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Government researchers in the U.S. are studying methods to help identify hackers based on the code they use to carry out cyberattacks. From a report: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the lead federal research agency for the intelligence community, plans to develop technologies that could speed up investigations for identifying perpetrators of cyberattacks. "The number of attacks is increasing far more than the number of forensic experts that are available to go after these attacks," said Kristopher Reese, who is managing the research program at IARPA and holds a doctorate in computer science and engineering. The lack of forensic resources means hackers who target small organizations or companies that don't fall under critical infrastructure sectors often escape identification, he said. Tools that are developed as part of the planned 30-month research project won't replace human analysts, who are crucial for identifying social and political dynamics that might explain why a particular hacking group targeted a victim, Reese said. But using artificial intelligence to analyze code used in cyberattacks will make investigations more efficient, he said. IARPA is accepting pitches from researchers until next month and plans to begin research next summer. [...] There hasn't been enough research into how analyzing code can reveal a hacker's identity, Reese said. Behavioral traits evident in code can reveal specific countries where hackers might be from or even the university where they were trained, he said. Some companies also have style guides outlining how employees should program, which could leave traces that indicate a person worked there, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SonicSpike writes: With several asterisks, qualification and caveats, Mickey Mouse in his earliest form will be the leader of the band of characters, films and books that will become public domain as the year turns to 2024. In a moment many close observers thought might never come, at least one version of the quintessential piece of intellectual property and perhaps the most iconic character in American pop culture will be free from Disney's copyright as his first screen release, the 1928 short "Steamboat Willie," featuring both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, becomes available for public use. "This is it. This is Mickey Mouse. This is exciting because it's kind of symbolic," said Jennifer Jenkins, a professor of law and director of Duke's Center for the Study of Public Domain, who writes an annual Jan. 1 column for "Public Domain Day." "I kind of feel like the pipe on the steamboat, like expelling smoke. It's so exciting." U.S. law allows a copyright to be held for 95 years after Congress expanded it several times during Mickey's life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ten years ago, a Dutch scientist unveiled a $330,000 lab-grown hamburger made from cow cells grown in petri dishes. It took six weeks to culture the patty. A chef cooked it onstage as journalists watched. Reactions ranged from "unpleasant" to "beeflike." The scientist expected supermarket sales in a decade. His company and others have since raised over $2 billion but have little to show, only recently making one pound of chicken monthly. Despite bold promises of mass production, low emissions, and better nutrition, commercial viability remains elusive. Bloomberg Business: The company [Upside Foods], in a letter from its attorney to Bloomberg Businessweek, says plans for scaling up have been an evolution saddled with "realities and complexities of doing something that has never been done before. Innovation rarely happens in a straight and continuous line." The dream is moist, meaty flesh self-multiplying ad infinitum in high-tech, stainless steel cell-growing chambers. But according to internal company documentation and eight former employees, most of whom requested anonymity because they don't have permission to discuss confidential information, Upside at the moment is actually growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh. This labor-intensive chicken has higher levels of cholesterol and lead than the real thing, publicly available company documentation shows. Even if that sounds remotely desirable, some scientists say the whole energy-intensive endeavor may actually be worse for the environment, especially with chicken, which has the smallest carbon footprint of anything at the local butcher. All of which points to this question: Why exactly are we chasing lab-grown chicken?[...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Group's Naughty Dog studio has cancelled an online version of its popular console game The Last of Us. From a report: Naughty Dog announced today that the multiplayer spin-off of the hit series is no longer in development, citing concerns about managing ongoing content for a live-service game while still trying to produce the single-player blockbusters the PlayStation studio is famous for. "We realize many of you have been anticipating news around the project that we've been calling The Last of Us Online," Naughty Dog wrote in an update. "There's no easy way to say this: We've made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on that game." The studio said that as production on the project ramped up, it became clear that "we'd have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games." The choices were apparently between becoming a "solely live-service games studio" in the mold of modern day Bungie, which makes Destiny 2, or "continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog's heritage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations' Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees. From a report: Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they're purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit's "Nature Day" events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets-- "as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions," Crowther said. The popularity of planting new trees is a problem -- at least partly -- of Crowther's own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab's research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. "This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date," the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect. This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only "one of the most effective" solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.) Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to "kill greenwashing" of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage -- that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon. "Killing greenwashing doesn't mean stop investing in nature," he says. "It means doing it right. It means distributing wealth to the Indigenous populations and farmers and communities who are living with biodiversity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will expand its use of advanced OLED screens to iPads and MacBooks and is considering eventually introducing foldable tablets, a move set to further shake up the $150 billion display industry as it shifts away from traditional LCD screens, Asian news outlet Nikkei reported Friday. From the report: OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, displays are already used in most premium smartphones, including iPhones. Apple plans to deploy the tech in its high-end iPads next year, multiple tech industry executives told Nikkei Asia. An OLED MacBook model is also under development for production in the second half of 2025 at the earliest, the people said. The growing penetration of OLED is a significant win for Samsung Display and LG Display of South Korea and China's BOE Technology Holding, which have all bet heavily on this expensive display technology. On the flip side, it could be a blow to display makers that do not have much presence in this segment, including JDI and Sharp of Japan, and AUO and Innolux of Taiwan. Apple has also started evaluating the possibility of making foldable iPads after it deploys the flexible OLED screens on the tablet, but it does not have a concrete timeline for doing so, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The iPhone maker is not the first company to adopt OLED displays for tablets. Huawei, for instance, has been a significant driver of this trend, which in turn has helped strengthen the Chinese display supply chain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos candidly acknowledged Blue Origin's slow progress (compared to SpaceX). From a report: "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to." How is Blue Origin going to speed up? "We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of withholding viewership data, Netflix earlier this week released statistics showing its top viewed titles from January-June 2023. The winner with over 800 million hours watched was The Night Agent. Though the steamy, soapy Sex/Life scored over 120 million hours, the warm coming-of-age series Sex Education had under 30 million. Netflix claimed "success comes in all shapes and sizes," but co-CEO Ted Sarandos admitted the data guides business decisions. So while Netflix says stats aren't everything, pouring resources into sure bets like The Night Agent seems likely as competition grows post-Hot Strike Summer. The show is what some call "just OK TV" -- not offensive, not groundbreaking, but reliably watched. Wired adds: This era of Just OK also comes as Netflix captures the King of Reality TV throne. Shows like Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset are becoming cultural juggernauts, and the streamer shows no sign of slowing down, especially now that the Squid Game spinoff, Squid Game: The Challenge, is getting major traction. True, Netflix is still putting out artful content. A show like Wednesday, for example, had more than 507 million hours viewed and is also currently up for 12 Emmys. Netflix, on the whole, is nominated for a whopping 103 Emmys. That's impressive, but also, it's down from the 160 nods it got at its peak in 2020 and fewer than the 127 nabbed by (HBO) Max, which crushed thanks to shows like The White Lotus, The Last of Us, and Succession. You see where this is going. Netflix likes to tout its prestige shows, but also has to keep its paying customers, who left in droves in 2022 before partly coming back as Netflix cracked down on password sharing. To that end, it behooves Netflix to make more Ginny & Georgia, more Night Agent, more You. One analysis of the data found that the most-watched film, according to Netflix's data dump, was the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother, which accumulated about 250 million hours watched in six months. Variety puts that level of engagement up there with Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Not a bad showing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soon after payment-processing giant Wirecard reported in June 2020 that nearly $2 billion had gone missing from its balance sheet, its chief operating officer Jan Marsalek boarded a private jet out of Austria. After a landing in Belarus, he was whisked by car to Moscow, where he got a Russian passport under an assumed name. Western intelligence and security officials now say they have reached the unsettling conclusion that Marsalek had likely been a Russian agent for nearly a decade. From a report: Marsalek already stands accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Following multiple international investigations, officials from intelligence, police and judiciary agencies in several countries now say the 43-year-old native of Austria used his defunct payments company to illegally help Russian spy agencies move money to fund covert operations around the world. One of the most wanted men in the world, Marsalek has also provided assistance to the mercenary organization of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late Russian warlord, and is now involved in the reconfiguration of his business empire in Africa on behalf of Russian officials from his new domicile in Dubai, according to Western intelligence. Wirecard got its start processing payments for pornography websites on its way to becoming an Internet finance behemoth. During its heyday, the company claimed to process $140 billion of transactions a year on behalf of a quarter million businesses, making it a rival of Square and PayPal. It was briefly valued at more than any German bank. Former associates remember Marsalek as a bon vivant who at one point rented a Munich mansion for 35,000 euros, or $38,000, a month. He was making millions of dollars a year in salary and crisscrossing the globe in private jets. He was also obsessed with the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, often intimating that he had connections with intelligence officers, they say -- claims many dismissed as bluster.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Criminal suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police under the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, according to a unanimous ruling issued (PDF) today by Utah's state Supreme Court. The questions addressed in the ruling could eventually be taken up by the US Supreme Court, whether through review of this case or a similar one. The case involves Alfonso Valdez, who was arrested for kidnapping and assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Police officers obtained a search warrant for the contents of Valdez's phone but couldn't crack his passcode. Valdez refused to provide his passcode to a police detective. At his trial, the state "elicited testimony from the detective about Valdez's refusal to provide his passcode when asked," today's ruling said. "And during closing arguments, the State argued in rebuttal that Valdez's refusal and the resulting lack of evidence from his cell phone undermined the veracity of one of his defenses. The jury convicted Valdez." A court of appeals reversed the conviction, agreeing "with Valdez that he had a right under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution to refuse to provide his passcode, and that the State violated that right when it used his refusal against him at trial." The Utah Supreme Court affirmed the court of appeals ruling. The Valdez case does not involve an order to compel a suspect to unlock a device. Instead, "law enforcement asked Valdez to verbally provide his passcode," Utah justices wrote. "While these circumstances involve modern technology in a scenario that the Supreme Court has not yet addressed, we conclude that these facts present a more straightforward question that is answered by settled Fifth Amendment principles." Ruling against the state, the Utah Supreme Court said it "agree[s] with the court of appeals that verbally providing a cell phone passcode is a testimonial communication under the Fifth Amendment."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have pinpointed the cause of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, "finding that the severity of illness is influenced by how much of a hormone called GDF15 the growing fetus makes," reports Science Magazine. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. From the report: GDF15 is present in the blood of nonpregnant people and is known to be associated with nausea; it's also been tested as a weight loss aid because of its tendency to suppress appetite. Levels of the hormone rise sharply in early pregnancy and increase throughout gestation. Pregnant people with higher GDF15 concentrations have been documented as having a higher risk of vomiting and nausea. Some researchers suggest the hormone-caused aversion to some smells and tastes might encourage an expectant parent to avoid foods potentially dangerous to the fetus. To find out more about GDF15 changes during pregnancy, University of Cambridge physician-scientist Stephen O'Rahilly and colleagues studied half a dozen pregnant people who were known from previous genetic screening to produce a slightly different version of the GDF15 protein from their fetuses. Researchers could take advantage of that difference to trace whether GDF15 in the parent's blood originated in the parental or fetal genome: Almost all of it came from the fetus, O'Rahilly says. The team also took a closer look at the link between GDF15 levels and pregnancy sickness. Consistent with previous research, questionnaires from more than 300 participants showed that people who reported vomiting and nausea had significantly higher levels of circulating GDF15 on average than people without these symptoms. The researchers also found elevated levels of GDF15 in an analysis of more than 50 women hospitalized with hyperemesis gravidarum. Still, hormone levels alone couldn't explain the difference in sickness severity. "There was a big overlap" in GDF15 levels between the groups, O'Rahilly says. He and co-author Marlena Fejzo, a researcher at the University of Southern California, suspected that people's sensitivity to GDF15 might also play a role. (Fejzo began to study the condition after her own pregnancy loss following hyperemesis gravidarum.) To test the idea, the researchers studied 10 nonpregnant people with a rare genetic variant known to carry a heightened risk of hyperemesis gravidarum. These people had reduced GDF15 levels in their blood, hinting that naturally low levels of the hormone might predispose someone to sickness during pregnancy. The researchers found the opposite when they asked 20 pregnant people with beta thalassemia, a blood disorder associated with high GDF15 levels, about their pregnancy symptoms: Just 5% of this group reported nausea or vomiting. O'Rahilly's lab found a similar pattern in animal experiments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is, once again, having trouble transmitting any scientific or systems data back to Earth. "The 46-year-old spacecraft is capable of receiving commands, but a problem seems to have arisen with the probe's computers," reports Space.com. Slashdot readers quonset and ArchieBunker shared the news. From the report: Voyager 1's flight data system (FDS), which collects onboard engineering information and data from the spacecraft's scientific instruments, is no longer communicating as expected with the probe's telecommunications unit (TMU), according to a NASA blog post on Dec. 12. When functioning properly, the FDS compiles the spacecraft's info into a data package, which is then transmitted back to Earth using the TMU. Lately, that data package has been "stuck," the blog post said, "transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros." Voyager's engineering team traced the problem back to the FDS, but it could be weeks before a solution is found. In May 2022, Voyager 1 experienced transmitting issues for several months before a workaround was found. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 experienced an unplanned "communications pause" earlier this year after a routine sequence of commands triggered a 2-degree change in the spacecraft's antenna orientation. This prevented it from receiving commands or transmitting data back to Earth until NASA fixed the issue a week later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle -- producing verifiable and valuable new information that did not previously exist. "It's not in the training data -- it wasn't even known," says coauthor Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind. Large language models have a reputation for making things up, not for providing new facts. Google DeepMind's new tool, called FunSearch, could change that. It shows that they can indeed make discoveries -- if they are coaxed just so, and if you throw out the majority of what they come up with. FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it's fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental math and computer science that DeepMind has made using AI. First Alpha Tensor found a way to speed up a calculation at the heart of many different kinds of code, beating a 50-year record. Then AlphaDev found ways to make key algorithms used trillions of times a day run faster. Yet those tools did not use large language models. Built on top of DeepMind's game-playing AI AlphaZero, both solved math problems by treating them as if they were puzzles in Go or chess. The trouble is that they are stuck in their lanes, says Bernardino Romera-Paredes, a researcher at the company who worked on both AlphaTensor and FunSearch: "AlphaTensor is great at matrix multiplication, but basically nothing else." FunSearch takes a different tack. It combines a large language model called Codey, a version of Google's PaLM 2 that isfine-tuned on computer code, with other systems that reject incorrect or nonsensical answers and plug good ones back in. The researchers started by sketching out the problem they wanted to solve in Python, a popular programming language. But they left out the lines in the program that would specify how to solve it. That is where FunSearch comes in. It gets Codey to fill in the blanks -- in effect, to suggest code that will solve the problem. A second algorithm then checks and scores what Codey comes up with. The best suggestions -- even if not yet correct -- are saved and given back to Codey, which tries to complete the program again. After a couple of million suggestions and a few dozen repetitions of the overall process -- which took a few days -- FunSearch was able to come up with code that produced a correct and previously unknown solution to the cap set problem, which involves finding the largest size of a certain type of set. Imagine plotting dots on graph paper. [...] To test its versatility, the researchers used FunSearch to approach another hard problem in math: the bin packing problem, which involves trying to pack items into as few bins as possible. This is important for a range of applications in computer science, from data center management to e-commerce. FunSearch came up with a way to solve it that's faster than human-devised ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Google is releasing a tool to help users diagnose problems with their Pixel phones. Users can launch the app by entering #*#7287#*# on the dial pad, allowing them to check whether their phone is working correctly before or after a repair. There are a bunch of diagnostic tools available within the app. While users can run a full diagnostic test to detect issues across the entire device, there are also options to run individual tests for physical defects and problems affecting the phone's display, sensors, and connectivity. The new tool is available on all Pixel phones in English. Aside from the diagnostics app, Google is introducing redesigned repair manuals the company says are "easier for technicians and DIYers to use." Users can download repair manuals from Google's website in English and French, but they're only available for the Pixel Fold, Pixel 8, and Pixel 8 Pro for now. Google says it will add repair manuals for previous and future devices "in the coming months." There's also a new Repair Mode Google introduced earlier this month, which Pixel Phone owners can toggle on when their device is getting repaired. The feature is meant to protect users' private information while their phone is in the hands of a technician [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Natasha Singer reports via The New York Times: According to new research from Stanford University, the popularization of A.I. chatbots has not boosted overall cheating rates in schools (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). In surveys this year of more than 40 U.S. high schools, some 60 to 70 percent of students said they had recently engaged in cheating -- about the same percent as in previous years, Stanford education researchers said. "There was a panic that these A.I. models will allow a whole new way of doing something that could be construed as cheating," said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education who has surveyed high school students for more than a decade through an education nonprofit she co-founded. But "we're just not seeing the change in the data." ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI in San Francisco, began to capture the public imagination late last year with its ability to fabricate human-sounding essays and emails. Almost immediately, classroom technology boosters started promising that A.I. tools like ChatGPT would revolutionize education. And critics began warning that such tools -- which liberally make stuff up -- would enable widespread cheating, and amplify misinformation, in schools. Now the Stanford research, along with a recent report from the Pew Research Center, are challenging the notion that A.I. chatbots are upending public schools.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's parent company, Alphabet, is launching a new company called "Renew Home." The new company will pull in some other projects from Nest and the rest of Alphabet to become a supposed one-stop shop for power savings and clean energy usage. The core concept is partnering with power companies to obtain data about the current condition of the power grid and using that data to change consumer habits. The new company is bankrolled by Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), an Alphabet venture capital firm. The first existing service getting pulled into Renew Home is Nest Renew. This service for Nest Thermostats uses power company data to tell consumers how their electricity is being generated and what it costs. That data lets your thermostat do things like automatically shift heating and cooling to times of day when energy is cheaper or cleaner, and shows various reports about the cleanness of the energy you've been using. (Nest's feature that lets utility companies remotely take control of your thermostat, Rush Hour Rewards, does not seem to be part of Renew Home.) Another Alphabet service being pulled into Renew Home is OhmConnect, which is the same basic idea as Nest's grid data-power thermostat adjustments but for more than just your thermostat. OhmConnect is compatible with a very small list of smart devices, like Nest-rival Ecobee and Honeywell thermostats, TL-Link's "Kasa" smart home system, and Tesla vehicles. The backbone of the service appears to be the in-house "OhmPlug" smart outlet, which can monitor the energy usage of anything that plugs into the wall. By seeing that you've turned these smart devices during peak usage times, OhmConnect offers people rewards like gift cards or cash for not using power when the grid is at capacity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amrita Khalid reports via The Verge: Proton has released a desktop version of its Proton Mail app that will give users full access to both Proton Mail and Proton Calendar and (eventually) the ability to view your emails offline. The desktop app is available in beta is optimized for both Windows and macOS, and encrypts sent emails end-to-end just like with the browser version, according to the Swiss company, while offline access to emails will be available "soon." [...] It's important to note that you'll still need internet access to both send and encrypt your emails on Proton. But the offline feature will let you view and draft emails while traveling, during a power outage, or any other situation where you don't have access to the internet. Proton is also bringing encrypted auto-forwarding to paid users, both on its desktop and browser versions, though the encryption for forwards will only apply when the forwarded emails go to other Proton users. The company says it has made improvements to Proton Calendar, too, including a fully searchable web version. Not everyone will be able to access Proton's desktop app right away. Proton is restricting access to its paid "Visionary" tier for legacy users at first (though the company is reopening subscriptions to that tier through January 3rd, 2024). The plan is to make the desktop app available to all users in early 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is now available to users in the European Union. "Today we're opening Threads to more countries in Europe," wrote Zuckerberg in a post on the platform. "Welcome everyone." MacRumors reports: The move comes five months after the social media network launched in most markets around the world, but remained unavailable to EU-based users due to regulatory hurdles. [...] In addition to creating a Threads profile for posting, users in the EU can also simply browse Threads without having an Instagram account, an option likely introduced to comply with legislation surrounding online services. The expansion into a market of 448 million people should see Threads' user numbers get a decent boost. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a company earnings call in October that Threads now has "just under" 100 million monthly users. Since its launch earlier this year it has gained a web app, an ability to search for posts, and a post editing feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Hackers compromised the code behind a crypto protocol used by multiple web3 applications and services, the software maker Ledger said on Thursday. Ledger, a company that makes a widely used and popular crypto hardware and software wallet, among other products, announced on X (previously Twitter) that someone had pushed out a "malicious version" of its Ledger Connect Kit, a library that decentralized apps (dApps) made by other companies and projects use to connect to the Ledger wallet service. "A genuine version is being pushed to replace the malicious file now. Do not interact with any dApps for the moment. We will keep you informed as the situation evolves," Ledger wrote. Soon after, Ledger posted an update saying that the hackers had replaced the genuine version of its software some six hours earlier, and that the company was investigating the incident and would "provide a comprehensive report as soon as it's ready." After this story was published, Ledger spokesperson Phillip Costigan shared more details about the hack with TechCrunch and on X. Costigan said that a former Ledger employee was victim of a phishing attack on Thursday, which gave the hackers access to their former employee's NPMJS account, which is a software registry that was acquired by GitHub. From there, the hackers published a malicious version of the Ledger Connect Kit. "The malicious code used a rogue WalletConnect project to reroute funds to a hacker wallet," Costigan said. Then, Ledger deployed a fix within 40 minutes of the company becoming aware of the hack. The malicious file, however, was live for round 5 hours, but "the window where funds were drained was limited to a period of less than two hours," according to Costigan. Ledger also "coordinated" with WalletConnect which "quickly disabled the the rogue project," essentially stopping the attack, according to Costigan. Costigan also said Ledger pushed out a genuine software update that is "safe to use." "We are actively talking with customers whose funds might have been affected, and working proactively to help those individuals at this time," the Ledger spokeperson said, adding that the company believes it has identified the hackers' wallet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission has taken a step toward prohibiting early termination fees charged by cable and satellite TV providers. From a report: If given final approval, the FCC action would also require cable and satellite providers to provide a prorated credit or rebate to customers who cancel before a billing period ends. The new rules are being floated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the FCC voted to approve this week in a 3-2 vote, with both Republicans dissenting. The NPRM seeks public comment on the proposed rules and could lead to a final vote in a few months or so. "Today's action proposes to adopt customer service protections that prohibit cable operators and DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) providers from imposing a fee for the early termination of a cable or DBS video service contract," the FCC said. "Additionally, the NPRM recommends the adoption of customer service protections to require cable and DBS providers to grant subscribers a prorated credit or rebate for the remaining whole days in a monthly or periodic billing cycle after the subscriber cancels service." FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, "Consumers are tired of these junk fees. They now have more choices when it comes to video content. But these friction-filled tactics to keep us subscribing to our current providers are aggravating and unfair. So today we kick off a rulemaking to put an end to these practices." Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association opposes the plan and said it will submit comments to support "consumer choice and competitive parity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon, which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean. From a report: The technology will enable a satellite to deliver data to a cruise ship, say, even if the spacecraft isn't in range of an Amazon ground station connected to the internet. Instead, the laser will pass the request on to another satellite that has a clear view of a ground station. The two prototype satellites successfully tested the technology, which is officially called optical inter-satellite links, Amazon said on Thursday. "If you're going to serve maritime customers, air customers, you have got to be able to get data up to your satellites," said Rajeev Badyal, who leads Amazon's Project Kuiper internet-from-space initiative. "And in the middle of the ocean, it's difficult if not impossible" to install ground stations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is about to launch its grand plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome that many websites use to track your activity across the web for profit. From a report: Starting on January 4th, Google will start testing its new Tracking Protection feature that will eventually restrict website access to third-party cookies by default. It will come to a very small subset of Chrome users at the start, specifically to one percent of users globally. Afterward, Google plans to phase out the use of third-party cookies for all users in the second half of 2024. If you're randomly selected to try Tracking Protection, Google will notify you when opening Chrome on desktop or Android. If there are issues detected by Chrome while you're browsing, a prompt will appear asking if you'd like to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for the site.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel unveiled new computer chips on Thursday, including Gaudi3, an AI chip for generative AI software. Gaudi3 will launch next year and will compete with rival chips from Nvidia and AMD that power big and power-hungry AI models. From a report: The most prominent AI models, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, run on Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. It's one reason Nvidia stock has been up nearly 230% year-to-date while Intel shares are up 68%. And it's why companies like AMD and, now Intel, have announced chips that they hope will attract AI companies away from Nvidia's dominant position in the market. While the company was light on details, Gaudi3 will compete with Nvidia's H100, the main choice among companies that build huge farms of the chips to power AI applications, and AMD's forthcoming MI300X, when it starts shipping to customers in 2024. Intel has been building Gaudi chips since 2019, when it bought a chip developer called Habana Labs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Motors' Cruise robotaxi unit announced today that it will lay off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce. The news follows the departure of nine executives amid an ongoing safety investigation following an inccident in which a pedestrian was dragged by one of the company's self-driving cars. CNBC reports: The company had 3,800 employees before Thursday's cuts, which also follow a round of contractor layoffs at Cruise last month. Affected employees will receive paychecks until Feb. 12 and at least an additional eight weeks of pay, plus severance based on tenure. A Cruise representative also told CNBC that the company's goal is now to work on a fully driverless L4 service, as well as relaunching ride-hailing in one city to start. In a statement, a Cruise spokesperson said, "We shared the difficult news that we are reducing our workforce, primarily in commercial operations and related corporate functions. These changes reflect our decision to focus on more deliberate commercialization plans with safety as our north star. We are supporting impacted Cruisers with strong severance and benefits packages and are grateful to the departing employees who played important roles in building Cruise and supporting our mission." GM added, "GM supports the difficult employment decisions made by Cruise as it reflects their more deliberate path forward, with safety as the north star. We are confident in the team and committed to supporting Cruise as they set the company up for long-term success with a focus on trust, accountability and transparency."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe said US regulators are probing the company's cancellation rules for software subscriptions, an issue that has long been a source of ire for customers. From a report: The company has been cooperating with the Federal Trade Commission on a civil investigation of the issue since June 2022, Adobe said Wednesday in a filing. A settlement could involve "significant monetary costs or penalties," the company said. Users of Adobe programs including Photoshop and Premiere have long complained about the expense of canceling a subscription, which can cost more than $700 annually for individuals. Subscribers must cancel within two weeks of buying a subscription to receive a full refund; otherwise, they incur a prorated penalty. Some other digital services such as Spotify and Netflix don't charge a cancellation fee. Digital subscriptions have been a recent focus for the FTC. It proposed a rule in March that consumers must be able to cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up for them. "Too often, companies make it difficult to unsubscribe from a service, wasting Americans' time and money on things they may not want or need," President Joe Biden said in a social media post at the time. Adobe said the FTC alerted the company in November that commission staff say "they had the authority to enter into consent negotiations to determine if a settlement regarding their investigation of these issues could be reached. We believe our practices comply with the law and are currently engaging in discussion with FTC staff."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Economist reports: "Shake, shake, shake, shake," Taylor Swift sings from the stage of Lumen Field in Seattle at 10.35 in the evening on July 22nd. The fans respond, enthusiastically; the stadium duly shakes; a nearby seismometer takes note. To pop aficionados "Shake it off" is an empowering up-tempo anthem played at 160 beats per minute. To the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which is designed to monitor earthquakes, it is a 2.6 hertz signal in which the amplitude of the acceleration was as large as one centimetre per second, per second. The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as "Beast Mode." The "Beast Quake" went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco. [...] Dr Caplan-Auerbach wanted to see whether such resonant amplification might also be at play elsewhere, and to distinguish between the effect of the music itself and the audience's response. Her concert-night data showed two distinct sets of signals, one in higher frequencies (30-80hz), one in lower frequencies (1-8hz). The higher-frequency signals were present during the sound check, when the band were on stage but the stadium empty, and absent during the concerts' "surprise songs," played without the band by Ms Swift alone. The lower frequencies were absent when the audience had yet to arrive. Clearly those higher frequencies were from the music itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Information: In the future, [Google] plans to use Gemini across nearly its entire line of products, from its search engine to its productivity applications and an AI assistant called Pixie that will be exclusive to its Pixel devices, two people familiar with the matter said. [...] The rollout of Pixie, an AI assistant exclusively for Pixel devices, could boost Google's hardware business at a time when tech companies are racing to integrate their hardware with new AI capabilities. Pixie will use the information on a customer's phone -- including data from Google products like Maps and Gmail -- to evolve into a far more personalized version of the Google Assistant, according to one of the people with knowledge of the project. The feature could launch as soon as next year with the Pixel 9 and the 9 Pro, this person said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel launched its Intel Core Ultra processors for AI-powered PCs at its AI Everywhere event today. From a report: The big chip maker said these processors spearhead a new era in computing, offering unparalleled power efficiency, superior compute and graphics performance, and an unprecedented AI PC experience to mobile platforms and edge devices. Available immediately, these processors will be used in over 230 AI PCs coming from renowned partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, and more. The Intel Core Ultra processors represent an architectural shift for Intel, marking its largest design change in 40 years. These processors harness the Intel 4 process technology and Foveros 3D advanced packaging, leveraging leading-edge processes for optimal performance and capabilities. The processors boast a performance-core (P-core) architecture enhancing instructions per cycle (IPC). Efficient-cores (E-cores) and low-power Efficient-cores (LP E-cores). They deliver up to 11% more compute power compared to competitors, ensuring superior CPU performance for ultrathin PCs. Features of Intel Core Ultra Intel Arc GPU: Featuring up to eight Xe-cores, this GPU incorporates AI-based Xe Super Sampling, offering double the graphics performance compared to prior generations. It includes support for modern graphics features like ray tracing, mesh shading, AV1 encode and decode, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.1 20G.AI Boost NPU: Intel's latest NPU, Intel AI Boost, focuses on low-power, long-running AI tasks, augmenting AI processing on the CPU and GPU, offering 2.5x better power efficiency compared to its predecessors.Advanced Performance Capabilities: With up to 16 cores, 22 threads, and Intel Thread Director for optimized workload scheduling, these processors boast a maximum turbo frequency of 5.1 GHz and support for up to 96 GB DDR5 memory capacity.Cutting-edge Connectivity: Integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6E and support for discrete Intel Wi-Fi 7 deliver blazing wireless speeds, while Thunderbolt 4 ensures connectivity to multiple 4K monitors and fast storage with speeds of 40 Gbps.Enhanced AI Performance: OpenVINO toolkits, ONNX, and ONNX Runtime offer streamlined workflow, automatic device detection, and enhanced AI performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pope Francis has called for a legally binding international treaty to regulate AI, saying algorithms must not be allowed to replace human values and warning of a "technological dictatorship" threatening human existence. From a report: The pope made his call on Thursday in a message for the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Peace, which is celebrated on Jan. 1. The title of the message, which is traditionally sent to world leaders and heads of institutions such as the United Nations, is "Artificial Intelligence and Peace." [...] "The global scale of artificial intelligence makes it clear that, alongside the responsibility of sovereign states to regulate its use internally, international organizations can play a decisive role in reaching multilateral agreements and coordinating their application and enforcement," Francis wrote in the message. "I urge the global community of nations to work together in order to adopt a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms," the pope said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After investigating reports that some users aren't getting iMessages on Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud, Beeper says that Apple seems to be "deliberately blocking" iMessages from being delivered to about five percent of Beeper Mini users. From a report: The company says that uninstalling and reinstalling the app fixes the issue and that it's working on a broader fix. Apple didn't immediately reply to a request for comment about Beeper's new claim, and it hasn't replied to my original request for comment, either. But given that the company has already blocked Beeper Mini before, it's not too surprising that it seems to be taking action against the app again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn has set aside an effort to relocate its data center technology out of its physical facilities and into Microsoft's Azure cloud, CNBC reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The decision not to proceed with the project, code-named "Blueshift," marks a major reversal for LinkedIn, which announced its plan to move to Azure in 2019, three years after Microsoft acquired the company for $27 billion. LinkedIn had been using Azure for specific tasks. The U-turn represents a setback for Microsoft, which is chasing Amazon Web Services in the lucrative cloud infrastructure market and has been counting on cloud technology and services to fuel much of its growth. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ran the cloud business before elevation to his current job in 2014. Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn's vice president of engineering, wrote in a 2019 blog post announcing Blueshift that "moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale." Staffers started to learn of the decision not to follow through with the Azure migration last year, said the sources, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality. Executives stressed that the project was being put on hold, rather than getting canceled altogether, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dropbox has enabled a default setting to share user data with OpenAI for an AI search feature, but says it's only accessed when the feature is used, not to train models, and deleted in 30 days. From a report: Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X. Wednesday afternoon, Drew Houston, the CEO of Dropbox, apologized for customer confusion in a post on X and wrote, "The third-party AI toggle in the settings menu enables or disables access to DBX AI features and functionality. Neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third-party AI service."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association have no trouble envisioning an AI-centered future, but developments over the past year are reason for concern. The association takes offense when AI models exploit the generosity of science fiction writers, who share their work without DRM and free of charge. [...] Over the past few months, we have seen a variety of copyright lawsuits, many of which were filed by writers. These cases target ChatGPT's OpenAI but other platforms are targeted as well. A key allegation in these complaints is that the AI was trained using pirated books. For example, several authors have just filed an amended complaint against Meta, alleging that the company continued to train its AI on pirated books despite concerns from its own legal team. This clash between AI and copyright piqued the interest of the U.S. Copyright Office which launched an inquiry asking the public for input. With more than 10,000 responses, it is clear that the topic is close to the hearts of many people. It's impossible to summarize all opinions without AI assistance, but one submission stood out to us in particular; it encourages the free sharing of books while recommending that AI tools shouldn't be allowed to exploit this generosity for free. The submission was filed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), which represents over 2,500 published writers. The association is particularly concerned with the suggestion that its members' works can be used for AI training under a fair use exception. SFWA sides with many other rightsholders, concluding that pirated books shouldn't be used for AI training, adding that the same applies to books that are freely shared by many Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. [...] Many of the authors strongly believe that freely sharing stories is a good thing that enriches mankind, but that doesn't automatically mean that AI has the same privilege if the output is destined for commercial activities. The SFWA stresses that it doesn't take offense when AI tools use the works of its members for non-commercial purposes, such as research and scholarship. However, turning the data into a commercial tool goes too far. AI freeloading will lead to unfair competition and cause harm to licensing markets, the writers warn. The developers of the AI tools have attempted to tone down these concerns but the SFWA is not convinced. [...] The writers want to protect their rights but they don't believe in the extremely restrictive position of some other copyright holders. They don't subscribe to the idea that people will no longer buy books because they can get the same information from an AI tool, for example. However, authors deserve some form of compensation. SFWA argues that all stakeholders should ultimately get together to come up with a plan that works for everyone. This means fair compensation and protection for authors, without making it financially unviable for AI to flourish. "Questions of 'how' and 'when' and 'how much money' all come later; first and foremost the author must have the right to say how their work is used," their submission reads. "So long as authors retain the right to say 'no' we believe that equitable solutions to the thorny problems of licensing, scale, and market harm can be found. But that right remains the cornerstone, and we insist upon it," SFWA concludes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Grunge music: a source of validation for a generation of disaffected youth. And a surprising source of scientific inspiration for Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. While listening to Soundgarden's 1994 hit Black Hole Sun 2 years ago, he contemplated a curious question: Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? A new study by Bellinger and colleagues suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. Astronomers could detect these trapped black holes by the vibrations they cause on the star's surface. And if there's enough of them out there, they could function as the mysterious dark matter that holds the universe together. The researchers found that the black holes would sink to the star's core where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion to produce heat and light. At first, very little would happen. Even a dense stellar core is mostly empty space. The most microscopic of the black holes would have a hard time finding matter to consume and its growth would be extremely slow, Bellinger says. "It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe to eat the star." But larger ones, roughly as massive as the asteroid Ceres or the dwarf planet Pluto, would get bigger on timescales of only a few hundred million years. Material would spiral onto the black hole, forming a disk that would heat up through friction and emit radiation. Once the black hole was about as massive as Earth, it would produce significant amounts of radiation, shining brightly and churning up the star's core like pot of boiling water. "It will become a black hole -- powered object rather than fusion-powered object," says study co-author Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University. He and his colleagues have dubbed these entities "Hawking stars." The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has spotted about 500 such anomalously cool giant stars, known as red stragglers, Bellinger says. To figure out whether these might actually be hiding a black hole, he says, astronomers could tune in to the particular frequencies at which the stars vibrate. Because a Hawking star would churn throughout its interior, rather than just in the topmost layers like an ordinary red giant, it would be expected to thrum with a particular combination of frequencies. Such waves can be detected in the way the star's light pulses and throbs. Bellinger is applying for funding to study the known red stragglers and see whether any display the characteristic vibrations of a black hole. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists are exploring infrasound, low-frequency sound waves produced by tornadoes to develop more accurate early warning systems for these destructive storms. The hope is that eavesdropping on infrasound signals, which travel for hundreds of miles, could provide up to two hours of advance warning. The BBC reports: Scientists have been listening to tornadoes and trying to work out whether they produce a unique sound since the 1970s. Experimental evidence suggests that low-frequency infrasound, with a frequency range of 1-10Hz , is produced while a tornado is taking shape and throughout its life. One recent set of measurements from a tornado near Lakin, Kansas in May 2020 revealed that the twister produced a distinct, elevated signal between 10Hz and 15Hz. In some cases arrays of infrasound detecting microphones have been shown to pick up the noise produced by tornadoes from more than 100km (60 miles) away and have also indicated that the infrasound is produced before tornadogenesis even begins. Researchers hope that by eavesdropping on these noises, it may be possible to not only hear a tornado coming but perhaps even predict them up to two hours before they form. Since 2020, a team from Oklahoma State University has been testing infrasound's predictive powers using equipment installed in tornado-chasing vehicles. Their portable kit, the Ground-based Local Infrasound Data Acquisition, or "Glinda", system, references a character from The Wizard of Oz. They hope the equipment will help storm chasers to better monitor the development of tornadoes in real time, but requires the equipment to be deployed to the right place at the right time. Some researchers, however, are working on systems that can be left to permanently monitor for tornadoes. One group, led by Roger Waxler, principal scientist at the National Centre for Physical Acoustics (NCPA) based at the University of Mississippi, are planning to deploy four permanent arrays of high-tech sensors in south Mississippi to detect infrasound signals. They hope the system will provide a way of consistently monitoring and detecting tornadoes. [...] Waxler and his team hope their decade-long experiment will lead to an effective early warning system for tornadoes, particularly when combined with other sources such as doppler radar. "It's not unreasonable that we could localize a tornado to half a football field," adds Waxler. "I envision seeing a map on an app with a dot that shows there's a tornado coming up South Lamar [Avenue, for example]." Warnings have improved in recent decades: from 2003 to 2017, 87% of deadly tornadoes were preceded by an advance warning, but people still have an average of just 10-15 minutes to find shelter. A study based on interviews with 23 survivors of two deadly tornadoes found that people tried to evaluate and respond to the risk of a tornado as the situation evolved, but some did not have a place to shelter easily. Experts believe tornado warnings are too often ignored due to "warning fatigue" created by false alarms and hours of televised storm coverage. One study found 37% of people surveyed did not understand the need for taking precautionary measures during a tornado warning. Waxler hopes that a more accurate early warning system could change the way people respond when they hear a storm is approaching. "Rather than going to hide in your bathtub or cellar, it might be a better idea to get in your car and drive if you know where a tornado is. "The goal is to save lives."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Brain organoids, clumps of human brain cells grown in a dish, can be hooked up to an electronic chip and carry out simple computational tasks, a new study shows. Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, known as Brainoware, to an AI tool. They found that this hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition. The work, published today in Nature Electronics, could one day lead to new kinds of bio-computers that are more efficient than conventional computers. "This is a first demonstration of using brain organoids [for computing]," says Guo. "It's exciting to see the possibilities of organoids for biocomputing in the future." With Brainoware, Guo aimed to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation to the hybrid system they'd built, Brainoware responded to those signals, and changes occurred in its neural networks. According to the researchers, this result suggests that the hybrid system did process information, and could perhaps even perform computing tasks without supervision. Guo and his colleagues then attempted to see if Brainoware could perform any useful tasks. In one test, they used Brainoware to try to solve mathematical equations. They also gave it a benchmark test for speech recognition, using 240 audio clips of eight people pronouncing Japanese vowels. The clips were converted into electrical signals and applied to the Brainoware system. This generated signals in the neural networks of the brain organoid, which were then fed into an AI tool for decoding. The researchers found that the brain organoid -- AI system could decode the signals from the audio recordings, which is a form of speech recognition, says Guo. "But the accuracy was low," he says. Although the system improved with training, reaching an accuracy of about 78%, it was still less accurate than artificial neural networks, according to the study. Lena Smirnova, an assistant professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, points out that brain organoids do not have the ability to truly hear speech but simply exhibit "a reaction" to pulses of electrical stimulation from the audio clips. And the study did not demonstrate whether Brainoware can process and store information over the long term or learn multiple tasks. Generating brain cell cultures in a lab and maintaining them long enough to perform computations is also a huge undertaking. Still, she adds, "it's a really good demonstration that shows the capabilities of brain organoids."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Maps will soon give you the option to store your location data on your device instead of in the cloud. Android Police reports: In the coming year, Google is planning to switch things up by defaulting to saving your Timeline directly on your device instead of the cloud. You'll also have the option to wipe out bits or the whole information dossier whenever you want and disable location history completely. When you're jumping ship to a new device and want to keep your data close, you always have the option to back it up in the cloud. Google assures you that it'll lock it up with encryption. Another significant update is the shorter default amount of time before your location history is auto-deleted. Soon, when you turn on location history, the default auto-delete time shrinks to three months. In the past, it used to hang around for 18 months by default. If you're the sentimental type, you can extend the Timeline's lifespan or turn off the auto-delete option. Google Maps has another nifty trick up its sleeve: soon, you can erase all traces of your trips with just a few taps. Say you've got a favorite hangout spot and you want to keep it to yourself. You can wipe the slate clean right from the app, whether it's searches, directions, visits, or shares. This handy feature is making its debut on Maps for Android and iOS in the next few weeks. Finally, you will soon be able to click on the blue dot on the map to view your Location History and Timeline at a glance. It allows you to tweak what you share and store on Maps, all without having to dive into the settings. Currently, the blue dot only gives you some neat shortcuts for parking saves and location sharing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Reuters, General Motors' Cruise robotaxi unit dismissed nine executives amid an ongoing safety investigation, which the company confirmed included Chief Operating Officer Gil West. The company conducted a full safety review following an incident in San Francisco where a pedestrian was struck and dragged by one of its cars. GM already halted service nationwide and removed its cars from public roads. Reuters reports: CEO Kyle Vogt and co-founder Dan Kan both resigned in recent weeks and Cruise is preparing for a round of layoffs this month. "Following an initial analysis of the October 2 incident and Cruise's response to it, nine individuals departed Cruise," according to the memo. "We are committed to full transparency and are focused on rebuilding trust and operating with the highest standards when it comes to safety, integrity, and accountability," the memo said. "As a result, we believe that new leadership is necessary to achieve these goals." The Cruise spokesperson confirmed that among those dismissed was also Chief Legal and Policy Officer Jeff Bleich and Senior Vice President of Government Affairs David Estrada. Cruise's troubles are also a setback for an industry dependent on public trust and the cooperation of regulators. The unit had in recent months touted ambitious plans to expand to more cities, offering fully autonomous taxi rides. The investigation, led by law firm Quinn Emmanuel, is expected to last until January, GM has said. "The personnel decisions made today are a necessary step for Cruise to move forward as it focuses on accountability, trust and transparency," GM said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A beta version of the Xbox Cloud Gaming app is now available for the Meta Quest headsets, allowing you to stream hundreds of Xbox games with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. The Verge reports: The beta app is available from the Meta Quest Store, and you'll simply need to pair a supported Bluetooth controller to start playing. You can use an Xbox controller (that supports Bluetooth), a PS4 one, or even Nintendo's Switch Pro controllers. Support for PS5 controllers is "coming in the future," according to Meta. There are a variety of display sizes for an immersive VR environment to stream Xbox games in or even an Xbox-themed virtual space on the latest Quest 3 and Pro headsets that takes advantage of full-color passthrough.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Some two years of talking about gig worker rights later and European Union lawmakers have finally reached a deal on the final shape of the Platform Worker Directive. [...] The Commission presented its original plan to reform labor laws to boost protections for platform workers back in December 2021, setting out a presumption of employment for workers in a bid to flip the odds on gig economy exploitation. But the proposal proved contentious, with heavy industry lobbying from tech platforms such as Uber pushing for gig workers to be carved out of Europe's employment protections. There were also divisions between Member States over how much worker protection vs platform shielding they were prepared to commit to. But after a final trilogue, lasting more than 12 hours, a provisional agreement has been clinched. The deal that's been provisionally agreed means a presumption of an employment relationship between a gig worker and a platform will be triggered when two out of a list of five "indicators of control or direction are present," as the parliament's press release puts it. "This list can be expanded by Member States. The presumption can be triggered by the worker, by their representatives, and by the competent authorities on their own initiative. This presumption can be rebutted if the platform proves that the contractual relationship is not an employment relationship," it adds. The agreement also contains transparency provisions that will require platforms to provide information to individuals performing platform work (and to their representatives) about how the algorithms that manage them work; and how their behavior affects decisions taken by automated systems. [...] The provisionally agreed new rules will also ban platforms from taking "certain important decisions," such as dismissals or decisions to suspend an account, without human oversight. Per the parliament, the agreed text also ensures "more human oversight on the decisions of systems that directly affect the persons performing platform work"; and obliges platforms to "assess the impact of decisions taken or supported by automated monitoring and decision-making systems on working conditions, health and safety and fundamental rights". So conducting data protection impact assessments looks set to be a hard requirement for complying with the new law. Another prohibition that's been agreed is a ban on platforms from processing certain types of personal data of workers, including personal beliefs, private exchanges with colleagues, or when a worker is not at work -- with the Directive billed as beefing up data protection rights for platform workers. Other provisions in the provisional deal include a requirement for platforms to share information on self-employed workers in their employ with competent national authorities and representatives of those performing platform work, such as trade unions. Measures to prevent platforms from circumventing the rules by using intermediaries has also been agreement -- a practice that's stepped up considerably in Spain since the country introduced its own labor reform, back in 2021, with the aim of forcing platforms to hire delivery workers. Some key details of exactly what's been agreed remain under wraps -- and full visibility and analysis of the ramifications will likely have to wait for a consolidated text to emerge in the coming weeks/months. [...] The final text still needs to be voted on by the Council and Parliament before it can be adopted as pan-EU law. What implementation period has been agreed also isn't yet clear. But today's political deal signals the train has now left the station.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, General Motors announced plans to phase out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, shifting instead to built-in infotainment systems developed with Google. Now, the company has explained why it made that decision to MotorTrend: Tim Babbitt, GM's head of product for infotainment, gave MT a better explanation at a press event for the new Chevrolet Blazer EV, the flagship vehicle in the no CarPlay or Android Auto strategy. According to him, there's an important factor that didn't make it into the fact sheet: safety. Specifically, he cited driver distraction caused by cell phone usage behind the wheel. According to Babbitt, CarPlay and Android Auto have stability issues that manifest themselves as bad connections, poor rendering, slow responses, and dropped connections. And when CarPlay and Android Auto have issues, drivers pick up their phones again, taking their eyes off the road and totally defeating the purpose of these phone-mirroring programs. Solving those issues can sometimes be beyond the control of the automaker. You can start to see GM's frustration. Babbitt's thesis is that if drivers were to do everything through the vehicle's built-in systems, they'd be less likely to pick up their phones and therefore less distracted and safer behind the wheel. He admits, though, GM hasn't tested this thesis in the lab or real world yet but believes it has potential, if customers go for it. The issues Babbitt cited with CarPlay and Android Auto seem like they'd be mostly linked to using those programs wirelessly, and while he says that's true, just plugging the phone into a USB data port doesn't solve all the problems. Babbitt says even when using a physical connection, Android phones are prone to compatibility issues between the vehicle and all the various phone manufacturers running Android. iPhones, meanwhile, suffer from backwards compatibility issues that cause older iPhone models to have trouble running CarPlay consistently. He points to J.D. Power data that shows issues with CarPlay and Android Auto are common owner complaints, and that customers tend to blame the automaker rather than the phone manufacturer or phone software. In that way, eliminating CarPlay and Android Auto potentially relieves GM of a key customer complaint dragging down their perceived quality scores. After MotorTrend's story was published, GM issued the following statement: "We wanted to reach out to clarify that comments about GM's position on phone projection were misrepresented and to reinforce our valued partnerships with Apple and Google and each company's commitment to driver safety. GM's embedded infotainment strategy is driven by the benefits of having a system that allows for greater integration with the larger GM ecosystem and vehicles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has struck a deal with Politico parent company Axel Springer, allowing ChatGPT to summarize news stories from Politico and Business Insider. CNBC reports: Once the OpenAI-Axel Springer deal goes into effect, when a user asks ChatGPT a question, it will respond with summaries of news articles from media outlets such as Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt. The chatbot will also include articles that would otherwise be limited to subscribers of those outlets, according to a release, and the answers will include "attribution and links to the full articles for transparency." The partnership follows a deal that OpenAI struck with the Associated Press in July, allowing it to license the AP's news archive for training data. As part of the agreement, Axel Springer will provide content from its media brands as training data for OpenAI's large language models, such as GPT-4, the AI model that helps power ChatGPT. The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 publishers, released research in October suggesting that data sets used to train popular AI models rely "significantly" more on publisher content, outweighing it by a factor ranging from over five to almost 100, compared to generic web content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For those looking for a more rigorous way of comparing various models, the folks over at the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSys) have set up Chatbot Arena, a platform for generating Elo-style rankings for LLMs based on a crowdsourced blind-testing website. Chatbot Arena users can enter any prompt they can think of into the site's form to see side-by-side responses from two randomly selected models. The identity of each model is initially hidden, and results are voided if the model reveals its identity in the response itself. The user then gets to pick which model provided what they judge to be the "better" result, with additional options for a "tie" or "both are bad." Only after providing a pairwise ranking does the user get to see which models they were judging, though a separate "side-by-side" section of the site lets users pick two specific models to compare (without the ability to contribute a vote on the result). Since its public launch back in May, LMSys says it has gathered over 130,000 blind pairwise ratings across 45 different models (as of early December). Those numbers seem poised to increase quickly after a recent positive review from OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy that has already led to what LMSys describes as "a super stress test" for its servers. Chatbot Arena's thousands of pairwise ratings are crunched through a Bradley-Terry model, which uses random sampling to generate an Elo-style rating estimating which model is most likely to win in direct competition against any other. Interested parties can also dig into the raw data of tens of thousands of human prompt/response ratings for themselves or examine more detailed statistics, such as direct pairwise win rates between models and confidence interval ranges for those Elo estimates. Chatbot Arena's latest public leaderboard update shows a few proprietary models easily beating out a wide range of open-source alternatives. OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 Turbo leads the pack by a wide margin, with only an older GPT-4 model ("0314," which was discontinued in June) coming anywhere close on the ratings scale. But even months-old, defunct versions of GPT-3.5 Turbo outrank the highest-rated open-source models available in Chatbot Arena's testbed. Anthropic's proprietary Claude models also feature highly in Chatbot Arena's top rankings. Oddly enough, though, the site's blind human testing tends to rank the older Claude-1 slightly higher than the subsequent releases of Claude-2.0 and Claude-2.1. Among the tested non-proprietary models, the Llama-based Tulu 2 and 01.ai's Yi get rankings that are comparable to some older GPT-3.5 implementations. Past that, there's a slow but steady decline until you get to models like Dolly and StableLM at the bottom of the pack (amid older versions of many models that have more recent, higher-ranking updates on Chatbot Arena's charts).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers unbricked a train in Poland that had been deliberately disabled by its manufacturer. Now the manufacturer is threatening legal action against the hackers despite evidence it sabotaged the trains. From a report: The manufacturer is also now demanding that the repaired trains immediately be removed from service because they have been "hacked," and thus might now be unsafe, a claim they also cannot substantiate. The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train's control systems that prevented them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent a certain number of days in an independent repair company's maintenance center, and also prevented it from running if certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number. This anti-repair mechanism is called "parts pairing," and is a common frustration for farmers who want to repair their John Deere tractors without authorization from the company. It's also used by Apple to prevent independent repair of iPhones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Overclocking AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series blows a fuse, indicating modification. However, AMD has told Tom's Hardware that this does not automatically invalidate the warranty of these top-tier workstation CPUs. From the report: "Threadripper 7000 Series processors do contain a fuse that is blown when overclocking is enabled. To be clear, blowing this fuse does not void your warranty. Statements that enabling an overclocking/overvolting feature will 'void' the processor warranty are not correct. Per AMD's standard Terms of Sale, the warranty excludes any damage that results from overclocking/overvolting the processor. However, other unrelated issues could still qualify for warranty repair/replacement," an AMD representative told Tom's Hardware. In summation, overclocking your Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 or non-Pro processor will not void the warranty -- only damages directly resulting from overclocking will. As always, AMD isn't against overclocking. If it was, the chipmaker wouldn't advertise overclocking support as one of the features of the WRX90 and TRX50 platforms. Only OEM systems lack overclocking support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has said it now requires a judge's order to hand over information about its customers' push notification to law enforcement, putting the iPhone maker's policy in line with rival Google and raising the hurdle officials must clear to get app data about users. From a report: The new policy was not formally announced but appeared sometime over the past few days on Apple's publicly available law enforcement guidelines. It follows the revelation from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that officials were requesting such data from Apple as well as from Google, the unit of Alphabet that makes the operating system for Android phones. Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible "dings" or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers. In a letter first disclosed by Reuters last week, Wyden said the practice gave the two companies unique insight into traffic flowing from those apps to users, putting them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you bought a new smart TV during any of the holiday sales, there's likely to be an uninvited guest watching along with you. The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you're watching and serve you highly targeted ads. The software is largely hidden from view, and it's complicated to opt out. Many consumers aren't aware of ACR, let alone that it's active on their shiny new TVs. If that's you, and you'd like to turn it off, we're going to show you how. First, a quick primer on the tech: ACR identifies what's displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots and comparing them to a massive database of media and advertisements. Think of it as a Shazam-like service constantly running in the background while your TV is on. These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second. The data is then used for content recommendations and ad targeting, which is a huge business; advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads in 2022, according to market research firm eMarketer. For anyone who'd rather not have ACR looking over their shoulder while they watch, we've put together a guide to turning it off on three of the most popular smart TV software platforms in use last year. Depending on the platform, turning off ACR took us between 10 and 37 clicks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is set to be hit by a ban on its App Store rules that govern music-streaming rivals and a potential hefty fine in the European Union's latest attempt to limit the power of Big Tech. From a report: EU regulators are putting the finishing touches to a decision that would prohibit Apple's practice of blocking music services from pushing their users away from the App Store to alternative subscription options, according to people familiar with the investigation. The decision is slated for early next year, they added. As part of the upcoming decision, Apple runs the risk of a potential fine of as much as 10% of its annual sales -- although EU penalties seldom reach that level and orders for companies to change their business models can be more hard-hitting.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's making the second generation of Imagen, its AI model that can create and edit images given a text prompt, more widely available -- at least to Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI who've been approved for access. From a report: But the company isn't disclosing which data it used to train the new model -- nor introducing a way for creators who might've inadvertently contributed to the data set to opt out or apply for compensation. Called Imagen 2, Google's enhanced model -- which was quietly launched in preview at the tech giant's I/O conference in May -- was developed using technology from Google DeepMind, Google's flagship AI lab. Compared to the first-gen Imagen, it's "significantly" improved in terms of image quality, Google claims (the company bizarrely refused to share image samples prior to this morning), and introduces new capabilities including the ability to render text and logos. "If you want to create images with a text overlay -- for example, advertising -- you can do that," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said during a press briefing on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This year has been marked by many terrifying things, but perhaps the most surprising of the 2023 horrors was ... eye drops. The seemingly innocuous teeny squeeze bottle made for alarming headlines numerous times during our current revolution around the sun, with lengthy lists of recalls, startling factory inspections, and ghastly reports of people developing near-untreatable bacterial infections, losing their eyes and vision, and dying. Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled "What You Should Know about Eye Drops" in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market. The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.