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Nvidia, in a blog post: To help customers make more efficient use of their AI computing resources, NVIDIA today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider. Customer AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex, with workloads distributed across cloud, edge and on-premises data center infrastructure. Managing and orchestrating generative AI, recommender systems, search engines and other workloads requires sophisticated scheduling to optimize performance at the system level and on the underlying infrastructure. Run:ai enables enterprise customers to manage and optimize their compute infrastructure, whether on premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. The deal is valued at about $700 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up, Sopwith, is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors. "The game involves piloting a Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy buildings while avoiding fire from enemy planes and various other obstacles," reads the Wiki page. "Sopwith uses four-color CGA graphics and music and sound effects use the PC speaker. A sequel with the same name, but often referred to as Sopwith 2, was released in 1985." You can play Sopwith in your browser here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Okian Warrior writes: For $10,000, you can now get a flamethrower mounted on a robotic dog. Just load the webpage and scroll down. I saw this on the news today. *Definitely* we need to have a conversation about where AI is going. The robot, called the Thermonator, is constructed by Ohio flame throwing manufacturer Throwflame and features one of the company's ARC flamethrowers mounted on its back. The 26-pound robotic quadruped "can shoot fire in a 30-foot stream and comes with a built-in fuel tank powered by gasoline," notes Gizmodo. "The company says the robot also has an hour-long battery, a laser sight, and lidar mapping, and it can be remotely controlled via the company's app." The company says its product is designed for "wildfire control and prevention," "agriculture management," "ecological conservation," "entertainment and SFX," and "snow and ice removal." It can be yours for the low price of $9,420 with free shipping.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Construction has begun on a $12 billion high-speed rail project to connect Las Vegas and Los Angeles by the end of the decade. The project, backed by $3 billion in federal support, aims to reduce travel time to under two hours and significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions. Popular Science reports: Brightline expects its trains will depart every 40 minutes from a station outside of the Vegas strip and another one in the LA suburb of Rancho Cucamonga. When it's completed, the train will travel at 186 miles per hour, making it the fastest train in the U.S. and comparable to Japan's famous bullet trains. For context, Brightline's most recently completed train connecting parts of Florida is estimated to top out around 130 miles per hour. Both of those still fall far short of the speed achieved by the world fastest commuter train in Shanghai, which can reportedly reach a speed of 286 miles per hour. Still, the new train could complete the 218 mile trip between Sin City and a suburb of the City of Angels in just 2 hours and 10 minutes. That same trip would take about four hours by car, and that's without substantial traffic. Once built, the trains will reportedly include onboard Wi-Fi, restrooms, and food and drinks available for purchase. Brightline hasn't provided an exact price for how much an individual train ticket will cost but has instead said they expect it to be roughly equivalent to the price of an airline flight. Brightline reportedly believes the train could attract 11 million one-way passengers annually once it's up and running. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates the new train could cut back 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and create 35,000 new jobs. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described the moment as a "major milestone in building the future of American rail." The ceremony symbolically took place on Earth Day. "Partnering with state leaders and Brightline West, we're writing a new chapter in our country's transportation story that includes thousands of union jobs, new connections to better economic opportunity, less congestion on the roads, and less pollution in the air," Buttigieg said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission narrowly voted Tuesday to ban nearly all noncompetes, employment agreements that typically prevent workers from joining competing businesses or launching ones of their own. From a report: The FTC received more than 26,000 public comments in the months leading up to the vote. Chair Lina Khan referenced on Tuesday some of the stories she had heard from workers. "We heard from employees who, because of noncompetes, were stuck in abusive workplaces," she said. "One person noted when an employer merged with an organization whose religious principles conflicted with their own, a noncompete kept the worker locked in place and unable to freely switch to a job that didn't conflict with their religious practices." These accounts, she said, "pointed to the basic reality of how robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms." The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes. It says the policy change could lead to increased wages totaling nearly $300 billion per year by encouraging people to swap jobs freely. The ban, which will take effect later this year, carves out an exception for existing noncompetes that companies have given their senior executives, on the grounds that these agreements are more likely to have been negotiated. The FTC says employers should not enforce other existing noncompete agreements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, new A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today. Described in a research paper published on Monday by a Berkeley, Calif., startup called Profluent, the technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, the online chatbot that launched the A.I. boom after its release in 2022. The company is expected to present the paper next month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. "Its OpenCRISPR-1 protein is built on a similar structure as the fabled CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipper, but with hundreds of mutations that help reduce its off-target effects by 95%," reports Fierce Biotech, citing the company's preprint manuscript published on BioRxiv. "Profluent said it can be employed as a 'drop-in replacement' in any experiment calling for a Cas9-like molecule." While Profluent will keep its LLM generators private, the startup says it will open-source the products of this initiative. "Attempting to edit human DNA with an AI-designed biological system was a scientific moonshot," Profluent co-founder and CEO Ali Madani, Ph.D., said in a statement. "Our success points to a future where AI precisely designs what is needed to create a range of bespoke cures for disease. To spur innovation and democratization in gene editing, with the goal of pulling this future forward, we are open-sourcing the products of this initiative."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nicola Davis reports via The Guardian: If every day appears to go in a blur, try seeking out new and interesting experiences, researchers have suggested, after finding memorable images appear to dilate time. Researchers have previously found louder experiences seem to last longer, while focusing on the clock also makes time dilate, or drag. Now researchers have discovered the more memorable an image, the more likely a person is to think they have been looking at it for longer than they actually have. Such images were also easier for participants to recall the next day. Prof Martin Wiener, co-author of the study who is based at George Mason University in the U.S., said the findings could help develop improve artificial intelligence that interacts with humans, while they also offer opportunities to tweak our perceptions, given research has previously shown non-invasive brain stimulation can be used to lengthen a perceived interval. The results from two groups, totaling about 100 people, revealed participants were more likely to think they had been looking at small, highly cluttered scenes -- such a crammed pantry -- for a shorter duration than was the case, whereas the reverse occurred when people viewed large scenes with little clutter, such as the interior of an aircraft hangar. The team also carried out experiments involving 69 participants that found images known from previous work to be more memorable were more likely to be judged as having been shown for longer than was the case. Crucially, the effect seemed to go both ways. "We also found that the longer the perceived subjective duration of an image, the more likely you were to remember it the next day," said Wiener. When the team carried out an analysis using deep learning models of the visual system, they discovered more memorable images were processed faster. What's more, the processing speed for an image was correlated with how long participants thought they had been looking at it. "Images may be more memorable because they are processed faster and more efficiently in the visual system, and that drives the perception of time," said Wiener. The team suggest time dilation might serve a purpose, enabling us to gather information about the world around us. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter. CNBC reports: In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a "huge campus" to Nashville, "which will ultimately be our world headquarters." He said Nashville is an established health center and a "fabulous place to live," one that Oracle employees are excited about. "It's the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the health-care industry," Ellison said. The announcement was seemingly spur-of-the-moment. "I shouldn't have said that," Ellison told Frist, a longtime health-care industry veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville. Nashville has been a major player in the health-care scene for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of health systems, startups and investment firms. The city's reputation as a health-care hub was catalyzed when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the U.S., was founded there in 1968. HCA helped attract troves of health-care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years, according to The Tennessean. "Our people love it here, and we think it's the center of our future," Ellison said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Greenberg reports via Wired: More than two months after the start of a ransomware debacle whose impact ranks among the worst in the history of cybersecurity, the medical firm Change Healthcare finally confirmed what cybercriminals, security researchers, and Bitcoin's blockchain had already made all too clear: that it did indeed pay a ransom to the hackers who targeted the company in February. And yet, it still faces the risk of losing vast amounts of customers' sensitive medical data. In a statement sent to WIRED and other news outlets on Monday evening, Change Healthcare wrote that it paid a ransom to a cybercriminal group extorting the company, a hacker gang known as AlphV or BlackCat. "A ransom was paid as part of the company's commitment to do all it could to protect patient data from disclosure," the statement reads. The company's belated admission of that payment accompanied a new post on its website where it warns that the hackers may have stolen health-related data that would "cover a substantial proportion of people in America." Cybersecurity and cryptocurrency researchers told WIRED last month that Change Healthcare appeared to have paid that ransom on March 1, pointing to a transaction of 350 bitcoins or roughly $22 million sent into a crypto wallet associated with the AlphV hackers. That transaction was first highlighted in a message on a Russian cybercriminal forum known as RAMP, where one of AlphV's allegedly jilted partners complained that they hadn't received their cut of Change Healthcare's payment. However, for weeks following that transaction, which was publicly visible on Bitcoin's blockchain and which both security firm Recorded Future and blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs told WIRED had been received by AlphV, Change Healthcare repeatedly declined to confirm that it had paid the ransom. Change Healthcare's confirmation of that extortion payment puts new weight behind the cybersecurity industry's fears that the attack -- and the profit AlphV extracted from it -- will lead ransomware gangs to further target health care companies. "It 100 percent encourages other actors to target health care organizations," Jon DiMaggio, a researcher with cybersecurity firm Analyst1 who focuses on ransomware, told WIRED at the time the transaction was first spotted in March. "And it's one of the industries we don't want ransomware actors to target -- especially when it affects hospitals." Compounding the situation, a conflict between hackers in the ransomware ecosystem has led to a second ransomware group claiming to possess Change Healthcare's stolen data and threatening to sell it to the highest bidder on the dark web. Earlier this month that second group, known as RansomHub, sent WIRED alleged samples of the stolen data that appeared to come from Change Healthcare's network, including patient records and a contract with another health care company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Quantum dots are already moving in the premium display category, particularly through QD-OLED TVs and monitors. The next step could be QDEL, short for "quantum dot electroluminescent," also known as NanoLED, screens. Not to be confused with the QLED (quantum light emitting diode) tech already available in TVs, QDEL displays don't have a backlight. Instead, the quantum dots are the light source. The expected result is displays with wider color spaces than today's QD-OLEDs (quantum dot OLEDs) that are also brighter, more affordable, and resistant to burn-in. It seems like QDEL is being eyed as one of the most potentially influential developments for consumer displays over the next two years. If you're into high-end display tech, QDEL should be on your radar. You may know QDEL as NanoLED because that's what Nanosys, a quantum dot supplier developing the technology, calls it. QDEL has gone by other names, such as QLED -- before Samsung claimed that acronym for LCD-LED TVs that use quantum dots. You may also see QDEL referred to as QD-EL, QD-LED, or EL-QD. As the alphabet soup suggests, there are still some things to finalize with this tech. This article will mostly use the term QDEL, with occasional references to NanoLED. If none of those names sound familiar, it's probably because you can't buy any QDEL products yet. Suppliers suggest that could change in the next few years; Nanosys is targeting 2026 for commercial availability. [...] Today's OLED screens use OLED material as their light source, with QD-OLED specifically applying quantum dots to convert the light into color. In QLED, the light source is a white backlight; QDEL displays apply electricity directly to quantum dots, which then generate light. QDEL uses a layer of quantum dots sandwiched between an anode and cathode to facilitates the flow of electricity into the quantum dots. QDEL displays have pixels made of a red quantum dot subpixel, green quantum dot subpixel, and -- differing from today's QLED and QD-OLED displays -- blue quantum dot subpixel. QDEL displays use the same quantum dot cores that QD-OLED and QLED products use, [Jeff Yurek, Nanosys' VP of marketing] told me, adding, "The functionalization of the outer layer of the [quantum dots] needs to be changed to make it compatible with each display architecture, but the cores that do the heavy lifting are pretty much the same across all of these." Because QDEL pixels make their own light and can therefore turn off completely, QDEL displays can deliver the same deep blacks and rich contrast that made OLED popular. But with the use of direct-view quantum dots, stakeholders are claiming the potential for wider color gamuts than we've seen in consumer displays before. With fewer layers and parts, there are also implications for QDEL product pricing, longevity, and even thinness. [...] The fact that quantum dots are already being successfully applied to LCD-LED and OLED screens is encouraging for future QDEL products. QDEL stakeholders claim that the tech could bring efficiencies like lower power consumption and higher brightness than OLED. (Research using a prototype device has recorded quantum dot light-emitting diodes reaching 614,000 nits. Of course, those aren't the type of results you should expect to see in a real-life consumer product.) There's also hope that QDEL could eventually last longer than OLED, especially since QDEL doesn't rely on organic materials that can cause burn-in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses now feature support for multimodal AI -- without the need for a projector or $24 monthly fee. (We're looking at you, Humane AI.) With the new update, the Meta AI assistant will be able to analyze what you're seeing, and it'll give you smart, helpful answers or suggestions. The Verge reports: First off, there are some expectations that need managing here. The Meta glasses don't promise everything under the sun. The primary command is to say "Hey Meta, look and..." You can fill out the rest with phrases like "Tell me what this plant is." Or read a sign in a different language. Write Instagram captions. Identify and learn more about a monument or landmark. The glasses take a picture, the AI communes with the cloud, and an answer arrives in your ears. The possibilities are not limitless, and half the fun is figuring out where its limits are. [...] To me, it's the mix of a familiar form factor and decent execution that makes the AI workable on these glasses. Because it's paired to your phone, there's very little wait time for answers. It's headphones, so you feel less silly talking to them because you're already used to talking through earbuds. In general, I've found the AI to be the most helpful at identifying things when we're out and about. It's a natural extension of what I'd do anyway with my phone. I find something I'm curious about, snap a pic, and then look it up. Provided you don't need to zoom really far in, this is a case where it's nice to not pull out your phone. [...] But AI is a feature of the Meta glasses. It's not the only feature. They're a workable pair of livestreaming glasses and a good POV camera. They're an excellent pair of open-ear headphones. I love wearing mine on outdoor runs and walks. I could never use the AI and still have a product that works well. The fact that it's here, generally works, and is an alright voice assistant -- well, it just gets you more used to the idea of a face computer, which is the whole point anyway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a deal for IBM to acquire HashiCorp could materialize in the next few days. Shares of HashiCorp jumped almost 20% on the news. CNBC reports: Developers use HashiCorp's software to set up and manage infrastructure in public clouds that companies such as Amazon and Microsoft operate. Organizations also pay HashiCorp for managing security credentials. Founded in 2012, HashiCorp went public on Nasdaq in 2021. The company generated a net loss of nearly $191 million on $583 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, according to its annual report. In December, Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, whose family name is reflected in the company name, announced that he was leaving. Revenue jumped almost 23% during that period, compared with 2% for IBM in 2023. IBM executives pointed to a difficult economic climate during a conference call with analysts in January. The hardware, software and consulting provider reports earnings on Wednesday. Cisco held $9 million in HashiCorp shares at the end of March, according to a regulatory filing. Cisco held early acquisition talks with HashiCorp, according to a 2019 report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lawsuit is alleging Amazon was so desperate to keep up with the competition in generative AI it was willing to breach its own copyright rules. From a report: The allegation emerges from a complaint accusing the tech and retail mega-corp of demoting, and then dismissing, a former high-flying AI scientist after it discovered she was pregnant. The lawsuit was filed last week in a Los Angeles state court by Dr Viviane Ghaderi, an AI researcher who says she worked successfully in Amazon's Alexa and LLM teams, and achieved a string of promotions, but claims she was later suddenly demoted and fired following her return to work after giving birth. She is alleging discrimination, retaliation, harassment and wrongful termination, among other claims.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a new Linux distro on the scene today, and it's a bit specialized. Its development was led by the automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit, and it's the first open source OS that complies with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements. [...] With Elektrobit's EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications (that sure is a long name), there's an open source Linux distro that finally fits the bill, having just been given the thumbs up by the German organization TUV Nord. (It also complies with the IEC 61508 standard for safety applications.) "The beauty of our concept is that you don't even need to safety-qualify Linux itself," said Moritz Neukirchner, a senior director at Elektrobit overseeing SDVs. Instead, an external safety monitor runs in a hypervisor, intercepting and validating kernel actions. "When you look at how safety is typically being done, look at communication -- you don't safety-certify the communication specs or Ethernet stack, but you do a checker library on top, and you have a hardware anchor for checking down below, and you insure it end to end but take everything in between out of the certification path. And we have now created a concept that allows us to do exactly that for an operating system," Neukirchner told me. "So in the end, since we take Linux out of the certification path and make it usable in a safety-related context, we don't have any problems in keeping up to speed with the developer community," he explained. "Because if you start it off and say, 'Well, we're going to do Linux as a one-shot for safety,' you're going to have the next five patches and you're off [schedule] again, especially with the security regulation that's now getting toward effect now, starting in July with the UNECE R155 that requires continuous cybersecurity management vulnerability scanning for all software that ends up in the vehicle." "In the end, we see roughly 4,000 kernel security patches within eight years for Linux. And this is the kind of challenge that you're being put up to if you want to participate in that speed of innovation of an open source community as rich as that of Linux and now want to combine this with safety-related applications," Neukirchner said. Elektrobit developed EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications together with Canonical, and together they will share the maintenance of keeping it compliant with safety requirements over time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's iPhone sales dropped sharply in China in the first quarter of this year as the company saw strong competition from domestic brand Huawei, according to a new report from market research firm Counterpoint Research. CNBC: Apple saw sales of its iPhones fall 19.1% in the first three months of the year, Counterpoint's data showed, as Chinese telecommunications and consumer electronics giant Huawei saw a resurgence in its smartphone business. The Shenzhen, China-based firm saw sales of its smartphones surge a whopping 69.7% in the first quarter, Counterpoint said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding "Reddit" to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products. A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as "the AI that plugs your product on Reddit" and which automatically "mentions your product in conversations naturally." Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called "AnySpeech" and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now. A video demo shows a dashboard where a user adds the name of their company and URL they want to direct users to. It then auto-suggests keywords that "help the bot know what types of subreddits and tweets to look for and when to respond." Moments later, the dashboard shows how Reply Guy is "already in the responses" of the comments section of different Reddit posts. "Many of our responses will get lots of upvotes and will be well-liked." The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called "Stealth Marketing" that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to "turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Motors (GM) has been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to insurance companies, leading to higher premiums for some drivers, according to a recent investigation. The affected drivers were not informed about the tracking, which was carried out through GM's OnStar connected services plan and the Smart Driver program. The New York Times reporter who broke the story discovered that her own driving data had been shared with data brokers working with the insurance industry, despite not being enrolled in the program. GM has since discontinued the Smart Driver product and stopped sharing data with LexisNexis and Verisk, following customer feedback and federal lawsuits filed by drivers across the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a result, Apple is expected to take a "conservative view" of headset demand when the Vision Pro launches in additional countries. Kuo previously said that Apple will introduce the Vision Pro in new markets before the June Worldwide Developers Conference, which suggests that we could see it available in additional areas in the next month or so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission is set to vote Tuesday afternoon on a proposal to ban noncompete agreements, which prevent workers from taking positions at competitors for a period of time after they leave a job. From a report: The ban could be a win for workers -- particularly at the low end of the income scale. Critics of these agreements say they stifle innovation and wage growth by restricting workers' ability to take new jobs that pay higher wages or offer some other opportunity. They also make it tougher for employers to hire strong talent, lessening competition. Some states have laws limiting noncompetes to higher-income folks or banning them altogether -- but most don't. Experts told Axios that the final rule will likely look similar to the draft proposal, which was a broad prohibition on all noncompetes, even for executives. Any final rule is unlikely to take effect for many years -- if ever, as it will surely get tied up in court. The Chamber of Commerce, which opposes the ban, has already said it's ready and willing to file a lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

prisoninmate writes: Fedora Linux 40 distribution has been officially released -- powered by the latest Linux 6.8 kernel series, and featuring the GNOME 46 and KDE Plasma 6 desktop environments, reports 9to5Linux: "Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.8 kernel series, the Fedora Linux 40 release ships with the GNOME 46 desktop environment for the flagship Fedora Workstation edition and the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment for the Fedora KDE Spin, which defaults to the Wayland session as the X11 session was completely removed." "Fedora Linux 40 also includes some interesting package management changes, such as dropping Delta RPMs and disabling support in the default configuration of DNF / DNF5. It also changes the DNF behavior to no longer download filelists by default. However, this release doesn't ship with the long-awaited DNF5 package manager. For AMD GPUs, Fedora Linux 40 ships with AMD ROCm 6.0 as the latest release of AMD's software optimized for AI and HPC workload performance, which enables support for the newest flagship AMD Instinct MI300A and MI300X datacenter GPUs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese tech giant Kuaishou is laying off employees in their mid-30s as part of a company-wide restructuring plan dubbed "Limestone," FT reported Tuesday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. The move highlights the pervasive ageism in China's tech sector, where younger workers are favored for their perceived willingness to work long hours and keep up with the latest technological developments, the report adds. While China's labor law does not explicitly prohibit age discrimination, some have interpreted it as such. However, tech executives have openly expressed their preference for younger employees, with companies like ByteDance and Pinduoduo boasting some of the youngest workforces in the industry. The economic slowdown and regulatory crackdowns have exacerbated the problem, with tens of thousands of jobs cut across the sector in recent months. Those over 35 face significant challenges in finding new employment, as even the civil service and service sector prioritize younger applicants. The situation has left many older tech workers anxious about their future job prospects, the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has launched Phi-3 Mini, a lightweight AI model with 3.8 billion parameters, as part of its plan to release three small models. Phi-3 Mini, trained on a smaller data set compared to large language models, is available on Azure, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Microsoft claims Phi-3 Mini performs as well as models 10 times its size, offering capabilities similar to GPT-3.5 in a smaller form factor. Smaller AI models are more cost-effective and perform better on personal devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has fired another 20 workers for participating in protests against its $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, according to an activist group representing the workers. From a report: In total, the company has now fired around 50 employees over sit-in protests held in Google offices last week that were part of yearslong discontent among a group of Google and Amazon workers over claims that Israel is using the companies' services to harm Palestinians. Google has denied those claims, saying Project Nimbus, the cloud-computing contract, doesn't involve "highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services," and that Israeli government ministries that use its commercial cloud must agree to its terms of services and other policies. No Tech For Apartheid, the group representing the workers, claimed in a statement that Google is attempting to "quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them." "That's because Google values its profit, and its $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military, more than people. And it certainly values it over its own workers," it said. The group said it will continue organizing until Google cancels Project Nimbus. Further reading: Google To Employees: 'We Are a Workplace'.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toyota's Mirai, a hydrogen-powered Fuel Cell EV initially heralded as the future of driving, has faced significant challenges due to inadequate hydrogen fueling infrastructure. As chronicled by InsideEVs, many owners have become disillusioned with the vehicle's high operational costs, unreliable refueling options, and significant depreciation, prompting lawsuits and calls for buybacks. Longtime Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: Toyota Mirai owners are fed up and disillusioned. Hydrogen fuel pumps are hard to find and, rather than new pumps opening, they are closing down. Owners feel misled about the costs and availability of hydrogen fuel stations. Even if a Mirai owner can find a fuel station, it may not be operating. Moreover, refueling is frequently a long and problematic process, with pumps taking over an hour to fill a tank and cars getting stuck to the fuel pump for hours. It would be quicker to charge a battery EV. Naturally, resale values of these cars are plummeting. Even without those problems, once the complimentary hydrogen fuel supply that Toyota gives new owners expires or runs out, the cost of hydrogen fuel becomes quite expensive. "Not in my wildest dreams or nightmares would I expect a purchase from a giant car company like Toyota would turn out to be such a terrible experience," said owner Shawn Hall. "The entire H2 vehicle experience is an experiment that is failing. I didn't expect to buy a vehicle from Toyota and feel duped, cheated, and misled." Another user wrote on Reddit: "We all need to realize that we bought a vehicle that had, at best, a questionable future. Unfortunately in this instance, the gamble didn't pay off, and the technology of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles does not appear to be something the vehicle industry is invested in pursuing. Very similar to HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, there was one clear winner and in our instance, the battery-powered EV won out over H2. Its sucks, but it is what it is."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA last week formally approved a $3.35 billion mission to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone. "Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth." The mission has a launch date of July 2028. Ars Technica reports: After reaching Titan, the eight-bladed rotorcraft lander will soar from place to place on Saturn's hazy moon, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Dragonfly will be the first mobile robot explorer to land on any other planetary body besides the Moon and Mars, and only the second flying drone to explore another planet. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first. Dragonfly will be more than 200 times as massive as Ingenuity and will operate six times farther from Earth. Despite its distant position in the cold outer Solar System, Titan appears to be reminiscent of the ancient Earth. A shroud of orange haze envelops Saturn's largest moon, and Titan's surface is covered with sand dunes and methane lakes. Titan's frigid temperatures -- hovering near minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius) -- mean water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon. Observations from Cassini found evidence for hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to generate waves in Titan's methane lakes. Clearly, Titan is an exotic world. Most of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which Cassini released to land on Titan in 2005. Huygens returned the first pictures from Titan's surface, but it only transmitted data for 72 minutes. Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan's surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before," Turtle said in a statement. "The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quonset writes: Just over two weeks ago, NASA figured out why its Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped sending useful data. They suspected corrupted memory in its flight data system (FDS) was the culprit. Today, for the first time since November, Voyager 1 is sending useful data about its health and the status of its onboard systems back to NASA. How did NASA accomplish this feat of long distance repair? They broke up the code into smaller pieces and redistributed them throughout the memory. From NASA: "... So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well. The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 1/2 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 1/2 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft. During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: In sunny California, solar panels are everywhere. They sit in dry, desert landscapes in the Central Valley and are scattered over rooftops in Los Angeles's urban center. By last count, the state had nearly 47 gigawatts of solar power installed -- enough to power 13.9 million homes and provide over a quarter of the Golden State's electricity. But now, the state and its grid operator are grappling with a strange reality: There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there's not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are "curtailed" -- essentially, thrown away. In response, California has cut back incentives for rooftop solar and slowed the pace of installing panels. But the diminishing economic returns may slow the development of solar in a state that has tried to move to renewable energy. And as other states build more and more solar plants of their own, they may soon face the same problems. Curtailing solar isn't technically difficult -- according to Paul Denholm, senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it's equivalent to flipping a switch for grid operators. But throwing away free power raises electricity prices. It has also undercut the benefits of installing rooftop solar. Since the 1990s, California has been paying owners of rooftop solar panels when they export their energy to the grid. That meant that rooftop solar owners got $0.20 to $0.30 for each kilowatt-hour of electricity that they dispatched. But a year ago, the state changed this system, known as "net-metering," and now only compensates new solar panel owners for how much their power is worth to the grid. In the spring, when the duck curve is deepest, that number can dip close to zero. Customers can get more money back if they install batteries and provide power to the grid in the early evening or morning. The change has sparked a huge backlash from Californians and rooftop solar companies, which say that their businesses are flagging. Indeed, Wood Mackenzie predicts that California residential solar installations in 2024 will fall by around 40 percent. Some state politicians are now trying to reverse the rule. "Under the CPUC's leadership California is responsible for the largest loss of solar jobs in our nation's history," Bernadette del Chiaro, the executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, said in a statement referring to California's public utility commission. But experts say that it reflects how the economics of solar are changing in a state that has gone all-in on the technology. [...] To cope, [California's grid operator, known as CAISO] is selling some excess power to nearby states; California is also planning to install additional storage and batteries to hold solar power until later in the afternoon. Transmission lines that can carry electricity to nearby regions will also help -- some of the lost power comes from regions where there simply aren't enough power lines to carry a sudden burst of solar. Denholm says the state is starting to take the steps needed to deal with the glut. "There are fundamental limits to how much solar we can put on the grid before you start needing a lot of storage," Denholm said. "You can't just sit around and do nothing." Further reading: The Energy Institute discusses this problem in a recent blog post. Since 2020, the residential electricity rates in California have risen by as much as 40% after adjusting for inflation. While there's been "a lot of finger-pointing about the cause of these increases," the authors note that the impact on rates is multiplied when customers install their own generation and buy fewer kilowatts-hours from the grid because those households "contribute less towards all the fixed costs in the system." These fixed costs include: vegetation management, grid hardening, distribution line undergrounding, EV charging stations, subsidies for low income customers, energy efficiency programs, and the poles and wires that we all rely on whether we are taking electricity off the grid or putting it onto the grid from our rooftop PV systems. "Since those fixed costs still need to be paid, rates go up, shifting costs onto the kWhs still being bought from the grid."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data scientist Antoine Mayerowitz, PhD, applied Vilfredo Pareto's (the early 20th-century Italian economist) theories to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to determine the best racer combinations. "When you break down the build options (including driver stats and various vehicle details) in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, there are over 700,000 possible combinations," notes Engadget. "But once you eliminate duplicates that differ only in appearance, you can narrow it down to 'only' 25,704 possibilities." From the report: Pareto's theories, most notably the Pareto front, help us navigate the complexities of choice. They can pinpoint the solutions with the most balanced strengths and the fewest trade-offs. Pareto's work is about efficiency and effectiveness. [...] Mayerowitz's Pareto front analysis lets you narrow your possibilities down to the 14 most efficient. And it turns out the game's top players were onto something: One of the combinations with the most ideal balance of speed, acceleration and mini-turbo is Cat Peach driving the Teddy Buggy, roller tires and cloud glider -- one already favored among Mario Kart 8 competitors. Of course, if that combination isn't your cup of tea, there are others that allow you to stay within the Pareto front's optimal range. As Eurogamer points out, Donkey Kong, Wario (my old standby, mostly because he makes me laugh) and Princess Peach are often highlighted as drivers, and you can use Mayerowitz's data fields to find the best matching vehicles. Keep in mind that others have identical stats, so racers like Villager (female), Inkling Girl and Diddy Kong are separated only by appearances. To find your ideal racer, you can head over to Mayerowitz's website. There, you can enter your most prized stats and view the combos that give you the best balance (those highlighted in yellow), according to Pareto's theories.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to French business magazine Challenges, Apple has acquired Datakalab -- a Paris-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence compression and computer vision technology. 9to5Mac reports: Datakalab described itself as "experts in low power, runtime efficient, and deep learning algorithms" that work on device. On its LinkedIn page, Datakalab highlights "industry leading compression and adaptation to deploy embedded computer vision that is fast, cost-effective and precise." Prior to the Apple acquisition had between 10 and 20 employees. From Datakalab's now-defunct website: "Datakalab is a French technology company that develops computer image analysis algorithms to measure flows in public space. The images are instantly transformed into anonymized statistical data processed locally in 100ms. Datakalab does not store any images or personal data and only keeps statistical data. Datakalab products are built according to the principle of 'Privacy by Design.'" While neither Apple nor DatakaLab have acknowledged the acquisition, Challenges says that the deal was reported to the European Commission this month. The report says that Datakalab's two founders did not join Apple, but multiple other employees did make the jump. Datakalab also held multiple patents related to AI compression and vision technology. The acquisition makes perfect sense given Apple's rumored ambitions to run its upcoming AI-related features in iOS 18 "entirely on device."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. "We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world," Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week. Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform. "In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps -- and thousands of other apps -- up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS. It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Swedish gaming conglomerate Embracer Group announced plans on Monday to split itself into three distinct games and entertainment companies: Asmodee Group, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends. These will be separate, publicly listed companies, according to Embracer, which says the move will allow "each entity to better focus on their respective core strategies and offer more differentiated and distinct equity stories for existing and new shareholders." [...] The three new companies will be broken down as follows: - Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends: This company, which will be renamed from Embracer Group, is described as a "creative powerhouse in AAA game development and publishing" that will retain ownership of the Dead Island, Killing Floor, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Tomb Raider, and The Lord of the Rings IPs.- Asmodee Group: a new arm dedicated to publishing and distributing tabletop games. The existing catalog includes established titles like Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Azul, CATAN, Dobble, and Exploding Kittens. Asmodee is also developing licensed tabletop games based on The Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars franchises. Embracer anticipates the spinoff and share listings will take place "within 12 months."- Coffee Stain & Friends: described as a "diverse gaming entity" that will focus on indie, mid-market, and free-to-play games. Properties sitting under this new company include Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Wreckfest, Teardown, and Valheim. The share listings are projected to become available in 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union has opened a second formal investigation into TikTok under its Digital Services Act (DSA), an online governance and content moderation framework. The investigation centers around TikTok Lite's "Task and Reward" feature that may harm mental health, especially among minors, by promoting addictive behavior. TechCrunch reports: The Commission also said it's minded to impose interim measures that could force the company to suspend access to the TikTok Lite app in the EU while it investigates concerns the app poses mental health risks to users. Although the EU has given TikTok until April 24 to argue against the measure -- meaning the app remains accessible for now. Penalties for confirmed violations of the DSA can reach up to 6% of global annual turnover. So ByeDance, TikTok's parent, could face hefty fines if EU enforcers do end up deciding it has broken the law. The EU's first TikTok probe covers multiple issues including the protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, and the risk management of addictive design and harmful content. Hence it said the latest investigation will specifically focus on TikTok Lite, a version of the video sharing platform which launched earlier this month in France and Spain and includes a mechanism that allows users to earn points for doing things like watching or liking videos. Points earned through TikTok Lite can be exchanged for things like Amazon gift vouchers or TikTok's own digital currency for gifting to creators. The Commission is worried this so-called "task and reward" feature could negatively impact the mental health of young users by "stimulating addictive behavior." The EU wrote that the second probe will focus on TikTok's compliance with the DSA obligation to conduct and submit a risk assessment report prior to the launch of the "Task and Reward Lite" program, with a particular focus on negative effects on mental health, including minors' mental health. It also said it will look into measures taken by TikTok to mitigate those risks. In a press release announcing the action, the EU said ByeDance failed to produce a risk assessment about the feature which it had asked to see last week -- when it gave the company 24 hours to produce the document. Since it failed to submit the risk assessment paperwork on April 18 the Commission wrote that it suspects a "prima facie infringement of the DSA."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project. The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn't want to be Alexa or Google Assistant. Home Assistant is a lot. After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant's shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project's ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects. "We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware," the Open Home Foundation states in a press release. "To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves -- so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes." Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT. Home Assistant's ambitions don't stop with money and board seats, though. They aim to "be an active political advocate" in the smart home field, toward three primary principles: - Data privacy, which means devices with local-only options, and cloud services with explicit permissions - Choice in using devices with one another through open standards and local APIs- Sustainability by repurposing old devices and appliances beyond company-defined lifetimes Notably, individuals cannot contribute modest-size donations to the Open Home Foundation. Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects. Further reading: The Verge's interview with Home Assistant founder Paulus SchoutsenRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Scorching weather has baked Europe in more days of "extreme heat stress" than its scientists have ever seen. The Guardian: Heat-trapping pollutants that clog the atmosphere helped push temperatures in Europe last year to the highest or second-highest levels ever recorded, according to the EU's Earth-watching service Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Europeans are suffering with unprecedented heat during the day and are stressed by uncomfortable warmth at night. The death rate from hot weather has risen 30% in Europe in two decades, the joint State of the Climate report from the two organisations found. "The cost of climate action may seem high," said WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo, "but the cost of inaction is much higher." The report found that temperatures across Europe were above average for 11 months of 2023, including the warmest September since records began. The hot and dry weather fuelled large fires that ravaged villages and spewed smoke that choked far-off cities. The blazes that firefighters battled were particularly fierce in drought-stricken southern countries such as Portugal, Spain and Italy. Greece was hit by the largest wildfire recorded in the EU, which burned 96,000 hectares of land, according to the report. Heavy rain also led to deadly floods. Europe was about 7% wetter in 2023 than the average over the last three decades, the report found, and one-third of its river network crossed the "high" flood threshold. One-sixth hit "severe" levels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade. An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students' submissions in Canvas -- the most widely used online learning management system -- which is based on alphabetical rank of their surnames. What's more, the researchers found, those alphabetically disadvantaged students receive comments that are notably more negative and less polite, and exhibit lower grading quality measured by post-grade complaints from students.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon confirmed it is ending Prime Air drone delivery operations in Lockeford, California. The Central California town of 3,500 was the company's second U.S. drone delivery site, after College Station, Texas. Operations were announced in June 2022. From a report: The retail giant is not offering details around the setback, only noting, "We'll offer all current employees opportunities at other sites, and will continue to serve customers in Lockeford with other delivery methods. We want to thank the community for all their support and feedback over the past few years." College Station deliveries will continue, along with a forthcoming site in Tolleson, Arizona set to kick off deliveries later this year. Tolleson, a city of just over 7,000, is located in Maricopa County, in the western portion of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Prime Air's arrival brings same-day deliveries to Amazon customers in the region, courtesy of a hybrid fulfillment center/delivery station. The company says it will be contacting impacted customers when the service is up and running. There's no specific information on timing beyond "this year," owing, in part, to ongoing negotiations with both local officials and the FAA required to deploy in the airspace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a huge move for the mixed reality industry, Meta announced today that it's opening the Quest's operating system to third-party companies, allowing them to build headsets of their own. From a report: Think of it like moving the Quest's ecosystem from an Apple model, where one company builds both the hardware and software, to more of a hardware free-for-all like Android. The Quest OS is being rebranded to "Meta Horizon OS," and at this point it seems to have found two early adopters. ASUS's Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand is working on a new "performance gaming" headsets, while Lenovo is working on devices for "productivity, learning and entertainment." (Don't forget, Lenovo also built the poorly-received Oculus Rift S.) As part of the news, Meta says it's also working on a limited-edition Xbox "inspired" Quest headset. (Microsoft and Meta also worked together recently to bring Xbox cloud gaming to the Quest.) Meta is also calling on Google to bring over the Google Play 2D app store to Meta Horizon OS. And, in an effort to bring more content to the Horizon ecosystem, software developed through the Quest App Lab will be featured in the Horizon Store. The company is also developing a new spatial framework to let mobile developers created mixed reality apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Shanghai flying taxi company says that China's "low altitude" industry is edging ahead of western rivals, thanks to more supportive regulators, technological breakthroughs and cut-throat competition in the Chinese logistics sector. From a report: The total market created by electric vertical take-off and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft is forecast to be worth $1.5tn a year by 2040 in a base-case assessment by Morgan Stanley analysts, with potential customers across airlines, logistics, emergency services, agriculture, tourism and security operations. China's AutoFlight Group won airworthiness certification from the Civil Aviation Administration of China in late March for the design and parts for its unmanned CarryAll aircraft -- a global first for an eVTOL weighing more than 1 tonne being cleared by regulators. Kellen Xie, AutoFlight vice-president, said that while the company is also seeking similar approvals in Europe, the CAAC has been "quite supportive" of the new industry. "They work longer hours... they are determined to actually speed up the process of bringing this new technology into reality," he said. EVTOL aircraft take off vertically, like helicopters, but then transition into fixed-wing mode for travelling at higher speeds, offering faster and more efficient transport than ground-based options. Analysts point to a labyrinth of regulatory and safety hurdles, but supporters say the technology could fundamentally reshape how humans travel and freight is moved, in a level of disruption akin to the introduction of mass-market cars and commercial airlines. Most eVTOL aircraft are still in the testing stages and vary widely in terms of how fast and high they can fly and how much weight they can carry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yet another international cop shop has come out swinging against end-to-end encryption - this time it's Europol which is urging an end to implementation of the tech for fear police investigations will be hampered by protected DMs. The Register: In a joint declaration of European police chiefs published over the weekend, Europol said it needs lawful access to private messages, and said tech companies need to be able to scan them (ostensibly impossible with E2EE implemented) to protect users. Without such access, cops fear they won't be able to prevent "the most heinous of crimes" like terrorism, human trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), murder, drug smuggling and other crimes. "Our societies have not previously tolerated spaces that are beyond the reach of law enforcement, where criminals can communicate safely and child abuse can flourish," the declaration said. "They should not now." The joint statement, which was agreed to in cooperation with the UK's National Crime Agency, isn't exactly making a novel claim. It's nearly the same line of reasoning that the Virtual Global Taskforce, an international law enforcement group founded in 2003 to combat CSAM online, made last year when Meta first first started talking about implementing E2EE on Messenger and Instagram.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to reliable Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." From a report: In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Apple introduced FineWoven, a soft fabric material, last year. The company claimed that the material is made of 68 percent post-consumer content and is overall more environmentally friendly compared to the company's previous line of leather accessories. As part of the introduction of FineWoven case, Apple also discontinued the use of leather for new Apple accessories. Reviewers didn't like FineWoven, calling it "bad. Like, really bad."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden travels to Triangle, Virginia, Monday to mark Earth Day, where he'll unveil $7 billion in grant funding for solar power under the Inflation Reduction Act and announce new steps to stand up his administration's American Climate Corps -- a program popular with youth climate groups. From a report: The announcements come days after the Biden administration made several significant conservation announcements, including barring oil drilling on nearly half of the national petroleum reserve in Alaska. Under the Environmental Protection Agency's Solar for All program, the administration will announce funding awards to states territories, tribal governments, municipalities and nonprofits "to develop long-lasting solar programs that are targeted towards the communities and people who need them most," EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe told reporters. Per McCabe, the funding will enable nearly one million households in low-income and disadvantaged communities to benefit from solar power, saving more than $350 million in electric costs annually and more than $8 billion over the life of the program for overburdened households.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: To accommodate tech companies' pivots to artificial intelligence, tech companies are increasingly investing in ways to power AI's immense electricity needs. Most recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman invested in Exowatt, a company using solar power to feed data centers, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's on the heals of OpenAI partner, Microsoft, working on getting approval for nuclear energy to help power its AI operations. Last year Amazon, which is a major investor in AI company Anthropic, said it invested in more than 100 renewable energy projects, making it the "world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for the fourth year in a row."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A military court in Moscow on Monday sentenced Meta spokesperson Andy Stone to six years in prison for "publicly defending terrorism," a verdict handed down in absentia, RIA news agency reported. Reuters: Meta itself is designated an extremist organisation in Russia and its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms have been banned in the country since 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. [...] Russia's interior ministry opened a criminal investigation into Stone late last year, without disclosing specific charges. RIA cited state investigators as saying Stone had published online comments that defended "aggressive, hostile and violent actions" towards Russian soldiers involved in what Moscow calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: Physicians commonly receive marketing-related transfers from drug firms. We examine the impact of these relationships on the prescribing of physician-administered cancer drugs in Medicare. We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is received, with the increase beginning sharply in the month of payment and fading out within a year. A marketing payment also leads physicians to begin treating cancer patients with lower expected mortality. While payments result in greater expenditure on cancer drugs, there are no associated improvements in patient mortality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

North Korean animators have been secretly working on major international TV shows, including an Amazon superhero series and an upcoming HBO Max children's anime, according to a report by cybersecurity researchers. The findings, detailed in a report by the Stimson Center think tank's 38 North Project and Google-owned security firm Mandiant, provide a glimpse into how North Korea can use skilled IT workers to raise funds for its heavily sanctioned regime. Researcher Nick Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address in December, containing thousands of animation files, including cells, videos, and notes discussing ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from Amazon's "Invincible" and HBO Max's "Iyanu: Child of Wonder." The server, which mysteriously stopped being used at the end of February, likely allowed work to be sent to and from North Korean animators, according to Martyn Williams, a senior fellow on the 38 North Project. U.S. sanctions prohibit companies from working with North Korean entities, but the researchers say it is unlikely that the companies involved were aware of the animators' origins. The report suggests the contracting arrangement was several steps removed from the major producers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

50 years ago this week, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall "demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system in Pacific Grove, California," according to a blog post from Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. It tells the story of "how his company, Digital Research Inc., established CP/M as an industry standard and its subsequent loss to a version from Microsoft that copied the look and feel of the DRI software." Kildall was a CS instructor and later associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California...He became fascinated with Intel Corporation's first microprocessor chip and simulated its operation on the school's IBM mainframe computer. This work earned him a consulting relationship with the company to develop PL/M, a high-level programming language that played a significant role in establishing Intel as the dominant supplier of chips for personal computers. To design software tools for Intel's second-generation processor, he needed to connect to a new 8" floppy disk-drive storage unit from Memorex. He wrote code for the necessary interface software that he called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in a few weeks, but his efforts to build the electronic hardware required to transfer the data failed. The project languished for a year. Frustrated, he called electronic engineer John Torode, a college friend then teaching at UC Berkeley, who crafted a "beautiful rat's nest of wirewraps, boards and cables" for the task. Late one afternoon in the fall of 1974, together with John Torode, in the backyard workshop of his home at 781 Bayview Avenue, Pacific Grove, Gary "loaded my CP/M program from paper tape to the diskette and 'booted' CP/M from the diskette, and up came the prompt: * [...] By successfully booting a computer from a floppy disk drive, they had given birth to an operating system that, together with the microprocessor and the disk drive, would provide one of the key building blocks of the personal computer revolution...As Intel expressed no interest in CP/M, Gary was free to exploit the program on his own and sold the first license in 1975. What happened next? Here's some highlights from the blog post:"Reluctant to adapt the code for another controller, Gary worked with Glen Ewing to split out the hardware dependent-portions so they could be incorporated into a separate piece of code called the BIOS (Basic Input Output System)... The BIOS code allowed all Intel and compatible microprocessor-based computers from other manufacturers to run CP/M on any new hardware. This capability stimulated the rise of an independent software industry..." "CP/M became accepted as a standard and was offered by most early personal computer vendors, including pioneers Altair, Amstrad, Kaypro, and Osborne...""[Gary's company] introduced operating systems with windowing capability and menu-driven user interfaces years before Apple and Microsoft... However, by the mid-1980s, in the struggle with the juggernaut created by the combined efforts of IBM and Microsoft, DRI had lost the basis of its operating systems business.""Gary sold the company to Novell Inc. of Provo, Utah, in 1991. Ultimately, Novell closed the California operation and, in 1996, disposed of the assets to Caldera, Inc., which used DRI intellectual property assets to prevail in a lawsuit against Microsoft."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bloomberg looks at America's biggest operator of private electrical vehicle charging infrastructure: Amazon. "In a little more than two years, Amazon has installed more than 17,000 chargers at about 120 warehouses around the U.S." - and had Rivian build 13,500 custom electric delivery vans.Amazon has a long way to go. The Seattle-based company says its operations emitted about 71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2022, up by almost 40% since Jeff Bezos's 2019 vow that his company would eventually stop contributing to the emissions warming the planet. Many of Amazon's emissions come from activities - air freight, ocean shipping, construction and electronics manufacturing, to name a few - that lack a clear, carbon-free alternative, today or any time soon. The company has not made much progress on decarbonization of long-haul trucking, whose emissions tend to be concentrated in industrial and outlying areas rather than the big cities that served as the backdrop for Amazon's electric delivery vehicle rollout... Another lesson Amazon learned is one the company isn't keen to talk about: Going green can be expensive, at least initially. Based on the type of chargers Amazon deploys - almost entirely midtier chargers called Level 2 in the industry - the hardware likely cost between $50 million and $90 million, according to Bloomberg estimates based on cost estimates supplied by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Factoring in costs beyond the plugs and related hardware - like digging through a parking lot to lay wires or set up electrical panels and cabinets - could double that sum. Amazon declined to comment on how much it spent on its EV charging push. In addition to the expense of the chargers, electric vehicle-fleet operators are typically on the hook for utility upgrades. When companies request the sort of increases to electrical capacity that Amazon has - the Maple Valley warehouse has three megawatts of power for its chargers - they tend to pay for them, making the utility whole for work done on behalf of a single customer. Amazon says it pays upgrade costs as determined by utilities, but that in some locations the upgrades fit within the standard service power companies will handle out of their own pocket. The article also includes this quote from Kellen Schefter, transportation director at the Edison Electric Institute trade group (which worked with Amazon on its electricity needs). "Amazon's scale matters. If Amazon can show that it meets their climate goals while also meeting their package-delivery goals, we can show this all actually works."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Register spoke to former senior White House cyber policy director A.J. Grotto - who complained it was hard to get even slight concessions from Microsoft:"If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago ... [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies" instead of making it the default, Grotto said. "As a result, it was really hard for agencies to identify their exposure to the SolarWinds breach." Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default. [In the interview he calls it "an epic fight" which lasted 18 months."] [G]iven the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best. That illustrates, Grotto said, that "they [Microsoft] just have a ton of leverage, and they're not afraid to use it." Add to that concerns over an Exchange Online intrusion by Chinese snoops, and another Microsoft security breach by Russian cyber operatives, both of which allowed spies to gain access to US government emails, and Grotto says it's fair to classify Microsoft and its products as a national security concern. He estimates that Microsoft makes 85% of U.S. government productivity software - and has an even greater share of their operating systems. "Microsoft in many ways has the government locked in, he says in the interview, "and so it's able to transfer a lot of these costs associated with the security breaches over to the federal government." And about five minutes in, he says, point-blank, that "It's perfectly fair" to consider Microsoft a national security threat, given its dominance "not just within the federal government, but really in sort of the boarder IT marketplace. I think it's fair to say, yeah, that a systemic compromise that affects Microsoft and its products do rise to the level of a national security risk." He'd like to see the government encourage more competition - to the point where public scrutiny prompts software customers to change their behavior, and creates a true market incentive for better performance...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:On a slice of the ocean front in west Singapore, a startup is building a plant to turn carbon dioxide from air and seawater into the same material as seashells, in a process that will also produce "green" hydrogen - a much-hyped clean fuel. The cluster of low-slung buildings starting to take shape in Tuas will become the "world's largest" ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant when completed later this year, according to Equatic, the startup behind it that was spun out of the University of California at Los Angeles. The idea is that the plant will pull water from the ocean, zap it with an electric current and run air through it to produce a series of chemical reactions to trap and store carbon dioxide as minerals, which can be put back in the sea or used on land... The $20 million facility will be fully operational by the end of the year and able to remove 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer of Equatic, which has partnered with Singapore's National Water Agency to construct the plant. That amount is equivalent to taking roughly 870 average passenger cars off the road. The ambition is to scale up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 removal a year by the end of 2026, and from there to millions of metric tons over the next few decades, Sanders told CNN. The plant can be replicated pretty much anywhere, he said, stacked up in modules "like lego blocks...." The upfront costs are high but the company says it plans to make money by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their pollution, as well as selling the hydrogen produced during the process. Equatic has already signed a deal with Boeing to sell it 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen, which it plans to use to create green fuel, and to fund the removal of 62,000 metric tons of CO2. There's other projects around the world attempting ocean-based carbon renewal, CNN notes. "Other projects include sprinkling iron particles into the ocean to stimulate CO2-absorbing phytoplankton, sinking seaweed into the depths to lock up carbon and spraying particles into marine clouds to reflect away some of the sun's energy." But carbon-removal projects are controversial, criticized for being expensive, unproven at scale and a distraction from policies to cut fossil fuels. And when they involve the oceans - complex ecosystems already under huge strain from global warming - criticisms can get even louder. There are "big knowledge gaps" when it comes to ocean geoengineering generally, said Jean-Pierre Gatusso, an ocean scientist at the Sorbonne University in France. "I am very concerned with the fact that science lags behind the industry," he told CNN.Read more of this story at Slashdot.