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Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Apple's response to Beeper Mini -- the app that briefly brought iMessage to Android. From a report: During the State of the Net Conference on Monday, Carr said the FCC should look into whether Apple's move "complies with the FCC's Part 14 rules" about accommodating users with disabilities. Beeper Mini launched last year, allowing Android users to gain access to iMessage features, including blue message bubbles and the ability to send high-quality photos and videos. However, Apple quickly blocked Beeper Mini users and continued to shut down attempts to make the app work, leading its developers to eventually just give up. The FCC's Part 14 rules lay out requirements that "advanced communications service," such as iMessage, must follow to ensure they're accessible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Russia hasbeen at the forefront ofinternet disinformationtechniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea. According to French authorities, the Kremlin is at it again. On February 12th Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries, tied in part to the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the elections to the European Parliament in June. Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames "Portal Kombat." Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. Over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022. Current traffic to these sites, which exist in various languages including French, German, Polish and English, is low. But French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a "massive" wave of Russian disinformation. Viginum says it watched the sites between September and December 2023. It concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread "deceptive or false" content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media. The underlying objective is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe. According to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organization. [...] As the campaign for the European Parliament elections draws near, France is thought to be a particular target for Moscow. According to an article in theWashington Postin December, Kremlin documents show that Russia has been intensifying its effort to undermine French backing for Ukraine. It also has a clear interest in promoting division in France, at a time when Marine Le Pen is riding high in the polls for the next presidential election in 2027. The hard-right leader, who financed previous campaigns with a Russian bank loan, stands to benefit the most from France's polarized politicsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Prime Video has cut Dolby Vision and Atmos support from their ad tier subscription. "That's on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th," reports The Verge. "Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well." The Verge reports: That's the word from 4KFilme, which discovered that their smart TVs from Sony, LG, and Samsung were now displaying content in HDR10 with Dolby Digital 5.1 as opposed to the higher fidelity options they'd enjoyed previously. Amazon spokesperson Katie Barker confirms to The Verge that it's a deliberate move: "Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos capabilities are only available on the ad free option, on relevant titles." While price hikes are no longer remotely unusual in the streaming video space, where Netflix now charges $22.99 a month for its 4K tier, it's a bit harder to compare Amazon's prices to Netflix. Prime Video is also available as an $8.99-per-month standalone subscription; if you subscribe that way and add $2.99 per month, it's more like a 28 percent price hike. If you prefer ads, Prime Video's $8.99-per-month is a dollar less than Disney Plus with ads at $9.99 per month, though Netflix currently offers its 1080p service with ads at $6.99 per month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Minesto, a marine energy tech developer based in Sweden, has deployed their new Dragon 12 tidal energy harvester to the Faroe Islands. Operating like an underwater kite, the Dragon 12 "uses lift generated by tidal flows to fly patterns faster than the currents, harvesting renewable energy," reports New Atlas. From the report: Where devices like Orbital's O2 tidal turbine more or less just sit there in the water harvesting energy from tidal currents, Minesto's Dragon series are anchored to the sea bed, and fly around like kites, treating the currents like wind. Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs -- and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting. These are by no means small kites -- the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether. As with any renewable energy project, the key figure here is LCoE (levelized cost of energy) -- so what's it gonna cost? Well, back in 2017, Minesto projected about US$108/MWh once its first hundred megawatts of capacity are installed -- with costs falling thereafter as low as $54/MWh. The Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more effective in some places than others -- and Denmark's Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the chilly North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to about 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands funnel tidal currents through a number of slim channels. This accelerates the water significantly, and thus increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon has been deployed, and on Friday, it was connected to the local power grid to begin delivering energy. You can watch a video of the Dragon 12 on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: After decades of progress in the U.S. toward cleaner air, climate change-related events will cause a steady deterioration through 2054. New research from the nonprofit First Street Foundation is part of a hyperlocal air quality model showing shifts down to the property level between 2024 and 2054. Its conclusions flow from methods contained in three peer-reviewed studies published by the coauthors. The report itself is not peer reviewed, however. The study finds that climate change is increasing the prevalence of two of the air pollutants most harmful to human health: particulate matter, commonly referred to as PM2.5, and tropospheric ozone. PM2.5 are tiny particles emitted by vehicles, power plants, wildfires and other sources. They can get lodged in people's lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing or exacerbating numerous health problems. Through the use of air quality observations and the development of the new model, First Street's researchers found that the West will be particularly hard hit by increasing amounts of PM2.5 emissions, as wildfires become more frequent and severe. [...] Future projections estimate a continued increase in PM2.5 levels by nearly 10% over the next 30 years, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street, tells Axios in an interview. This would "completely" erase air quality gains made in the last two decades, he said. Porter says that whereas pollutants from cars and factors could be targeted by regulations over the past few decades (and the EPA is proposing tightening some further), climate-related deterioration in air quality is a much tougher problem to solve. Instead of national regulations, climate action requires global emissions cuts, and even sharp declines in greenhouse gas emissions may not alter trend lines for the next few decades. The population exposed to "dangerous" days on the air quality index is likely to grow to 11.2 million between 2024 and 2054, an increase of about 13%. A 27% gain in the population exposed to "hazardous" (or maroon) days on the AQI is likely between the present climate and 30 years from now, the report finds. Porter said that while 83 million people are exposed to at least one "unhealthy" (red) day, this is likely to grow to over 125 million during the next three decades. "The climate penalty, associated with the rapidly increasing levels of air pollution, is perhaps the clearest signal we've seen regarding the direct impact climate change is having on our environment," Porter told Axios via email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have made significant progress toward developing a blood test that can predict the risk of dementia up to 15 years before clinical diagnosis. The Guardian reports: Hopes for the test were raised after scientists discovered biological markers for the condition in blood samples collected from more than 50,000 healthy volunteers enrolled in the UK Biobank project. Analysis of the blood identified patterns of four proteins that predicted the onset of dementia in general, and Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia specifically, in older age. When combined with more conventional risk factors such as age, sex, education and genetic susceptibility, the protein profiles allowed researchers to predict dementia with an estimated 90% accuracy nearly 15 years before people received clinical confirmation of the disease. For the latest study, blood samples from 52,645 UK adults without dementia were collected and frozen between 2006 and 2010 and analyzed 10 to 15 years later. More than 1,400 participants went on to develop dementia. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers looked for connections between nearly 1,500 blood proteins and developing dementia years later. Writing in Nature Aging, they describe how four proteins, Gfap, Nefl, Gdf15 and Ltbp2, were present in unusual levels among those who developed all-cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia. Higher levels of the proteins were warning signs of disease. Inflammation in the brain can trigger cells called astrocytes to over-produce Gfap, a known biomarker for Alzheimer's. People with raised Gfap were more than twice as likely to develop dementia than those with lower levels. Another blood protein, Nefl, is linked to nerve fibre damage, while higher than normal Gdf15 can occur after damage to the brain's blood vessels. Rising levels of Gfap and Ltbp2 was highly specific for dementia rather than other brain diseases, the scientists found, with changes occurring at least 10 years before people received a dementia diagnosis. The researchers are speaking to companies to develop the test but said the cost, currently at several hundred pounds, would need to come down to make it viable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a post on Threads today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a new test in the U.S. that shows a list of popular topics that other people are discussing. It's a core feature of Twitter (now "X") that should help make it easier to find new posts and users on Threads. The Verge reports: The list will appear on the search page and in the For You feed, allowing you to browse through posts about a particular topic. In addition to testing a way to save posts, Meta recently said it will add controls to limit political content recommendations on Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says Threads uses machine learning AI systems to determine what goes on the list. It takes into account how many people are talking about a certain topic, as well as how many people have interacted with posts about it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A class-action lawsuit alleges (PDF) that Amazon manipulates its platform through a biased algorithm to favor the "Buy Box" for items that generate higher fees for Amazon, often leading consumers to overpay for products that could be obtained cheaper and just as quickly from other sellers on the platform. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit claims that a biased algorithm drives Amazon's "Buy Box," which appears on an item's page and prompts shoppers to "Buy Now" or "Add to Cart." According to customers suing, nearly 98 percent of Amazon sales are of items featured in the Buy Box, because customers allegedly "reasonably" believe that featured items offer the best deal on the platform. "But they are often wrong," the complaint said, claiming that instead, Amazon features items from its own retailers and sellers that participate in Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), both of which pay Amazon higher fees and gain secret perks like appearing in the Buy Box. "The result is that consumers routinely overpay for items that are available at lower prices from other sellers on Amazona"not because consumers don't care about price, or because they're making informed purchasing decisions, but because Amazon has chosen to display the offers for which it will earn the highest fees," the complaint said. Authorities in the US and the European Union have investigated Amazon's allegedly anticompetitive Buy Box algorithm, confirming that it's "favored FBA sellers since at least 2016," the complaint said. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than $1 billion by the Italian Competition Authority over these unfair practices, and in 2022, the European Commission ordered Amazon to "apply equal treatment to all sellers when deciding what to feature in the Buy Box." These investigations served as the first public notice that Amazon's Buy Box couldn't be trusted, customers suing said. Amazon claimed that the algorithm was fixed in 2020, but so far, Amazon does not appear to have addressed all concerns over its Buy Box algorithm. As of 2023, European regulators have continued pushing Amazon "to take further action to remedy its Buy Box bias in their respective jurisdictions," the customers' complaint said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees found out they had been laid off in the company's third round of job cuts last year. Not long after, music fans around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working. These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees who was let go that day, but his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn't have access to internal Spotify data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which became a pivotal resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love. "The project is to understand the communities of listening that exist in the world, figure out what they're called, what artists are in them and what their audiences are," McDonald told TechCrunch. "The goal is to use math where you can to find real things that exist in listening patterns. So I think about it as trying to help global music self-organize." If you work at a big tech company and get laid off, you probably won't expect the company's customers to write nine pages of complaints on a community forum, telling your former employer how badly they messed up by laying you off. Nor would you expect an outpouring of Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you could possibly get the axe. But that's how fans reacted when they heard McDonald's fate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A registered sex offender has become the first person in England and Wales to be convicted of cyber-flashing. The BBC reports: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, of Basildon, Essex, sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on Friday. The woman took screenshots of the image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to Essex Police the same day.Hawkes admitted two charges when he appeared before magistrates in Southend earlier. He is the first person to be convicted of the new offense of cyber-flashing, which was brought in under the Online Safety Act and came into effect on January 31. After pleading guilty to two counts of sending a photograph or film of genitals to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation, he was remanded in custody until March 11, when he will be sentenced at Basildon Crown Court. Hawkes is a registered sex offender until November 2033 after he was convicted and given a community order for sexual activity with a child under 16 and exposure last year at Basildon Crown Court, the CPS said. He will also be sentenced for breaching the order when he is sentenced in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting today, telcos in American will need to disclose system break-ins within seven days. "[T]he same deadline now exists to report any data leaks to the FBI and US Secret Service as well," adds The Register. From the report: After releasing a proposed rule in early January and giving the industry 30 days to respond, the FCC's final rule was published today. It solidifies what the agency proposed a little more than a month ago, and what was teased in early 2022 when FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel drafted initial changes to the commission's 16-year old security "breach" reporting duties. Along with requiring that attacks are reported to the FCC within seven days of a telco discovering them, the same deadline now exists to report any data leaks to the FBI and US Secret Service as well. As the FCC planned, the new rule also eliminates the mandatory seven-day waiting period for reporting break-ins to consumers. The FCC now "requires carriers to notify customers of breaches of covered data without unreasonable delay ... and in no case more than 30 days following reasonable determination of a breach." "Reasonable determination" of a data blurt is further defined as "when the carrier has information indicating that it is more likely than not that there was a breach" and "does not mean reaching a conclusion regarding every fact surrounding a data security incident that may constitute a breach." In other words, if customers are affected then they had better be notified post-haste. The FCC has additionally extended the scope of data exposure types that telecom customers must be notified of. Prior to the passage of the new rule customers only had to be told if Customer proprietary network information (CPNI) was exposed to the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The US government has committed $42 million to further the development of the 5G Open RAN (O-RAN) standard that would allow wireless providers to mix and match cellular hardware and software, opening up a bigger market for third-party equipment that's cheaper and interoperable. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) grant would establish a Dallas O-RAN testing center to prove the standard's viability as a way to head off Huawei's steady cruise toward a global cellular network hardware monopoly. Verizon global network and technology president Joe Russo promoted the funding as a way to achieve "faster innovation in an open environment." To achieve the standard's goals, AT&T vice president of RAN technology Robert Soni says that AT&T and Verizon have formed the Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments Consortium (ACCoRD), which includes a grab bag of wireless technology companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, and Rakuten. Japanese wireless carrier Rakuten formed as the first O-RAN network in 2020. The company's then CEO, Tareq Amin, told The Verge's Nilay Patel in 2022 that Open RAN would enable low-cost network build-outs using smaller equipment rather than massive towers -- which has long been part of the promise of 5G. But O-RAN is about more than that; establishing interoperability means companies like Verizon and AT&T wouldn't be forced to buy all of their hardware from a single company to create a functional network. For the rest of us, that means faster build-outs and "more agile networks," according to Rakuten. In the US, Dish has been working on its own O-RAN network, under the name Project Genesis. The 5G network was creaky and unreliable when former Verge staffer Mitchell Clarke tried it out in Las Vegas in 2022, but the company said in June last year that it had made its goal of covering 70 percent of the US population. Dish has struggled to become the next big cell provider in the US, though -- leading satellite communications company EchoStar, which spun off from Dish in 2008, to purchase the company in January. The Washington Post writes that O-RAN "is Washington's anointed champion to try to unseat the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies" as the world's biggest supplier of cellular infrastructure gear. According to the Post, Biden has emphasized the importance of O-RAN in conversations with international leaders over the past few years. Additionally, it notes that Congress along with the NTIA have dedicated approximately $2 billion to support the development of this standard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FT Alphaville: Last year, Norway's $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund revealed that it had lost NKr980mn, roughly $92mn, on an error relating to how it calculated its mandated benchmark. Here's what Norges Bank Investment Management said at the time: "In February this year, a calculation error was discovered in the composition of the index we're measured against. This error led to a marginal overweight in US fixed income relative to global fixed income. When this was discovered, we immediately set about correcting it, but because the fund is so large, the return was 0.7 basis points. Due to this our previously reported positive relative return of NOK 118 billion was adjusted down to NOK 117 billion." It is a good example of how even tiny operational mistakes can have mammoth-sized consequences in nominal terms when you manage one of the world's biggest pools of capital. Sometimes a mistake can even lead to a windfall -- such as in 2021, when NBIM apparently made NKr582mn by accidentally accumulating an outsized position in a rising stock. But the 2023 index snafu is by far the biggest the fund has registered, almost twice as large as the cumulative operational-accidental losses it suffered from 2010-20. Alphaville was intrigued. What exactly went wrong? Well, in a recently-released anthropological report commissioned to investigate its own culture, NBIM seems to have inadvertently revealed just how minuscule the mistake was. Here's an NBIM employee called "Simon" recounting the debacle to the report's author, Tone Danielsen. Alphaville's emphasis below: "Last year (spring 2022) we had an off-site. One of our workshops was on 'Mistakes and how to deal with them.' We wrote post-it notes, classifying them into different categories from harmless to no-goes. One of my post-it notes, I remember it vividly, read: Miscalculation of the Ministry of Finance benchmark. I placed it in the category unforgivable. When I wrote that note, I honestly couldn't even dare to think about the consequences. And less than a year later, I did exactly that. My worst nightmare. It was a manual mistake. My mistake. I used the wrong date, December 1st instead of November 1st which is clearly stated in our mandate. The mistake was not revealed until months later, by the Ministry of Finance. They reported back that the numbers did not add up. I did all the numbers once more, and the cause of the mistake was identified. I immediately reported to Patrick [Global Head] and Dag [Chief]. I openly express that this was my mistake, and mine alone. I felt miserable and was ready to take the consequences -- whatever they might be."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper [PDF] the on pre-print server Arxiv: Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of about 1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. We survey faculty at highly-ranked universities, and confirm that Google Scholar is widely used when evaluating scientists. Intrigued by a citationboosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations. These findings provide conclusive evidence that citations can be bought in bulk, and highlight the need to look beyond citation counts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft appears to be readying its own DLSS-like AI upscaling feature for PC games. From a report: X user PhantomOcean3 discovered the feature inside the latest test versions of Windows 11 over the weekend, with Microsoft describing its automatic super resolution as a way to "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details." That sounds a lot like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which uses AI to upscale games and improve frame rates and image quality. AMD and Intel also offer their own variants, with FSR and XeSS both growing in popularity in recent PC game releases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid increasing speculation about the future of Xbox, its exclusives, and even its status as a hardware manufacturer, Phil Spencer reportedly told employees last week that it has no plans to stop making consoles. From a report: Reporter Shannon Liao said in her weekly Substack industry newsletter that Spencer moved to reassure staff during an all-hands meeting on Tuesday. "The company held an internal Tuesday townhall where Spencer told employees that there were no plans to stop making consoles, and that Xboxes would continue to be part of a strategy that involves multiple kinds of devices," Liao reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

stikves writes: Today, Broadcom announced immediate end of ESXi availability. ESXi has been an important tool for many "homelab" enthusiasts -- offering simple bare metal virtualization for small setups. Unfortunately they don't offer a replacement, except for paid subscription services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia blog: Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees Monday at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Huang, who spoke as part of a fireside chat with the UAE's Minister of AI, His Excellency Omar Al Olama, described sovereign AI -- which emphasizes a country's ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces -- as an enormous opportunity for the world's leaders. "It codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history -- you own your own data," Huang told Al Olama during their conversation, a highlight of an event attended by more than 4,000 delegates from 150 countries. "We completely subscribe to that vision," Al Olama said. "That's why the UAE is moving aggressively on creating large language models and mobilizing compute." Huang's appearance in the UAE comes as the Gulf State is moving rapidly to transform itself from an energy powerhouse into a global information technology hub. Dubai is the latest stop for Huang in a global tour that has included meetings with leaders in Canada, France, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam over the past six months. The Middle East is poised to reap significant benefits from AI, with PwC projecting a $320 billion boost to the region's economy by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia briefly surpassed Amazon in market capitalization on Monday, as the euphoria around AI catapulted the chipmaker to the fourth most valuable U.S. company. From a report: At a record high of $734.96, Nvidia was worth $1.82 trillion in market value, compared to $1.81 trillion for retail giant Amazon.com and a few billions away from Google-owner Alphabet's $1.87 trillion, according to LSEG data. The last time Nvidia was more valuable than Amazon was in 2002, when they were each worth under $6 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP is seeking as much as $4 billion from Autonomy's former bosses following a London judge's finding that they fraudulently boosted the value of the company before its sale. From a report: Founder Mike Lynch was found to have inflated Autonomy's revenue alongside his chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain and induced HP to buy the firm for $11 billion, according to a London civil judgment in 2022. The British tech tycoon is currently waiting to face a criminal trial in the US over the sale after being extradited last year. He was previously investigated by the UK's Serious Fraud Office but the agency dropped its case. Hussain was convicted in the US for his role in the saga. Lawyers for HP calculated the total losses that Lynch and Hussain must pay back as over $4 billion, according to court documents prepared for a hearing Monday. This was revised from a previous calculation of $5 billion at trial due to further evidence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The startup that develops the phone app for casino resort giant WinStar has secured an exposed database that was spilling customers' private information to the open web. Oklahoma-based WinStar bills itself as the "world's biggest casino" by square footage. The casino and hotel resort also offers an app, My WinStar, in which guests can access self-service options during their hotel stay, their rewards points and loyalty benefits, and casino winnings. The app is developed by a Nevada software startup called Dexiga. The startup left one of its logging databases on the internet without a password, allowing anyone with knowledge of its public IP address to access the WinStar customer data stored within using only their web browser. Dexiga took the database offline after TechCrunch alerted the company to the security lapse. Anurag Sen, a good-faith security researcher who has a knack for discovering inadvertently exposed sensitive data on the internet, found the database containing personal information, but it was initially unclear who the database belonged to. Sen said the personal data included full names, phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses. Sen shared details of the exposed database with TechCrunch to help identify its owner and disclose the security lapse.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many websites are using AI tools to generate fake obituaries about average people for profit. These articles lack substantiating details but are optimized for SEO, frequently outranking legitimate obituaries, The Verge reports. The fake obituaries, as one can imagine, are causing distress for grieving families and friends. In response, Google told The Verge that it aims to surface high-quality information but struggles with "data voids." The company terminated some YouTube channels sharing fake notices but declined to say if the flagged websites violate policies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US companies are discussing cost control on earnings calls at a record rate, amid a push to reallocate funds and invest in new technologies, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley strategists. From a report: Transcript mentions of "operational efficiency" are at the highest ever in the US during this earnings season as companies focus on expense discipline, but also invest in technologies "that can drive future productivity like AI," a team led by Michael Wilson wrote in a note. There is a notable overlap among the industries discussing operational efficiency most prevalently and those that are discussing AI, the strategists said. These groups include software, professional services, health care services, and financial services. Pfizer, BlackRock, and Lam Research were among S&P 500 companies touting operational efficiency in their earnings calls this season, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The rising focus on cost control comes as firms position to protect margins amid hopes for a soft economic landing. Investors have looked for signs of cooling in the jobs market to gauge when the Federal Reserve will lower borrowing costs, although recent hot data has signaled the Fed won't be easing anytime soon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2006 Slashdot reported on a 50-megabyte "micro" distro called Damn Small Linux. (And in 2012 we wrote that it "rose from the dead" with a new release candidate.) Now Damn Small Linux has been reborn again, according to its developer's web site:Creating the original DSL, a versatile 50MB distribution, was a lot of fun and one of the things I am most proud of as a personal accomplishment. However, as a concept, it was in the right place at the right time, and the computer industry has changed a lot since then. While it would be possible to make a bootable Xwindows 50MB distribution today, it would be missing many drivers and have only a handful of very rudimentary applications. People would find such a distribution a fun toy or something to build upon, but it would not be usable for the average computer user out of the gate.... The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB. This project is meant to service older computers and have them continue to be useful far into the future. Such a notion sits well with my values. I think of this project as my way of keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills. As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386... a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian. The blog It's FOSS News describes it as "a unique experience in a sea of Debian-based and Fedora-based distros."It is offered with two window managers, Fluxbox and JWM, with apt being fully enabled by default for easy package installations...At the time of writing, only the Alpha ISOs were made available on the official downloads page. It is only a matter of time before we get a stable release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lawsuit involving the now-defunct Google+ social media site "has been settled for $350 million," reports CPO magazine, "after a lengthy appeals process played out..." "[T]he total pool after attorney and legal fees are deducted is likely to be well over $200 million."[The lawsuit] dates all the way back to 2018, when Google internally discovered that the Google+ API was being abused to access the private data of about half a million of the social media service's users. Google opted not to publicly declare the breach, as they were not legally compelled to. News of it came via the Wall Street Journal in late 2018. Google shareholders contend that the company kept the issue under wraps due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that Facebook was experiencing at the time, believing that they would suffer a similar negative PR blow. This was supported by an internal company memo that became public. As the news of the exploitable software glitch gradually came out, Google shareholders took a hit as the company collectively lost tens of billions of dollars in market value. The lead plaintiff in the case is Rhode Island Treasurer James Diossa, who was responsible for overseeing a state pension fund that held stock in Google parent company Alphabet. Google+ was shuttered in 2019 after an eight-year run due in part to repeated technical issues with unauthorized API access (as well as low user engagement). "If the settlement is approved by the 9th Circuit judge, the proceeds will be available to Google shareholders who held stock at any time from April 23, 2018, to April 30, 2019... "A separate class-action privacy lawsuit involving users who had private data exposed during the incident was settled in 2018 for $7.5 million, leading to very low payments for each of the claimants."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology made its mark on the Super Bowl ads this year. Microsoft purchased a long inspirational ad for Copilot, ending with the tagline "Your everyday AI companion." (Although another message made the opposite point. "With artificial intelligence, the future is in good hands," an announcer says ironically -- while the ad shows the minions from Despicable Me 4.) Google's ad showed how its Pixel 8 smartphone helps people with vision problems take photos. T-Mobile touted its internet service. And for some reason CrowdStrike's ad about its endpoint security software took place in the Old West... VW ended an ad looking at its history with a shot of its new electric vehicle, the ID.Buzz minivan, while Kia had its own heart-tugging ad touting their electric EV9. And Pfizer ran a minute-long ad showing the history of medical progress, culminating with a pointer to their new domain, LetsOutdoCancer.com. Even NASA got into the action, releasing a video showing an astronaut catching a pass in zero gravity. ("Including its solar panels, the Space Station is the same size as a regulation football field.") And some people even tried watching the Super Bowl on their new Apple Vision Pro...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a press conference last week, a California Assemblymember joined the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in announcing a bill that, if passed, would require every public high school to teach computer science. (And establish CS as a high school graduation requirement by the 2030-31 school year.) Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says he noticed posters with CS-education advocacy charts and stats "copied verbatim" from the tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org. (And "a California Dept. of Education news release also echoed Code.org K-12 CS advocacy factoids.")The announcement came less than two weeks after Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi - whose goal is to make CS a HS graduation requirement in all 50 states by 2030 - was a keynote speaker at the Association of California School Administrators Superintendents' Symposium. Even back in an October 20 Facebook post, [California state assemblyman] Berman noted he'd partnered with Code.org on legislation in the past and hinted that something big was in the works on the K-12 CS education front for California. "I had the chance to attend Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration and chat with their founder, Hadi Partovi, as well as CS advocate Aloe Blacc. They've done amazing work expanding access to computer science education... and I've been proud to partner with them on legislation to do that in CA. More to come!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night in San Francisco's Chinatown, "A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield..." reports the Verge, "generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire."The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.... Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car "was not transporting any riders" when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames... The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators... Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path. The "burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar" appears in a video posted on YouTube, according to the article. "Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew." San Francisco's 49ers play in the Super Bowl this afteroon, so last night's celebrations for Chinese New Year could be followed by additional celebrations tonight. Police Chief Bill Scott is already urging residents to behave responsibly. "Please don't light anything on fire."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:An abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents that could put large parts of Europe in a deep freeze is looking a bit more likely and closer than before as a new complex computer simulation finds a "cliff-like" tipping point looming in the future. A long-worried nightmare scenario, triggered by Greenland's ice sheet melting from global warming, still is at least decades away if not longer, but maybe not the centuries that it once seemed, a new study in Friday's Science Advances finds. The study, the first to use complex simulations and include multiple factors, uses a key measurement to track the strength of vital overall ocean circulation, which is slowing. A collapse of the current - called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC - would change weather worldwide because it means a shutdown of one of key the climate and ocean forces of the planet. It would plunge northwestern European temperatures by 9 to 27 degrees (5 to 15 degrees Celsius) over the decades, extend Arctic ice much farther south, turn up the heat even more in the Southern Hemisphere, change global rainfall patterns and disrupt the Amazon, the study said. Other scientists said it would be a catastrophe that could cause worldwide food and water shortages. "We are moving closer (to the collapse), but we we're not sure how much closer," said study lead author Rene van Westen, a climate scientist and oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "We are heading towards a tipping point." When this global weather calamity - grossly fictionalized in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" - may happen is "the million-dollar question, which we unfortunately can't answer at the moment," van Westen said. He said it's likely a century away but still could happen in his lifetime. He just turned 30. "It also depends on the rate of climate change we are inducing as humanity," van Westen said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer," reports Sky News, "raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans."Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the U.S., has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles... The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human. Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness? "The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far."If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward. Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented. He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage. 2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future." One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser" Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday a climate technology startup called Twelve "took a major step toward producing sustainable aviation fuel..." reports Bloomberg, "by launching its commercial-scale carbon transformation unit."Twelve is among the emerging companies working on ways to transform captured CO2 into useful products. In the case of the Berkeley, California-based startup, its nascent technology will be critical to cleaning up one of the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors: aviation. Twelve uses a technique called electrolysis that uses electricity to repurpose carbon dioxide and water into various products. When the electricity is generated from renewables, the process is essentially no-carbon. The company's CO2 electrochemical reactor - called OPUS - will be at the center of its first commercial production plant for sustainable aviation fuel, under construction in Moses Lake and set to be completed this year. The plant will run on hydropower and use CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant. That CO2 and water will be fed through OPUS and turned into synthetic gas, the basis of sustainable aviation fuel. Twelve's airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions... Although Twelve's carbon transformation technology can be used to make products ranging from spandex pants to car parts, it pivoted to focus more fully on sustainable aviation fuel after the announcement of tax credits for SAF blending, carbon capture and utilization, and hydrogen production, said Twelve co-founder and Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave. Those tax credits helped the company launch this commercial unit. "Without that, we would not be competitive in terms of being able to get to market at the stage we're at," Cave said. It's still not cost competitive with traditional jet fuel, the article points out, "but airlines are under increasing pressure from governments and their own net zero commitments to integrate SAF into their fuel mix. "Twelve would not disclose its cost to make the fuel, though it said it expects prices to go down as its technology scales up and eventually reach parity with traditional jet fuel."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martin Hellman "achieved legendary status as co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman public key exchange algorithm, a breakthrough in software and computer cryptography," notes a new interview in InfoWorld. Nine years after winning the Turing award, the 78-year-old cryptologist shared his perspective on some other issues: What do you think about the state of digital spying today? Hellman: There's a need for greater international cooperation. How can we have true cyber security when nations are planning - and implementing - cyber attacks on one another? How can we ensure that AI is used only for good when nations are building it into their weapons systems? Then, there's the grandaddy of all technological threats, nuclear weapons. If we keep fighting wars, it's only a matter of time before one blows up. The highly unacceptable level of nuclear risk highlights the need to look at the choices we make around critical decisions, including cyber security. We have to take into consideration all participants' needs for our strategies to be effective.... Your battle with the government to make private communication available to the general public in the digital age has the status of folklore. But, in your recent book (co-authored with your wife Dorothie [and freely available as a PDF]), you describe a meeting of minds with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the NSA. Until I read your book, I saw the National Security Agency as bad and Diffie-Hellman as good, plain and simple. You describe how you came to see the NSA and its people as sincere actors rather than as a cynical cabal bent on repression. What changed your perspective? Hellman: This is a great, real-life example of how taking a holistic view in a conflict, instead of just a one-sided one, resolved an apparently intractable impasse. Those insights were part of a major change in my approach to life. As we say in our book, "Get curious, not furious." These ideas are effective not just in highly visible conflicts like ours with the NSA, but in every aspect of life. Hellman also had an interesting answer when asked if math, game theory, and software development teach any lessons applicable to issues like nuclear non-proliferation or national defense. "The main thing to learn is that the narrative we (and other nations) tell ourselves is overly simplified and tends to make us look good and our adversaries bad."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Something revolutionary is on the horizon..." claims the company's web site. "Wearable neurotechnology that augments sleep, attention, and ultimately the human experience." Or, as Fierce Biotech put it, "A startup emerged from stealth this week with grand plans to pioneer a new form of neurotech dubbed 'electric medicine.'"Elemind's approach centers on artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that are trained to continuously analyze neurological activity collected by a noninvasive wearable device, then to deliver through the wearable bursts of neurostimulation that are uniquely tailored to those real-time brain wave readings. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company claims that its approach - which is based on research from its founders, a group of high-profile scientists hailing from the likes of MIT, Stanford and Harvard - offers a more "natural" treatment option than pharmaceuticals for neurological conditions like insomnia, essential tremor and memory loss. "Chemical drugs affect the entire body, often leading to unwanted side effects. Elemind offers a nonchemical, direct and on-demand solution that learns and dynamically adjusts to each person," Meredith Perry, a co-founder of Elemind and its CEO, said in the company's debut announcement. "We're the first and only company able to precisely guide and redirect brainwaves in real time." "Elemind's first product is a general wellness device and will not be subject to FDA regulation," notes an announcement from the company. But they've thoroughly researched the product's potential:To date, Elemind's technology is supported by five clinical trials and several publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Clinical trials show Elemind's technology is effective at inducing sleep up to 74% faster, suppressing essential tremor with a significant decrease after only 30 seconds of stimulation, and boosting memory. Clinical trials also demonstrate Elemind is effective at increasing pain thresholds and enhancing sedation; this study is currently in peer review.... "You can think about it like noise cancellation for the mind," said Dr. David Wang, CTO and co-founder of Elemind. "Our technology uses phase-locking auditory stimuli to align precisely with the user's brainwaves and steer them to a different frequency associated with a different state." The company plans to announce its first product within a few months, reports the Boston Globe, noting that the company's $12 million in seed funding came from "a consortium that includes Village Global, an early-stage venture fund backed by high-tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates., Reid Hoffman, and Ann Wojcicki..." More info from VentureBeat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shell once announced it would build 48 new Hydrogen fueling stations for light-duty vehicles in California, according to the blog Hydrogen Insights. But then in September, Shell told the site they'd "discontinued" that plan. And last month the Inside EVs blog noted that in all of 2023, just 2,968 hydrogen cars were sold "in the United States - and by that, we mean in California, where the series-produced models are available." That's according to data from the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership - admittedly a 10% increase from 2022's sales figure of 2,707 - but with both numbers lower than 2021's sales of 3,341. "The overall cumulative sales of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles exceeded 17,940 as of the end of the quarter (not counting vehicles removed from use), which is 20% more than a year ago." Then this week Shell said it will "no longer be operating" any light-duty hydrogen fuelling stations in the U.S., and will close all seven of its California pumping stations immediately. (Three in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, one in San Jose, and two in the Sacramento area.) Inside EVs says Shell's move "represents another blow to the struggling hydrogen car market in the only state where the fuel is widely available at all."Shell had, until recently, operated seven of the 55 total retail hydrogen stations in California, per the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership (H2FCP). That makes this a blow, but not apocalyptic news for the (small) hydrogen community.... In the letter announcing the closure, Shell Hydrogen Vice President Andrew Beard said they were shutting them down "due to hydrogen supply complications and other external market factors." It's not hard to see what Beard is referencing here... Hydrogen Insight reports that this shortage has been disrupting stations since August 13... Some are also down for repairs, as many hydrogen stations suffer from serious reliability issues. Iwatani, a Japanese gas company that is one of the two largest names in American hydrogen filling stations, is currently suing the company that provided the core technology for its stations. In a court filing viewed by Hydrogen Insight, Iwatini alleges that its provider did not test its equipment in a real-world commercial scenario, hid defects, and misled the company. It is, in short, a big mess. All of this makes the future of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the United States even more uncertain. The technology has struggled to catch on, as the stations and their fuel remain expensive. Though hydrogen car manufacturers usually include a large amount of free fuel in the purchase of a vehicle, once that runs out consumers are left with eye-watering prices from stations that are often broken, out of fuel, or swarmed with long lines. It's why used hydrogen cars are so cheap, and why they still aren't a good deal. Few companies can make a better case for it than Shell, though, as the cheapest way to produce hydrogen involves a lot of natural gas. Its proximity to the fossil-fuel industry was supposed to make it cheaper, and provide incentive for robust fueling infrastructure. That hasn't played out, though, and one of the largest oil giants is throwing in the towel. If even a fossil giant like Shell can't justify investing in the future of light-duty hydrogen infrastructure, we're not sure who can.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York TimesWhen it's after hours, and the boss is on the line, Australian workers - already among the world's best-rested and most personally fulfilled employees - can soon press "decline" in favor of the seductive call of the beach. In yet another buttress against the scourge of overwork, Australia's Senate on Thursday passed a bill giving workers the right to ignore calls and messages outside of working hours without fear of repercussion. It will now return to the House of Representatives for final approval. The bill, expected to pass in the House with ease, will let Australian workers refuse "unreasonable" professional communication outside of the workday. Workplaces that punish employees for not responding to such demands could be fined. "Someone who is not being paid 24 hours a day shouldn't be penalized if they're not online and available 24 hours a day," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a news conference Wednesday... Australia follows in the footsteps of European nations such as France, which in 2017 introduced the right of workers to disconnect from employers while off duty, a move later emulated by Germany, Italy and Belgium. The European Parliament has also called for a law across the European Union that would alleviate the pressure on workers to answer communications off the clock... Australians already enjoy a host of standardized benefits, including 20 days of paid annual leave, mandatory paid sick leave, "long service" leave of six weeks for those who have remained at an employer for at least seven years, 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and a nationwide minimum wage of about $15 an hour.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Federal Aviation Administration "is midway through a review of manufacturing at Boeing," reports the Associated Press, but "already knows that changes must be made in how the government oversees the aircraft manufacturer."FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker suggested that Boeing - under pressure from airlines to produce large numbers of planes - is not paying enough attention to safety. Whitaker said that FAA has had two challenges since January 5, when an emergency door panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner over Oregon. "One, what is wrong with this airplane? But two, what's going on with the production at Boeing?" Whitaker told a House subcommittee. "There have been issues in the past. They don't seem to be getting resolved, so we feel like we need to have a heightened level of oversight." Whitaker, who took over the FAA about three months ago, was making his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the blowout over Oregon.... Whitaker said the FAA is halfway through a six-week audit that has involved placing "about two dozen" inspectors in Boeing's 737 plant in Renton, Washington, and "maybe half a dozen" at a Wichita, Kansas, plant where supplier Spirit AeroSystems makes the fuselages for 737s. The inspectors are looking for gaps in the quality of work during the manufacturing process that might have contributed to a door plug blowing off an Alaska Airlines Max 9 at 16,000 feet over Oregon. Whitaker said he expects the FAA will keep people in the Boeing and Spirit factories after the audit is done, but he said the numbers haven't been determined. For many years, the FAA has relied on employees of aircraft manufacturers to perform some safety-related work on planes being built by their companies. That saves money for the government, and in theory taps the expertise of industry employees, but it was criticized after two deadly crashes involving Boeing Max 8 planes in 2018 and 2019. "In order to have a truly safe system, it seems to me that we can't rely on the manufacturers themselves to be their own watchdogs," Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, said during Tuesday's hearing. Whitaker has said that the self-checking practice - in theory, overseen by FAA inspectors - should be reconsidered, but he again stopped short of saying it should be scrapped. But he said closer monitoring of Boeing is needed. "The current system is not working because it is not delivering safe aircraft," Whitaker said. "Maybe we need to look at the incentives to make sure safety is getting the appropriate first rung of consideration that it deserves."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

InfoWorld reports:Don't look now, but 25% of organizations surveyed in the United Kingdom have already moved half or more of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures. This is according to a recent study by Citrix, a Cloud Software Group business unit. The survey questioned 350 IT leaders on their current approaches to cloud computing. The survey also showed that 93% of respondents had been involved with a cloud repatriation project in the past three years. That is a lot of repatriation. Why? Security issues and high project expectations were reported as the top motivators (33%) for relocating some cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures such as enterprise data centers, colocation providers, and managed service providers (MSPs). Another significant driver was the failure to meet internal expectations, at 24%... Those surveyed also cited unexpected costs, performance issues, compatibility problems, and service downtime. The most common motivator for repatriation I've been seeing is cost. In the survey, more than 43% of IT leaders found that moving applications and data from on-premises to the cloud was more expensive than expected. Although not a part of the survey, the cost of operating applications and storing data on the cloud has also been significantly more expensive than most enterprises expected. The cost-benefit analysis of cloud versus on-premises infrastructure varies greatly depending on the organization... The cloud is a good fit for modern applications that leverage a group of services, such as serverless, containers, or clustering. However, that doesn't describe most enterprise applications. The article cautions, "Don't feel sorry for the public cloud providers." "Any losses from repatriation will be quickly replaced by the vast amounts of infrastructure needed to build and run AI-based systems... As I've said a few times here, cloud conferences have become genAI conferences, which will continue for several years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2022 Apple filed a lawsuit against startup Rivos. The lawsuit said that in one year Rivos had hired more than 40 former Apple employees to work on competing system-on-a-chip technology, according to Reuters, "and that at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos." But Friday Bloomberg reported that the two companies told a judge that they'd "signed an agreement that potentially settles the case.""The agreement provides for remediation of Apple confidential information based on a forensic examination of Rivos systems and other activities," according to the filing in federal court in San Jose, California. "The parties currently are working through that process." More details from Engadget:Apple also accused the defendant of instructing the employees it hired away to steal presentations and other proprietary information for unreleased iPhone chip designs that cost billions of dollars to develop. Rivos countersued Apple last year, accusing the larger company of restricting employees' ability to work elsewhere and of hindering emerging startups' growth by using anticompetitive measures. The court dismissed Apple's trade secret claims against Rivos in April 2023, though the company was allowed to file a revised complaint. Apple already settled with its six former employees who filed a countersuit against the iPhonemaker along with Rivos after they dropped their claims against each other last month. Both companies are now requesting the court to put their cases on hold until March 15, when they expect the settlement to be completed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:Nvidia is building a new business unit focused on designing bespoke chips for cloud computing firms and others, including advanced AI processors, nine sources familiar with its plans told Reuters. The dominant global designer and supplier of AI chips aims to capture a portion of an exploding market for custom AI chips and shield itself from the growing number of companies pursuing alternatives to its products. The Santa Clara, California-based company controls about 80% of high-end AI chip market, a position that has sent its stock market value up 40% so far this year to $1.73 trillion after it more than tripled in 2023. Nvidia's customers, which include ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms, have raced to snap up the dwindling supply of its chips to compete in the fast-emerging generative AI sector. Its H100 and A100 chips serve as a generalized, all-purpose AI processor for many of those major customers. But the tech companies have started to develop their own internal chips for specific needs. Doing so helps reduce energy consumption, and potentially can shrink the cost and time to design. Nvidia is now attempting to play a role in helping these companies develop custom AI chips that have flowed to rival firms such as Broadcom and Marvell Technology, said the sources, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly... Nvidia moving into this territory has the potential to eat into Broadcom and Marvell sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:A California state lawmaker introduced a bill on Thursday aiming to force companies to test the most powerful artificial intelligence models before releasing them - a landmark proposal that could inspire regulation around the country as state legislatures increasingly tackle the swiftly evolving technology. The new bill, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who represents San Francisco, would require companies training new AI models to test their tools for "unsafe" behavior, institute hacking protections and develop the tech in such a way that it can be shut down completely, according to a copy of the bill. AI companies would have to disclose testing protocols and what guardrails they put in place to the California Department of Technology. If the tech causes "critical harm," the state's attorney general can sue the company. Wiener's bill comes amid an explosion of state bills addressing artificial intelligence, as policymakers across the country grow wary that years of inaction in Congress have created a regulatory vacuum that benefits the tech industry. But California, home to many of the world's largest technology companies, plays a singular role in setting precedent for tech industry guardrails. "You can't work in software development and ignore what California is saying or doing," said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center's Elections and Government Program... Wiener says he thinks the bill can be passed by the fall. The article notes there's now 407 AI-related bills "active in 44 U.S. states (according to an analysis by an industry group called BSA the Software Alliance) - with several already signed into law. "The proliferation of state-level bills could lead to greater industry pressure on Congress to pass AI legislation, because complying with a federal law may be easier than responding to a patchwork of different state laws." Even the proposed California law "largely builds off an October executive order by President Biden," according to the article, "that uses emergency powers to require companies to perform safety tests on powerful AI systems and share those results with the federal government. The California measure goes further than the executive order, to explicitly require hacking protections, protect AI-related whistleblowers and force companies to conduct testing." They also add that as America's most populous U.S. state, "California has unique power to set standards that have impact across the country." And the group behind last year's statement on AI risk helped draft the legislation, according to the article, though Weiner says he also consulted tech workers, CEOs, and activists. "We've done enormous stakeholder outreach over the past year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former FTX customers "have reasons to believe they could actually recoup their money," reports CNBC:Bankman-Fried, who could spend the rest of his life behind bars, was found guilty in November on seven criminal counts after roughly $10 billion in customer funds from his company went missing. Some of that money went to pay for Bankman-Fried's lavish lifestyle, but much of it went towards other investments that have, of late, appreciated dramatically in value. Lawyers representing the bankruptcy estate of FTX told a judge in Delaware last week that they expect to fully repay customers and creditors with legitimate claims. Bankruptcy attorney Andrew Dietderich, who works with FTX's new leadership team, said "there is still a great amount of work and risk" ahead in getting all the money back to clients, but that the team has a "strategy to achieve it." It's a welcome development for the many thousands of customers (reportedly up to a million) who collectively lost billions of dollars in FTX's collapse 15 months ago, when the crypto exchange spiraled into bankruptcy in a matter of days. Given the lightly regulated and unsecured nature of FTX - and the crypto industry at large - those clients faced the real possibility that the vast majority of their money had evaporated. Plenty of failed hedge funds and lenders lost virtually everything during the 2022 crypto winter... [C]rypto was mired in a bear market, with bitcoin trading at around $16,000. It's now above $47,000... FTX's bitcoin stash, which was worth $560 million at the time of the September report, is today valued north of $1 billion. Bankman-Fried's investments weren't limited to crypto. He also used client money to back startups like Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company founded by ex-OpenAI employees. FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, before the generative AI boom. Anthropic's valuation hit $18 billion in December 2023, which would value FTX's roughly 8% stake at about $1.4 billion. CNBC suggests this could affect the length of Bankman-Fried's prison sentence (which will be determined next month). There's now also a so-called "FTX IOU" market where investors are selling their debt, CNBC adds. "One financial firm that had lost around $100 million initially sold its FTX debt for 6 cents on the dollar in a new secondary market out of concern that he may never get a better deal. As of December, those claims were going for more than 70 cents on the dollar." CNBC also reports that FTX "had been negotiating with bidders about a potential reboot of the company, but those efforts were scrapped last month."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth had its first year-long, 1.5-degree rise in temperature. But does this mean we've already missed our goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees? No, argues the Washington Post:There's actually some disagreement about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold - but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period. Scientists estimate that without dramatic emissions reductions, that will happen sometime in the 2030s. But there could be other single years or 12-month periods that cross the line before then. Can we still avoid passing 1.5C? Most scientists say passing 1.5C is inevitable. "The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail," Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a call with reporters late last year.... The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 modeled pathways for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world hitting the 1.5C target without substantially overshooting or using speculative technology (like large-scale carbon capture) that doesn't yet exist. At this point, many experts believe that the economy is too stuck on fossil fuels to transition fast enough for 1.5 degrees. Does that mean we'll pass catastrophic tipping points? That's a more difficult question. Scientists don't know exactly when certain tipping points - like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost - will occur. It's very hard to predict and model these types of catastrophic changes. And 1.5C isn't a magic threshold; it's not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will grind to a halt. But one thing is certain: For every tenth of a degree of warming, tipping points are more likely. Two degrees is worse than 1.9 degrees, which is worse than 1.8 degrees, and so on. And at each tenth of a degree, the infrastructure and systems that the world has built - electric grids, homes, livelihoods - will become more strained. Our modern world simply was not designed for temperatures this high. At some level, the final temperature of the planet isn't what matters most. It's where countries can actually get carbon emissions to zero - and stop contributing to future warming altogether.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since 2006 Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) has been part of the team verifying "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge," an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of Wikipedia (approximately the amount a human can read in a lifetime). "The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to Artificial General Intelligence," explains the project's web site. 15 years ago, Baldrson wrote a Slashdot post explaining the logic (titled "Compress Wikipedia and Win AI Prize"):The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids. The amount of the prize also increases based on how much compression is achieved. (So if you compress the 1GB file x% better than the current record, you'll receive x% of the prize...) The first prize was awarded in 2006. And now Baldrson writes:Kaido Orav has just improved 1.38% on the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge with his "fx-cmix" entry. The competition seems to be heating up, with this winner coming a mere 6 months since the prior winner. This is all the more impressive since each improvement in the benchmark approaches the (unknown) minimum size called the Kolmogorov Complexity of the data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz shared this report from MuckRock:Founded in 2003, Appin has been described as a cybersecurity company and an educational consulting firm. Appin was also, according to Reuters reporting and extensive marketing materials, a prolific "hacking for hire" service, stealing information from politicians and militaries as well as businesses and even unfaithful spouses. Legal letters, being sent to newsrooms and organizations around the world, are trying to remove that story from the internet - and are often succeeding. Reuters investigation, published in November, was based in part on corroborated marketing materials, detailing a range of "hacking for hire" services Appin provided. After publication, Reuters was targeted by a legal campaign to shut down critical reporting, an effort which expanded to target news organizations around the world, including MuckRock. With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MuckRock is now sharing more details on this effort while continuing to host materials the Association of Appin Training Centers has gone to great lengths to remove from the web. The original story, by Reuters' staff writers Raphael Satter, Zeba Siddiqui and Chris Bing, is no longer available on the Reuters website. Following a preliminary court ruling issued in New Delhi, the story has been replaced with an editor's note, stating that Reuters "stands by its reporting and plans to appeal the decision." The story has since been reposted on Distributed Denial of Secrets, while the primary source materials that Reuters reporters and editors used in their reporting are available on MuckRock's DocumentCloud service. Representatives of the company's founders denied the assertions in the Reuters story, insisting instead that rogue actors "were misusing the Appin name." TechDirt titled their article "Sorry Appin, We're Not Taking Down Our Article About Your Attempts To Silence Reporters." And Thursday the EFF wrote its own take on "a campaign of bullying and censorship seeking to wipe out stories about the mercenary hacking campaigns of a less well-known company, Appin Technology, in general, and the company's cofounder, Rajat Khare, in particular." These efforts follow a familiar pattern: obtain a court order in a friendly international jurisdiction and then misrepresent the force and substance of that order to bully publishers around the world to remove their stories. We are helping to push back on that effort, which seeks to transform a very limited and preliminary Indian court ruling into a global takedown order. We are representing Techdirt and MuckRock Foundation, two of the news entities asked to remove Appin-related content from their sites... On their behalf, we challenged the assertions that the Indian court either found the Reuters reporting to be inaccurate or that the order requires any entities other than Reuters and Google to do anything. We requested a response - so far, we have received nothing... At the time of this writing, more than 20 of those stories have been taken down by their respective publications, many at the request of an entity called "Association of Appin Training Centers (AOATC)...." It is not clear who is behind The Association of Appin Training Centers, but according to documents surfaced by Reuters, the organization didn't exist until after the lawsuit was filed against Reuters in Indian court.... If a relatively obscure company like AOATC or an oligarch like Rajat Khare can succeed in keeping their name out of the public discourse with strategic lawsuits, it sets a dangerous precedent for other larger, better-resourced, and more well-known companies such as Dark Matter or NSO Group to do the same. This would be a disaster for civil society, a disaster for security research, and a disaster for freedom of expression.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from SiliconANGLE:The Rust Foundation, which supports the development of the popular open-source Rust programming language... shared that Google LLC had made a $1 million contribution specifically earmarked for a C++/Rust interoperability effort known as the "Interop Initiative." The initiative aims to foster seamless integration between Rust and the widely used C++ programming language, addressing one of the significant barriers to Rust's adoption in legacy systems entrenched in C++ code. Rust has the ability to prevent common memory errors that plague C++ programs and offers a path toward more secure and reliable software systems. However, transitioning from C++ to Rust presents notable challenges, particularly for organizations with extensive C++ codebases. The Interop Initiative seeks to mitigate these challenges by facilitating smoother transitions and enabling organizations to leverage Rust's advantages without completely overhauling their existing systems. As part of the initiative, the Rust Foundation will collaborate closely with the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders and member organizations to develop a comprehensive scope of work. The collaborative effort will focus on enhancing build system integration, exploring artificial intelligence-assisted code conversion techniques and expanding upon existing interoperability frameworks. By addressing these strategic areas, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Rust across the software industry and hence contribute to advancing memory safety and reducing the prevalence of software vulnerabilities. A post on Google's security blog says they're excited to collaborate "to ensure that any additions made are suitable and address the challenges of Rust adoption that projects using C++ face. Improving memory safety across the software industry is one of the key technology challenges of our time, and we invite others across the community and industry to join us in working together to secure the open source ecosystem for everyone." The blog post also includes this quote from Google's VP of engineering, Android security and privacy. "Based on historical vulnerability density statistics, Rust has proactively prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from impacting the Android ecosystem. This investment aims to expand the adoption of Rust across various components of the platform." The Register adds:Lars Bergstrom, director of Android platform tools and libraries and chair of the Rust Foundation Board, announced the grant and said that the funding will "improve the ability of Rust code to interoperate with existing legacy C++ codebases.... Integrating Rust today is possible where there is a fallback C API, but for high-performance and high-fidelity interoperability, improving the ability to work directly with C++ code is the single biggest initiative that will further the ability to adopt Rust...." According to Bergstrom, Google's most significant increase in the use of Rust has occurred in Android, where interoperability started receiving attention in 2021, although Rust is also being deployed elsewhere.... Bergstrom said that as of mid-2023, Google had more than 1,000 developers who had committed Rust code, adding that the ad giant recently released the training material it uses. "We also have a team working on building out interoperability," he added. "We hope that this team's work on addressing challenges specific to Google's codebases will complement the industry-wide investments from this new grant we've provided to the Rust Foundation." Google's grant matches a $1 million grant last November from Microsoft, which also committed $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a "first-class language in our engineering systems." The Google-bucks are expected to fund further interoperability efforts, along the lines of KDAB's bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's biggest builder of recycling plants has teamed with a startup to install AI-powered systems for sorting recycling, reports the Washington Post. And now over the next few years, "The companies plan to retrofit thousands of recycling facilities around the world with computers that can analyze and identify every item that passes through a waste plant, they said Wednesday.""[S]orted" recyclables, particularly plastic, wind up contaminated with other forms of trash, according to Lokendra Pal, a professor of sustainable materials engineering at North Carolina State University... [W]aste plants don't catch everything. [AI startup] Greyparrot has already installed over 100 of its AI trash spotters in about 50 sorting facilities around the world, and [co-founder Ambarish] Mitra said as much as 30 percent of potentially recyclable material winds up getting lumped in with the trash that's headed for the landfill. Failing to recycle means companies have to make more things from scratch, including a lot of plastic from fossil fuels. Also, more waste ends up in landfills and incinerators, which belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and pollute their surroundings. Mitra said putting Greyparrot's AI tools in thousands of waste plants around the world can raise the percentage of glass, plastic, metal and paper that makes it to recycling facilities. "If we can move the needle by even 5 to 10 percent, that would be a phenomenal outcome on a planetary basis for greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact," he said. Cutting contamination would make recycled materials more valuable and raise the chances that companies would use them to make new products, according to Reck. "If the AI and the robots potentially helped to increase the quality of the recycling stream, that's huge," she said... Greyparrot's device is, basically, a set of visual and infrared cameras hooked up to a computer, which monitors trash as it passes by on a conveyor belt and labels it under 70 categories, from loose bottle caps (not recyclable!) to books (sometimes recyclable!) to aluminum cans (recyclable!). Waste plants could connect these AI systems to sorting robots to help them separate trash from recyclables more accurately. They could also use the AI as a quality control system to measure how well they're sorting trash from recyclables. That could help plant managers tinker with their assembly lines to recover more recyclables, or verify that a bundle of recyclables is free of contaminants, which would allow them to sell for a higher price. GreyParrot's co-founder said their trash-spotting computers "could one day help regulators crack down on companies that produce tsunamis of non-recyclable packaging," according to the article. "The AI systems are so accurate, he said, that they can identify the brands on individual items. 'There could be insights that make them more accountable for ... the commitments they made to the public or to shareholders,' he said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor suddenly stopped supporting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. But now Microsoft "has announced a temporary reprieve for developers who use VS Code to connect to servers, clouds, container, and other devices running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu:Microsoft [had] pushed out an update to VS Code that bumps its glibc requirement, dropping support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (which uses an older version of glibc) in the process. Innocuous though it sounds, that move had a huge impact, leaving thousands of developers who use VS Code unable to connect to/work with devices running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or other Linux distros using glibc 2.27, including RHEL 7, CentOS 7, and Amazon Linux 2. - "Screwed" was the term many of those affected used! Well, good news: Microsoft says it plans to release a 'recovery' update for VS Code soon. This will restore the ability for developers to use the text editor's remote dev tools to connect to/work with machines running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and other, older Linux distros. But only for the next 12 months. "We hope this will provide the needed time for you and your companies to migrate to newer Linux distributions," Microsoft's senior product manager for VS Code posted on GitHub. He added that the software will "show the appropriate dialog and banner that you are connecting to an OS that is not supported by VS Code." (The updated was released on Thursday.) He also thanked developers for their feedback and "for sharing your passion for VS Code and sharing how it is being used to enable various scenarios." Thanks to Slashdot reader motang for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Standard: California would ban all plastic shopping bags in 2026 under a new bill announced Thursday in the state Legislature. California already bans thin plastic shopping bags at grocery stores and other shops, but shoppers at checkout can purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly makes them reusable and recyclable. Democratic state Sen. Catherine Blakespear said people are not reusing or recycling those bags. She points to a state study that found the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed per person grew from 8 pounds per year in 2004 to 11 pounds per year in 2021. "It shows that the plastic bag ban that we passed in this state in 2014 did not reduce the overall use of plastic. It actually resulted in a substantial increase in plastic," Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said Thursday. "We are literally choking our planet with plastic waste." While California's bag ban would apply statewide, it would only end up impacting about half the state's population, according to Mark Murray, lead advocate for the environmental advocacy group Californians Against Waste. That's because most of the state's major cities already ban these types of thicker plastic bags. But a state law passed in 2014 and approved by voters in a 2016 referendum bans cities from passing new laws restricting plastic bag use. If the Legislature passes this bill, it would be up to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to decide whether to sign it into law. As San Francisco's mayor in 2007, Newsom signed the nation's first plastic bag ban.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gen Z is reviving the trend of reading physical books over digital ones, with a notable increase in library visits and book purchases, as evidenced by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner promoting literature and book clubs. The Guardian reports: This week the 22-year-old model Kaia Gerber launched her own book club, Library Science. Gerber, who this month appears on the cover of British Vogue alongside her supermodel mum, Cindy Crawford, describes it as "a platform for sharing books, featuring new writers, hosting conversations with artists we admire -- and continuing to build a community of people who are as excited about literature as I am." "Books have always been the great love of my life," she added. "Reading is so sexy." Gerber isn't alone. Last year in the UK 669m physical books were sold, the highest overall level ever recorded. Research from Nielsen BookData highlights that it is print books that gen Z favour, accounting for 80% of purchases from November 2021 to 2022. Libraries are also reporting an uptick in gen Z users who favour their quiet over noisy coffee shops. In the UK in-person visits are up 71%. While the BookTok charts -- a subsection of TikTok where avid readers post recommendations -- are regularly topped by fantasy and romance titles from authors such as Colleen Hoover, gen Z are reading a diverse range of genres. [...] "Overall we are seeing a move towards escapism through the rise in speculative fiction, romance and fantasy, but I think it would be a mistake to homogenise gen Z and say they're reading lighter," says the author and literary agent Abigail Bergstrom. "With the oversaturation and noise of the wild west digital landscape, they are also demanding higher standards, especially when it comes to the authority and expertise of a writer on a particular subject."Read more of this story at Slashdot.