economies in check with Beijing's priorities. A rise in coal power approvals came in 2020 when the five-year plan came to an end, as local governments anticipated even tighter restrictions on coal expansion in the next round. But in 2021, China suffered huge power outages, leading to a dramatic shift in the CCP's energy priorities. In September the price of electricity soared as factories reopened to service global demand as the rest of the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. But the government had capped prices, so many power plants reduced output rather than operated at a loss.
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2023-04-28 19:21:00

**New Venmo Feature Lets Users Transfer Crypto To Outside Wallets - and To Each Other**
Venmo soon will allow users to transfer their Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash to outside wallets -- as well as to other users of the popular payment app. From a report: The feature will roll out starting in May, according to a statement from PayPal, which acquired Venmo in 2013. Users can also transfer crypto to their PayPal wallets, which released a similar ability for users in 2022. Crypto transfers on Venmo will be irreversible, just like crypto transactions more broadly -- a function of cryptocurrency's use of blockchains, or immutable public ledgers. To roll out the transfer system, PayPal is partnering with Paxos, a crypto firm that specializes in stablecoins.
"We're excited to connect Venmo's customers to the community, other wallets and exchanges, and we intend to continue to roll out additional crypto products and services in the year ahead," PayPal said in its statement. The announcement from PayPal is one of the first drips of crypto updates from the payments giant since February, when it was reported that the publicly traded company was pausing work on its own stablecoin after reports that Paxos, its partner in the effort, was under investigation from the New York Department of Financial Services, a key player among U.S. cryptocurrency regulators.
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2023-04-28 18:40:00

**Microsoft is Busy Rewriting Core Windows Code in Memory-safe Rust**
Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers. From a report: David "dwizzle" Weston, director of OS security for Windows, announced the arrival of Rust in the operating system's kernel at BlueHat IL 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel, last month. "You will actually have Windows booting with Rust in the kernel in probably the next several weeks or months, which is really cool," he said. "The basic goal here was to convert some of these internal C++ data types into their Rust equivalents."
Microsoft showed interest in Rust several years ago as a way to catch and squash memory safety bugs before the code lands in the hands of users; these kinds of bugs were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in its own products since 2006. The Rust toolchain strives to prevent code from being built and shipped that is exploitable, which in an ideal world reduces opportunities for miscreants to attack weaknesses in software. Simply put, Rust is focused on memory safety and similar protections, which cuts down on the number of bad bugs in the resulting code. Rivals like Google have already publicly declared their affinity for Rust.
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2023-04-28 18:00:00

**Tech Companies Are Colluding To Cheat H1-B Visa Lottery**
The Biden administration says it has found evidence that several dozen small technology companies have colluded to increase the chances that their prospective foreign hires will win a coveted H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers in this year's lottery. From a report: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that awards H-1B visas, said it has found that a small number of companies are responsible for entering the same applicants into the lottery multiple times, with the alleged goal of artificially boosting their chances of winning a visa. The findings were laid out in a notice to employers viewed by The Wall Street Journal and set to be released Friday. That practice, according to the agency, is in large part responsible for inflating demand for the visas to a record high this year, with 781,000 entries into the lottery for 85,000 visa slots. Some of that increase in demand is organic, government data shows. About 350,000 applicants for H-1B visas submitted one entry into the lottery this year, compared with about 307,000 last year.
A much greater share of the increase, the data shows, can be attributed to applicants whose names were submitted by multiple companies. A large proportion of the duplicate entries, the immigration agency says, were submitted by a handful of the same companies. Some 96,000 people submitted multiple visa entries, for a total of about 408,000 entries. Though it isn't technically illegal for a foreign worker to have multiple companies submit visa applications on their behalf, companies submitting applications must attest that they have a real job for the employee in question if they win a visa. If companies that win a visa then quickly contract an employee out to third parties, or lay off an employee on the visa so he or she can switch companies, that could potentially amount to fraud.
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2023-04-28 17:32:00

2023-04-28 17:23:00

**Former Apple Employee Must Repay $19 Million After Defrauding the Company**
A former Apple employee has been sentenced to three years in prison and must pay back over $19 million in restitution for stealing around $17 million from the tech giant through mail and wire fraud schemes. From a report: Dhirendra Prasad, 55, was originally charged in March 2022 and later pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud Apple and related tax crimes back in November last year. Prasad was employed at the company between 2008 and 2018, mostly working as a buyer in Apple's global service supply chain, purchasing parts and services from vendors. In his written plea agreement, Prasad admitted he started siphoning money from his employer around 2011 by accepting kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices, and fraudulently charging Apple for goods that were never delivered. He also admitted to evading tax on the proceeds of his schemes and conspiring on these activities with the owners of two vendor companies, who have been charged in separate cases.
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2023-04-28 16:48:00

**Top Taiwan Chip Designer MediaTek 'Rapidly' Shifts Focus To Autos, AI**
Taiwan's top chip design company MediaTek is focusing more resources on chips for cars and AI computing as its smartphone clients face a supply glut and inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty dent demand for consumer electronics. From a report: "We are definitely moving our resources very, very rapidly towards the automotive and computing areas, because those areas will provide our growth in the next three to five years," MediaTek Chief Executive Rick Tsai told an earnings call. "In this very demanding environment, we are not reducing people. We're not increasing either. The critical thing is to allocate those precious resources," he said. Tsai said everyone, including MediaTek, was rushing to claim that they were able to support generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. "We're confident that we will be able to provide the capability to our customers," Tsai said. MediaTek is investing heavily in AI because the new areas the company is focusing on are all related to computing, Tsai said. The development of autonomous vehicles, for instance, requires AI chips.
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2023-04-28 16:00:00

**Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data**
A shocking number of organizations -- including banks and healthcare providers -- are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. From the report: The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in. Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization's private information and lead to potential data leaks. Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant's full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
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2023-04-28 15:32:00

**Microsoft is Done With Major Windows 10 Updates**
Windows 10 22H2 will be the final version of the operating system, Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday. From a report: Moving forward, all editions of Windows 10 will be supported with monthly security updates until October 14th, 2025, when Microsoft will end support. (Some releases on the Long-Term Servicing Channel, or LTSC, will get updates past that end of support date.) Microsoft is encouraging users to now transition to Windows 11 because Windows 10 won't be getting any new features.
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2023-04-28 14:40:00

**Mastercard Seeks To Expand Crypto Card Tie-ups**
Mastercard will expand its cryptocurrency payment card programme by seeking more partnerships with crypto firms, the company's head of crypto and blockchain said, even as the sector comes under closer scrutiny from regulators and banks grow wary. From a report: Mastercard has already partnered with crypto exchanges including Binance, Nexo and Gemini to offer crypto-linked payment cards in some countries. The Binance cards allow users to make payments in traditional currencies, funded by their cryptocurrency holdings on the exchange. "We have dozens of partners around the world who offer crypto card programmes and they continue to expand," Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard's head of crypto and blockchain, told Reuters on Thursday.
"Providing access to crypto in a safe way is also part of our value proposition and we're continuing to do that." Banks have become wary of crypto clients after a number of big crypto firms collapsed last year, including the bankruptcy of major exchange FTX. Meanwhile, U.S. regulators are increasingly cracking down on what they say is a lack of compliance in the market.
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2023-04-28 14:00:00

**Wikipedia Will Not Perform Online Safety Bill Age Checks**
Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says. From a report: Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors." A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result. But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification. Wikipedia has millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world.
It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb. The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024. Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.
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2023-04-28 13:00:00

**Google Gets Court Order To Take Down CryptBot That Infected Over 670,000 Computers**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hacker News: Google on Wednesday said it obtained a temporary court order in the U.S. to disrupt the distribution of a Windows-based information-stealing malware called CryptBot and "decelerate" its growth. The tech giant's Mike Trinh and Pierre-Marc Bureau said the efforts are part of steps it takes to "not only hold criminal operators of malware accountable, but also those who profit from its distribution." CryptBot is estimated to have infected over 670,000 computers in 2022 with the goal of stealing sensitive data such as authentication credentials, social media account logins, and cryptocurrency wallets from users of Google Chrome. The harvested data is then exfiltrated to the threat actors, who then sell the data to other attackers for use in data breach campaigns. CryptBot was first discovered in the wild in December 2019.
The malware has been traditionally delivered via maliciously modified versions of legitimate and popular software packages such as Google Earth Pro and Google Chrome that are hosted on fake websites. \[...\] The major distributors of CryptBot, per Google, are suspected to be operating a "worldwide criminal enterprise" based out of Pakistan. Google said it intends to use the court order, granted by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, to "take down current and future domains that are tied to the distribution of CryptBot," thereby kneecapping the spread of new infections.
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2023-04-28 10:00:00

**New Senate Bill Could Force Ticket Sellers To Disclose Their Fees Upfront**
schwit1 shares a report from Rolling Stone: It was a busy day for the live music industry in Washington \[on Wednesday\] as senators introduced multiple pieces of legislation aimed at improving transparency and competition in ticketing. One of the most common complaints among music fans in a long list of gripes about the modern ticketing industry is the hidden fees that get tacked on at the very end of a purchase, adding a deceptive extra costs customers won't even see until they've already selected their seats based on a different price. The Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing, or TICKET Act, could end that annoyance. Introduced on Tuesday by U.S. Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) and committee ranking member Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the bill, if passed, would require ticket sellers for concerts and sporting events to disclose the total price of a ticket including fees right away. Fees themselves can be a significant addition for concert tickets, usually adding a 20 to 30-percent extra charge on tickets but sometimes well exceeding that. Joe Biden pushed for a reform on "junk fees" earlier this year.
While passing the new legislation wouldn't stop the actual fees themselves, it would certainly be a step forward in making the business more transparent for consumers. While the bill would pass all-in prices on a federal level, some states like New York already enacted the policy. "Right now, one company is leveraging its power to lock venues into exclusive contracts that last up to ten years, ensuring there is no room for potential competitors to get their foot in the door," Klobuchar said, seemingly referencing Ticketmaster but not mentioning it by name. "Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences. The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act would help consumers, artists, and independent venue operators alike by making sure primary ticketing companies face pressure to innovate and improve."
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2023-04-28 07:00:00

**NASA Power Tweak Extends Voyager 2 Mission Even Longer**
Longtime Slashdot reader canux writes: In an effort to continue to power Voyager 2's five on-board scientific instruments, NASA engineers have devised a software update that disables the probe's electrical supply safety system \[to redirect the power to them\]. "Although the spacecraft's voltage will not be tightly regulated as a result, even after more than 45 years in flight, the electrical systems on both probes remain relatively stable, minimizing the need for a safety net," according to NASA JPL. "The engineering team is also able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. If the new approach works well for Voyager 2, the team may implement it on Voyager 1 as well."
The Voyager probes each contain a Multihundred-Watt Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for their power which use Plutonium-238 to generate heat to produce electricity with a thermocouple. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of a little over 87 years which means that Voyager 2 has seen a greater than 25% reduction in its power output since it was launched.
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2023-04-28 03:30:00

**Palantir Demos AI To Fight Wars**
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Palantir, the company of billionaire Peter Thiel, is launching Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), software meant to run large language models like GPT-4 and alternatives on private networks. In one of its pitch videos, Palantir demos how a military might use AIP to fight a war. In the video, the operator uses a ChatGPT-style chatbot to order drone reconnaissance, generate several plans of attack, and organize the jamming of enemy communications. In Palantir's scenario, a "military operator responsible for monitoring activity within eastern Europe" receives an alert from AIP that an enemy is amassing military equipment near friendly forces. The operator then asks the chatbot to show them more details, gets a little more information, and then asks the AI to guess what the units might be.
"They ask what enemy units are in the region and leverage AI to build out a likely unit formation," the video said. After getting the AI's best guess as to what's going on, the operator then asks the AI to take better pictures. It launches a Reaper MQ-9 drone to take photos and the operator discovers that there's a T-80 tank, a Soviet-era Russia vehicle, near friendly forces. Then the operator asks the robots what to do about it. "The operator uses AIP to generate three possible courses of action to target this enemy equipment," the video said. "Next they use AIP to automatically send these options up the chain of command." The options include attacking the tank with an F-16, long range artillery, or Javelin missiles. According to the video, the AI will even let everyone know if nearby troops have enough Javelins to conduct the mission and automate the jamming systems. \[...\]
What Palantir is offering is the illusion of safety and control for the Pentagon as it begins to adopt AI. "LLMs and algorithms must be controlled in this highly regulated and sensitive context to ensure that they are used in a legal and ethical way," the pitch said. According to Palantir, this control involves three pillars. The first claim is that AIP will be able to deploy these systems into classified networks and "devices on the tactical edge." It claims it will be able to parse both classified and real-time data in a responsible, legal, and ethical way. According to the video, users will then have control over what every LLM and AI in the Palantir-backed system can do. "AIP's security features what LLMs and AI can and cannot see and what they can and cannot do," the video said. "As operators take action, AIP generates a secure digital record of operations. These capabilities are crucial for mitigating significant legal, regulatory, and ethical risks in sensitive and classified settings.
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