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2024-10-23 10:00:00

Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain
Theoretical Physicist Jacques Treiner, from the University of Paris Cite, explains why you should run in the rain: ... Let p represent the number of drops per unit volume, and let a denote their vertical velocity. We'll denote Sh as the horizontal surface area of the individual (e.g., the head and shoulders) and Sv as the vertical surface area (e.g., the body). When you're standing still, the rain only falls on the horizontal surface, Sh. This is the amount of water you'll receive on these areas. Even if the rain falls vertically, from the perspective of a walker moving at speed v, it appears to fall obliquely, with the angle of the drops' trajectory depending on your speed. During a time period T, a raindrop travels a distance of aT. Therefore, all raindrops within a shorter distance will reach the surface: these are the drops inside a cylinder with a base of Sh and a height of aT, which gives:
p.Sh.a.T.
As we have seen, as we move forward, the drops appear to be animated by an oblique velocity that results from the composition of velocity a and velocity v. The number of drops reaching Sh remains unchanged, since velocity v is horizontal and therefore parallel to Sh. However, the number of drops reaching surface Sv -- which was previously zero when the walker was stationary -- has now increased. This is equal to the number of drops contained within a horizontal cylinder with a base area of Sv and a length of v.T. This length represents the horizontal distance the drops travel during this time interval. In total, the walker receives a number of drops given by the expression:
p.(Sh.a + Sv.v). T
Now we need to take into account the time interval during which the walker is exposed to the rain. If you're covering a distance d at constant speed v, the time you spend walking is d/v. Plugging this into the equation, the total amount of water you encounter is:
p.(Sh.a + Sv.v). d/v = p.(Sh.a/v + Sv). d
This equation proves that the faster you move, the less water hits your head and shoulders, but the amount of water hitting the vertical part of your body remains constant. To stay drier, it's best to move quickly and lean forward. However, you'll have to increase your speed to offset the exposed surface area caused by leaning.
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https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/23/0150203/physicist-reveals-why-you-should-run-in-the-rain?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

2024-10-13 16:43:00

Running X86_64 (Linux) Game Servers on ARM With Box64
Though native Linux game servers have been scarce over the last two decades, "I've seen people using the Box64 emulator to play x86_64 games on ARM devices," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "It got me thinking: why not apply this to game servers...?
"I thought it would be fun to see if I could build a super low-power Trackmania 2 server using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W."
They dubbed the experiment "Trackberry", and shared all the technical details in a blog post at Interfacing Linux (includinga video). For example, they installed PyEnv so it could create a virtual environment for the PyPlanet server controller. ("That's right, your little Pi Zero 2 W is about to compile some software, slowly....")
But ultimately "it turns out that the A53 can run not only the server but also the server controller, with minimal effort. Five players push one core to around 50% load, while the others handle the database and controller."
WHY STOP THERE? There are a gang of x86 Linux servers that could potentially run with Box64. Imagine playing Pirraria, 7 Days to Pi, Counter-Pi 2, Pitorio, and countless others! Granted, you may need a more powerful device than a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. I'll leave that research up to you.
My main takeaway from this experiment? Box64 is straight-up Scandinavian witchcraft and is not to be trifled with. Not even a little bit.
That said, it introduces a compelling option for those of us looking to run dedicated game servers that don't require much in the way of system resources. Under load, TrackBerry averages 2.8 watts and, according to the scientific number digits below, ends up running just under $3.00 a year or $0.25 a month. I find the concept of having a stack of microSD cards, each holding a different game server, neat....
You can see TrackBerry in action every Tuesday and Friday on Twitch...
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2024-10-10 02:10:00

DIY Photographer Builds Full-Frame Camera, Open-Sources the Project
Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang built his own full-frame camera and open-sourced the project on GitLab for anyone else to build upon. The camera, named Sitina S1, features a 10MP CCD sensor, custom electronics, and a 3D-printed body. Digital Photography Review reports: Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it's not finished yet. "Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off," he says. He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn't going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what's involved in building a camera from the ground up.
Although CMOS has become the dominant sensor technology in consumer cameras, owing to factors like speed, lower power consumption and cost, Zhang's camera is built around a 10MP Kodak KAI-11000CM CCD sensor with a global electronic shutter, which he selected for a rather pragmatic reason: it was easy to source. "Most manufacturers (like Sony) aren't going to just sell a sensor to a random hobbyist, so I have to buy whatever is available on eBay. This 10MP CCD turned out to be available," he explains. The choice of sensor has a useful benefit. As he explains in one of his videos, designing and building a mechanical shutter is complicated and beyond his area of expertise, so his DIY design is based on using an electronic shutter. For similar reasons, he chose to use an LCD screen as a viewfinder rather than a prism-based optical design, resulting in a mirrorless camera.
Zhang wanted his design to be compatible with existing lenses. His mirrorless design, with a short flange distance, provided a great deal of flexibility to adapt different lenses to the camera, and he's currently using E-mount with active electrical contacts. And that's just the start. Zhang also needed to integrate a CCD signal processor with an ADC (analog to digital converter), a CPU, battery, an LCD screen and buttons. He also designed and built his own circuit board with a power-only USB port, flash sync terminal, power button and SD card slot, and create the software and user interface to tie it all together. Finally, everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that, to my eye, looks rather attractive.
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https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/09/2322227/diy-photographer-builds-full-frame-camera-open-sources-the-project?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

2024-10-08 03:30:00

Artist Appeals Copyright Denial For Prize-Winning AI-Generated Work
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jason Allen-a synthetic media artist whose Midjourney-generated work "Theatre D'opera Spatial" went viral and incited backlash after winning a state fair art competition-is not giving up his fight with the US Copyright Office. Last fall, the Copyright Office refused to register Allen's work, claiming that almost the entire work was AI-generated and insisting that copyright registration requires more human authorship than simply plugging a prompt into Midjourney. Allen is now appealing (PDF) that decision, asking for judicial review and alleging that "the negative media attention surrounding the Work may have influenced the Copyright Office Examiner's perception and judgment." He claims that the Examiner was biased and considered "improper factors" such as the public backlash when concluding that he had "no control over how the artificial intelligence tool analyzed, interpreted, or responded to these prompts."
As Allen sees it, a rule establishing a review process requiring an Examiner to determine which parts of the work are human-authored seems "entirely arbitrary" since some Copyright Examiners "may not even be able to distinguish an artwork that used AI tools to assist in the creation from one which does not use any computerized tools." Further, Allen claims that the denial of copyright for his work has inspired confusion about who owns rights to not just Midjourney-generated art but all AI art, and as AI technology rapidly improves, it will only become harder for the Copyright Office to make those authorship judgment calls. That becomes an even bigger problem if the Copyright Office gets it wrong too often, Allen warned, running the risk of turning every artist registering works into a "suspect" and potentially bogging courts down with copyright disputes. Ultimately, Allen is hoping that a jury reviewing his appeal will reverse the denial, arguing that there is more human authorship in his AI-generated work than the Copyright Office considered when twice rejecting his registration.
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2024-10-03 22:40:00

Cloudflare Blocks Largest Recorded DDoS Attack Peaking At 3.8Tbps
BleepingComputer's Ionut Ilascu reports: During a distributed denial-of-service campaign targeting organizations in the financial services, internet, and telecommunications sectors, volumetric attacks peaked at 3.8 terabits per second, the largest publicly recorded to date. The assault consisted of a "month-long" barrage of more than 100 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks flooding the network infrastructure with garbage data. In a volumetric DDoS attack, the target is overwhelmed with large amounts of data to the point that they consume the bandwidth or exhaust the resources of applications and devices, leaving legitimate users with no access.
Many of the attacks aimed at the target's network infrastructure (network and transport layers L3/4) exceeded two billion packets per second (pps) and three terabits per second (Tbps). According to researchers at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, the infected devices were spread across the globe but many of them were located in Russia, Vietnam, the U.S., Brazil, and Spain. The threat actor behind the campaign leveraged multiple types of compromised devices, which included a large number of Asus home routers, Mikrotik systems, DVRs, and web servers. Cloudflare mitigated all the DDoS attacks autonomously and noted that the one peaking at 3.8 Tbps lasted 65 seconds.
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2024-10-02 10:00:00

Google Flights Now Uses Amtrak Data To Show 'Trains To Consider' Alongside Flights
Google Flights is offering train routes as an alternative to airlines, thanks to a new partnership with Amtrak. 9to5Google reports: In the US, this option surfaces routes and pricing directly provided by Amtrak, as the rail service announced recently: "Amtrak and Google have joined forces to help travelers choose more sustainable transportation options when searching for intercity travel. Thanks to a newly launched, direct data integration, travelers using Google can now view the most up-to-date Amtrak departure times, trip durations and fares directly on the Google Search results page. Amtrak's new integration with Google also means that once customers select a train, they can click through to Amtrak.com to complete the booking for their chosen itinerary without needing to re-enter their trip details."
Amtrak says that choosing a train route over a flight can cut a customer's carbon footprint by up to 72%. Of course, train routes in the US often take considerably longer than flights, but this new option should make it far easier to make the comparison.
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2024-09-28 00:10:00

AI Avatars Are Doing Job Interviews Now
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Jack Ryan from San Diego was recently being interviewed for a job. On a video call, the interviewer, a woman with red hair, said, "I find it helps when candidates tell me a story in answering the questions." "I'm looking for examples from your work experience," the woman added. During the conversation, Ryan had a smirk on his face. That's because the woman is not real. She is an AI avatar from a company called Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies.
On its website, Fairgo says its AI agent "talks to candidates any time, any where." The company claims that it can "Ensure every candidate is evaluated on a level playing field with consistent and unbiased interview practices." Julian Bright, founder and CEO of Fairgo, told 404 Media in an email that after an introductory video voiced by the AI avatar, candidate interviews are done by an audio-only AI. "At no point is any of the video or audio captured used to evaluate the candidate," he wrote. Instead, that is done with a transcript afterwards. Bright said that Fairgo does not make decisions on who to shortlist for a role; that instead falls to the hirers. Fairgo also says on its site that the interview process is low stress, and that "candidates consistently love the interview experience." "This HR AI avatar is a perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism," Ryan told 404 Media in an online chat. "While Fairgo's intent is to provide a fair and equitable interview process, I can't imagine AI, LLMs, and other tools are able to interpret the human emotion and facial reactions to provide an actual, well rounded interview."
"As someone who has interviewed upwards of 50 candidates for prior roles, human connection and interaction is the single most important indicator of how a team will mesh and jive together. If an AI is running the early stage process, it eliminates potential candidates because of its algorithmic design," he added. "It shows how executives and corporations are further trying to cut costs on the human side of business. As someone who has seen these layoffs at numerous top tech companies that then go on to rehire 6-12-18 months later for the same roles because they realized their strategy failed and they actually need good people to do the work, it's laughable at best and terrifying at worst."
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2024-09-27 20:45:00

If 23andMe Is Up for Sale, So Is All That DNA
23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company's CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she'll consider selling 23andMe -- which means the DNA of 23andMe's 15 million customers would be up for sale, too. The Atlantic: 23andMe's trove of genetic data might be its most valuable asset. For about two decades now, since human-genome analysis became quick and common, the A's, C's, G's, and T's of DNA have allowed long-lost relatives to connect, revealed family secrets, and helped police catch serial killers. Some people's genomes contain clues to what's making them sick, or even, occasionally, how their disease should be treated. For most of us, though, consumer tests don't have much to offer beyond a snapshot of our ancestors' roots and confirmation of the traits we already know about. 23andMe is floundering in part because it hasn't managed to prove the value of collecting all that sensitive, personal information. And potential buyers may have very different ideas about how to use the company's DNA data to raise the company's bottom line. This should concern anyone who has used the service.
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2024-09-22 21:12:00

Amazon Ads Launches a New AI Video Generator
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On Thursday, Amazon Ads announced Video Generator and Live Image, "our first generative AI-powered technology designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that enhances ad performance."
Amazon's blog post calls it "a new feature that uses generative AI technology to make it easier for advertisers to create more interesting and relevant video ads for customers. The new feature, Video generator, creates visually rich video content in a matter of minutes and at no additional cost. Using a single product image, Video generator curates custom AI-generated videos tailored to a product's distinct selling proposition and features, leveraging Amazon's unique insights to vividly bring a product story to life." An accompanying video demonstrates how Amazon's AI-powered tech can be used to animate still images, making it appear that steam is rising from a coffee mug, flowers are being blown in the wind, the night sky is changing breathtakingly behind a telescope, and that waves are breaking behind a smart speaker at the beach.
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2024-09-18 16:12:00

Fossil Fuel Companies Sponsor $5.6 Billion in Global 'Sportswashing' Deals
Fossil fuel companies pumped at least $5.6bn of sponsorship money into motorsports, football, golf and even snow sports in an effort to "buy social licence to operate," according to a new report. From a report: Almost no major spectator sport remains untouched by oil and gas money, according to research carried out by the New Weather Institute (NWI), a climate thinktank, which traced more than 200 sponsorship deals between sports teams and the industry. In addition, sports stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have all been successfully recruited to spend time in the Middle East as part of sponsorship deals, the report says.
It comes as concern grows about the fossil fuel industry's increasing efforts to launder its global standing through "sportswashing" -- a practice, long used by nation states, of building associations with sporting events to improve tarnished reputations. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, said: "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we'll continue doing sportswashing." According to NWI's Dirty Money report, Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, was the biggest single investor in sports sponsorship identified by NWI's report, handing out almost $1.3bn across 10 deals. The petrochemical company Ineos was second, with $777m in sponsorship deals; Shell had sponsored sports to the tune of $470m; and TotalEnergies, France's leading oil company, had $340m in deals.
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2024-09-17 21:40:00

Mozilla Exits the Fediverse, Will Shutter Its Mastodon Server In December
Mozilla is exiting the fediverse by shutting down its Mozilla.social Mastodon server on December 17. Moving forward, the company will focus on Firefox and AI, aligning with its strategy under interim CEO Laura Chambers to scale back investments in non-core products. TechCrunch reports: Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users at the time of Tuesday's announcement. By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users. Mozilla had telegraphed its plans to scale back on its fediverse investments earlier this year after the CEO stepped down. At the time, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers took over the job as the interim CEO of Mozilla Corporation through the end of 2024. Shortly after the change in leadership, Mozilla said it would refocus its product strategy around Firefox and AI and significantly scale back or even shutter other efforts. Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down.
The redirection of Mozilla's efforts came after its flagship product, the Firefox web browser, spent years losing market share. That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market. Months prior to this change in strategy, Mozilla had been touting the fediverse's potential, but under Chambers, the company said that a more "modest approach" to the fediverse would have allowed it to participate with "greater agility." In an internal memo, Mozilla signaled that going forward, a "much smaller team" would participate in the Mastodon ecosystem. However, it didn't say at the time that the Mozilla.social instance would shut down, adding that it would continue to bring small experiments to those who participated on its instance. Mozilla said it was a "hard decision."
"Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17," a post on Mastodon reads. Users can download their data or migrate their accounts at the respective links.
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2024-09-05 16:07:00

Madrid Bans Hired E-scooters Over Safety Concerns
Madrid City Hall said on Thursday it would ban all rental e-scooters from October because of the risk they pose to pedestrians, the latest city to make the move. From a report: "We are withdrawing authorization for companies hiring out scooters on the city's streets," the Spanish capital's conservative mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida wrote on X. "Our priority is the... safety of the people of Madrid," he said, adding that the measure would "take full effect in October." The three companies currently with licenses to rent out e-scooters on the streets of Madrid -- Lime, Dott and Tier Mobility -- will now have to remove their devices. These firms "did not comply with the conditions we imposed to guarantee the safety of pedestrians, particularly the elderly," the mayor said. Madrid City Hall criticized the firms for not using technology to prevent e-scooters from driving or parking in prohibited areas and lacking the appropriate accident insurance.
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2024-08-30 03:30:00

Feds Bust Alaska Man With 10,000+ CSAM Images Despite His Many Encrypted Apps
A recent indictment (PDF) of an Alaska man stands out due to the sophisticated use of multiple encrypted communication tools, privacy-focused apps, and dark web technology. "I've never seen anyone who, when arrested, had three Samsung Galaxy phones filled with 'tens of thousands of videos and images' depicting CSAM, all of it hidden behind a secrecy-focused, password-protected app called 'Calculator Photo Vault,'" writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson. "Nor have I seen anyone arrested for CSAM having used all of the following: [Potato Chat, Enigma, nandbox, Telegram, TOR, Mega NZ, and web-based generative AI tools/chatbots]." An anonymous reader shares the report: According to the government, Seth Herrera not only used all of these tools to store and download CSAM, but he also created his own -- and in two disturbing varieties. First, he allegedly recorded nude minor children himself and later "zoomed in on and enhanced those images using AI-powered technology." Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then "turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see." In other words, he created fake AI CSAM -- but using imagery of real kids.
The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have "created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM." He also joined "multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups" and frequented dark websites with taglines like "The Only Child Porn Site you need!" Despite all the precautions, Herrera's home was searched and his phones were seized by Homeland Security Investigations; he was eventually arrested on August 23. In a court filing that day, a government attorney noted that Herrera "was arrested this morning with another smartphone -- the same make and model as one of his previously seized devices."
The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera "tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM." Presumably, this "apparent" CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it. In the end, given that fatal click, none of the "I'll hide it behind an encrypted app that looks like a calculator!" technical sophistication accomplished much. Forensic reviews of Herrera's three phones now form the primary basis for the charges against him, and Herrera himself allegedly "admitted to seeing CSAM online for the past year and a half" in an interview with the feds.
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2024-08-29 22:50:00

EmuDeck Enters the Mini PC Market With Linux-Powered 'EmuDeck Machines'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from overkill.wtf: The team behind popular emulation tool EmuDeck is today announcing something rather special: they've spent the first half of 2024 working on their very first hardware product, called the EmuDeck Machine, and it's due to arrive before the year is out. This EmuDeck Machine is an upcoming, crowdfunded, retro emulation mini PC running Bazzite, a Linux-based system similar to SteamOS. [...] This new EmuDeck Machine comes in two variants, the EM1 running an Intel N97 APU, and the EM2 -- based on an AMD Ryzen 8600G. While both machines are meant as emulation-first devices, the AMD-based variant can easily function as a console-like PC. This is also thanks to some custom work done by the team: "We've optimized the system for maximum power. The default configuration of an 8600G gets you 32 FPS in Cyberpunk; we've managed to reach 47 FPS with a completely stable system, or 60FPS if you use FSR."
Both machines will ship with a Gamesir Nova Lite controller and EmuDeck preinstalled naturally. The team has also preinstalled all available Decky plugins. But that's not all: if the campaign is successful, the EmuDeck team will also work on a docking station for the EM2 that will upgrade the graphics to an AMD Radeon 7600 desktop GPU. With this, in games like Cyberpunk 2077, you'll be able to reach 160 FPS in 1080p as per EmuDeck's measurements. You can preorder the EmuDeck Machines via Indigogo, starting at $322 and shipping in December.
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2024-08-23 19:30:00

China Hits Xi Jinping's Renewable Power Target Six Years Early
China's world-leading clean energy boom has passed another benchmark, with its wind and solar capacity surpassing a target set by President Xi Jinping almost six years earlier than planned. From a report: The nation added 25 gigawatts of turbines and panels in July, expanding total capacity to 1,206 gigawatts, according to a statement from the National Energy Administration on Friday. Xi set a goal in December 2020 for at least 1,200 gigawatts from the clean energy sources by 2030. China by far outspends the rest of the world when it comes to clean energy, and has repeatedly broken wind and solar installation records in recent years. The rapid growth has helped lead to declines in coal power generation this summer and may mean the world's biggest polluter has already reached peak emissions well before its 2030 target.
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2024-08-23 00:30:00

Trump Promotes Family's New Crypto Platform, 'The DeFiant Ones'
Former President Donald Trump is about to launch a crypto platform called "The DeFiant Ones," according to a post of his on Truth Social. "For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites," Trump wrote. "It's time we take a stand -- together." From a report: The post marks the first time the Republican nominee for president has used his personal platform to promote the as yet unactivated digital bank. Within minutes, his son Donald Trump Jr., shared the post with his 12 million X followers. Trump's post includes a link to a Telegram channel called "The DeFiant Ones," which had approximately 29,000 followers as of Thursday morning, and climbing. An Aug. 15 post describes the group chat as "the only official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project" which is building "the future of finance."
Two of Trump's sons, Eric Trump and and Donald Jr., have spent weeks teasing the forthcoming platform, which Eric recently described as "digital real estate." "It's equitable. It's collateral anyone can get access to and do so instantly," Eric told the New York Post earlier this month. "I don't know if people realize what a shake up that is for the world of banking and finance. I hope we can help change that." The Trump brothers have also promoted the project with posts declaring that "decentralized finance is the future" and asking people to "stay tuned for a big announcement."
The mention of digital real estate could be a reference to selling digitized versions of assets in the metaverse, a concept which peaked in popularity in 2021 during the last bull market cycle in crypto. Digitized real estate could also mean that the project would tokenize real-world assets. [...] Trump's eldest son recently said that the family wasn't launching a memecoin and instead, was working to develop a crypto platform that would rival the traditional banking system. "What we want to do is take on a lot of the banking world," he said Aug. 8. "I think there has been a lot of inequality in that only certain people can get financing [...] so this notion of decentralized finance is obviously very appealing to guys like me who have been debanked," Donald Trump Jr. said in the interview on Locals.
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2024-08-21 22:40:00

Google Agrees To $250 Million Deal To Fund California Newsrooms, AI
Google has reached a groundbreaking deal with California lawmakers to contribute millions to local newsrooms, aiming to support journalism amid its decline as readers migrate online and advertising dollars evaporate. The agreement also includes a controversial provision for artificial intelligence funding. Politico reports: California emulated a strategy that other countries like Canada have used to try and reverse the journalism industry's decline as readership migrated online and advertising dollars evaporated. [...] Under the deal, the details of which were first reported by POLITICO on Monday, Google and the state of California would jointly contribute a minimum of $125 million over five years to support local newsrooms through a nonprofit public charity housed at UC Berkeley's journalism school. Google would contribute at least $55 million, and state officials would kick in at least $70 million. The search giant would also commit $50 million over five years to unspecified "existing journalism programs."
The deal would also steer millions in tax-exempt private dollars toward an artificial intelligence initiative that people familiar with the negotiations described as an effort to cultivate tech industry buy-in. Funding for artificial intelligence was not included in the bill at the core of negotiations, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. The agreement has drawn criticism from a journalists' union that had so far championed Wicks' effort. Media Guild of the West President Matt Pearce in an email to union members Sunday evening said such a deal would entrench "Google's monopoly power over our newsrooms." "This public-private partnership builds on our long history of working with journalism and the local news ecosystem in our home state, while developing a national center of excellence on AI policy," said Kent Walker, chief legal officer for Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Media Guild of the West President Matt Pearce wasn't so chipper. He criticized the plan in emails with union members, calling it a "total rout of the state's attempts to check Google's stranglehold over our newsrooms."
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2024-08-20 23:40:00

Toyota Confirms Breach After Stolen Data Leaks On Hacking Forum
Toyota confirmed a breach of its network after 240GB of data, including employee and customer information, was leaked on a hacking forum by a threat actor. The company has not provided details on how or when the breach occurred. BleepingComputer reports: ZeroSevenGroup (the threat actor who leaked the stolen data) says they breached a U.S. branch and were able to steal 240GB of files with information on Toyota employees and customers, as well as contracts and financial information. They also claim to have collected network infrastructure information, including credentials, using the open-source ADRecon tool that helps extract vast amounts of information from Active Directory environments.
"We have hacked a branch in United States to one of the biggest automotive manufacturer in the world (TOYOTA). We are really glad to share the files with you here for free. The data size: 240 GB," the threat actor claims. "Contents: Everything like Contacts, Finance, Customers, Schemes, Employees, Photos, DBs, Network infrastructure, Emails, and a lot of perfect data. We also offer you AD-Recon for all the target network with passwords." While Toyota hasn't shared the date of the breach, BleepingComputer found that the files had been stolen or at least created on December 25, 2022. This date could indicate that the threat actor gained access to a backup server where the data was stored. "We are aware of the situation. The issue is limited in scope and is not a system wide issue," Toyota told BleepingComputer. The company added that it's "engaged with those who are impacted and will provide assistance if needed."
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2024-08-20 22:40:00

Federal Judge Strikes Down Ban On Worker 'Noncompete' Agreements
U.S. District Judge Ada Brown in Dallas blocked the FTC's rule banning noncompete agreements, arguing the FTC lacks authority to implement such broad regulations and did not adequately justify the sweeping prohibition. Reuters reports: Brown had temporarily blocked the rule in July while she considered a bid by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country's largest business lobby, and tax service firm Ryan to strike it down entirely. The rule was set to take effect Sept. 4. Brown in her ruling said that even if the FTC had the power to adopt the rule, the agency had not justified banning virtually all noncompete agreements. "The Commission's lack of evidence as to why they chose to impose such a sweeping prohibition ... instead of targeting specific, harmful non-competes, renders the Rule arbitrary and capricious," wrote Brown, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump.
FTC spokesperson Victoria Graham said the agency was disappointed with the ruling and is "seriously considering a potential appeal."
"Today's decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-base enforcement actions," Graham said in a statement. The Democratic-controlled FTC approved the ban on noncompete agreements in a 3-2 vote in May. The commission and supporters of the rule say the agreements are an unfair restraint on competition that violate U.S. antitrust law and suppress workers' wages and mobility.
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2024-08-20 10:00:00

GoPro To Cut 15% of Workforce In Restructuring Push
GoPro has announced a restructuring plan that involves cutting about 15% of its workforce. "The company expects to take charges in the range of $5 million to $7 million for the restructuring plan, with cash expenses of $1 million to be recognized in the third quarter and about $4 million to $6 million in the fourth quarter of 2024," reports Reuters. From the report: The layoffs - around 139 jobs - are expected to begin in the third quarter and would be completed by the end of 2024. Shares of the company, which had 925 full-time employees at the end of the second quarter ended June 30, were up 1.5% after the layoffs were announced. Earlier this month, GoPro reported revenue of $186 million for second quarter, down 22.7% compared to last year and operating expenses of $103 million, an increase of 5% from a year ago.
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2024-08-19 16:42:00

GM Cuts 1,000 Software Jobs As It Prioritizes AI
General Motors is cutting around 1,000 software workers around the world in a bid to focus on more "high-priority" initiatives like improving its Super Cruise driver assistance system, the quality of its infotainment platform and exploring the use of AI. From a report: The job cuts are not about cost cutting or individual performance, GM spokesperson Stuart Fowle told TechCrunch. Rather, they are meant to help the company move more quickly as it tries to compete in the world of "software-defined vehicles." For example, Fowle said, that could mean moving away from developing many different infotainment features and instead focusing on ones that matter most to consumers.
The shuffle comes after GM has struggled with recent software problems. The automaker temporarily halted sales of its new Blazer EV in late 2023 after early vehicles encountered glitches. In June, GM promoted two former Apple executives to run its software and services division. The promotions were meant to fill the gap left by Mike Abbott, another Apple veteran who had joined GM as its executive vice president of software and services. Abbott left GM in March for health reasons.
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2024-08-18 21:30:00

Can the Linux Foundation's 'Open Model Initiative' Build AI-Powering LLMs Without Restrictive Licensing?
"From the beginning, we have believed that the right way to build these AI models is with open licenses," says the Open Model Initiative. SD Times quotes them as saying that open licenses "allow creatives and businesses to build on each other's work, facilitate research, and create new products and services without restrictive licensing constraints."
Phoronix explains the community initiative "came about over the summer to help advance open-source AI models while now is becoming part of the Linux Foundation to further their cause."
As part of the Linux Foundation, the OMI will be working to establish a governance framework and working groups, create shared standards to enhance model interoperability and metadata practices, develop a transparent dataset for training and captioning, complete an alpha test model for targeted red teaming, and release an alpha version of a new model with fine-tuning scripts before the end of 2024.
The group was established "in response to a number of recent decisions by creators of popular open-source models to alter their licensing terms," reports Silicon Angle:
The creators highlighted the recent licensing change announced by Stability AI Ltd., regarding its popular image-generation model Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3). That model had previously been entirely free and open, but the changes introduced a monthly fee structure and imposed limitations on its usage. Stability AI was also criticized for the lack of clarity around its licensing terms, but it isn't the only company to have introduced licensing restrictions on previously free software. The OMI intends to eliminate all barriers to enterprise adoption by focusing on training and developing AI models with "irrevocable open licenses without deletion clauses or recurring costs for access," the Linux Foundation said.
InfoWorld also notes "the unavailability of source code and the license restrictions from LLM providers such as Meta, Mistral and Anthropic, who put caveats in the usage policies of their 'open source' models."
Meta, for instance, does provide the rights to use Llama models royalty free without any license, but does not provide the source code, according to [strategic research firm] Everest Group's AI practice leader Suseel Menon. "Meta also adds a clause: 'If, on the Meta Llama 3, monthly active users of the products or services is greater than 700 million monthly active users, you must request a license from Meta.' This clause, combined with the unavailability of the source code, raises the question if the term open source should apply to Llama's family of models," Menon explained....
The OMI's objectives and vision received mixed reactions from analysts. While Amalgam Insights' chief analyst Hyoun Park believes that the OMI will lead to the development of more predictable and consistent standards for open source models, so that these models can potentially work with each other more easily, Everest Group's Malik believes that the OMI may not be able to stand before the might of vendors such as Meta and Anthropic. "Developing LLMs is highly compute intensive and has cost big tech giants and start-ups billions in capital expenditure to achieve the scale they currently have with their open-source and proprietary LLMs," Malik said, adding that this could be a major challenge for community-based LLMs.
The AI practice leader also pointed out that previous attempts at a community-based LLM have not garnered much adoption, as models developed by larger entities tend to perform better on most metrics... However, Malik said that the OMI might be able to find appropriate niches within the content development space (2D/3D image generation, adaptation, visual design, editing, etc.) as it begins to build its models... One of the other use cases for the OMI's community LLMs is to see their use as small language models (SLMs), which can offer specific functionality at high effectiveness or functionality that is restricted to unique applications or use cases, analysts said.
Currently, the OMI's GitHub page has three repositories, all under the Apache 2.0 license.
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2024-08-17 01:25:00

National Public Data Confirms Breach Exposing Social Security Numbers
BleepingComputer's Ionut Ilascu reports: Background check service National Public Data confirms that hackers breached its systems after threat actors leaked a stolen database with millions of social security numbers and other sensitive personal information. The company states that the breached data may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers (SSNs), and postal addresses.
In the statement disclosing the security incident, National Public Data says that "the information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es)." The company acknowledges the "leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024" and believes the breach is associated with a threat actor "that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023." NPD says they investigated the incident, cooperated with law enforcement, and reviewed the potentially affected records. If significant developments occur, the company "will try to notify" the impacted individuals.
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2024-08-16 18:42:00

AI-powered 'Undressing' Websites Are Getting Sued
The San Francisco City Attorney's office is suing 16 of the most frequently visited AI-powered "undressing" websites, often used to create nude deepfakes of women and girls without their consent. From a report: The landmark lawsuit, announced at a press conference by City Attorney David Chiu, says that the targeted websites were collectively visited over 200 million times in the first six months of 2024 alone.
The offending websites allow users to upload images of real, fully clothed people, which are then digitally "undressed" with AI tools that simulate nudity. One of these websites, which wasn't identified within the complaint, reportedly advertises: "Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates, when you can just use [the redacted website] to get her nudes."
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2024-08-16 10:00:00

Florida Man Arrested For Causing $700,000 In Damage At Solar Power Facility
A 43-year-old Jordanian national, Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen, was arrested in Orlando, Florida, and charged with threatening to use explosives and destroying a solar power facility. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the charges could result in up to 60 years in prison. Gizmodo reports: Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen allegedly smashed windows at local businesses in Florida, leaving behind threatening letters about their perceived support of Israel, and broke into a solar power generation facility in Wedgefield, Florida back in June. Hnaihen allegedly spent hours smashing solar panels, cutting various wires, and destroying critical electronic equipment, according to a press release from the DOJ issued Thursday.
Hnaihen was wearing a mask when he allegedly smashed the glass front doors of businesses that he thought supported Israel in June, the DOJ says, leaving behind "warning letters" that included lines like a desire to, "destroy or explode everything here in whole America. Especially the companies and factories that support the racist state of Israel." [...] Hnaihen was arrested on July 11, though news of his arrest was only made public today. Hnaihen entered a plea of not guilty and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for each threat made against the Florida businesses and a maximum of 20 years for the destruction of an energy facility, according to the DOJ.
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2024-08-16 07:00:00

AT&T and Verizon Ask FCC To Throw a Wrench Into Starlink's Mobile Plan
AT&T and Verizon are urging the FCC to reject SpaceX's plan to offer cellular service with T-Mobile, arguing that it would cause harmful interference to terrestrial mobile networks. Ars Technica reports: Filings urging the Federal Communications Commission to deny SpaceX's request for a waiver were submitted by AT&T and Verizon this week. The plan by SpaceX's Starlink division also faces opposition from satellite companies EchoStar (which owns Dish and Hughes) and Omnispace. SpaceX and T-Mobile plan to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) for T-Mobile's cellular network using SpaceX satellites. As part of that plan, SpaceX is seeking a waiver of FCC rules regarding out-of-band emission limits.
AT&T's petition to deny the SpaceX waiver request said the FCC's "recent SCS order appropriately recognized that SCS deployments should not present any risk to the vital terrestrial mobile broadband networks upon which millions of Americans rely today. The Commission authorized SCS as secondary to terrestrial mobile service, correctly explaining that the SCS framework must 'retain service quality of terrestrial networks, protect spectrum usage rights, and minimize the risk of harmful interference.'" AT&T said SpaceX's requested "ninefold increase" to the allowable power flux-density limits for out-of-band emissions "would cause unacceptable harmful interference to incumbent terrestrial mobile operations. Specifically, AT&T's technical analysis shows that SpaceX's proposal would cause an 18% average reduction in network downlink throughput in an operational and representative AT&T PCS C Block market deployment." Verizon's opposition to the waiver request similarly said that SpaceX's proposal "would subject incumbent, primary terrestrial licensee operations in adjacent bands to harmful interference." Wireless phone performance will suffer, Verizon said [...]. SpaceX and T-Mobile told FCC staff that their plan will not harm other wireless operations and predicted that competitors will make misleading claims. SpaceX also argued that the FCC's emissions limit is too strict and should be changed.
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2024-08-14 20:01:00

Gamer Connects 444 Consoles To Single TV, Sets World Record
Ibrahim Al-Nasser, a gaming enthusiast from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has set a Guinness World Record for the most video game consoles connected to a single television, with 444 systems hooked up simultaneously.
Al-Nasser's collection spans five decades of gaming history, from the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey to the 2023 PlayStation 5 Slim. It includes mainstream consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, as well as rare items such as the Super A'Can. To manage the complex setup, Al-Nasser employs over 30 RCA switchers and 12 HDMI switchers, along with various converters for older systems. He maintains an Excel spreadsheet detailing the location and activation procedure for each console.
"After a while I noticed that I had a big stack of gaming consoles that I couldn't play," Al-Nasser said. "By adding more switchers, the idea came to my mind to connect all of the gaming consoles I have to the TV then contact Guinness World Records because this project is unique." Engadget adds: He's even organized his collection so the cables aren't showing or creating the kind of tangled mess most of us have to deal with when we have just two consoles hooked up to a single television. That may sound like a lot of video game consoles for one collection but it's far from the actual record. Linda Guillory of Garland, Texas currently holds the record for the largest collection of playable gaming systems with her collection of 2,430 items, according to Guinness World Records.
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2024-08-14 19:20:00

WHO Declares Mpox Outbreak a Global Health Emergency
The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the ongoing mpox outbreak in Africa a global health emergency. From a report: WHO convened its emergency mpox committee amid concerns that a deadlier strain of the virus, clade Ib, had reached four previously unaffected provinces in Africa. This strain had previously been contained to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Independent experts on the committee met virtually Wednesday to advise WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on the severity of the outbreak. After that consultation, he announced Wednesday that he had declared a public health emergency of international concern -- the highest level of alarm under international health law.
Also known as PHEIC, this is a status given by WHO to "extraordinary events" that pose a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease. [...] Since the beginning of this year, more than 17,000 cases and more than 500 deaths have been reported in 13 countries in Africa, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which classifies the outbreak as a "very high risk event."
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2024-08-14 18:40:00

Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI - And Remote Work Is Why
Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, said his former company is losing the AI race and remote work is to blame. From a report: "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," Schmidt said at a talk at Stanford University. "The reason startups work is because the people work like hell." Schmidt made the comments earlier at a wide-ranging discussion at Stanford. His remarks about Google's remote-work policies were in response to a question about Google competing with OpenAI.
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2024-08-14 16:44:00

Microsoft is Enabling BitLocker Device Encryption By Default on Windows 11
Microsoft is making BitLocker device encryption a default feature in its next major update to Windows 11. From a report: If you clean install the 24H2 version that's rolling out in the coming months, device encryption will be enabled by default when you first sign in or set up a device with a Microsoft account or work / school account.
Device encryption is designed to improve the security of Windows machines by automatically enabling BitLocker encryption on the Windows install drive and backing up the recovery key to a Microsoft account or Entra ID. In Windows 11 version 24H2, Microsoft is reducing the hardware requirements for automatic device encryption, opening it up to many more devices -- including ones running the Home version of Windows 11. Device encryption no longer requires Hardware Security Test Interface (HSTI) or Modern Standby, and encryption will also be enabled even if untrusted direct memory access (DMA) buses / interfaces are detected.
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2024-08-14 15:28:00

To Best China, Pentagon Must Shed 'the Same Old Mindsets'
An anonymous reader shares a report: Pentagon officials say the U.S. stands at the precipice of a new golden age of defense innovation driven by upstart contractors, advances in technology and a world brimming with threats. The Defense Department's inability to make unorthodox bets, feed a vibrant industrial base and embrace readily available technologies has rendered it under-supplied, the target of dual-use evangelists and vulnerable to more nimble adversaries.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a speech last week the department "cannot tolerate the same old mindsets" as it butts heads with Russia and China, while also invoking America's mass production overhaul during World War II. Heidi Shyu, the Pentagon's chief tech officer, separately called the clip of "nontraditional, venture-backed companies" entering the defense industry "unprecedented," adding: "They're nipping at the heels, I tell you. I have traditional defense contractors say, 'Hey, this isn't fair.'"
Defense Innovation Unit director Doug Beck said the department is at a "positive tipping point." "We've been given the tools, and now it's about execution and delivery," Beck said. "I think we're well on our way out of the dark age." Hicks' declaration comes one year after she stuck her neck out for Replicator, meant to arm troops with thousands of drones and prove the Pentagon can be agile. That $1 billion gambit is on track, with more than 1,000 AeroVironment-made Switchblade 600 drones already in the pipeline, according to officials.
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2024-08-12 22:40:00

Replika CEO Says It's OK If We Marry AI Chatbots
In an interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda discusses the role AI will play in the future of human relationships. Replika is an AI-powered chatbot that offers personalized, empathetic conversations to users, serving as a virtual companion for emotional support, mental health, and social interaction. It allows users to engage in meaningful, human-like conversations, enhancing their well-being through AI-driven companionship. Here is an excerpt from the interview: Where have you landed with Replika now? Is it still sort of romantic? Is it mostly friendly? Have you gotten the user base to stop thinking of it as dating in that way?
It's mostly friendship and a long-term one-on-one connection, and that's been the case forever for Replika. That's what our users come for. That's how they find Replika. That's what they do there. They're looking for that connection. My belief is that there will be a lot of flavors of AI. People will have assistants, they will have agents that are helping them at work, and then, at the same time, there will be agents or AIs that are there for you outside of work. People want to spend quality time together, they want to talk to someone, they want to watch TV with someone, they want to play video games with someone, they want to go for walks with someone, and that's what Replika is for.
You've said "someone" several times now. Is that how you think of a Replika AI avatar -- as a person? Is it how users think of it? Is it meant to replace a person?
It's a virtual being, and I don't think it's meant to replace a person. We're very particular about that. For us, the most important thing is that Replika becomes a complement to your social interactions, not a substitute. The best way to think about it is just like you might a pet dog. That's a separate being, a separate type of relationship, but you don't think that your dog is replacing your human friends. It's just a completely different type of being, a virtual being. Or, at the same time, you can have a therapist, and you're not thinking that a therapist is replacing your human friends. In a way, Replika is just another type of relationship. It's not just like your human friends. It's not just like your therapist. It's something in between those things.
With an AI that kind of feels like a person and is meant to complement your friends, the boundaries of that relationship are still pretty fuzzy. In the culture, I don't think we quite understand them. You've been running Replika for a while. Where do you think those boundaries are with an AI companion?
I actually think, just like a therapist has agency to fire you, the dog has agency to run away or bite or shit all over your carpet. It's not really that you're getting this subservient, subordinate thing. I think, actually, we're all used to different types of relationships, and we understand these new types of relationships pretty easily. People don't have a lot of confusion that their therapist is not their friend. I mean, some people do project and so on, but at the same time, we understand that, yes, the therapist is there, and he or she is providing this service of listening and being empathetic. That's not because they love you or want to live with you. So we actually already have very different relationships in our lives. We have empathy for hire with therapists, for instance, and we don't think that's weird. AI friends are just another type of that -- a completely different type. People understand boundaries. At the end of the day, it's a work in progress, but I think people understand quickly like, 'Okay, well, that's an AI friend, so I can text or interact with it anytime I want.' But, for example, a real friend is not available 24/7. That boundary is very different. You know these things ahead of time, and that creates a different setup and a different boundary than, say, with your real friend. In the case of a therapist, you know a therapist will not hurt you. They're not meant to hurt you. Replika probably won't disappoint you or leave you. So there's also that. We already have relationships with certain rules that are different from just human friendships. The full transcript can be read here. You can also listen to the interview on the latest episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel.
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2024-08-08 16:42:00

Palantir CTO Urges Pentagon To Prioritize Speed in Defense Spending
Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar has called for faster defense spending, arguing the Pentagon should focus on rapid deployment over higher budgets. "The biggest challenge is speed," Sankar told Axios in an interview. "The Department of Defense would be better off spending half as much money twice as quickly."
The U.S. military has "lost our ability to value time," he said. The Denver-based software company, known for its work in areas ranging from vaccine logistics to Ukraine demining efforts, has positioned itself as a "software prime" in the defense sector.
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2024-08-08 16:02:00

Video Game Adaptation 'Borderlands' Hits Theaters With Rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes
An anonymous reader shares a report: I'm not sure I knew of anyone, Borderlands fan or not, who believed that the movie adaptation of the game was going to be good, based on everything from casting to trailers. Now as reviews come in ahead of its release tomorrow, those fears have been validated. And then some. As I write this, the Borderlands movie has a flat 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. No positive reviews whatsoever, and the ones that are in are not just negative, but brutal.
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2024-08-07 01:30:00

NVMe 2.1 Specifications Published With New Capabilities
At the Flash Memory Summit 2024 this week, NVM Express published the NVMe 2.1 specifications, which hope to enhance storage unification across AI, cloud, client, and enterprise. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: New NVMe capabilities with the revised specifications include:
- Enabling live migration of PCIe NVMe controllers between NVM subsystems.
- New host-directed data placement for SSDs that simplifies ecosystem integration and is backwards compatible with previous NVMe specifications.
- Support for offloading some host processing to NVMe storage devices.
- A network boot mechanism for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).
- Support for NVMe over Fabrics zoning.
- Ability to provide host management of encryption keys and highly granular encryption with Key Per I/O.
- Security enhancements such as support for TLS 1.3, a centralized authentication verification entity for DH-HMAC-CHAP, and post sanitization media verification.
- Management enhancements including support for high availability out-of-band management, management over I3C, out-of-band management asynchronous events and dynamic creation of exported NVM subsystems from underlying NVM subsystem physical resources. You can learn more about these updates at NVMExpress.org.
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2024-08-07 00:10:00

WordStar 7, the Last Ever DOS Version, Is Re-Released For Free
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans. WordStar 7.0d was the last-ever DOS release of the classic word processor, and it still has admirers today. A notable enthusiast is Canadian SF writer Robert J Sawyer, who wrote the book that became the TV series Flashforward.
Thanks to his efforts you can now try out this pinnacle of pre-Windows PC programs for professional prose-smiths. Sawyer has taken the final release, packaged it up along with some useful tools -- including DOS emulators for modern Windows -- and shared the result. Now you, too, can revel in the sheer unbridled power of this powerful app. The download is 680MB, but as well as the app itself, full documentation, and some tools to help translate WordStar documents to more modern formats, it also includes copies of two FOSS tools that will let you run this MS-DOS application on modern Windows: DOSbox-X and vDosPlus. "The program has been a big part of my career -- not only did I write all 25 of my novels and almost all of my short stories with it (a few date back to the typewriter era), I also in my earlier freelance days wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles with WordStar," says Sawyer.
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2024-08-06 23:30:00

Google and Cloudflare Summoned To Explain Their Plans To Defeat Pirate IPTV
Italy's telecoms regulator AGCOM has summoned Google and Cloudflare to a September meeting to discuss strategies for combating online piracy, six months after launching its Piracy Shield blocking system. The move comes as IPTV piracy remains resilient despite new anti-piracy legislation passed in the country last year. The law introduced harsher penalties for providers and consumers of pirated content, including fines for watching pirate streams. It also granted more aggressive site-blocking powers.
Major stream suppliers appear minimally affected by overseas laws. however. AGCOM chief Massimiliano Capitanio seeks commitments from Google to limit pirate services in search results, according to TorrentFreak. The regulator also wants Cloudflare to address IPTV providers using its services to evade blocking.
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2024-08-06 22:10:00

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From
Facebook's AI-generated content problem is being fueled by its own creator bonus program, according to an investigation by 404 Media. The program incentivizes users, particularly from developing countries, to flood the platform with AI-generated images for financial gain. The outlet found that influencers in India and Southeast Asia are teaching followers how to exploit Facebook's algorithms and content moderation systems to go viral with AI-generated images. Many use Microsoft's Bing Image Creator to produce bizarre, often emotive content that garners high engagement.
"The post you are seeing now is of a poor man that is being used to generate revenue," said Indian YouTuber Gyan Abhishek in a video, pointing to an AI image of an emaciated elderly man. He claimed users could earn "$100 for 1,000 likes" through Facebook's bonus program. While exact payment rates vary, 404 Media verified that consistent viral posting can lead to significant earnings for users in countries like India. Meta has defended the program to 404 Media, stating it works as intended if content meets community standards and engagement is authentic.
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2024-08-06 21:30:00

Apple's Hidden AI Prompts Discovered In macOS Beta
A Reddit user discovered the backend prompts for Apple Intelligence in the developer beta of macOS 15.1, offering a rare glimpse into the specific guidelines for Apple's AI functionalities. Some of the most notable instructions include: "Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or in any way negative, sad, or provocative"; "Do not hallucinate"; and "Do not make up factual information." MacRumors reports: For the Smart Reply feature, the AI is programmed to identify relevant questions from an email and generate concise answers. The prompt for this feature is as follows: "You are a helpful mail assistant which can help identify relevant questions from a given mail and a short reply snippet. Given a mail and the reply snippet, ask relevant questions which are explicitly asked in the mail. The answer to those questions will be selected by the recipient which will help reduce hallucination in drafting the response. Please output top questions along with set of possible answers/options for each of those questions. Do not ask questions which are answered by the reply snippet. The questions should be short, no more than 8 words. The answers should be short as well, around 2 words. Present your output in a json format with a list of dictionaries containing question and answers as the keys. If no question is asked in the mail, then output an empty list. Only output valid json and nothing else."
The Memories feature in Apple Photos, which creates video stories from user photos, follows another set of detailed guidelines. The AI is instructed to generate stories that are positive and free of any controversial or harmful content. The prompt for this feature is: "A conversation between a user requesting a story from their photos and a creative writer assistant who responds with a story. Respond in JSON with these keys and values in order: traits: list of strings, visual themes selected from the photos; story: list of chapters as defined below; cover: string, photo caption describing the title card; title: string, title of story; subtitle: string, safer version of the title. Each chapter is a JSON with these keys and values in order: chapter: string, title of chapter; fallback: string, generic photo caption summarizing chapter theme; shots: list of strings, photo captions in chapter. Here are the story guidelines you must obey: The story should be about the intent of the user; The story should contain a clear arc; The story should be diverse, that is, do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or trait; Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy or in any way negative, sad or provocative. Here are the photo caption list guidelines you must obey.
Apple's AI tools also include a general directive to avoid hallucination. For instance, the Writing Tools feature has the following prompt: "You are an assistant which helps the user respond to their mails. Given a mail, a draft response is initially provided based on a short reply snippet. In order to make the draft response nicer and complete, a set of question and its answer are provided. Please write a concise and natural reply by modifying the draft response to incorporate the given questions and their answers. Please limit the reply within 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information."
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2024-08-06 20:52:00

Figure AI's Humanoid Robot Helped Assemble BMWs At US Factory
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Unlike Tesla, which hopes to develop its own bipedal 'bot to work on its production line sometime next year, BMW has brought in a robot from Figure AI. The Figure 02 robot has hands with sixteen degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength. "We are excited to unveil Figure 02, our second-generation humanoid robot, which recently completed successful testing at the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. Figure 02 has significant technical advancements, which enable the robot to perform a wide range of complex tasks fully autonomously," said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI.
BMW wanted to test how to integrate a humanoid robot into its production process -- how to have the robot communicate with the production line software and human workers and determine what requirements would be necessary to add robots to the mix. The Figure robot was given the job of inserting sheet metal parts into fixtures as part of the process of making a chassis. BMW says this required particular dexterity and that it's an ergonomically awkward and tiring task for humans.
Now that the trial is over, Figure's robot is no longer working at Spartanburg, and BMW says it has "no definite timetable established" to add humanoid robots to its production lines. "The developments in the field of robotics are very promising. With an early-test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production. We want to accompany this technology from development to industrialization," said Milan Nedeljkovi, BMW's board member responsible for production. BMW Group published a video of the Figure 02 robot on YouTube.
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2024-08-06 19:25:00

Amazon, Microsoft, Google Remind Public of Their K-12 CS Education Philanthropy
theodp writes: After issuing mea culpas over diversity and compensation equity issues, tech companies began to promote their K-12 CS education philanthropy initiatives as corrective measures as they sought to deflect criticism and defeat shareholder calls for greater transparency into hiring and compensation practices. In 2016, for instance, Amazon argued it was already working with tech-backed nonprofits such as Code.org, the Anita Borg Institute, and Girls Who Code to increase women's and minorities' involvement in tech as it sought the SEC's permission to block a shareholder vote on a proposal on gender pay equality. As such, it wasn't terribly surprising to see the nation's tech giants again remind the public of their K-12 CS philanthropy efforts as they recently announced quarterly earnings.
In the Addressing Racial Injustice and Inequity section of its most recent 10-K Annual Report SEC filing, Microsoft boasted, "We also expanded our Technology Education and Learning Support ("TEALS") program to reach nearly 550 high schools across 21 racial equity expansion regions with the support of nearly 1,500 volunteers, 12% of whom identify as Black or African American."
An Amazon press release claimed the company is inspiring Girl Scouts to explore the future of STEM by awarding girls aged 7-and-up a co-branded Girl Scouts and Amazon patch for attending in-person or virtual Amazon warehouse tours. "As humanity looks to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for new ideas and discoveries," Amazon explained, "it is more important than ever to harness the unique insights, skills, and potential of girls. [..] That's why Amazon partnered with Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) to host exclusive tours [of Amazon fulfillment centers] for troops around the nation to showcase the importance and diversity of careers in STEM."
Most recently, a press release celebrated the move of Google's Code Next high school program into a lab located in the newly-rehabbed Michigan Central Station, which has thus far enrolled approximately 100 students. "Google has called Michigan home for over 15 years with offices in Detroit and Ann Arbor. We're dedicated to investing in the city and providing its students with the resources and inspiration they need to excel," said Shanika Hope, Director, Google Education and Social Impact. "We're excited to bring our Code Next program to Michigan Central, empowering Detroit's youth with computer science education to help them reach their full potential in the classroom and beyond."
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2024-08-06 18:42:00

Apple Thinks Bing is Pretty Bad
U.S. Judge Amit Mehta released a 286-page ruling Monday in the Google search antitrust case, revealing key details of the tech giant's business practices. The document is packed with factual findings and legal conclusions and some amazing comments. Here's one, for instance: Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine in Safari. But according to Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, there's no other meaningful alternative. During the trial, he said that "there's no price that Microsoft could ever offer" to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari. "I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us," Cue said at another point. "They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company."
For Google, this is a sign that they've earned their default status (which, incidentally, they pay Apple gobs of money to maintain). Judge Mehta says that this is an indication that the "market reality is that Google is the only real choice as the default GSE [general search engine]." (Of course, Cue's opinion doesn't mean Bing is objectively bad. Elsewhere, the opinion notes that Bing's search quality is comparable to Google's on desktop, though it falls behind on mobile.)
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2024-08-06 17:25:00

Google Discontinues the Chromecast Line
Speaking of Google launching a new TV streaming device, the company says it's "ending production of Chromecast" after 11 years of selling the streaming dongles. From a report: Even though Chromecast devices will now be available "while supplies last," Google says it will continue to push software and security updates to its newer devices without specifying which ones. The most recent update to the lineup was the Chromecast with Google TV released in 2022.
But now, Google says "technology has evolved dramatically" since the launch of the original Chromecast in 2013. "We invested heavily in embedding Google Cast technology into millions of TV devices, including Android TV," Google writes. "We are taking the next step in evolving how streaming TV devices can add even more capabilities to your smart TV, built on top of the same Chromecast technology."
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2024-08-06 16:50:00

Need To Move 1.2 Exabytes Across the World Every Day? Just Effingo
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has revealed technical details of its in-house data transfer tool, called Effingo, and bragged that it uses the project to move an average of 1.2 exabytes every day. As explained in a paper [PDF] and video to be presented on Thursday at the SIGCOMM 2024 conference in Sydney, bandwidth constraints and the stubbornly steady speed of light mean that not even Google is immune to the need to replicate data so it is located close to where it is processed or served.
Indeed, the paper describes managed data transfer as "an unsung hero of large-scale, globally-distributed systems" because it "reduces the network latency from across-globe hundreds to in-continent dozens of milliseconds." The paper also points out that data transfer tools are not hard to find, and asks why a management layer like Effingo is needed. The answer is that the tools Google could find either optimized for transfer time or handled point-to-point data streams -- and weren't up to the job of handling the 1.2 exabytes Effingo moves on an average day, at 14 terabytes per second. To shift all those bits, Effingo "balances infrastructure efficiency and users' needs" and recognizes that "some users and some transfers are more important than the others: eg, disaster recovery for a serving database, compared to migrating data from a cluster with maintenance scheduled a week from now."
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2024-08-06 14:40:00

Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era
Mainframe computers, stalwarts of high-speed data processing, are finding new relevance in the age of AI. Banks, insurers, and airlines continue to rely on these industrial-strength machines for mission-critical operations, with some now exploring AI applications directly on the hardware, WSJ reported in a feature story. IBM, commanding over 96% of the mainframe market, reported 6% growth in its mainframe business last quarter. The company's latest zSystem can process up to 30,000 transactions per second and hold 40 terabytes of data. WSJ adds: Globally, the mainframe market was valued at $3.05 billion in 2023, but new mainframe sales are expected to decline through 2028, IDC said. Of existing mainframes, however, 54% of enterprise leaders in a 2023 Forrester survey said they would increase their usage over the next two years.
Mainframes do have limitations. They are constrained by the computing power within their boxes, unlike the cloud, which can scale up by drawing on computing power distributed across many locations and servers. They are also unwieldy -- with years of old code tacked on -- and don't integrate well with new applications. That makes them costly to manage and difficult to use as a platform for developing new applications.
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2024-08-06 14:00:00

The Biggest Loser Google Search Ruling Could Be Mozilla and Firefox
Mozilla, the non-profit behind the Firefox browser, faces an uncertain future following Monday's landmark antitrust ruling against Google. The decision, which found Google illegally maintained its search monopoly, puts Mozilla's primary funding source at risk. In 2021-2022, Mozilla received $510 million from Google out of $593 million total revenue, according to its latest financial report. Fortune adds: You can be sure that critics of the judge's ruling will highlight the potentially devastating impact on Mozilla to make the case that the antitrust ruling will have unintended consequences on smaller tech industry players. Others might argue that Mozilla hasn't done enough with those spoils to differentiate its Firefox browser, or that it could cut a deal with another search engine like Bing if its Google deal goes away completely. Either way, Google will appeal the suit so a long battle may ensue. And there's another big domino to fall: the judge will rule on the remedy or remedies -- essentially, the business-model penalties -- that Google will face. Apple also stands to lose more than $20 billion a year that Google pays the iPhone-maker to be the default search engine on Safari. But as Fortune notes, "Apple is a large, diversified company with many sources of revenue."
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2024-08-06 13:00:00

Mac and Windows Users Infected By Software Updates Delivered Over Hacked ISP
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers delivered malware to Windows and Mac users by compromising their Internet service provider and then tampering with software updates delivered over unsecure connections, researchers said. The attack, researchers from security firm Volexity said, worked by hacking routers or similar types of device infrastructure of an unnamed ISP. The attackers then used their control of the devices to poison domain name system responses for legitimate hostnames providing updates for at least six different apps written for Windows or macOS. The apps affected were the 5KPlayer, Quick Heal, Rainmeter, Partition Wizard, and those from Corel and Sogou.
Because the update mechanisms didn't use TLS or cryptographic signatures to authenticate the connections or downloaded software, the threat actors were able to use their control of the ISP infrastructure to successfully perform machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks that directed targeted users to hostile servers rather than the ones operated by the affected software makers. These redirections worked even when users employed non-encrypted public DNS services such as Google's 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 rather than the authoritative DNS server provided by the ISP. "That is the fun/scary part -- this was not the hack of the ISPs DNS servers," Volexity CEO Steven Adair wrote in an online interview. "This was a compromise of network infrastructure for Internet traffic. The DNS queries, for example, would go to Google's DNS servers destined for 8.8.8.8. The traffic was being intercepted to respond to the DNS queries with the IP address of the attacker's servers."
In other words, the DNS responses returned by any DNS server would be changed once it reached the infrastructure of the hacked ISP. The only way an end user could have thwarted the attack was to use DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS to ensure lookup results haven't been tampered with or to avoid all use of apps that deliver unsigned updates over unencrypted connections. As an example, the 5KPlayer app uses an unsecure HTTP connection rather than an encrypted HTTPS one to check if an update is available and, if so, to download a configuration file named Youtube.config. StormBamboo, the name used in the industry to track the hacking group responsible, used DNS poisoning to deliver a malicious version of the Youtube.config file from a malicious server. This file, in turn, downloaded a next-stage payload that was disguised as a PNG image. In fact, it was an executable file that installed malware tracked under the names MACMA for macOS devices or POCOSTICK for Windows devices. As for the hacked ISP, the security firm said "it's not a huge one or one you'd likely know."
"In our case the incident is contained but we see other servers that are actively serving malicious updates but we do not know where they are being served from. We suspect there are other active attacks around the world we do not have purview into. This could be from an ISP compromise or a localized compromise to an organization such as on their firewall."
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2024-08-06 10:00:00

OpenAI Co-Founder John Schulman Is Joining Anthropic
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced Monday that he is leaving to join rival AI startup Anthropic. CNBC reports: The move comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded a superalignment team that focused on trying to ensure that people can control AI systems that exceed human capability at many tasks. Schulman had been a co-leader of OpenAI's post-training team that refined AI models for the ChatGPT chatbot and a programming interface for third-party developers, according to a biography on his website. In June, OpenAI said Schulman, as head of alignment science, would join a safety and security committee that would provide advice to the board. Schulman has only worked at OpenAI since receiving a Ph.D. in computer science in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley.
"This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work," Schulman wrote in the social media post. He said he wasn't leaving because of a lack of support for new work on the topic at OpenAI. "On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area," he said. The leaders of the superalignment team, Jan Leike and company co-founder Ilya Sutskever, both left this year. Leike joined Anthropic, while Sutskever said he was helping to start a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. "Very excited to be working together again!" Leike wrote in reply to Schulman's message.
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2024-08-06 05:30:00

Gamification Gets Drivers To Put Down Their Phones, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Distracted driving isn't only a result of drivers using their phones when they should be paying attention. But it is a significant cause of the problem, accounting for at least 13 percent of distracted driving deaths and rising to 1 in 5 for young drivers. Now, a study conducted with customers of the Progressive insurance company has tested different strategies to get those drivers to put their phones down in the car, and it found two that significantly reduced handheld use, with the effect persisting after the end of the study. The study recruited 1,653 customers already enrolled in its Progressive Snapshot program, which involves the use of a smartphone app that detects phone use while driving. Before the start of the trial, the participants all averaged more than 6.4 minutes per hour of handheld use while driving -- Progressive says its safest customers have handheld usage of less than 1 minute per hour while driving. [...] Paying drivers on top of competitive gamification was the most effective way to get them to put down their phones. This group reduced its handheld usage by 27.6 percent, or 89 seconds/hour, compared to the control. That reduction was maintained at the same level throughout the post-intervention period for this arm.
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2024-08-06 00:20:00

iPhone Driver's License Support Coming Soon To California
iPhone and Apple Watch users in California will soon be able to add their digital ID and driver's license to the Wallet app, as revealed by new landing pages on the state DMV website. This feature follows a slow rollout since its announcement, with only five states currently supporting it. MacRumors reports: "Now you can add your California driver's license or state ID to Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch so you can present it easily and securely in person and in app," reads the landing page, which contains broken links and placeholder images, and is still missing a proper website security certificate. The webpages were discovered on Sunday by Jimmy Obomsawin, after someone added a link to the landing pages in an Apple Wallet Wikipedia entry last Wednesday.
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2024-08-05 23:40:00

Windows 11 Hits 30% Market Share For the First Time
With Windows 10's end-of-life update coming next October, it appears that users are finally making the jump to its successor. As spotted by Neowin, Windows 11 crossed the 30% market share mark for the first time since its release. From the report: According to Statcounter's latest findings, last month, Windows 11 reached a new all-time high of 30.83%, gaining 1.08 points in just one month or 7.17 points year-over-year (it was at 23.66% in July 2023). Just as Windows 11 climbs, Windows 10 loses its market share. It is now below 65%, or 64.99%, to be precise, or -1.06 points in one month. Year-over-year change is 11.15 points (it was at 71.14% in July 2023).
[...]
Other Windows versions, which are now long unsupported, still have a fair share of customers who refuse to jump-ship. Windows 7, for one, is the third most popular Windows with a 3.04% market share (+0.08 points). Windows 8.1 is fourth with 0.42% (+0.02 points), and Windows XP is fifth with 0.38% (-0.01 points).
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2024-08-05 23:00:00

Silicon Valley Parents Are Sending Kindergarten Kids To AI-Focused Summer Camps
Silicon Valley's fascination with AI has led to parents enrolling children as young as five in AI-focused summer camps. "It's common for kids on summer break to attend space, science or soccer camp, or even go to coding school," writes Priya Anand via the San Francisco Standard. "But the growing effort to teach kindergarteners who can barely spell their names lessons in 'Advanced AI Robot Design & AR Coding' shows how far the frenzy has extended." From the report: Parents who previously would opt for coding camps are increasingly interested in AI-specific programming, according to Eliza Du, CEO of Integem, which makes holographic augmented reality technology in addition to managing dozens of tech-focused kids camps across the country. "The tech industry understands the value of AI," she said. "Every year it's increasing." Some Bay Area parents are so eager to get their kids in on AI's ground floor that they try to sneak toddlers into advanced courses. "Sometimes they'll bring a 4-year-old, and I'm like, you're not supposed to be here," Du said.
Du said Integem studied Common Core education standards to ensure its programming was suitable for those as young as 5. She tries to make sure parents understand there's only so much kids can learn across a week or two of camp. "Either they set expectations too high or too low," Du said of the parents. As an example, she recounted a confounding comment in a feedback survey from the parent of a 5-year-old. "After one week, the parent said, "My child did not learn much. My cousin is a Google engineer, and he said he's not ready to be an intern at Google yet.' What do I say to that review?" Du said, bemused. "That expectation is not realistic." Even less tech-savvy parents are getting in on the hype. Du tells of a mom who called the company to get her 12-year-old enrolled in "AL" summer camp. "She misread it," Du said, explaining that the parent had confused the "I" in AI with a lowercase "L."
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2024-08-05 22:20:00

Yelp's Lack of Transparency Around API Charges Angers Developers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On July 19, Yelp informed select indie developers that they would have to switch to paid accounts, due to high API usage. Developers were given four days to make the change, in a move that echoes recent communication bungles by Reddit and Twitter. When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API calls per day. Developers were concerned that other, more affordable options weren't mentioned in the deck. Yelp said the pricing is equivalent and simply presented in different ways. The method of communication and lack of transparency has angered developers, some of whom shuttered their services, even after Yelp gave them a 90-day leeway and apologized. While the company has issued an apology email to developers and extended their free usage by 90 days, it may not be enough to keep these frustrated developers from moving to new platforms.
"We apologize for last week's abbreviated transition that impacted a small percentage of developers and have extended access to these users," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Yelp sunsetted free, commercial, unlimited use of the Yelp Fusion API in 2019 and has been in the process of migrating developers to a paid program over the last several years. The developer community is important to Yelp, and we've heard their feedback about the transition period from the free Yelp Fusion API to our paid program."
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2024-08-05 21:40:00

Video Game Actors Are Officially On Strike Over AI
Members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) are striking against the video game industry due to failed negotiations over AI-related worker protections. "The guild began striking on Friday, July 26th, preventing over 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking new video game projects and impeding games already in development from the biggest publishers to the smallest indie studios," notes The Verge. From the report: Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI. The actors union, SAG-AFTRA, negotiates the terms of the interactive media agreement, or IMA, with a bargaining committee of video game publishers, including Activision, Take-Two, Insomniac Games, WB Games, and others that represent a total of 30 signatory companies. Though SAG-AFTRA and the video game bargaining group were able to agree on a number of proposals, AI remained the final stumbling block resulting in the strike.
SAG-AFTRA's provisions on AI govern both voice and movement performers with respect to digital replicas -- or using an existing performance as the foundation to create new ones without the original performer -- and the use of generative AI to create performances without any initial input. However, according to SAG-AFTRA, the bargaining companies disagreed about which type of performer should be eligible for AI protections. SAG-AFTRA chief contracts officer Ray Rodriguez said that the bargaining companies initially wanted to offer protections to voice, not motion performers. "So anybody doing a stunt or creature performance, all those folks would have been left unprotected under the employers' offer," Rodriguez said in an interview with Aftermath. Rodriguez said that the companies later extended protections to motion performers, but only if "the performer is identifiable in the output of the AI digital replica."
SAG-AFTRA rejected this proposal as it would potentially exclude a majority of movement performances. "Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn't look and sound identical to me," said Andi Norris, a member of SAG-AFTRA's IMA negotiating committee, during a press conference. "[The proposal] would leave movement specialists, including stunts, entirely out in the cold, to be replaced ... by soulless synthetic performers trained on our actual performances." The bargaining game companies argued that the terms went far enough and would require actors' approval. "Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA's concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry," wrote Audrey Cooling, a representative working on behalf of the video game companies on the bargaining committee in a statement to The Verge.
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2024-08-05 20:24:00

Indonesia Bans Search Engine DuckDuckGo On Gambling, Pornography Concerns
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indonesia said it has banned the privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, citing concerns that it could be used to access pornography and online gambling websites which are illegal in the country, the communications ministry said on Friday. Indonesia, with the world's biggest Muslim population, has strict rules that ban the sharing online of content deemed obscene. Social media platform Reddit and video-hosting platform Vimeo are blocked.
Usman Kansong, a communications ministry official, told Reuters that DuckDuckGo had been blocked "because of the many complaints made to us about the rampant online gambling and pornography content in its search results." The ministry did not say how DuckDuckGo differs from other search engines such as Alphabet's Google but on its website, DuckDuckGo said it offered several products intended to "help people protect their online privacy" including the search engine, which it said has been praised by privacy advocates.
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2024-08-05 18:50:00

Design Flaw Has Microsoft Authenticator Overwriting MFA Accounts, Locking Users Out
snydeq writes: CSO Online's Evan Schuman reports on a design flaw in Microsoft Authenticator that causes it to often overwrite authentication accounts when a user adds a new one via QR scan. "But because of the way the resulting lockout happens, the user is not likely to realize the issue resides with Microsoft Authenticator. Instead, the company issuing the authentication is considered the culprit, resulting in wasted corporate helpdesk hours trying to fix an issue not of that company's making."
Schuman writes: "The core of the problem? Microsoft Authenticator will overwrite an account with the same username. Given the prominent use of email addresses for usernames, most users' apps share the same username. Google Authenticator and just about every other authenticator app add the name of the issuer -- such as a bank or a car company -- to avoid this issue. Microsoft only uses the username."
The flaw appears to have been in place since Authenticator was released in 2016. Users have complained about this issue in the past to no avail. In its two correspondences with Schuman, Microsoft first laid blame on users, then on issuers. Several IT experts confirmed the flaw, with one saying, "It's possible that this problem occurs more often than anyone realizes because [users] don't realize what the cause is. If you haven't picked an authentication app, why would you pick Microsoft?"
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2024-08-05 18:10:00

Illinois Governor Approves Business-Friendly Overhaul of Biometric Privacy Law
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed a bill into law that will significantly curb the penalties companies could face for improperly collecting and using fingerprints and other biometric data from workers and consumers. From a report: The bill passed by the legislature in May and signed by Pritzker, a Democrat, on Friday amends the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) so that companies can be held liable only for a single violation per person, rather than for each time biometric data is allegedly misused.
The amendments will dramatically limit companies' exposure in BIPA cases and could discourage plaintiffs' lawyers from filing many lawsuits in the first place, management-side lawyers said. "By limiting statutory damages to a single recovery per individual ... companies in most instances will no longer face the prospect of potentially annihilative damages awards that greatly outpace any privacy harms," David Oberly, of counsel at Baker Donelson in Washington, D.C., said before the bill was signed. BIPA, a 2008 law, requires companies to obtain permission before collecting fingerprints, retinal scans and other biometric information from workers and consumers. The law imposes penalties of $1,000 per violation and $5,000 for reckless or intentional violations.
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2024-08-05 17:25:00

Every Microsoft Employee Is Now Being Judged on Their Security Work
Reeling from security and optics issues, Microsoft appears to be trying to correct its story. An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft made it clear earlier this year that it was planning to make security its top priority, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. Starting today, the software giant is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews. Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft's chief people officer, has outlined what the company expects of employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. "Everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority," says Hogan. "When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else."
A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses. "Delivering impact for the Security Core Priority will be a key input for managers in determining impact and recommending rewards," Microsoft is telling employees in an internal Microsoft FAQ on its new policy. Microsoft has now placed security as one of its key priorities alongside diversity and inclusion. Both are now required to be part of performance conversations -- internally called a "Connect" -- for every employee, alongside priorities that are agreed upon between employees and their managers.
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2024-08-05 16:05:00

Elon Musk Revives Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman
Elon Musk has reignited his legal battle against OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, by filing a new lawsuit in a California federal court. The suit, which revives a six-year-old dispute, accuses OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of breaching the company's founding principles by prioritizing commercial interests over public benefit.
Musk's complaint alleges that OpenAI's multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft contradicts the original mission to develop AI responsibly for humanity's benefit. The lawsuit describes the alleged betrayal in dramatic terms, claiming "perfidy and deceit... of Shakespearean proportions." OpenAI has not yet commented on the new filing. In response to Musk's previous lawsuit, which was withdrawn seven weeks ago, the company stated its commitment to building safe artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
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2024-08-05 14:42:00

Schwab, Fidelity Traders Report Outages During Stock Meltdown
Charles Schwab and other retail brokerage users reported outages as a global stocks selloff surged when trading in the US market opened on Monday. From a report: More than 14,000 users reported an outage at Schwab at 9:50 a.m. in New York, according to the website Downdetector. The outage comes at a time when global financial markets are experiencing a significant downturn as a widespread sell-off intensified following Friday's disappointing US employment data, which heightened concerns about a potential recession in the world's largest economy. The turbulence was particularly pronounced in Asian markets, with Japanese stocks leading the decline, while cryptocurrencies, oil prices, and European equities also suffered losses. The volatility spread to the US, where stocks plummeted at the opening bell, and the yield curve briefly inverted as investors increased their bets on imminent Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.
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2024-08-05 11:34:00

Are EV 'Charger Hogs' Ruining the EV Experience?
A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette."
[T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there.
Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...."
Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page.
In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit.
Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notse that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours...
"For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."
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2024-08-04 21:26:00

Rust-Written 'Redox OS' Now Has a Working Web Server
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix:
The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July...
Notable new software work includes getting the Simple HTTP Server running as the first web (HTTP) server for the platform. Simple HTTP Server itself is written in Rust as well. There is also an ongoing effort to bring the Apache HTTP server to Redox OS too.
Another app milestone is the wget program now working on Redox OS. There's also been more work on getting the COSMIC desktop apps working on Redox OS, build system improvements, and other changes.
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2024-08-04 20:26:00

Is the 'Kids Online Safety Act' Losing Momentum?
America's Senate "overwhelmingly passed major online safety reforms to protect children on social media, reports the Guardian.
"But with ongoing pushback from the tech industry and freedom of speech organizations, the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House."
"It's a terrible idea to let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online," freedom of speech group the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of the Senate's passage of Kosa... Advocates of Kosa reject these critiques, noting the bill has been revised to address many of those concerns — including shifting enforcement from attorneys general to the federal trade commission and focusing the "duty of care" provisions on product design features of the site or app rather than content specifically. A number of major LGBTQ+ groups dropped their opposition to the legislation following these changes, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and the Trevor Project.
After passing the Senate this week, the bill has now moved onto the House, which is on a six-week summer recess until September. Proponents are now directing their efforts towards House legislators to turn the bill into law. Joe Biden has indicated he would sign it if it passes. In a statement Tuesday encouraging the House to pass the legislation, the US president said: "We need action by Congress to protect our kids online and hold big tech accountable for the national experiment they are running on our children for profit...."
House speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has expressed support for moving forward on Kosa and passing legislation this Congress, but it's unclear if he will bring the bill up in the House immediately. Some experts say the bill is unlikely to be passed in the House in the form passed by the Senate. "Given the concerns about potential censorship and the possibility of minors' lacking access to vital information, pausing KOSA makes eminent sense," said Gautam Hans, associate clinical professor of law and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell Law School. He added that the House may put forward its own similar legislation instead, or modify KOSA to further address some of these concerns.
The political news site Punchbowl News also noted this potentially significant quote:
A House GOP leadership aide told us this about KOSA: "We've heard concerns across our Conference and the Senate bill cannot be brought up in its current form."
TechDirt argues that "Senator Rand Paul's really excellent letter laying out the reasons he couldn't support the bill may have had an impact."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the news.
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2024-08-03 03:30:00

US Prepares For Bird Flu Pandemic With $176 Million Moderna Vaccine Deal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza -- an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle. The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of a new Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium. The program is intended to set up partnerships with industry to help the country better prepare for pandemic threats and develop medical countermeasures, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a press announcement Tuesday.
In its own announcement on Tuesday, Moderna noted that it began a Phase 1/2 trial of a pandemic influenza virus vaccine last year, which included versions targeting H5 and H7 varieties of bird flu viruses. The company said it expects to release the results of that trial this year and that those results will direct the design of a Phase 3 trial, anticipated to begin in 2025. The funding deal will support late-stage development of a "pre-pandemic vaccine against H5 influenza virus," Moderna said. But, the deal also includes options for additional vaccine development in case other public health threats arise.
US health officials have said previously that they were in talks with Moderna and Pfizer about the development of a pandemic bird flu vaccine. The future vaccine will be in addition to standard protein-based bird flu vaccines that are already developed. In recent weeks, the health department has said it is working to manufacture 4.8 million vials of H5 influenza vaccine in the coming months. The plans come three months into the H5N1 dairy outbreak, which is very far from the initial hopes of containment. [...] The more the virus expands its footprint across US dairy farms, adapts to its newfound mammalian host, and comes in contact with humans, the more and more chances it has to leap to humans and gain the ability to spread among us. "The award made today is part of our longstanding commitment to strengthen our preparedness for pandemic influenza," said Dawn O'Connell, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response. "Adding this technology to our pandemic flu toolkit enhances our ability to be nimble and quick against the circulating strains and their potential variants."
In a separate article, Ars Technica reports on a small study in Texas that suggests human cases are going undetected on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has spread in cows.
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2024-08-03 00:50:00

Suno & Udio To RIAA: Your Music Is Copyrighted, You Can't Copyright Styles
AI music generators Suno and Udio responded to the lawsuits filed by the major recording labels, arguing that their platforms are tools for making new, original music that "didn't and often couldn't previously exist."
"Those genres and styles -- the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music -- are not something that anyone owns," the companies said. "Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself." TorrentFreak reports: "[The labels] frame their concern as one about 'copies' of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology -- that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don't want is competition." The labels' position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren't stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, "outputting a collage of 'samples' stitched together from existing recordings" when prompted by users.
"[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings," Suno explains. "From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings -- what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on." These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it's from that information new music is made.
Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that's certainly not the case here. "The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement." With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, "that key point makes all the difference," Suno's conclusion is served raw. "That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product." Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.
In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a "no AI" policy on licensees, to claims that they "may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal." The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels' dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. "No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. "Plaintiffs' contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values." You can read Suno and Udio's answers to the RIAA's lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).
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2024-08-03 00:10:00

Japan Mandates App To Ensure National ID Cards Aren't Forged
The Japanese government has released details of an app that verifies the legitimacy of its troubled My Number Card -- a national identity document. From a report: Beginning in 2015, every resident of Japan was assigned a 12 digit My Number that paved the way for linking social security, taxation, disaster response and other government services to both the number itself and a smartcard. The plan was to banish bureaucracy and improve public service delivery -- but that didn't happen.
My Number Card ran afoul of data breaches, reports of malfunctioning card readers, and database snafus that linked cards to other citizens' bank accounts. Public trust in the scheme fell, and adoption stalled. Now, according to Japan's Digital Ministry, counterfeit cards are proliferating to help miscreant purchase goods -- particularly mobile phones -- under fake identities. Digital minister Taro Kono yesterday presented his solution to the counterfeits: a soon to be mandatory app that confirms the legitimacy of the card. The app uses the camera on a smartphone to read information printed on the card -- like date of birth and name. It compares those details to what it reads from info stored in the smartcard's resident chip, and confirms the data match without the user ever needing to enter their four-digit PIN.
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2024-08-02 22:50:00

US Sues TikTok Over 'Massive-Scale' Privacy Violations of Kids Under 13
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit Friday against TikTok and parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children's privacy on the social media app as the Biden administration continues its crackdown on the social media site. The government said TikTok violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that requires services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13. The suit (PDF), which was joined by the Federal Trade Commission, said it was aimed at putting an end "to TikTok's unlawful massive-scale invasions of children's privacy." Representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the suit "underscores the importance of divesting TikTok from Chinese Communist Party control. We simply cannot continue to allow our adversaries to harvest vast troves of Americans' sensitive data."
The DOJ said TikTok knowingly permitted children to create regular TikTok accounts, and then create and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on the regular TikTok platform. TikTok collected personal information from these children without obtaining consent from their parents. The U.S. alleges that for years millions of American children under 13 have been using TikTok and the site "has been collecting and retaining children's personal information." The FTC is seeking penalties of up to $51,744 per violation per day from TikTok for improperly collecting data, which could theoretically total billions of dollars if TikTok were found liable. TikTok said Friday it disagrees "with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed. We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform."
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2024-08-02 22:10:00

Google Pulls 'Dear Sydney' Olympics Ad After Appearing Tone-Deaf To AI Concerns
Google has pulled its "Dear Sydney" Olympics ad after it garnered significant backlash. (You can still watch the ad on YouTube, but comments have been turned off.) According to Ad Age, the ad was "meant to promote Google's Gemini AI platform, but viewers had a difficult time looking past its miscalculated storyline." From the report: In the ad, a father wants to help his daughter write a letter to her idol, Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. But instead of encouraging her to take part in such a personal moment, he delegates Gemini to write the letter for her. Viewers and ad leaders lambasted the spot on social media for being tone-deaf. Some were upset over Google evidently seeing no problem with an AI co-opting a formative childhood act, while others alluded to its reinforcing of a more existential fear, that AI is bound to replace meaningful work. The ad got significant airplay during NBCU's TV coverage of the Olympics this week, including on NBC in primetime, as well as on E!, CNBC and USA, according to iSpot.tv. It last ran on national TV around midnight of July 30 on USA, according to iSpot.TV. "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we've decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation," a Google spokesperson told Ad Age today.
The company earlier this week defended the ad in a statement: "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA. It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing."
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2024-08-02 21:30:00

Intel Stock Drops Toward 50-Year Low Amid Mass Layoffs
Intel's stock plunged as much as 30% on Friday after the company issued disappointing guidance and announced plans for a substantial workforce reduction. According to Bloomberg, it was the company's biggest single-day drop since at least 1982. Markets Insider reports: The decline comes after the software company announced quarterly revenue of $12.83 billion, down 1% from the previous year and missing analyst expectations of $12.94 billion, according to LSEG estimates. The company also lowered its revenue forecast for the current quarter to a range between $12.5 billion and $13.5 billion, down from analyst estimates of $14.35 billion. Intel executives pointed to unexpected trends in the most recent quarter to explain how it performed this way even with product milestones.
"Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones," CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a press release. "Second-half trends are more challenging than we previously expected, and we are leveraging our new operating model to take decisive actions that will improve operating and capital efficiencies." Those operations and efficiency improvements include plans to lay off over 15% of staff by the end of this year, realign structure and operations, and cut operations expenses by over $10 billion next year. Technology shares fell across the globe following underwhelming earnings and fears of a U.S. economic recession grew. Stock markets in Europe, Asia and New York tumbled on Friday.
"Japanese equities suffered their worst day since the Covid-19 pandemic rocked markets in 2020; the Nikkei 225 share index tumbled by 5.8% to its lowest closing level since January," reports The Guardian. "The broader Japanese Topix fell 6.1%, Australia's ASX fell 2.5% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng was down 2.1%."
"Europe's main stock indices also declined on Friday, with European technology stocks falling to their lowest level in more than six months."
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2024-08-02 20:50:00

Edge-Lit LCD TV Durability Concerns Emerge in New Test
A recent investigation by consumer electronics testing site RTINGs has raised concerns about the long-term durability of edge-lit LCD-LED televisions, a popular choice among consumers for their slim profiles and aesthetic appeal. The study, which simulated approximately six years of use through 10,000 hours of extreme testing on dozens of TVs, revealed a troubling trend of uniformity issues in edge-lit models, particularly affecting Samsung and LG products.
According to RTINGs' findings, 64% of edge-lit TVs tested exhibited noticeable uniformity problems, compared to only 20% of full array local dimming (FALD) and direct-lit models. The primary issues identified were warped reflector sheets, cracked light guide plates, and burnt-out LEDs, all exacerbated by extended use at maximum brightness settings. RTINGs attributed these problems to the concentrated heat generation in edge-lit designs, with some LEDs reaching temperatures as high as 253.4F (123C). While Samsung defended its use of edge-lit technology, citing 15 years of reliable implementation and rigorous testing procedures, and LG reported no difference in defect rates between edge-lit and other LCD TV designs, RTINGs' research suggests that consumers seeking more durable TVs may want to consider alternatives to edge-lit models.
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2024-08-02 20:10:00

Intel Will Give Two Years of Additional Warranty on Crash-Prone 13th and 14th Gen CPUs
After months of back and forth, Intel has finally agreed to extend the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs by an additional two years. This extension increases the warranty period for new boxed Intel CPUs from three to five years. For CPUs pre-installed in systems, Intel directs users to contact their PC's manufacturer for support, maintaining its established channels for warranty claims. The Verge adds: Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an "elevated operating voltage" and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won't fix any damage that's already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.
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2024-08-02 19:30:00

Secret Service's Tech Issues Helped Shooter Go Undetected At Trump Rally
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The technology flaws of the U.S. Secret Service helped the gunman who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month evade detection. An officer broadcast "long gun!" over the local law enforcement radio system, according to congressional testimony from the Secret Service this week, the New York Times reported. The radio message should have travelled to a command center shared between local police and the Secret Service, but the message was never received by the Secret Service. About 30 seconds later, the shooter, Thomas Crooks, fired his first shots.
It was one of several technology issues facing the Secret Service on 13 July due to either malfunction, improper deployment or the Secret Service opting not to utilize them. The Secret Service had also previously rejected requests from the Trump campaign for more resources over the past two years. The use of a surveillance drone was turned down by the Secret Service at the rally site and the agency also did not bring in a system to boost the signals of agents' devices as the area had poor cell service. And a system to detect drone use in the area by others did not work, according to the report in the New York Times, due to the communications network in the area being overwhelmed by the number of people gathered at the rally. The federal agency did not use technology it had to bolster their communications system. The shooter flew his own drone over the site for 11 minutes without being detected, about two hours before Trump appeared at the rally. Ronald Rowe Jr, the acting Secret Service director, said it never utilized the technological tools that could have spotted the shooter beforehand.
A former Secret Service officer also told the New York Times he "resigned in 2017 over frustration with the agency's delays in evaluating new technology and getting clearance and funding to obtain it and then train officers on it," notes The Guardian. Furthermore, the Secret Service failed to record communications between federal and local law enforcement at the rally.
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2024-08-02 18:51:00

Google Hires Character.AI Cofounders and Licenses Its Models
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has agreed to pay a licensing fee [non-paywalled link] to chatbot maker Character.AI for its models and will hire its cofounders and many of its researchers, Character's leaders told staff on Friday. The leaders told Character staff that investors would be bought out at a valuation of about $88 per share, the leaders said in a meeting. That's about 2.5 times the value of shares in Character's 2023 Series A, which valued the company at $1 billion, they said.
The Character employees joining Google will work on its Gemini AI efforts, they said. Character will switch to open-source models such as Meta Platforms' Llama 3.1 to power its products, rather than its in-house models, they said. The deal follows a string of similar arrangements by other well-funded artificial intelligence startups. AI developers Adept and Inflection have both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in the last five months despite raising considerable capital.
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2024-08-02 18:10:00

The Best ROM Hack Website is Shutting Down After Nearly 20 Years
ROMhacking.net, a prominent platform for fan translations and modifications of classic games, is shutting down after nearly two decades of operation. The site's administrator, who goes by the name Nightcrawler, said the website will remain accessible in a read-only format, but all new submissions have been halted and the site's extensive database has been transferred to the Internet Archive for preservation.
ROMhacking.net has long served as a crucial resource for gaming enthusiasts, according to Polygon, hosting a vast array of fan-made translations, bug fixes, and modifications for classic titles, many of which never received official localizations outside their countries of origin. The site's contributions to the gaming community include fan translations of Japanese-exclusive titles and even patches for long-standing bugs in popular games like Super Mario 64. Nightcrawler said the website ran into challenges including in managing the site's exponential growth and increasing copyright pressures, things that contributed to the decision to winding down operations.
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2024-08-02 17:28:00

GameStop Shuts Down Game Informer
Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. Kotaku: It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more.
Staff at the magazine, which also publishes a website, weekly podcast, and online video documentaries about game studios and developers, were all called into a meeting on Friday with parent company GameStop's VP of HR. In it they were told the publication was closing immediately, they were all laid off, and would begin receiving severance terms. At least one staffer was in the middle of a work trip when the team was told. The sudden closure of Game Informer means that issue number 367, the outlet's Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story, will be its last.
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2024-08-02 16:52:00

UK Government Shelves $1.66 Billion Tech and AI Plans
An anonymous reader shares a report: The new Labour government has shelved $1.66 bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned. It includes $1 bn for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further $640m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI. Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget. Some in the industry have criticised the government's decision. Tech business founder Barney Hussey-Yeo posted on X that reducing investment risked "pushing more entrepreneurs to the US." Businessman Chris van der Kuyl described the move as "idiotic." Trade body techUK said the government now needed to make "new proposals quickly" or the UK risked "losing out" to other countries in what are crucial industries of the future.
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2024-08-02 16:05:00

US Court Blocks Biden Administration Net Neutrality Rules
schwit1 writes: A U.S. appeals court on Thursday blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge. The agency voted in April along party lines to reassume regulatory oversight of broadband internet and reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 that were rescinded under then-President Donald Trump.
The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which had temporarily delayed the rules, said on Thursday it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules. "The final rule implicates a major question, and the commission has failed to satisfy the high bar for imposing such regulations," the court wrote. "Net neutrality is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization."
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2024-08-02 07:00:00

Fully-Automatic Robot Dentist Performs World's First Human Procedure
For the first time, an AI-controlled autonomous robot performed an entire dental procedure on a human patient, completing the task eight times faster than a human dentist could. New Atlas reports: The system, built by Boston company Perceptive, uses a hand-held 3D volumetric scanner, which builds a detailed 3D model of the mouth, including the teeth, gums and even nerves under the tooth surface, using optical coherence tomography, or OCT. This cuts harmful X-Ray radiation out of the process, as OCT uses nothing more than light beams to build its volumetric models, which come out at high resolution, with cavities automatically detected at an accuracy rate around 90%. At this point, the (human) dentist and patient can discuss what needs doing -- but once those decisions are made, the robotic dental surgeon takes over. It plans out the operation, then jolly well goes ahead and does it.
The machine's first specialty: preparing a tooth for a dental crown. Perceptive claims this is generally a two-hour procedure that dentists will normally split into two visits. The robo-dentist knocks it off in closer to 15 minutes. Here's a time-lapse video of the drilling portion, looking very much like a CNC machine at work. Remarkably, the company claims the machine can take care of business safely "even in the most movement-heavy conditions," and that dry run testing on moving humans has all been successful. [...] The robot's not FDA-approved yet, and Perceptive hasn't placed a timeline on rollout, so it may be some years yet before the public gets access to this kind of treatment.
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2024-08-02 00:50:00

Bungie CEO Faces Backlash After Announcing 220 Employees Will Be Laid Off
Rob Thubron reports via TechSpot: It's a sad case of another day, another round of mass layoffs at a game studio. On this occasion, Destiny developer Bungie has announced it is letting go of 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce. CEO Pete Parsons said the eliminations were due to "financial challenges," which isn't going down well, especially after it was discovered he may have spent over $2.4 million on classic cars after Sony acquired the company, and continued buying them even after the previous layoffs. Bungie blames the job eliminations on "rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions." The Sony subsidiary says it needs to make substantial changes to its cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon. The cuts will impact every level of the company, including executives and senior leader roles -- but not Parsons, obviously.
In what appears to be a way of reducing the number of people being laid off, Bungie is moving 155 people to Sony Interactive Entertainment over the next few quarters. Furthermore, a team working on one of Bungie's incubation projects -- an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe -- will be spun off to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios. [...] "This is hitting people who were told they were valued. That they were important. That they were critical to business success. But none of that mattered," wrote Bungie technical UX designer Ash Duong.
Many have called for Parsons to resign. The calls were amplified when he set his X account to private, but it seems the CEO realized that was making things worse and soon set it to public again. What's angering people even further is the discovery of what seems to be Parsons' account on a car bidding site called Bring a Trailer. It shows he has spent $2.4 million on classic cars since September 2022, which includes $500,000 since the October layoffs.
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2024-08-02 00:10:00

US Progressives Push For Nvidia Antitrust Investigation
Progressive groups and Senator Elizabeth Warren are urging the Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia for potential antitrust violations due to its dominant position in the AI chip market. The groups criticize Nvidia's bundling of software and hardware, claiming it stifles innovation and locks in customers. Reuters reports: Demand Progress and nine other groups wrote a letter (PDF) this week, opens new tab urging Department of Justice antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter to probe business practices at Nvidia, whose market value hit $3 trillion this summer on demand for chips able to run the complex models behind generative AI. The groups, which oppose monopolies and promote government oversight of tech companies, among other issues, took aim at Nvidia's bundling of software and hardware, a practice that French antitrust enforcers have flagged as they prepare to bring charges.
"This aggressively proprietary approach, which is strongly contrary to industry norms about collaboration and interoperability, acts to lock in customers and stifles innovation," the groups wrote. Nvidia has roughly 80% of the AI chip market, including the custom AI processors made by cloud computing companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com. The chips made by the cloud giants are not available for sale themselves but typically rented through each platform. A spokesperson for Nvidia said: "Regulators need not be concerned, as we scrupulously adhere to all laws and ensure that NVIDIA is openly available in every cloud and on-prem for every enterprise. We'll continue to support aspiring innovators in every industry and market and are happy to provide any information regulators need."
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2024-08-01 22:50:00

San Francisco Supervisors Approve Ban on Rent-Setting Software
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has approved a first-in-the-nation ordinance banning landlords from using certain software and algorithms to set rents. The measure, proposed by Board President Aaron Peskin, passed with a 10-0 vote and targets companies like RealPage and Yardi.
The ordinance prohibits the sale or use of "algorithmic devices" that analyze non-public competitor data to recommend rents or occupancy levels for residential units in San Francisco. Violators could face civil penalties up to $1,000 per infraction. Proponents argue the software exacerbates the city's housing crisis by enabling artificial rent inflation. RealPage defended its product, stating it "benefits both housing providers and residents" and that customers can reject price recommendations. The ban follows federal scrutiny of algorithmic rent-setting practices. A final vote is scheduled for September 3.
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2024-08-01 22:10:00

'Venmo and Zelle May Not Be Free For Much Longer'
An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed, written by former hedge fund manager Marc Rubinstein: With new technologies come new rules governing how they are used. Often, policy is framed via analogy: Are social media platforms publishers or are they town squares? Are instant messages water-cooler chatter or are they formal communication? So it is with peer-to-peer electronic payments. Last week a US Senate committee joined the debate over whether they're analogous to cash or to bank-payment channels. It's an essential distinction -- for both consumers and the companies that provide this free service. [...] Yet while no bank would accept liability if a customer lost their wallet to a pickpocket, the senators' debate focused on who's responsible when fraudsters target electronic wallets. Last year, customers of the three largest lenders -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- lost a total of $370 million via Zelle, the platform these banks jointly own with four others. According to the majority staff report (PDF) filed by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which convened the July 23 hearing, the banks reimbursed only around $100 million of that, leaving consumers to shoulder the rest. While small in the context of overall volume that go through Zelle -- $806 billion last year, of which these banks did 73% -- that's cold comfort for the customers.
Legally, a bank's obligation rests on whether clients fall victim to a "fraud" or to a "scam." In a fraud, money is transferred out of the user's account without their authorization, usually as the result of hacking. Under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, banks are required to reimburse such losses. As long as the customer authorizes the transaction, though, even if fraudulently induced to do so, banks don't have to pick up the tab. Such scams are growing as fraudsters parade as a bank employee, a love interest or a potential new employer, often via social media. According to a Pew Research survey, 13% of P2P platform users reported sending money, only later to realize they were set up. Persuading your bank you are the victim of a fraud rather than a scam can take some work. [...] For bad guys, the speed of P2P payments makes them a particularly attractive target. A Zelle transfer can take 20 to 30 seconds to initiate. In most cases, by the time an unsuspecting consumer realizes they have been targeted, their money is already gone. Banks argue this is no different from cash. [...]
However, others see P2P transactions more akin to electronic payments and question why reimbursement rates, at 26% in the case of Zelle, are so much lower than for credit-card payments (47%) or debit-card payments (36%) at the three big banks. Despite critical differences, the subcommittee agrees. Its report recommends extending purchase protections standard in credit and debit-card markets to commercial P2P payments, and amending the Electronic Fund Transfer Act to make fraudulently induced transactions subject to reimbursement. Such a move has already been adopted in the UK, where new rules requiring financial institutions to fully reimburse victims of scams come into force in October this year. US bankers aren't keen. "We need to be thoughtful and think about unintended consequences," Adam Vancini, Wells Fargo's head of payments for Consumer, Small & Business Banking, said at the Senate hearing. For now, Zelle transfers enjoy all the benefits of cash. Layer in the benefits of card payments, too, and the no-cost model may disappear.
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2024-08-01 20:50:00

Linux Hits Another Desktop Market Share Record
According to Statcounter, Linux use hit another all-time high in July. For July 2024, the statistics website is showing Linux at 4.45%, climbing almost a half a percentage point from June's 4.05% high.
Is 2024 truly the year of Linux on the desktop?
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2024-08-01 19:25:00

Argentina Will Use AI To 'Predict Future Crimes'
Argentina's security forces have announced plans to use AI to "predict future crimes" in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens' rights. From a report: The country's far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use "machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes." It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify "wanted persons," patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities.
While the ministry of security has said the new unit will help to "detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances," the Minority Report-esque resolution has sent alarm bells ringing among human rights organisations. Experts fear that certain groups of society could be overly scrutinised by the technology, and have also raised concerns over who -- and how many security forces -- will be able to access the information.
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2024-08-01 18:53:00

Microsoft Now Lists OpenAI as a Competitor in AI and Search
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long term partnership. As part of the deal, Microsoft runs OpenAI's models across its enterprise and consumer products, and is OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider. However, the tech giant called the startup a "competitor" for the first time in an SEC filing on Tuesday.
In Microsoft's annual 10K, OpenAI joined long list of competitors in AI, alongside Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta. OpenAI was also listed alongside Google as a competitor to Microsoft in search, thanks to OpenAI's new SearchGPT feature announced last week. It's possible Microsoft is trying to change the narrative on its relationship with OpenAI in light of antitrust concerns -- the FTC is currently looking into the relationship, alongside similar cloud provider investments into AI startups.
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2024-08-01 18:05:00

Jailed Cybercriminals Returned To Russia in Historic Prisoner Swap
A blockbuster prisoner exchange between the United States, Russia and Germany on Thursday included at least two prominent cybercriminals held by the U.S. on charges of financially motivated cybercrime and hacking to facilitate insider trading. Cyberscoop reports: The prisoners were part of a deal that freed 16 people from Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. A White House spokesperson confirmed that as part of the deal, the U.S. released convicted Russian cybercriminals Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin.
Seleznev is a notorious Russian hacker known for running extensive cybercrime operations. He was involved in numerous cyberattacks, including credit card fraud, theft, and selling stolen credit card information on "Carder[dot]su," a cybercriminal forum ring. Seleznev conducted his criminal activities under the alias "Track2" and "nCux." He is the son of Valery Seleznev, a prominent member of the Russian Duma, the country's parliament. Seleznev was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for his involvement in a massive credit-card computer fraud scheme. Klyushin was extradited to the U.S. for his involvement in an elaborate hack-to-trade scheme that netted approximately $93 million through securities trades based on confidential corporate information stolen from U.S. computer networks. With insider knowledge of companies' financial performance, Klyushin and his co-conspirators predicted stock price movements and traded on stolen information. They used accounts in multiple countries, including Cyprus, Denmark, Portugal, Russia, and the U.S., misleading brokerage firms about their activities.
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2024-08-01 17:24:00

Google Defeats RNC Lawsuit Claiming Email Spam Filters Harmed Republican Fundraising
A U.S. judge has thrown out a Republican National Committee lawsuit accusing Alphabet's Google of intentionally misdirecting the political party's email messages to users' spam folders. From a report: U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, on Wednesday dismissed the RNC's lawsuit for a second time, and said the organization would not be allowed to refile it. While expressing some sympathy for the RNC's allegations, he said it had not made an adequate case that Google violated California's unfair competition law.
The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations. Google denied any wrongdoing.
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2024-08-01 16:42:00

FOSSA is Buying StackShare, a Site Used By 1.5 Million Developers
Open-source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. From a report: StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build applications. This encompasses everything from which front-end JavaScript framework to use to which cloud provider to use for specific tasks.
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2024-08-01 16:06:00

Chrome is Going To Use AI To Help You Compare Products From Across Your Tabs
Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page. From a report: The tool, which Google is calling "tab compare," will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view.
But while it's potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare product information -- which might be especially worrying for independent publishers that are already struggling to be seen on Google. I'm also skeptical that Google will correctly pull all of the finer details about various products into the tables it creates with tab compare. I don't always trust Google's accuracy right now! There are some limits on what tab compare can do. The tables it creates are limited to 10 items because "we've just found the column layout doesn't scale very well beyond that," Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz tells The Verge.
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2024-08-01 15:24:00

AI Startup Suno Says Music Industry Suit Aims to Stifle Competition
AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. From a report: In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music.
"Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.
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2024-08-01 14:40:00

Mozilla Follows Google in Losing Trust in Entrust's TLS Certificates
Mozilla is following in Google Chrome's footsteps in officially distrusting Entrust as a root certificate authority (CA) following what it says was a protracted period of compliance failures. From a report: A little over a month ago, Google was the first to make the bold step of dropping Entrust as a CA, saying it noted a "pattern of concerning behaviors" from the company. Entrust has apologized to Google, Mozilla, and the wider web community, outlining its plans to regain the trust of browsers, but these appear to be unsatisfactory to both Google and Mozilla.
In an email shared by Mozilla's Ben Wilson on Wednesday, the root store manager said the decision wasn't taken lightly, but equally Entrust's response to Mozilla's concerns didn't inspire confidence that the situation would materially change for the better. "Mozilla previously requested that Entrust provide a detailed report on these recent incidents and their root causes, an evaluation of Entrust's recent actions in light of their previous commitments given in the aftermath of similarly serious incidents in 2020, and a proposal for how Entrust will re-establish Mozilla's and the community's trust," said Wilson.
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2024-08-01 13:00:00

Laid-Off California Tech Workers Are Sick To Death of LinkedIn
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: Over the past few years, scores of California tech workers have ended up in the exact same position: laid-off, looking for work on LinkedIn and sick of it. LinkedIn, part job site and part social network, has become an all but necessary tool for the office-job-seeking masses in the Bay Area and beyond. As tech companies gut their workforces, people who would otherwise give the blue-and-white site a wide berth feel compelled to scroll for hours every day for job opportunities. LinkedIn is a dominant force in the professional world, with more than 1 billion users and 67 million weekly job searchers. That scale, plus the torrent of self-promotion and corporate platitudes fueling the platform, has long made it a symbol of modern capitalism. Now, in the age of tech's layoffs, it's also a symbol of dread.
The platform's specter looms so large because it does exactly what it needs to. Tech workers are stuck on Linkedin: In a competitive job market rife with spam listings, the free platform's networking-focused features set it a peg above competitors like Indeed, Dice and Levels.fyi in the search for full-time work. Since February, SFGATE has spoken with 10 recently laid-off tech workers; most of them see LinkedIn as painful but necessary and have locked up new jobs in part thanks to the platform. Tech worker Kyle Kohlheyer told SFGATE that returning to LinkedIn after losing his job at Cruise in December felt like "salt in the wound" and called the job site a "cesspool" of wannabe thought leaders and "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
"I found success on their platform, but I f-king hate LinkedIn," Kohlheyer said. "It sucks. It is a terrible place to exist every day and depend on a job for. [...] There's just such a capitalist-centric mindset on there that is so annoying as a worker who has been fundamentally screwed by companies," he said. "Wading" through LinkedIn, he said, it's hard to tell if people feel like an alternative to the top-heavy, precarious tech economy is even possible.
Another tech worker, Mark Harris, added: "Is [LinkedIn] a terrible sign that we live in a capitalist hellscape? Hell yes! But we do live in a capitalist hellscape, and girl's gotta eat."
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2024-08-01 10:00:00

Meta's Reality Labs Posts $4.5 Billion Loss In Second Quarter
In the company's second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Meta's Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss of $4.48 billion. CNBC reports: Since late 2020, the Reality Labs unit has generated cumulative losses of about $50 billion, underscoring CEO Mark Zuckerberg's massive investments into the hardware and software that underpins what he says will be the next era of personal computing. Revenue in Reality Labs, largely derived from the company's Quest family of VR headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, came in at $353 million, representing growth of 28% from $276 million a year earlier. Analysts were expecting the unit to bring in $371 million.
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2024-08-01 07:00:00

New Study Simulates Gravitational Waves From Failing Warp Drive
Physicists have been exploring the theoretical possibility of warp drives, which could propel spaceships faster than light by compressing spacetime. A new study published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics simulates the gravitational waves such a drive might emit if it failed, showing potential detectable signals by future high-frequency instruments and advancing our understanding of exotic spacetimes. Phys.Org reports: The results are fascinating. The collapsing warp drive generates a distinct burst of gravitational waves, a ripple in spacetime that could be detectable by gravitational wave detectors that normally target black hole and neutron star mergers. Unlike the chirps from merging astrophysical objects, this signal would be a short, high-frequency burst, and so current detectors wouldn't pick it up. However, future higher-frequency instruments might, and although no such instruments have yet been funded, the technology to build them exists. This raises the possibility of using these signals to search for evidence of warp drive technology, even if we can't build it ourselves.
The study also delves into the energy dynamics of the collapsing warp drive. The process emits a wave of negative energy matter, followed by alternating positive and negative waves. This complex dance results in a net increase in the overall energy of the system, and in principle could provide another signature of the collapse if the outgoing waves interacted with normal matter.
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2024-08-01 03:30:00

Scientists Propose Lunar Biorepository As 'Backup' For Life On Earth
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: With thousands of species at risk of extinction, scientists have devised a radical plan: a vault filled with preserved samples of our planet's most important and at-risk creatures located on the moon. An international team of experts says threats from climate change and habitat loss have outpaced our ability to protect species in their natural habitats, necessitating urgent action. A biorepository of preserved cells, and the crucial DNA within them, could be used to enhance genetic diversity in small populations of critically endangered species, or to clone and create new individuals in the worst-case scenario of extinction.
The proposed lunar biorepository, as described in the journal BioScience, would be beyond the reach of climate breakdown, geopolitical events or other Earth-based disasters. The moon's naturally frigid environment means samples would remain frozen year-round without the need for human involvement or an energy source. By taking advantage of deep craters near the polar regions that are never exposed to sunlight, the moon is one of few places that can provide the ultra-low temperature of -196C necessary to preserve the samples in a way suitable for future cloning. [...] Besides those facing the imminent risk of extinction, the proposed repository would prioritize species with important functions in their environment and food webs. Through careful selection, those housed could be used to re-establish an extinct population on Earth or even to terraform another planet. Dr Mary Hagedorn of the Smithsonian's national zoo and conservation biology institute and the proposal's lead author believes the biorepository proposal will come to fruition, although perhaps not in our lifetime: "We know how to do this and can do this and will do this, but it may take decades to finally achieve," she said.
The report says the next steps "will be to develop packaging for the cryopreserved samples that can withstand the conditions of space, and to work out the logistics of transporting samples to the moon."
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2024-08-01 01:00:00

CrowdStrike Is Sued By Shareholders Over Huge Software Outage
Shareholders have sued CrowdStrike on Tuesday, claiming the cybersecurity company defrauded them by concealing how its inadequate software testing could cause the global software outage earlier this month that crashed millions of computers. Reuters reports: In a proposed class action filed on Tuesday night in the Austin, Texas federal court, shareholders said they learned that CrowdStrike's assurances about its technology were materially false and misleading when a flawed software update disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency lines around the world. They said CrowdStrike's share price fell 32% over the next 12 days, wiping out $25 billion of market value, as the outage's effects became known, Chief Executive George Kurtz was called to testify to the U.S. Congress, and Delta Air Lines reportedly hired prominent lawyer David Boies to seek damages.
The complaint cites statements including from a March 5 conference call where Kurtz characterized CrowdStrike's software as "validated, tested and certified." The lawsuit led by the Plymouth County Retirement Association of Plymouth, Massachusetts, seeks unspecified damages for holders of CrowdStrike Class A shares between Nov. 29, 2023 and July 29, 2024. Further reading: Delta CEO Says CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage Cost the Airline $500 Million
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2024-07-31 23:40:00

Study Details 'Transformative' Results From LA Guaranteed Basic Income Program
The results of Los Angeles' 12-month guaranteed income pilot program show that it was "overwhelmingly beneficial (source may be paywalled; alternative source)," reports the Los Angeles Times. The program, which involved giving L.A.'s poorest families cash assistance of $1,000 a month with no strings attached, significantly improved participants' financial stability, job opportunities, and overall well-being. From the report: The Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot, or BIG:LEAP, disbursed $38.4 million in city funds to 3,200 residents who were pregnant or had at least one child, lived at or below the federal poverty level and experienced hardship related to COVID-19. Participants were randomly selected from about 50,000 applicants and received the payments for 12 months starting in 2022. The city paid researchers $3.9 million to help design the trial and survey participants throughout about their experiences.
[Dr. Amy Castro, co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Guaranteed Income Research] and her colleagues partnered with researchers at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health to compare the experiences of participants in L.A.'s randomized control trial -- the country's first large-scale guaranteed-income pilot using public funds -- with those of nearly 5,000 people who didn't receive the unconditional cash. Researchers found that participants reported a meaningful increase in savings and were more likely to be able to cover a $400 emergency during and after the program. Guaranteed-income recipients also were more likely to secure full-time or part-time employment, or to be looking for work, rather than being unemployed and not looking for work, the study found.
In a city with sky-high rents, participants reported that the guaranteed income functioned as "a preventative measure against homelessness," according to the report, helping them offset rental costs and serving as a buffer while they waited for other housing support. It also prevented or reduced the incidence of intimate partner violence, the analysis found, by making it possible for people and their children to leave and find other housing. Intimate partner violence is an intractable social challenge, Castro said, so to see improvements with just 12 months of funding is a "pretty extraordinary change." People who had struggled to maintain their health because of inflexible or erratic work schedules and lack of child care reported that the guaranteed income provided the safety net they needed to maintain healthier behaviors, the report said. They reported sleeping better, exercising more, resuming necessary medications and seeking mental health therapy for themselves and their children. Compared with those who didn't receive cash, guaranteed income recipients were more likely to enroll their kids in sports and clubs during and after the pilot.
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2024-07-31 21:40:00

Bumble and Hinge Allowed Stalkers To Pinpoint Users' Locations Down To 2 Meters, Researchers Say
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of researchers said they found that vulnerabilities in the design of some dating apps, including the popular Bumble and Hinge, allowed malicious users or stalkers to pinpoint the location of their victims down to two meters. In a new academic paper, researchers from the Belgian university KU Leuven detailed their findings (PDF) when they analyzed 15 popular dating apps. Of those, Badoo, Bumble, Grindr, happn, Hinge and Hily all had the same vulnerability that could have helped a malicious user to identify the near-exact location of another user, according to the researchers. While neither of those apps share exact locations when displaying the distance between users on their profiles, they did use exact locations for the "filters" feature of the apps. Generally speaking, by using filters, users can tailor their search for a partner based on criteria like age, height, what type of relationship they are looking for and, crucially, distance.
To pinpoint the exact location of a target user, the researchers used a novel technique they call "oracle trilateration." In general, trilateration, which for example is used in GPS, works by using three points and measuring their distance relative to the target. This creates three circles, which intersect at the point where the target is located. Oracle trilateration works slightly differently. The researchers wrote in their paper that the first step for the person who wants to identify their target's location "roughly estimates the victim's location," for example, based on the location displayed in the target's profile. Then, the attacker moves in increments "until the oracle indicates that the victim is no longer within proximity, and this for three different directions. The attacker now has three positions with a known exact distance, i.e., the preselected proximity distance, and can trilaterate the victim," the researchers wrote.
"It was somewhat surprising that known issues were still present in these popular apps," Karel Dhondt, one of the researchers, told TechCrunch. While this technique doesn't reveal the exact GPS coordinates of the victim, "I'd say 2 meters is close enough to pinpoint the user," Dhondt said. The good news is that all the apps that had these issues, and that the researchers reached out to, have now changed how distance filters work and are not vulnerable to the oracle trilateration technique. The fix, according to the researchers, was to round up the exact coordinates by three decimals, making them less precise and accurate.
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2024-07-31 19:40:00

Xbox Console Sales Continue To Crater With Massive 42% Revenue Drop
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft's revenue from Xbox console sales was down a whopping 42 percent on a year-over-year basis for the quarter ending in June, the company announced in its latest earnings report. The massive drop continues a long, pronounced slide for sales of Microsoft's gaming hardware—the Xbox line has now shown year-over-year declines in hardware sales revenue in six of the last seven calendar quarters (and seven of the last nine). And Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told investors in a follow-up call (as reported by GamesIndustry.biz) to expect hardware sales to decline yet again in the coming fiscal quarter, which ends in September. The 42 percent drop for quarterly hardware revenue -- by far the largest such drop since the introduction of the Xbox Series X/S in 2020 -- follows an 11 percent year-over-year decline in the second calendar quarter of 2023.
Microsoft no longer shares raw console shipment numbers like its competitors, so we don't know how many Xbox consoles are selling on an absolute basis. But industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimates that Microsoft sold less than 900,000 Xbox units for the quarter ending in March, compared to 4.5 million PS5 units shipped in the same period. Overall, the reported revenue numbers suggest that sales of the Xbox Series X/S line peaked sometime in 2022, during the console's second full year on store shelves. That's extremely rare for a market where sales for successful console hardware usually see a peak in the fourth or fifth year on the market before a slow decline in the run-up to a successor. [...] Aside from hardware sales, Microsoft's gaming content and services revenue was up a healthy-sounding 61 percent year-over-year for the latest reported quarter. But a full 58 percent of that increase was the "net impact from the Activision acquisition," which you may remember cost the company $68.7 billion dollars.
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2024-07-31 16:40:00

Microsoft is Removing Ads From Skype
Microsoft is making Skype ad-free in an update that will rollout to users across all platforms soon. From a report: The update also includes improved AI image creation tools on Skype for Windows and macOS, and the ability to sign in automatically on iOS if you're already signed into another Microsoft app. "Our latest update removes all ads from Skype channels and the entire Skype platform, ensuring a smoother, decluttered and more enjoyable user experience," says Skype product manager Irene Namuganyi. The removal of ads in Skype means you'll no longer see ads in the main chat interface, or in the channels section. Microsoft says it has listened to feedback around ads in Skype, and decided to "focus on your chats without any ad distractions, making your Skype experience cleaner and more user-friendly."
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