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The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. From a report: The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit [PDF], filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works." It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times. The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative A.I. technologies -- so called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets -- and could carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is among a small number of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been hobbled by readers' migration to the internet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon aims to make online car purchases as seamless as getting everyday essentials. But it's not as easy as selling other items. WSJ: Car sales represent Amazon's next bet in e-commerce dominance and come after the Covid-19 pandemic made online car purchases more popular. Amazon executives want to make buying vehicles through its website as simple as purchasing toilet paper or dog food, and the company is looking to strike broad partnerships with carmakers. The company is set to face several challenges in expanding the program beyond a pilot phase for employees starting early next year: One is dealerships, which remain at the center of most new-car sales and depend on service revenue for profit incentives. A second will be trying to get customers who visit its website mainly for lower-priced items to turn to the platform for one of the biggest purchases of their lives. Amazon also will have to navigate different government regulations. "Customers tell us it's really hard to buy a car," Fan Jin, Amazon's director of vehicle sales, said in an interview. Vehicle-buying software is fragmented, with dealers using a range of software providers. Varying regulations across states also make it difficult. "It's a process that we've heard time and again could use improvement, and we have an opportunity to go and prove it," she said. When the new service launches later next year, Amazon said shoppers will be able to complete every step of the car-buying process through its website. Only new Hyundai vehicles will be available at the start. Consumers will have different financing options, but the company said it is still working through details. Eventually, Amazon wants to expand to trade-in vehicles and used cars. Many dealers might be loath to accept a high volume of online sales because they make a significant amount of money on service and warranty deals that customers agree to when they finance a car purchase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Moore's Law slowed to a crawl, chips, particularly those used in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), have steadily gotten hotter. In 2023 we saw accelerators enter the kilowatt range with the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 Superchips. We've known these chips would be hot for a while now -- Nvidia has been teasing the CPU-GPU franken-chip for the better part of two years. What we didn't know until recently is how OEMs and systems builders would respond to such a power-dense part. Would most of the systems be liquid cooled? Or, would most stick to air cooling? How many of these accelerators would they try to cram into a single box, and how big would the box be? Now that the first systems based on the GH200 make their way to market, it's become clear that form factor is very much being dictated by power density than anything else. It essentially boils down to how much surface area you have to dissipate the heat. Dig through the systems available today from Supermicro, Gigabyte, QCT, Pegatron, HPE, and others and you'll quickly notice a trend. Up to about 500 W per rack unit (RU) -- 1 kW in the case of Supermicro's MGX ARS-111GL-NHR -- these systems are largely air cooled. While hot, it's still a manageable thermal load to dissipate, working out to about 21-24 kW per rack. That's well within the power delivery and thermal management capacity of modern datacenters, especially those making use of rear door heat exchangers. However, this changes when system builders start cramming more than a kilowatt of accelerators into each chassis. At this point most of the OEM systems we looked at switched to direct liquid cooling. Gigabyte's H263-V11, for example, offers up to four GH200 nodes in a single 2U chassis. That's two kilowatts per rack unit. So while a system like Nvidia's air-cooled DGX H100 with its eight 700 W H100s and twin Sapphire Rapids CPUs has a higher TDP at 10.2 kW, it's actually less power dense at 1.2 kW/RU.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Legendary designer Jony Ive and OpenAI's Sam Altman are enlisting an Apple veteran to work on a new AI hardware project, aiming to create devices with the latest capabilities. From a report: As part of the effort, outgoing Apple executive Tang Tan will join Ive's design firm LoveFrom, which will shape the look and capabilities of the new products, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman, an executive who has become the face of modern AI, plans to provide the software underpinnings, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the endeavor isn't public.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big tech companies have vastly outspent venture capital groups with investments in generative AI start ups this year, as established giants use their financial muscle to dominate the much-hyped sector. From a report: Microsoft, Google and Amazon last year struck a series of blockbuster deals, amounting to two-thirds of the $27bn raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023, according to new data from private market researchers PitchBook. The huge outlay, which exploded after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, highlights how the biggest Silicon Valley groups are crowding out traditional tech investors for the biggest deals in the industry. The rise of generative AI -- systems capable of producing humanlike video, text, image and audio in seconds -- have also attracted top Silicon Valley investors. But VCs have been outmatched, having been forced to slow down their spending as they adjust to higher interest rates and falling valuations for their portfolio companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than two decades after J.K. Rowling introduced the world to a universe of magical creatures, forbidden forests and a teenage wizard, Harry Potter is finding renewed relevance in a very different body of literature: AI research. From a report: A growing number of researchers are using the best-selling Harry Potter books to experiment with generative artificial intelligence technology, citing the series' enduring influence in popular culture and the wide range of language data and complex wordplay within its pages. Reviewing a list of studies and academic papers referencing Harry Potter offers a snapshot into cutting-edge AI research -- and some of the thorniest questions facing the technology. In perhaps the most notable recent example, Harry, Hermione and Ron star in a paper titled "Who's Harry Potter?" that sheds light on a new technique helping large language models to selectively forget information. It's a high-stakes task for the industry: Large language models, which power AI chatbots, are built on vast amounts of online data, including copyrighted material and other problematic content. That has led to lawsuits and public scrutiny for some AI companies. The paper's authors, Microsoft researchers Mark Russinovich and Ronen Eldan, said they've demonstrated that AI models can be altered or edited to remove any knowledge of the existence of the Harry Potter books, including characters and plots, without sacrificing the AI system's overall decision-making and analytical abilities. The duo said they chose the books because of their universal familiarity. "We believed that it would be easier for people in the research community to evaluate the model resulting from our technique and confirm for themselves that the content has indeed been 'unlearned,'" said Russinovich, chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure. "Almost anyone can come up with prompts for the model that would probe whether or not it 'knows' the books. Even people who haven't read the books would be aware of plot elements and characters."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

National Amusements, the cinema chain and corporate parent giant of media giants Paramount and CBS, has confirmed it experienced a data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of tens of thousands of people. TechCrunch: The private media conglomerate said in a legally required filing with Maine's attorney general that hackers stole personal information on 82,128 people during a December 2022 data breach. Details of the December 2022 breach only came to light a year later, after the company began notifying those affected last week. According to Maine's notice, the company discovered the breach months later in August 2023, but did not say what specific personal information was taken. The data breach notice filed with Maine said that hackers also stole financial information, such as banking account numbers or credit card numbers in combination with associated security codes, passwords or secrets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon earlier this year announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you'll start seeing them: it's January 29th. From a report: "This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time," the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to "limited advertisements." "We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership," the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever performed a fresh reinstall of Windows 11, you'll know how long it takes and how much effort you need to make to get it started. Fortunately, Microsoft is taking note. As spotted in a recent update to the Windows 11 beta branch, the company is working on a way to reinstall your operating system through Windows Update, and no files are lost in the process. The newest update to the Windows Insider beta branch has added a new feature titled "Fix Problems using Windows Update." The feature is still a work in progress, so it doesn't work as it should right now. However, if you're on the Windows 11 Insider beta branch, you can see the button for yourself on the Recovery page, among the Windows 11 backup settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Biden's administration last week announced a new proposal aimed at banning logging in old-growth forests, a move meant to protect millions of trees that play a key role in fighting the climate crisis. From a report: The proposal comes from an executive order signed by the president on Earth Day in 2022 that directed the US Forest Service and the land management bureau to conduct an inventory of old-growth and mature forest groves as well as to develop policies that protect them. "We think this will allow us to respond effectively and strategically to the biggest threats that face old growth," the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, told the Washington Post. "At the end of the day, it will protect not just the forests but also the culture and heritage connected to the forests." The US Forest Service oversees 193m acres of forests and grasslands, 144m of which are forests. In its inventory conducted after Biden's executive order, the agency found that the vast majority of forests it oversees, about 80%, are either old-growth or mature forests. It found more than 32m acres of old-growth forests and 80m acres of mature forests on federal land. The land management bureau defines old-growth forests as those with trees that are in later stages of stand development, which typically means at least 120 years of growth, depending on species. The giant sequoias in California, for example, are old-growth trees. Mature forests, meanwhile, have trees that are in the development stage immediately before old growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan is preparing regulations that would require tech giants like Apple and Google to allow outside app stores and payments on their mobile operating systems, in a bid to curb abuse of their dominant position in the Japanese market. From a report: Legislation slated to be sent to the parliament in 2024 would restrict moves by platform operators to keep users in the operators' own ecosystems and shut out rivals, focusing mainly on four areas: app stores and payments, search, browsers, and operating systems. The plan is to allow the Japan Fair Trade Commission to impose fines for violations. If this is modeled on existing antitrust law, the penalties would generally amount to around 6% of revenue earned from the problematic activities. The details will be worked out this spring. The government will determine which companies the legislation applies to, based on criteria such as sales and user numbers. It is expected to affect mainly multinational giants, with no Japanese companies likely to be caught in the net. Apple does not allow apps to be downloaded onto iPhones through channels other than its own App Store. In-app payments also must go through Apple's system, which takes a cut of up to 30%. And although Google permits third-party app distribution platforms, it still requires apps to use its billing system. These effective monopolies on in-app payments can lead to users paying more for the same content or services on mobile devices than on personal computers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After promising early dumps of snow in some areas of Europe this autumn, the pattern of recent years resumed and rain and sleet took over. From a report: In the ski resorts of Morzine and Les Gets in the French Alps, the heavy rainfall meant that full opening of resorts was delayed until two days before Christmas, leaving the industry and the millions of tourists planning trips to stare at the sky in hope. But no amount of wishing and hoping will overcome what is an existential threat to skiing in the Alps, an industry worth $30bn that provides the most popular ski destination in the world. The science is clear, and is spelled out in carefully weighed-up peer reviewed reports. The most recent, this year, warned that at 2C of global heating above pre-industrial levels, 53% of the 28 European resorts examined would be at very high risk of a scarce amount of snow. Scarce snow has been defined as the poorest coverage seen on average every five years between 1961 and 1990. If the world were to hit 4C of heating, 98% of the resorts would be at very high risk of scarce snow cover. Another study has revealed the way in which snow cover in the Alps has had an "unprecedented" decline over the past 600 years, with the duration of the cover now shorter by 36 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Back in May 2021, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org touted the signing of a licensing agreement with WhiteHat Jr., allowing the edtech company with a controversial past (Whitehat Jr. was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, an edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm) to integrate Code.org's free-to-educators-and-organizations content and tools into their online tutoring service. Code.org did not reveal what it was charging Byju's to use its "free curriculum and open source technology" for commercial purposes, but Code.org's 2021 IRS 990 filing reported $1M in royalties from an unspecified source after earlier years reported $0. Coincidentally, Whitehat Jr. is represented by Aaron Kornblum, who once worked at Microsoft for now-President Brad Smith, who left Code.org's Board just before the lawsuit was filed. Fast forward to 2023 and the bloom is off the rose, as Court records show that Code.org earlier this month sued Whitehat Education Technology, LLC (Exhibits A and B) in what is called "a civil action for breach of contract arising from Whitehat's failure to pay Code.org the agreed-upon charges for its use of Code.org's platform and licensed content and its ongoing, unauthorized use of that platform and content." According to the filing, "Whitehat agreed [in April 2022] to pay to Code.org licensing fees totaling $4,000,000 pursuant to a four-year schedule" and "made its first four scheduled payments, totaling $1,000,000," but "about a year after the Agreement was signed, Whitehat informed Code.org that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled license payments." While the original agreement was amended to backload Whitehat's license fee payment obligations, "Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended" and "has continued to access Code.org's platform and content." That Byju's Whitehat Jr. stiffed Code.org is hardly shocking. In June 2023, Reuters reported that Byju's auditor Deloitte cut ties with the troubled Indian Edtech startup that was once an investor darling and valued at $22 billion, adding that a Byju's Board member representing the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had resigned with two other Board members. The BBC reported in July that Byju's was guilty of overexpanding during the pandemic (not unlike Zuck's Facebook). Ironically, the lawsuit Exhibits include screenshots showing Mark Zuckerberg teaching Code.org lessons. Zuckerberg and Facebook were once among the biggest backers of Code.org, although it's unclear whether that relationship soured after court documents were released that revealed Code.org's co-founders talking smack about Zuck and Facebook's business practices to lawyers for Six4Three, which was suing Facebook. Code.org's curriculum is also used by the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) initiative, but it is unclear what royalties -- if any -- Amazon pays to Code.org for the use of Code.org curriculum. While the AFE site boldly says, "we provide free computer science curriculum," the AFE fine print further explains that "our partners at Code.org and ProjectSTEM offer a wide array of introductory and advance curriculum options and teacher training." It's unclear what kind of organization Amazon's AFE ("Computer Science Learning Childhood to Career") exactly is -- an IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search failed to find any hits for "Amazon Future Engineer" -- making it hard to guess whether Code.org might consider AFE's use of Code.org software 'commercial use.' Would providing a California school district with free K-12 CS curriculum that Amazon boasts of cultivating into its "vocal champion" count as "commercial use"? How about providing free K-12 CS curriculum to children who live where Amazon is seeking incentives? Or if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies Amazon "funds computer science coursework" for schools as he attempts to counter a Congressional antitrust inquiry? These seem to be some of the kinds of distinctions Richard Stallman anticipated more than a decade ago as he argued against a restriction against commercial use of otherwise free software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel confirmed it will invest a total of $25 billion in Israel after securing $3.2 billion in incentives from the country's government. From a report: The outlay, announced by the Israeli government in June and unconfirmed by Intel until now, will go toward an expansion of the company's wafer fabrication site in Kiryat Gat, south of Tel Aviv. The incentives amount to 12.8% of Intel's planned investment. "The expansion plan for the Kiryat Gat site is an important part of Intel's efforts to foster a more resilient global supply chain, alongside the company's ongoing and planned manufacturing investments in Europe and the US," Intel said in a statement Tuesday. Intel is among chipmakers diversifying manufacturing outside of Asia, which dominates chip production. The semiconductor pioneer is trying to restore its technological heft after being overtaken by rivals including Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. President Joe Biden's administration on Tuesday declined to veto a government tribunal's decision to ban imports of Apple Watches based on a complaint from medical monitoring technology company Masimo. From a report: The U.S. International Trade Commission's (ITC) order will go into effect on Dec. 26, barring imports and sales of Apple Watches that use patent-infringing technology for reading blood-oxygen levels. Apple has included the pulse oximeter feature in its smart watches starting with its Series 6 model in 2020. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai decided not to reverse the ban following careful consultations, and the ITC's decision became final on Dec. 26, the Trade Representative's office said Tuesday. Apple can appeal the ban to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The company has paused the sales of its Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches in the United States since last week. The ban does not affect Apple Watch SE, a less expensive model, which will continue to be sold. Previously sold watches will not be affected by the ban. Masimo has accused Apple of hiring away its employees, stealing its pulse oximetry technology and incorporating it into the popular Apple Watch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Programmer and writer Jose Gilgado, writes about WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s that continues to work reliably well. Famously author George R.R. Martin used the application to write "A Song of Ice and Fire." "It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital," R.R. Martin said earlier, as we previously covered. Gilgado argues that WordStar 4.0 embodies the concept of finished software -- a software you can use forever with no unneeded changes. He adds: Sometimes, a software upgrade is a step backward: less usable, less stable, with new bugs. Even if it's genuinely better, there's the learning curve. You were efficient with the old version, but now your most used button is on the other side of the screen under a hidden menu. In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software provides a breath of fresh air. It's a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development. So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update, remember that sometimes, the best software is the one that doesn't change at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major streaming services test releasing children's content on YouTube and cut back on fare for kids. From a report: Netflix's share of U.S. streaming viewership by 2- to 11-year-olds fell to 21% in September from 25% two years earlier, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, YouTube's share jumped to 33% from 29.4% over the same period. That reality is changing major streaming services' approach to children's entertainment, from what shows and movies they make to where they release them. Many are pulling back on investments in children's content, and some streamers have started content for young viewers on such platforms as Google-owned YouTube and Roblox. [...] Netflix has also slimmed down its slate of animated children's originals, opting instead to rely more on third parties such as Skydance Animation, with which it just signed a multiyear deal to do animated films. Now, Netflix is focusing its youth programming resources on bigger swings, such as the animated film "Leo," starring Adam Sandler, its biggest animated debut ever in terms of views. The eight largest U.S. streamers, including Netflix, Warner's Max and Amazon Prime Video, added 53 originals catering to children and families in the first half of the year, down from 135 for the first half of 2022, according to Ampere. That represents a decrease of 61%, compared with a 31% decrease in overall originals across these streamers for the same period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Brazil's Amazon, armed men with a rogue police unit overseeing illegal mining operations intimidated journalists investigating regional violence and trafficking surges. Though Brazil's 2023 deforestation decreased, fires and attacks continued as governments deprioritized crime reduction. Illegal mining finances threats to the climate-critical rainforest, yet improving security was absent from the 2023 UN climate summit agenda. With complex criminal networks forging cross-border alliances and violence escalating, addressing this dilemma is pivotal to safeguarding the Amazon and its Indigenous peoples. Nature: Solutions to these multifaceted issues might not be simple, but practical steps exist. Nations must cooperate to guard against this violence. They must support local communities -- by increasing the state's presence in remote areas and promoting health care, education and sustainable economic development -- and help them to safeguard the rainforest. For example, Indigenous peoples in Peru and Brazil are using drones and GPS devices to monitor their land and detect threats from violent invaders. Indigenous peoples are the Amazon's best forest guardians, but they need more legally demarcated lands and protective measures, such as funding for Indigenous guards and rapid response and emergency protocols. In 2022, Colombia and Brazil saw the most deaths of environmental and land defenders worldwide. Developing effective strategies to enhance cooperation between law enforcement and local populations must also be a priority. To prevent irreversible damage to the rainforest and the climate, security in the Amazon must be added to the global climate agenda.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigeria's central bank has lifted a ban on transacting in cryptocurrencies, while saying global trends had shown a need to regulate such activities, the bank said in its latest circular. From a report: The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in Feb. 2021 barred banks and financial institutions from dealing in or facilitating transactions in crypto assets, citing money laundering and terrorism financing risks. Subsequently Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in May last year published regulations for digital assets that signalled Africa's most populous country was trying to find a middle ground between an outright ban on crypto assets and their unregulated use. In a circular dated Dec. 22, the CBN said current trends globally have shown there is a need to regulate the activities of virtual asset service providers (VASPs), which include cryptocurrencies and crypto assets. The latest guidelines spell out how banks and financial institutions (FI) should open accounts, provide designated settlement accounts and settlement services and act as channels for forex inflows and trade for firms transacting in crypto assets. VASPs would need to be licensed by the Nigerian SEC to engage in the crypto business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The source code for Grand Theft Auto 5 was reportedly leaked on Christmas Eve, a little over a year after the Lapsus$ threat actors hacked Rockstar games and stole corporate data. From a report: Links to download the source code were shared on numerous channels, including Discord, a dark web website, and a Telegram channel that the hackers previously used to leak stolen Rockstar data. In a post to a Grand Theft Auto leak channel on Telegram, the channel owner known as 'Phil' posted links to the stolen source code, sharing a screenshot of one of the folders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Occupations with the highest share of workers older than 65 have changed little, data from the past seven decades show. Bloomberg Businessweek: Americans may dream about being able to go off the clock when they reach retirement age, but a good number simply can't or won't. We compiled data on the occupations with the highest share of workers older than 65, going back seven decades. The job types held remarkably steady over the decades (farmers, tailors and clergy). A few faded out of the data with time -- blacksmiths, furriers and household washers, for instance. The data can't fully tell us why people in some professions keep at it longer than others. But we know they're largely low-paying jobs, which means workers have likely struggled to put aside money for retirement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of people living in California fell below 39 million this year, according to new census estimates, the lowest count since 2015. From a report: California's population dipped by about 75,000 from 2022 to 2023, estimates released Tuesday by the Census Bureau shows, with about 38,965,000 million people in the state this year. The state's population has fallen since its 2019 peak of 39.5 million, though the annual loss has also slowed each year. Between 2021 and 2022, California lost a net of about 104,000 people, or 0.3%, higher than the dip of 0.2% between 2022 and 2023. About 338,000 more people left California for other states than vice versa from July 2022 to July 2023, the Census Bureau data shows. That's slightly greater than the 333,000 from 2021 to 2022, and the most of any state. California historically loses more people to the rest of the country than it gains. The state partially offset its domestic loss via international migration, with a net of 151,000 people moving to California from outside the United States. That was the second-highest number of any state, behind Florida, and a 19% increase from 2021-22. And it was the highest total for California since 2015.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After thousands of U.S. flights were canceled or delayed over the holidays in 2022, most holiday travelers this year are off to a cheerier start this Christmas. But a few trouble spots were emerging on Christmas Day. From a report: Roughly 135 flights to, from or within the U.S. had been been cancelled as of 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time, while just over 1,100 were delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware. Airlines had canceled only 1.2% of U.S. flights so far this year as of Dec. 22, the lowest in five years. Nearly 3 million passengers were expected to pass through domestic airports during the busy holiday period, up 16% from 2022. Not everyone got off so lucky. Some passengers at Chicago's Midway International Airport this Christmas Eve were left stranded on Christmas Eve, according to CBS News Chicago, with the U.S. carrier most disrupted during last year's holiday period -- Southwest Airlines -- again experiencing problems. Southwest attributed the delays to foggy weather in Chicago, but passengers also told CBS2 that a shortage of workers was a factor. Those snafus also affected passengers at Denver International Airport, with Southwest canceling 293 flights on Sunday, while nearly 1,300 trips were delayed, FlightAware data shows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. officials are worried about hacking and insider theft of AI secrets, which China has denied. From a report: On a July day in 2018, Xiaolang Zhang headed to the San Jose, Calif., airport to board a flight to Beijing. He had passed the checkpoint at Terminal B when his journey was abruptly cut short by federal agents. After a tipoff by Apple's security team, the former Apple employee was arrested and charged with stealing trade secrets related to the company's autonomous-driving program. It was a skirmish in a continuing shadow war between the U.S. and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence. The two rivals are seeking any advantage to jump ahead in mastering a technology with the potential to reshape economies, geopolitics and war. Artificial intelligence has been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of critical U.S. technologies to protect, just as China placed it on a list of technologies it wanted its scientists to achieve breakthroughs on by 2025. China's AI capabilities are already believed to be formidable, but U.S. intelligence authorities have lately made new warnings beyond the threat of intellectual-property theft. Instead of just stealing trade secrets, the FBI and other agencies believe China could use AI to gather and stockpile data on Americans at a scale that was never before possible. China has been linked to a number of significant thefts of personal data over the years, and artificial intelligence could be used as an "amplifier" to support further hacking operations, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, speaking at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mint Mobile has disclosed a new data breach that exposed the personal information of its customers, including data that can be used to perform SIM swap attacks. From a report: Mint is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) offering budget, pre-paid mobile plans. T-Mobile has proposed paying $1.3 billion to purchase the company. The company began notifying customers on December 22nd via emails titled "Important information regarding your account," stating that they suffered a security incident and a hacker obtained customer information. "We are writing to inform you about a security incident we recently identified in which an unauthorized actor obtained some limited types of customer information," warns the Mint Mobile data breach notification. "Our investigation indicates that certain information associated with your account was impacted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google considered changing its app store pricing model to circumvent a regulatory crackdown, but abandoned a proposal to charge a set fee per app after it became clear that could cost the company billions of dollars, according to documents released late week. From a report: Google created Project Everest in 2021 to reconsider the Play Store billing model, according to the documents, which were released as part of an antitrust suit by Epic Games. Google last week lost the suit brought by the maker of Fortnite when a federal jury found the tech giant abused its monopoly power over the app store. Sparked by mounting pressure from regulators and developers over Google Play's hefty 30% commission, the presentation showed the search giant was concerned about staving off what it saw as potential regulatory overreach. "We can defend the status quo for a few months," Google said in the presentation. "Making proposed changes sooner may help support reasonable legislation, position Google as a leader, and prevent more draconian legislation." Project Everest explored charging developers piecemeal service fees for putting their apps or games in the Play Store, with additional fees for user downloads, updates and referrals. But the company estimated that model created "potential for significant loss" from $1 billion to $2 billion for apps and $6 billion to $9 billion for games.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration has spent much of the last two years bracing key U.S. networks and infrastructure against crippling cyberattacks from Russia, Iran and China. But it is following a different playbook as it ramps up its efforts to thwart digital threats from North Korea: Follow the crypto -- and stop it. From a report: Convinced North Korea primarily sees hacking as a way to funnel money back to the cash-strapped Kim Jong Un regime, the White House has focused on blocking the country's ability to launder the cryptocurrency it steals through its cyberattacks. In the last year, the administration has unveiled a flurry of sanctions against North Korean hacking groups, front companies and IT workers, and blacklisted multiple cryptocurrency services they use to launder stolen funds. Earlier this month, national security adviser Jake Sullivan announced a new partnership with Japan and South Korea aimed at cracking down on Pyongyang's crypto bonanza -- thereby choking off money to its nuclear and conventional weapons programs. "In countering North Korean cyber operations, our first priority has been focusing on their crypto heists," Anne Neuberger, the National Security Council's top cybersecurity official, said in an interview. The stepped-up effort to blunt North Korea's cyber operations is fueled by growing alarm about where the fruits of those attacks are going, Neuberger said. Hacking, she argued, has enabled North Korea to "either evade sanctions or evade the steps the international community has taken to target their weapons proliferation ... their missile regime, and the growth in the number of launches we've seen."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper published on the American Psychological Association: People are frequently invited to join others for fun social activities. They may be invited to lunch, to attend a sporting event, to watch the season finale of a television show, and so forth. Invitees -- those who are on the receiving ends of invitations -- sometimes accept invitations from inviters -- those who extend invitations -- but other times, invitees decline. Unfortunately, saying no can be hard, leading invitees to accept invitations when they would rather not. The present work sheds light on one factor that makes it so hard to decline invitations. We demonstrate that invitees overestimate the negative ramifications that arise in the eyes of inviters following an invitation decline. Invitees have exaggerated concerns about how much the decline will anger the inviter, signal that the invitee does not care about the inviter, make the inviter unlikely to offer another invitation in the future, and so forth. We also demonstrate that this asymmetry emerges in part because invitees exaggerate the degree to which inviters focus on the decline itself, as opposed to the thoughts ran through the invitee's head before deciding. Indeed, across multiple studies, we find support for this process through mediation and moderation, while simultaneously finding evidence against multiple alternative accounts. We conclude with a discussion of the contributions and limitations of this research, along with directions for future work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What would you like OpenAI to build/fix in 2024?" the company's CEO asked on X this weekend. But "Amid all the hysteria about ChatGPT and co, one thing is being missed," argues the Observer - "how energy-intensive the technology is."The current moral panic also means that a really important question is missing from public discourse: what would a world suffused with this technology do to the planet? Which is worrying because its environmental impact will, at best, be significant and, at worst, could be really problematic. How come? Basically, because AI requires staggering amounts of computing power. And since computers require electricity, and the necessary GPUs (graphics processing units) run very hot (and therefore need cooling), the technology consumes electricity at a colossal rate. Which, in turn, means CO2 emissions on a large scale - about which the industry is extraordinarily coy, while simultaneously boasting about using offsets and other wheezes to mime carbon neutrality. The implication is stark: the realisation of the industry's dream of "AI everywhere" (as Google's boss once put it) would bring about a world dependent on a technology that is not only flaky but also has a formidable - and growing - environmental footprint. Shouldn't we be paying more attention to this? Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Portland International Airport in Oregon understands holiday travel is stressful. So this season, it invited a few specialists..." writes the Washington Post. One TV station describes them as "therapy llamas... two 400-pound fluffballs serving as therapy animals" stationed at Portland International Airport (or PDX) earlier this week, for "travelers, in need of a calming moment." From the Washington Post:Airports around the globe use a variety of methods to inject some Zen into one of the busiest travel periods of the year. They decorate their halls in holiday lights, host carolers and concerts, and bring in therapy dogs for group canine counseling. Portland does all of the above. True to the city's quirky spirit, it also invites local camelids to the airport to canoodle with passengers. That's where Gregory, president and founder of Mountain Peaks Therapy Llamas & Alpacas, comes in. "PDX has an ongoing partnership with various therapy animal programs," said Allison Ferre, media relations manager with the Port of Portland, which operates the airport. "So this year, when we were bringing back holiday concessions programing, we just thought, "Who better to lead that parade than the llamas and alpacas?" This year's theme was "reindeer." Gregory and her daughter, Shannon Joy, dressed the pair in antler headbands, glittery halters with tinkling bells and poinsettia-adorned wreathes. Red velvet banners worn like saddles were inscribed with their names and silvery snowflakes. "They looked pretty fancy," Gregory said... Though the pair had to pass through security, they didn't have to submit to a pat down, which they might have enjoyed for the extra pets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's easy to default to giving the tech gifts that retailers tend to push on us this time of year..." notes Lifehacker senior writer Thorin Klosowski. "But before you give one, think twice about what you're opting that person into."A number of these gifts raise red flags for us as privacy-conscious digital advocates. Ring cameras are one of the most obvious examples, but countless others over the years have made the security or privacy naughty list (and many of these same electronics directly clash with your right to repair). One big problem with giving these sorts of gifts is that you're opting another person into a company's intrusive surveillance practice, likely without their full knowledge of what they're really signing up for... And let's not forget about kids. Long subjected to surveillance from elves and their managers, electronics gifts for kids can come with all sorts of surprise issues, like the kid-focused tablet we found this year that was packed with malware and riskware. Kids' smartwatches and a number of connected toys are also potential privacy hazards that may not be worth the risks if not set up carefully. Of course, you don't have to avoid all technology purchases. There are plenty of products out there that aren't creepy, and a few that just need extra attention during set up to ensure they're as privacy-protecting as possible. While we don't endorse products, you don't have to start your search in a vacuum. One helpful place to start is Mozilla's Privacy Not Included gift guide, which provides a breakdown of the privacy practices and history of products in a number of popular gift categories.... U.S. PIRG also has guidance for shopping for kids, including details about what to look for in popular categories like smart toys and watches.... Your job as a privacy-conscious gift-giver doesn't end at the checkout screen. If you're more tech savvy than the person receiving the item, or you're helping set up a gadget for a child, there's no better gift than helping set it up as privately as possible.... Giving the gift of electronics shouldn't come with so much homework, but until we have a comprehensive data privacy law, we'll likely have to contend with these sorts of set-up hoops. Until that day comes, we can all take the time to help those who need it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports:Last month, I received an alarming email from someone I did not know: Rui Zhu, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University Bloomington. Mr. Zhu had my email address, he explained, because GPT-3.5 Turbo, one of the latest and most robust large language models (L.L.M.) from OpenAI, had delivered it to him. My contact information was included in a list of business and personal email addresses for more than 30 New York Times employees that a research team, including Mr. Zhu, had managed to extract from GPT-3.5 Turbo in the fall of this year. With some work, the team had been able to "bypass the model's restrictions on responding to privacy-related queries," Mr. Zhu wrote. My email address is not a secret. But the success of the researchers' experiment should ring alarm bells because it reveals the potential for ChatGPT, and generative A.I. tools like it, to reveal much more sensitive personal information with just a bit of tweaking. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it does not simply search the web to find the answer. Instead, it draws on what it has "learned" from reams of information - training data that was used to feed and develop the model - to generate one. L.L.M.s train on vast amounts of text, which may include personal information pulled from the Internet and other sources. That training data informs how the A.I. tool works, but it is not supposed to be recalled verbatim... In the example output they provided for Times employees, many of the personal email addresses were either off by a few characters or entirely wrong. But 80 percent of the work addresses the model returned were correct. The researchers used the API for accessing ChatGPT, the article notes, where "requests that would typically be denied in the ChatGPT interface were accepted..." "The vulnerability is particularly concerning because no one - apart from a limited number of OpenAI employees - really knows what lurks in ChatGPT's training-data memory." And there was a broader related warning in another article published the same day. Microsoft may be building an AI silo in a walled garden, argues a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's school of information, calling the development "detrimental for technology development, as well as costly and potentially dangerous for society and the economy."[In January] Microsoft sealed its OpenAI relationship with another major investment - this time around $10 billion, much of which was, once again, in the form of cloud credits instead of conventional finance. In return, OpenAI agreed to run and power its AI exclusively through Microsoft's Azure cloud and granted Microsoft certain rights to its intellectual property... Recent reports that U.K. competition authorities and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission are scrutinizing Microsoft's investment in OpenAI are encouraging. But Microsoft's failure to report these investments for what they are - a de facto acquisition - demonstrates that the company is keenly aware of the stakes and has taken advantage of OpenAI's somewhat peculiar legal status as a non-profit entity to work around the rules... The U.S. government needs to quickly step in and reverse the negative momentum that is pushing AI into walled gardens. The longer it waits, the harder it will be, both politically and technically, to re-introduce robust competition and the open ecosystem that society needs to maximize the benefits and manage the risks of AI technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Share this holiday fairy tale with your loved ones," urges the Free Software Foundation. A company offers you a tool to make your life easier, but, when you use it, you find out that the tool forces you to use it only in the way the tool's manufacturer approves. Does this story ring a bell? It's what millions of software users worldwide experience again and again, day after day. It's also the story of Wendell the Elf and the ShoeTool. They suggest enjoying the video "to remind yourself why you shouldn't let your tools tell you how to use them." First released in 2019, it's available on the free/open-source video site PeerTube, a decentralized (and ActivityPub-federated) platform powered by WebTorrent. They've also created a shortened URL for sharing on social media (recommending the hashtag #shoetool ). "And, of course, you can adapt the video to your liking after downloading the source files."Or, you can share the holiday fairy tale with your loved ones so that they can learn not to let their tools control them. If we use free software, we don't need anyone's permission to, for example, modify our tools ourselves or install modifications shared by others. We don't need permission to ask someone else to tailor our tools to serve our wishes, exercise our creativity. The Free Software Foundation believes that everyone deserves full control over their computers and phones, and we hope this video helps you explain the importance of free software to your friends and family. "Don't let your tools tell you how to use them," the video ends. "Join the Free Software Foundation!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For Epic's Christmas special this year, they're giving away for free "an AAA game that only launched back in 2022..." reports ComicBook.com - a game that invites players to "ally with a powerful spectral entity on theiraquest for vengeance." ComicBook.com notes that the game giveaway is "not for long... Starting today and lasting until the late morning of December 25."The latest free game on the Epic Games Store is almost certainly the biggest title that users have received so far to coincide with the holidays... Initially released back in March 2022, Ghostwire: Tokyo is developed by Tango Gameworks and published by Bethesda. Since this is a AAA title, Ghostwire: Tokyo normally retails for $59.99 in total. As such, for it to now be free means that this is one of the best deals that Epic has had so far to close out the year... Epic's ongoing holiday promotion is set to extend to January and should see 17 games in total being handed out at no cost. This promotion will continue tomorrow on Christmas Day when a new freebie lands on the PC platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from CNET:Marking its 60th year on television, the British time-travel series will close out 2023 with one last anniversary special that arrives on Christmas Day. Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor helms the Tardis in The Church on Ruby Road, which centers on an abandoned baby who grows up looking for answers... Disney Plus will stream Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road on Monday, Dec. 25, at 12:55 p.m. ET (9:55 a.m. PT) in all regions except the UK and Ireland, where it will air on the BBC. In case you missed it, viewers can also watch David Tennant starring in the other three anniversary specials: The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle. All releases are available on Disney Plus. But what's interesting is CNET goes on to explain "why a VPN could be a useful tool."Perhaps you're traveling abroad and want to stream Disney Plus while away from home. With a VPN, you're able to virtually change your location on your phone, tablet or laptop to get access to the series from anywhere in the world. There are other good reasons to use a VPN for streaming too. A VPN is the best way to encrypt your traffic and stop your ISP from throttling your speeds... You can use a VPN to stream content legally as long as VPNs are allowed in your country and you have a valid subscription to the streaming service you're using. The U.S. and Canada are among the countries where VPNs are legalRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux..." emphasizes its page on the Fedora project Wiki. "As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee." But Phoronix reports that "One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations."The change proposal explains: "The /usr/sbin directory becomes a symlink to bin, which means paths like /usr/bin/foo and /usr/sbin/foo point to the same place. /bin and /sbin are already symlinks to /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, so effectively /bin/foo and /sbin/foo also point to the same place. /usr/sbin will be removed from the default $PATH." Fedora years ago merged /bin and /usr/bin and as the last step they want to unify /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. The change proposal argues that with this change, "Fedora becomes more compatible with other distributions." - We have /sbin/ip while Debian has /bin/ip - We have /bin/chmem and /bin/isosize, but Debian has /sbin/chmem and /sbin/isosize - We also have /sbin/{addpart,delpart,lnstat,nstat,partx,ping,rdma,resizepart,ss,udevadm,update-alternatives}, while Debian has those in under /bin, etc. - Fedora becomes more compatible with Arch, which did the merge a few years ago. The proposal on the Fedora project Wiki offers this summary:The split between /bin and /sbin is not useful, and also unused. The original split was to have "important" binaries statically linked in /sbin which could then be used for emergency and rescue operations. Obviously, we don't do static linking anymore. Later, the split was repurposed to isolate "important" binaries that would only be used by the administrator. While this seems attractive in theory, in practice it's very hard to categorize programs like this, and normal users routinely invoke programs from /sbin. Most programs that require root privileges for certain operations are also used when operating without privileges. And even when privileges are required, often those are acquired dynamically, e.g. using polkit. Since many years, the default $PATH set for users includes both directories. With the advent of systemd this has become more systematic: systemd sets $PATH with both directories for all users and services. So in general, all users and programs would find both sets of binaries... Since generally all user sessions and services have both directories in $PATH, this split actually isn't used for anything. Its main effect is confusion when people need to use the absolute path and guess the directory wrong. Other distributions put some binaries in the other directory, so the absolute path is often not portable. Also, it is very easy for a user to end up with /sbin before /bin in $PATH, and for an administrator to end up with /bin before /sbin in $PATH, causing confusion. If this feature is dropped, the system became a little bit simpler, which is useful especially for new users, who are not aware of the history of the split.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Of course AI is a bubble," argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow. The real question is what happens when it bursts? Doctorow examines history - the "irrational exuberance" of the dotcom bubble, 2008's financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. ("A few programmers were trained in Rust... but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.") So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind?The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They're expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run.... Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments... There just aren't that many customers for a product that makes their own high-stakes projects betAter, but more expensive. There are many low-stakes applications - say, selling kids access to a cheap subscription that generates pictures of their RPG characters in action - but they don't pay much. The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can't think of anything that belongs in it. There are some promising avenues, like "federated learning," that hypothetically combine a lot of commodity consumer hardware to replicate some of the features of those big, capital-intensive models from the bubble's beneficiaries. It may be that - as with the interregnum after the dotcom bust - AI practitioners will use their all-expenses-paid education in PyTorch and TensorFlow (AI's answer to Perl and Python) to push the limits on federated learning and small-scale AI models to new places, driven by playfulness, scientific curiosity, and a desire to solve real problems. There will also be a lot more people who understand statistical analysis at scale and how to wrangle large amounts of data. There will be a lot of people who know PyTorch and TensorFlow, too - both of these are "open source" projects, but are effectively controlled by Meta and Google, respectively. Perhaps they'll be wrestled away from their corporate owners, forked and made more broadly applicable, after those corporate behemoths move on from their money-losing Big AI bets. Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they'll do if the AI bubble doesn't pop - wrangling about "AI ethics" and "AI safety." But - as with all the previous tech bubbles - very few people are talking about what we'll be able to salvage when the bubble is over. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Of course AI is a bubble," argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow. The real question is what happens when it bursts? Doctorow examines history - the "irrational exuberance" of the dotcom bubble, 2008's financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. ("A few programmers were trained in Rust... but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.") So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind?The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They're expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run.... Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments... There just aren't that many customers for a product that makes their own high-stakes projects betAter, but more expensive. There are many low-stakes applications - say, selling kids access to a cheap subscription that generates pictures of their RPG characters in action - but they don't pay much. The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can't think of anything that belongs in it. There are some promising avenues, like "federated learning," that hypothetically combine a lot of commodity consumer hardware to replicate some of the features of those big, capital-intensive models from the bubble's beneficiaries. It may be that - as with the interregnum after the dotcom bust - AI practitioners will use their all-expenses-paid education in PyTorch and TensorFlow (AI's answer to Perl and Python) to push the limits on federated learning and small-scale AI models to new places, driven by playfulness, scientific curiosity, and a desire to solve real problems. There will also be a lot more people who understand statistical analysis at scale and how to wrangle large amounts of data. There will be a lot of people who know PyTorch and TensorFlow, too - both of these are "open source" projects, but are effectively controlled by Meta and Google, respectively. Perhaps they'll be wrestled away from their corporate owners, forked and made more broadly applicable, after those corporate behemoths move on from their money-losing Big AI bets. Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they'll do if the AI bubble doesn't pop - wrangling about "AI ethics" and "AI safety." But - as with all the previous tech bubbles - very few people are talking about what we'll be able to salvage when the bubble is over. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom "is headed for one of the lowest starts in the history of the DC Cinematic Universe," writes the Hollywood Reporter, "with a projected four-day Christmas weekend gross of $40 million, including $28 million for the three days." "The sequel cost $205 million," notes Variety, "and ranks among the worst debuts of the year for a superhero movie."It's softer than November's misfire The Marvels ($47 million), which ended its run as the lowest-grossing installment in the history of Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Marvels was shocking because it was the rare MCU movie to tumble out of the gate. By contrast, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is shaping up to be the fourth of four DC movies this year to crumble at the box office. Already in 2023, The Flash ($55 million debut), Shazam! Fury of the Gods ($30 million debut) and Blue Beetle ($25 million debut) majorly flopped in theaters. December releases are known to start slower but enjoy staying power through the new year. That was the case with 2018's Aquaman, which opened unspectacularly to $67 million and powered to $335 million in North America (and $1.15 billion globally). However, "Aquaman 2" faces choppier waters. Beyond the minimal buzz and terrible reviews, The Lost Kingdom is the final installment before DC's new bosses, James Gunn and Peter Safran, reset the sprawling superhero universe without heroes like Jason Momoa's Arthur Curry to save the day. A movie consultant tells Variety that superhero films should perform better in 2024 with the release of Joker 2, Venom 3 and Deadpool 3. As for Aquaman, the Hollywood Reporter writes that "The hope now is that moviegoing will pick up in earnest once presents are unwrapped on Monday. (Hollywood studios never like it when Dec. 25 falls on a Monday since it messes with the weekend.)" The Verge argues that, for better or worse, Aquaman 2 is the quintessential product of the DC Extended Universe:In Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom, you can plainly see just how much attention Warner Bros. has been paying to the public's response to its own unwieldy franchise of comic book adaptations and to the direction that its competitors like Disney / Marvel have been taking their projects lately. But in the wake of the entire DCEU being shuttered and set aside in favor of a hard reboot, you can also see The Lost Kingdom as a monument to everything that was great (which was not a lot) and terrible about this particular superhero movie experiment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Canadian cybersecurity firm has warned that as soon as 2025, quantum computers could make current encryption methods useless. But now Slashdot reader christoban shares a "reality check" - an IEEE Spectrum takedown with the tagline "Hype is everywhere, skeptics say, and practical applications are still far away."The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That's the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry... [T]here's growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology. Meta's head of AI research Yann LeCun recently made headlines after pouring cold water on the prospect of quantum computers making a meaningful contribution in the near future. Speaking at a media event celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Meta's Fundamental AI Research team he said the technology is "a fascinating scientific topic," but that he was less convinced of "the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful." While LeCun is not an expert in quantum computing, leading figures in the field are also sounding a note of caution. Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services, says there is a "tremendous amount of hype" in the industry at the minute and "it can be difficult to filter the optimistic from the completely unrealistic." A fundamental challenge for today's quantum computers is that they are very prone to errors. Some have suggested that these so-called "noisy intermediate-scale quantum" (NISQ) processors could still be put to useful work. But Painter says there's growing recognition that this is unlikely and quantum error-correction schemes will be key to achieving practical quantum computers. The leading proposal involves spreading information over many physical qubits to create "logical qubits" that are more robust, but this could require as many as 1,000 physical qubits for each logical one. Some have suggested that quantum error correction could even be fundamentally impossible, though that is not a mainstream view. Either way, realizing these schemes at the scale and speeds required remains a distant goal, Painter says... "I would estimate at least a decade out," he says. A Microsoft technical fellow believes there's fewer applications where quantum computers can really provide a meaningful advantage, since operating a qubit its magnitudes slower than simply flipping a transistor, which also makes the throughput rate for data thousands or even millions of times slowers. "We found out over the last 10 years that many things that people have proposed don't work," he says. "And then we found some very simple reasons for that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's like visiting an old friend for the holidays," according to this article:Approaching his 86th birthday, Donald Knuth - Stanford's beloved computer science guru - honored what's become a long-standing tradition. He gave a December "Christmas lecture" that's also streamed online for all of his fans... More than 60 years ago, back in 1962, a 24-year-old Donald Knuth first started writing The Art of Computer Programming - a comprehensive analysis of algorithms which, here in 2023, he's still trying to finish. And 30 years ago Knuth also began making rare live appearances each December in front of audiences of Stanford students... Recently Stanford uploaded several decades of Knuth's past Christmas lectures, along with a series of 22 videos of Knuth from 1985 titled "the 'Aha' Sessions'" (courses in mathematical problem-solving). There are also two different sets of five videos from 1981 showing Knuth introducing his newly-created typesetting system TeX. There are even 12 videos from 1982 of what Knuth calls "an intensive course about the internal details." And on Dec. 6, wearing his traditional brown holiday sweater, Knuth gave yet another live demonstration of the beautifully clear precision that's made him famous.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With everyone worrying about climate change, CNN shares a list of reasons to feel positive:The year 2023 is on track to see the biggest increase in renewable energy capacity to date, according to the International Energy Agency. China, the world's biggest climate polluter, has made lightning advances in renewables, with the country set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early. A report published in June found that China's solar capacity is now greater than the rest of the world's nations combined, in a surge described by the report's author, Global Energy Monitor, as "jaw-dropping...." The popularity of electric vehicles has surged this year, with American sales at an all-time high. People in China and Europe are snapping up EVs in large numbers as well... Americans purchased 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, an annual record, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Electric vehicles accounted for about 8% of all new vehicles sales in the US during the first half of 2023, according to the report. In China, EVs accounted for 19% of all vehicle sales, and worldwide, they made up 15% of new passenger vehicle sales. EV sales in Europe were up 47% in the first nine months of 2023, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA) Other positive developments from the article:"For more than six days straight, between October 31 to November 6, the nation of more than 10 million people relied solely on renewable energy sources - setting an exciting example for the rest of the world.""Deforestation in Brazil fell by 22.3% in the 12 months through July, according to data from the national government, as President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva started to make progress on his pledge to rein in the rampant forest destruction that occurred under his predecessor...""The Earth's ozone layer is on track to recover completely within decades, a UN-backed panel of experts announced in January, as ozone-depleting chemicals are phased out across the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"10 years later, the demise of Google Reader still stings," writes PC Magazine. But "Time marches on and corporate priorities shift. Here are the products and services that took a final bow in 2023..." Some of the highlights?'Clubhouse' Clones In the early days of the pandemic, when Zoom happy hours and sourdough starters proliferated, Clubhouse burst onto the scene with an app that facilitated audio-only chats between groups large and small. Tech giants quickly churned out their own Clubhouse clones, but these party-line throwbacks were not long for this world. Facebook was the first to go, ditching its Live Audio Rooms in December 2022, but 2023 also saw the end of Reddit Talk, Spotify Live, and Amazon's live radio DJ Amp app. [X Spaces is still around] Amazon Smile Launched in 2013, AmazonSmile saw Amazon donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases made through smile.amazon.com to charity, with consumers able to choose from over a million charitable organizations to support. On Feb. 20, however, the program shut down because it "has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped," Amazon said at the time. NFTs on Facebook and Instagram Remember non-fungible tokens (NFTs)? Somehow, crypto bros convinced people to spend big bucks on what are essentially JPEGs. (Don't try to convince me otherwise.) Meta got in on the action in 2022, allowing Instagram users to create NFTs and Facebook users to share them. It didn't exactly set either social network on fire and Meta said in March it would be "winding down digital collectibles." Cortana on Windows In June, AI claimed its latest victim by coming after Microsoft's Cortana. The voice assistant never really made a splash compared to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, and with the launch of Bing Chat (now Copilot), Microsoft removed Cortana as a built-in app on Windows. Also on the list are Blizzard's Overwatch League, third-party Reddit clients, and Venmo as a payment option on Amazon (effective this January 10). Looking further into the future, Gmail's Basic HTML View disappears in 2024, while Wordpad will eventually be removed in an unspecified future release of Windows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fast Company:Providers of critical infrastructure in the United States are doing a sloppy job of defending against cyber intrusions, the National Security Council tells Fast Company, pointing to recent Iran-linked attacks on U.S. water utilities that exploited basic security lapses [earlier this month]. The security council tells Fast Company it's also aware of recent intrusions by hackers linked to China's military at American infrastructure entities that include water and energy utilities in multiple states. Neither the Iran-linked or China-linked attacks affected critical systems or caused disruptions, according to reports. "We're seeing companies and critical services facing increased cyber threats from malicious criminals and countries," Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging tech, tells Fast Company. The White House had been urging infrastructure providers to upgrade their cyber defenses before these recent hacks, but "clearly, by the most recent success of the criminal cyberattacks, more work needs to be done," she says... The attacks hit at least 11 different entities using Unitronics devices across the United States, which included six local water facilities, a pharmacy, an aquatics center, and a brewery... Some of the compromised devices had been connected to the open internet with a default password of "1111," federal authorities say, making it easy for hackers to find them and gain access. Fixing that "doesn't cost any money," Neuberger says, "and those are the kinds of basic things that we really want companies urgently to do." But cybersecurity experts say these attacks point to a larger issue: the general vulnerability of the technology that powers physical infrastructure. Much of the hardware was developed before the internet and, though they were retrofitted with digital capabilities, still "have insufficient security controls," says Gary Perkins, chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm CISO Global. Additionally, many infrastructure facilities prioritize "operational ease of use rather than security," since many vendors often need to access the same equipment, says Andy Thompson, an offensive cybersecurity expert at CyberArk. But that can make the systems equally easy for attackers to exploit: freely available web tools allow anyone to generate lists of hardware connected to the public internet, like the Unitronics devices used by water companies. "Not making critical infrastructure easily accessible via the internet should be standard practice," Thompson says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The iMessage connection software that powers Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud is now 100% open source," Beeper announced late this week. " Anyone who wants can use it or continue development." But while Beeper says it's done trying to bring iMessage to Android, CNET reports that the whole battle was "deeply tied" to Apple's ongoing strategy to control the mobile market:The tide seems to be changing, however: Apple said last month it would be opening up its Messages app (likely due to European regulation) to work with the newer, more feature-rich texting protocol called RCS. This hopefully will lead to a more modern and secure messaging experience when texting between an iPhone and an Android phone, and lead away from the aging SMS and MMS standards. Unfortunately, green bubbles will continue to persist even if there might be little to no functional difference. While third-party apps like Nothing Chats attempted and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android, Apple will likely never release the app on Google's mobile operating system. Until RCS is fully adopted, companies are creating services to allow access to iMessage via Android phones. Apple, for its part, has been quick to block apps like Beeper Mini, citing security concerns. This, however, is raising eyebrows from lawmakers regarding competition in the messaging space and Apple's tight control over the market... Beeper in a December 21 blog post told users to grab a jailbroken iPhone and install a free Beeper tool that'll generate iMessage registration codes to keep the service operational. It's such a roundabout and potentially expensive way of trying to get iMessage on Android that it likely won't be worth it for most people. For those not willing to go out and jailbreak an iPhone, Beeper said in a now-deleted blog post that it would allow people to rent a jailbroken unit for a small monthly fee starting next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says that he stands by the company's decision to charge for API access," writes the blog 9to5Mac, "despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo." In an interview with FastCo, Huffman is unrepentant about the API decision, but says it could have been better communicated... "[H]e defended the company's decision to limit free access to its API as a necessary measure to foil AI-training freeloaders. 'Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,' he told me. 'At the same time, we have been taken advantage of by some of the largest companies in the world.'" The incident ended up reappearing in Reddit's own "recap" pages showing highlights from its popular subreddits. For its Technology subreddit, the official recap shows that two most popular posts were "Apollo for Reddit is shutting down" and "Reddit sparks outrage after a popular app developer said it wants him to pay $20 million a year for data access." And Reddit's official recap also shows that discussion leading to the second-most popular comment of the entire year for the subreddit. "Users supply all the content, and reddit turns around with this huge fuck you to its users, without whom it's just another crappy link aggregator. No, reddit, fuck you and your money grab." The first most-popular comment appeared in a related discussion, headlined "Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts." The comment? Reddit: You're fired!Moderator: I don't even work here. The topic also dominated the official recap for the Programming subreddit, where it was the subject of all three of the top comments - and all three of the year's top posts: Ironically, FastCo headlined its interview "As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity." ("Rebellious moderators. Large language models' peril and promise. Maybe a long-awaited IPO. Amid it all, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the web megacommunity is on a roll.")Other work has addressed concerns that bubbled to the surface during the moderator dust-up, such as accessibility issues: "I told the team, 'Just show up and ship,'" Huffman says. The official Reddit apps are finally compatible with screen readers used by users with vision impairments, with full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility guidelines planned by the end of 2024. As for AI's potential to transform the Reddit experience, Huffman is less prone to exuberant overpromising than the average tech company CEO. But the same attributes that led third-party assemblers of large language models to crave access to the company's corpus of information could help it leverage the technology to its own benefit... Rather than involving the most obvious AI functionality, like a Reddit chatbot, the examples he provides relate to moderation of problem content. For instance, the latitude that individual moderators have to govern their communities means that they can set rules that Huffman describes as "sometimes strict and sometimes esoteric." Newbies may run afoul of them by accident and have their posts yanked just as they're trying to join the conversation. In response, Reddit is currently prototyping an AI-powered feature called "post guidance." It'll flag rule-violating material before it's ever published: "The new user gets feedback, and the mod doesn't have to deal with it," says Huffman. He adds that Reddit will also use AI to crack down on willful bad behavior, such as bullying and hate speech, and that he expects progress on that front in 2024... Members already engage in acts of commerce such as tipping Photoshop wizards to remove ex-boyfriends from images; he says the company plans to facilitate these transactions with a payment system "that will basically involve users sending money to users, whether it's rewarding them for content or paying for digital services or digital goods or [physical] services." "People are trying to start businesses on Reddit, but it wasn't really built for that," he adds. "So just trying to flesh out that ecosystem, I think that'll be very powerful."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:In February, a Canadian cybersecurity firm delivered an ominous forecast to the U.S. Department of Defense. America's secrets - actually, everybody's secrets - are now at risk of exposure, warned the team from Quantum Defen5e (QD5). QD5's executive vice president, Tilo Kunz, told officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency that possibly as soon as 2025, the world would arrive at what has been dubbed "Q-day," the day when quantum computers make current encryption methods useless. Machines vastly more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers would be capable of cracking the codes that protect virtually all modern communication, he told the agency, which is tasked with safeguarding the U.S. military's communications. In the meantime, Kunz told the panel, a global effort to plunder data is underway so that intercepted messages can be decoded after Q-day in what he described as "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, according to a recording of the session the agency later made public. Militaries would see their long-term plans and intelligence gathering exposed to enemies. Businesses could have their intellectual property swiped. People's health records would be laid bare... One challenge for the keepers of digital secrets is that whenever Q-day comes, quantum codebreakers are unlikely to announce their breakthrough. Instead, they're likely to keep quiet, so they can exploit the advantage as long as possible. The article adds that "a scramble is on to protect critical data. Washington and its allies are working on new encryption standards known as post-quantum cryptography... Beijing is trying to pioneer quantum communications networks, a technology theoretically impossible to hack, according to researchers... "In a quantum communications network, users exchange a secret key or code on subatomic particles called photons, allowing them to encrypt and decrypt data. This is called quantum key distribution, or QKD."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Millions of Star Wars fans get nostalgia pangs during the holiday season," reports the Washington Post, "when they are accustomed to seeing broadcasts of their beloved movies.... FX, now owned by Disney, has multiple Star Wars marathons on tap this month, including a marathon on December 23 and 24." The program-planning director at Disney's Freedom channel even calls Star Wars a "Christmas-adjacent" franchise. And now, long-time Slashdot reader H_Fisher writes...Call it a Life Day miracle, even if nobody was asking for it. YouTube historian and retro-tech enthusiast Perifractic uploaded a restored, mostly-complete 4K upscale of the "infamous" Star Wars Holiday Special to his channel on Wednesday. From the video summary: "Using Topaz Labs [Video AI] with a few other techniques we've meticulously upscaled & restored the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special to 5120x3840, with stereo elements, to the best quality the technology currently allows." Jokingly labeling the resulting file "5K" (8K video height, but tagged "4K" by YouTube due to its original 4:3 aspect ratio), the upscaled version unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) replaces some songs and omits some segments that were flagged by YouTube's copyright watchdog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago when a city-size asteroid struck a shallow sea off the coast of what is now Mexico," writes CNN. "But exactly how the mass extinction of 75% of the species on Earth unfolded in the years that followed the cataclysmic impact has remained unclear."Previous research suggested that sulfur released during the impact, which left the 112-mile-wide (180-kilometer-wide) Chicxulub crater, and soot from wildfires triggered a global winter, and temperatures plunged. However, a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests that fine dust made from pulverized rock thrown up into Earth's atmosphere in the wake of the impact likely played a greater role. This dust blocked the sun to an extent that plants were unable to photosynthesize, a biological process critical for life, for almost two years afterward. "Photosynthesis shutting down for almost two years after impact caused severe challenges (for life)," said lead study author and planetary scientist Cem Berk Senel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "It collapsed the food web, creating a chain reaction of extinctions." To reach their findings, scientists developed a new computer model to simulate the global climate after the asteroid strike. The model was based on published information on Earth's climate at that point in time, as well as new data from sediment samples taken from the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota that captured a 20-year period during the aftermath of the strike.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 months ago U.S. grandmaster Hans Niemannn was accused of cheating in a tournament after beating Magnus Carlsen (five-time world chess champion). Last week a report was finally issued by the world governing body of chess, CNN reports:FIDE's report said that analysis from professor Kenneth Regan - a computer chess cheating expert - showed "instances of cheating" by Niemann in around 32-55 games on the online chess platform; far less than the 100 suggested by Chess.com. According to the FIDE report, Regan also found "discrepancies" in Niemann's statement that he had only cheated between the ages of 12 and 16. However, the games of 2017 and the games against Bok in August of 2020 occurred after he turned 17 in June. Another important discrepancy is that the cheating took place in rated online games," said the FIDE report. The report also said there was no "statistical evidence to support GM Niemann cheating in over the-board games" in an analysis of 13 tournaments over the past three years. "Additionally, it was determined that GM NiemannAs overall results in the Sinquefield Cup showed no statistical basis for cheating," the report said. "GM Niemann's performance through the years is characterized by peaks and troughs, consistent with his expected level of play," according to the FIDE report. FIDE's Ethics and Disciplinary Commission (EDC) said in the report that it concluded the case was "an in-between situation," one "where a complaint can be well-founded without the suspected person not found guilty of cheating.... The EDC also found that Carlsen was not guilty on three charges - reckless or manifestly unfounded accusation of chess cheating, disparagement of FIDE's reputation and Interest, and attempt to undermine honor. However, the EDC did find Carlsen guilty of withdrawing from the 2022 Sinquefield Cup "without valid reason." He was fined 10,000 ($10,800) as a result. Meanwhile, Forbes reports that the world Rapid Chess Championship begins Monday in Uzbekistan and runs through December 31. "Norwegian chess legend Magnus Carlsen will compete."Read more of this story at Slashdot.