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Computer science teachers around the globe have been left scrambling to find an alternative IDE for their students, after Replit announced it was shuttering its Teams for Education plan. From a report: "To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu ... Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs," a statement from Replit, shared with educators and brought to our attention on Monday by Reg readers, declared last week. The platform provided a collaborative integrated development environment (IDE) tailored toward classrooms. It allowed students to work together on projects at the same time, similar to Google Docs, as well as automating code evaluation to streamline assessments carried out by teachers. The decision has sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily in the platform since Replit made the plan available for free in early 2022. "Computer science teachers in the last 48 hours have had to scramble to try to find alternatives as soon as possible and it will be the students that suffer," a teacher based in Asia-Pacific told The Register. "Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers." In a Xeet last week, CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the pain the decision to shut down Teams for Education was likely to cause, but said the current system had become economically nonviable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using fake names, sham LinkedIn profiles, counterfeit work papers and mock interview scripts, North Korean IT workers seeking employment in Western tech companies are deploying sophisticated subterfuge to get hired. From a report: Landing a job outside North Korea to secretly earn hard currency for the isolated country demands highly-developed strategies to convince Western hiring managers, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, an interview with a former North Korean IT worker and cybersecurity researchers. North Korea has dispatched thousands of IT workers overseas, an effort that has accelerated in the last four years, to bring in millions to finance Pyongyang's nuclear missile programme, according to the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations. "People are free to express ideas and opinions," reads one interview script used by North Korean software developers that offers suggestions for how to describe a "good corporate culture" when asked. Expressing one's thoughts freely could be met with imprisonment in North Korea. The scripts totalling 30 pages, were unearthed by researchers at Palo Alto Networks, a U.S. cybersecurity firm which discovered a cache of internal documents online that detail the workings of North Korea's remote IT workforce. The documents contain dozens of fraudulent resumes, online profiles, interview notes, and forged identities that North Korean workers used to apply for jobs in software development.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sunbird, the app that brings iMessage to Android, has temporarily shut down the service over "security concerns." From a report: In a notice to users, Sunbird says it has "decided to pause Sunbird usage for now" while it investigates reports that its messages aren't actually end-to-end encrypted. Sunbird launched in 2022 as a messaging app that attempts to put the blue versus green bubble battle to rest. It has only been available to those who sign up for its waitlist, touting numerous privacy features, like end-to-end encryption, no message data collection, and no ads. Last week, Sunbird partnered with Nothing, the phone brand owned by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, on the launch of Nothing Chats. The Sunbird-powered messaging service is supposed to let owners of the Phone 2 send texts via iMessage, but it was pulled from the Google Play Store just one day after its launch. At the time, Nothing said it had to fix "several bugs" within the app. However, its removal from the Play Store came around the same time a post from Texts.blog revealed that messages sent via Sunbird may not be end-to-end encrypted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing a cutting-edge therapy called exa-cel that could potentially cure people of sickle cell disease, a painful and deadly disease with no universally successful treatment. "If approved, exa-cel, made by Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and the Swiss company CRISPR Therapeutics, would be the first FDA-approved treatment that uses genetic modification called CRISPR," reports CNN. From the report: CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a technology researchers use to selectively modify DNA, the carrier of genetic information that the body uses to function and develop. [...] The new exa-cel treatment under FDA consideration can use the patient's own stem cells. Doctors would alter them with CRISPR to fix the genetic problems that cause sickle cell, and then the altered stem cells are given back to the patient in a one-time infusion. In company studies, the treatment was considered safe, and it had a "highly positive benefit-risk for patients with severe sickle cell disease," Dr. Stephanie Krogmeier, vice president for global regulatory affairs with Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, told the panel. Thirty-nine of the 40 people tested with the treatment did not have a single vaso-occlusive crisis, which means the misshapen red blood cells block normal circulation and can cause moderate to severe pain. It's the top reason patients with sickle cell go to the emergency room or are hospitalized. Before the treatment, patients experienced about four of these painful crises a year, resulting in about two weeks in the hospital. The FDA sought the independent panel's advice, in part, because this would be the first time the FDA would approve a treatment that uses CRISPR technology, but Dr. Fyodor Urnov, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, reminded the committee CRISPR has been around for 30 years and, in that time, scientists have learned a lot about how to use it safely. "The technology is, in fact, ready for primetime," Urnov said. With this kind of genetic editing, scientists could inadvertently make a change to a patient's DNA that is off-target, and the therapy could harm the patient. [...] The FDA is expected to make an approval decision by December 8.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI's board of directors approached rival Anthropic's CEO about replacing Sam Altman and potentially merging the two AI startups. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declined on both fronts. Reuters reports: The news, reported earlier by The Information on Monday, follows various reported calls to find Altman's successor days after OpenAI's board ousted him. [...] The co-founders of Anthropic, who were also executives at OpenAI until 2020, had broken from their employer over disagreements regarding how to ensure AI's safe development and governance. Anthropic has won investments from Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com. Its Claude AI models have vied for prominence with OpenAI's GPT series.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program's legality. According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans' calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well. The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs' departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T's infrastructure -- a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had "serious concerns about the legality" of the DAS program, adding that "troubling information" he'd received "would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress." That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered "sensitive but unclassified" by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator's letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, "there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades' worth of Americans' call records for law enforcement purposes," notes Wired. "Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T's voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance." "The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient's names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time." It's unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program's legality. According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans' calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well. The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs' departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T's infrastructure -- a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had "serious concerns about the legality" of the DAS program, adding that "troubling information" he'd received "would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress." That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered "sensitive but unclassified" by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator's letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, "there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades' worth of Americans' call records for law enforcement purposes," notes Wired. "Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T's voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance." "The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient's names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time." It's unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, the entire Optus mobile network went offline nationwide following a "routine software upgrade." According to Reuters, "More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout [...], triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure." Now, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned in the wake of the outage. From the report: She said it "had been an honour to serve" but that "now was an appropriate time to step down." During Friday's Senate hearing into the outage, Ms Bayer Rosmarin rebuffed suggestions she was under pressure to step down. "On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded," she said in a statement on Monday. "I was also able to communicate Optus's commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward." Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced in the interim by chief financial officer Michael Venter. Yuen Kuan Moon, the chief executive of Optus's Singaporean parent company Singtel Group, said the company understood her decision to resign. Mr Yuen said Singtel recognised "the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence as the team works through the impact and consequences of the recent outage and continues to improve." He said Optus's priority was about "setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers." Singtel said Optus had also created a new chief operating officer position, which would be carried out by former Optus Business Managing Director Peter Kaliaropoulos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Android smartphone manufacturer "Nothing" announced that it's bringing iMessage to its newest phone through a new "Nothing Chats" app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. After launching Friday, the app was shut down within 24 hours and the Sunbird app, which Nothing Chat is a clone of, was put "on pause." The reason? It's a security nightmare. Ars Technica reports: The initial sales pitch for this app -- that it would log you into iMessage on Android if you handed over your Apple username and password -- was a huge security red flag that meant Sunbird would need an ultra-secure infrastructure to avoid disaster. Instead, the app turned out to be about as unsecure as you could possibly be. Here's Nothing's statement: "We've removed the Nothing Chats beta from the Play Store and will be delaying the launch until further notice to work with Sunbird to fix several bugs. We apologize for the delay and will do right by our users." How bad are the security issues? Both 9to5Google and Text.com (which is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress) uncovered shockingly bad security practices. Not only was the app not end-to-end encrypted, as claimed numerous times by Nothing and Sunbird, but Sunbird actually logged and stored messages in plain text on both the error reporting software Sentry and in a Firebase store. Authentication tokens were sent over unencrypted HTTP so this token could be intercepted and used to read your messages. [...] Despite being the cause of this huge catastrophe, Sunbird has been bizarrely quiet during this whole mess. The app's X (formerly Twitter) page still doesn't say anything about the shutdown of Nothing Chats or Sunbird. Maybe that's for the best because some of Sunbird's early responses to the security concerns raised on Friday do not seem like they came from a competent developer. [...] Nothing has always seemed like an Android manufacturer that was more hype than substance, but we can now add "negligent" to that list. The company latched on to Sunbird, reskinned its app, created a promo website and YouTube video, and coordinated a media release with popular YouTubers, all without doing the slightest bit of due diligence on Sunbird's apps or its security claims. It's unbelievable that these two companies made it this far -- the launch of Nothing Chats required a systemic security failure across two entire companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the governance structure of OpenAI needs to change after the AI company's sudden firing of CEO Sam Altman. "At this point, I think it's very clear that something has to change around the governance," Nadella said. He added that Microsoft would have "a good dialogue with their board on that." Unlike traditional private company boards, OpenAI's board consists mostly of outsiders and isn't tasked with maximizing shareholder value. "[N]one of them hold equity in OpenAI," notes The Verge. "Instead, their stated mission is to ensure the creation of 'broadly beneficial' artificial general intelligence, or AGI." From the report: In his first press interview since Altman's ouster, Nadella dismissed concerns of long-term damage at OpenAI and said that the critical artificial intelligence research continues as does the partnership with Microsoft. But his comments didn't clear up confusion surrounding where Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who was the company's chairman, will ultimately end up. Early Monday morning Nadella said that Altman, Brockman and their colleagues would join Microsoft as part of a new AI research group. That post followed news that ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear had been named OpenAI interim head as Altman looked to depart. Over the course of Monday, it became less evident that Altman and Brockman would actually be joining Microsoft. Hundreds of OpenAI employees signed a letter to the company's board demanding that they resign or else the staffers may choose to leave and join their former boss at Microsoft. Nadella said it's the choice of OpenAI employees whether they stay in their current roles or move to Microsoft, adding that his company has what it needs to keep innovating on its own. "I'm open to both options," he said. Nadella told Fortt that Microsoft respects OpenAI's nonprofit roots and shares its belief that AI needs to be developed and rolled out in a safe manner. "We want to make sure that we're dealing with not only the benefits of technology, but the unintended consequences of the technology from day one, as opposed to waiting for things to happen," Nadella said. Stay tuned: Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher is releasing a 30 minute interview with Nadella in which he says, among other things, that he felt he should have been informed earlier as a partner of OpenAI and that will change in the future. "Also lots of deets about new hire [Sam Altman], safety in AGI and even India's loss to Australia in that cricket match," says Swisher in a post on X. Further reading: Some investors in OpenAI are considering suing the board. "Sources said investors are working with legal advisors to study their options," reports Reuters. "Investors worry that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Commercial air crews are reporting something "unthinkable" in the skies above the Middle East: novel "spoofing" attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September. In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes' systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it's only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it. OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it's not just GPS -- fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure. According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September. While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously "unthinkable," according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a "fundamental flaw in avionics design." The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the "brain" of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was "highly significant." "This immediately sounds unthinkable," OPSGROUP said in its public post about the incidents. "The IRS (Inertial Reference System) should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed. The idea that we could lose all on-board nav capability, and have to ask [air traffic control] for our position and request a heading, makes little sense at first glance" especially for state of the art aircraft with the latest avionics. However, multiple reports confirm that this has happened." [...] There is currently no solution to this problem, with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause. According to OPSGROUP's November update, "The industry has been slow to come to terms with the issue, leaving flight crews alone to find ways of detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing." If air crews do realize that something is amiss, Humphreys said, their only recourse is to depend on air traffic control.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple plans to ditch Qualcomm and build its own custom modem that could launch around 2026. MacRumors reports: Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple's custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity. Gurman says Apple will "probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad -- and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company's system-on-a-chip." Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem. Gurman's latest newsletter also said some of Apple's other ongoing in-house chip projects include camera sensors, batteries, a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip that will eventually replace parts from Broadcom, Micro-LED displays for Apple devices, and a non-invasive glucose monitoring system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox 120 will be available tomorrow, bringing support for the Global Privacy Control "Sec-GPC" request header to indicate whether a user consents to a website or service selling or sharing their personal information with third parties. It's also enabling the WebAssembly GC extension by default, opening up new languages like Dart and Kotlin to run in the browser. Phoronix's Michael Larabel highlights some of the other features included in this release: - Ubuntu Linux users now have the ability to import data from Chromium when both are installed as Snap packages.- Picture-in-Picture mode now supports corner snapping on Windows and Linux.- Support for the light-dark() CSS color function that allows setting of colors for both light and dark without needing to use the prefers-color-scheme media feature. This allows conveniently specifying the preferred light color theme value followed by the dark color theme value.- CSS support for the lh and rlh line height units.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Apple has been sued by Venmo and Cash App customers in a proposed class action claiming the iPhone maker abused its market power to curb competition for mobile peer-to-peer payments, causing consumers to pay "rapidly inflating prices." Four consumers in New York, Hawaii, South Carolina and Georgia filed the lawsuit (PDF) on Friday in San Jose, California, federal court. They alleged Apple violated U.S. antitrust law through its agreements with PayPal's Venmo and Block's Cash App. Apple's agreements limit "feature competition" within peer-to-peer payment apps, including prohibiting existing or new platforms from using "decentralized cryptocurrency technology," the complaint said. The lawsuit seeks an injunction that could force Apple to divest or segregate its Apple Cash business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype, described in a study published last week in Science, uses electric fields and a special ceramic instead of alternately vaporizing a refrigerant fluid and condensing it with a compressor to warm or cool air. From a report: The technology combines a number of existing techniques and has "superlative performance," says Neil Mathur, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK. Emmanuel Defay, a materials scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in Belvaux, and his collaborators built their experimental device out of a ceramic with a strong electrocaloric effect. Materials that exhibit this effect heat up when exposed to electric fields. In an electrocaloric material, the atoms have an electric polarization -- a slight imbalance in their distribution of electrons, which gives these atoms a 'plus' and a 'minus' pole. When the material is left alone, the polarization of these atoms continuously swivels around in random directions. But when the material is exposed to an electric field, all the electrostatic poles suddenly align, like hair combed in one direction. This transition from disorder to order means that the electrons' entropy -- physicists' way of measuring disorder -- suddenly drops, Defay explains. But the laws of thermodynamics say that the total entropy of a system can never decline, so if it falls somewhere it must increase somewhere else. "The only possibility for the material to get rid of this extra mess is to pour it into the lattice" of its crystal structure, he says. That extra disorder means that the atoms themselves start vibrating faster, resulting in a rise in temperature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Justice Department is seeking more than $4 billion from Binance as part of a proposed resolution of a years-long investigation into the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. From a report: Negotiations between the Justice Department and Binance include the possibility that its founder Changpeng Zhao would face criminal charges in the US under an agreement to resolve the probe into alleged money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Zhao, also known as "CZ," is residing in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US, but that doesn't prevent him from coming voluntarily. An announcement could come as soon as the end of the month, though the situation remains fluid, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is starting to offer free educational courses on generative AI with an aim to extend "critical skills" to adults and young learners everywhere. From a report: The company's initiative, called "AI Ready," is an extension of current AWS-based AI skills training programs offered by Amazon but now includes eight free courses that cover AI project management and development. Amazon says 21 million people have already trained on AWS cloud computing skills through its programs, and it hopes 2 million will use its AI courses by 2025. Amazon says that demand for talent for AI jobs is increasing, and companies are willing to pay higher salaries for those with the skills, but the courses are also geared toward promoting Amazon's own AI products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Misplaced concern about existential risk is impeding the opportunity to expand human potential, writes venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. From his op-ed: I was the first venture investor in OpenAI. The weekend drama illustrated my contention that the wrong boards can damage companies. Fancy titles like "Director of Strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology" can lead to a false sense of understanding of the complex process of entrepreneurial innovation. OpenAI's board members' religion of "effective altruism" and its misapplication could have set back the world's path to the tremendous benefits of artificial intelligence. Imagine free doctors for everyone and near free tutors for every child on the planet. That's what's at stake with the promise of AI. The best companies are those whose visions are led and executed by their founding entrepreneurs, the people who put everything on the line to challenge the status quo -- founders like Sam Altman -- who face risk head on, and who are focused -- so totally -- on making the world a better place. Things can go wrong, and abuse happens, but the benefits of good founders far outweigh the risks of bad ones. [...] Large, world-changing vision is axiomatically risky. It can even be scary. But it is the sole lever by which the human condition has improved throughout history. And we could destroy that potential with academic talk of nonsensical existential risk in my view. There is a lot of benefit on the upside, with a minuscule chance of existential risk. In that regard, it is more similar to what the steam engine and internal combustion engine did to human muscle power. Before the engines, we had passive devices -- levers and pulleys. We ate food for energy and expended it for function. Now we could feed these engines oil, steam and coal, reducing human exertion and increasing output to improve the human condition. AI is the intellectual analog of these engines. Its multiplicative power on expertise and knowledge means we can supersede the current confines of human brain capacity, bringing great upside for the human race. I understand that AI is not without its risks. But humanity faces many small risks. They range from vanishingly small like sentient AI destroying the world or an asteroid hitting the earth, to medium risks like global biowarfare from our adversaries, to large and looming risks like a technologically superior China, cyberwars and persuasive AI manipulating users in a democracy, likely starting with the U.S.'s 2024 elections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: In a panel on AI at the Paris Peace Forum just 10 days ago, Microsoft President Brad Smith gave Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun a lecture on the importance of OpenAI's nonprofit independence. "Meta is owned by shareholders," Smith argued. "OpenAI is owned by a nonprofit . Which would you have more confidence in? Getting your technology from a nonprofit? Or a for-profit company that is entirely controlled by one human being?" But on Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pretty much trashed Smith's argument with his announcement that Microsoft was hiring OpenAI's co-founders and some of its top talent to head up a "new advanced AI research team." Another case of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world is on track for a "hellish" 3C of global heating, the UN has warned before the crucial Cop28 climate summit that begins next week in the United Arab Emirates. From a report: The report found that today's carbon-cutting policies are so inadequate that 3C of heating would be reached this century. Temperature records have already been obliterated in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, in response to a temperature rise of 1.4C to date. Scientists say far worse is to come if temperatures continue to rise. The secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres, has said repeatedly the world is heading for a "hellish" future. The UN Environment Programme (Unep) report said that implementing future policies already promised by countries would shave 0.1C off the 3C limit. Putting in place emissions cuts pledged by developing countries on condition of receiving financial and technical support would cut the temperature rise to 2.5C, still a catastrophic scenario. To get on track for the internationally agreed target of 1.5C, 22bn tonnes of CO2 must be cut from the currently projected total in 2030, the report said. That is 42% of global emissions and equivalent to the output of the world's five worst polluters: China, US, India, Russia and Japan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI was in open revolt on Monday with 490 employees threatening to leave unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman as CEO, along with cofounder and former president Greg Brockman. Altman was controversially fired by the board on Friday. From a report: "The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company" the letter reads. "Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI." Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. Shortly before the letter was released, Sutskever posted on X: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company." The letter's release follows an extraordinary, head-spinning weekend in Silicon Valley. OpenAI's board removed Altman from his position on Friday, claiming "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has hired OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to head up a "new advanced AI research team," the software conglomerate's chief Satya Nadella said Monday, capping three days of intense discussions following the unexpected decision by OpenAI's board to dismiss Altman. From a report: Many OpenAI members, including the co-founder Brockman, left the firm in protest last week. Altman will serve as the chief executive of the new AI group at Microsoft, Nadella said. "We've learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I'm looking forward to having you do the same." Nadella said Altman and Brockman will be joined by "colleagues." Former OpenAI top talent Szymon Sidor, Jakub Pachocki, Aleksander Madry are joining Microsoft with "more" to follow suit, Brockman said in a post on X.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from ZDNet:At the Linux Plumbers Conference, the invite-only meeting for the top Linux kernel developers, ByteDance Linux Kernel Engineer Cong Wang, proposed that we use AI and machine learning to tune the Linux kernel for the maximum results for specific workloads... There are thousands of parameters. Even for a Linux expert, tuning them for optimal performance is a long, hard job. And, of course, different workloads require different tunings for different sets of Linux kernel parameters... What ByteDance is working on is a first attempt to automate the entire Linux kernel parameter tuning process with minimal engineering efforts. Specifically, ByteDance is working on tuning Linux memory management. ByteDance has found that with machine learning algorithms, such as Bayesian optimization, automated tuning could even beat most Linux kernel engineers. Why? Well, the idea, as Wang wryly put it, "is not to put Linux kernel engineers out of business." No, the goal is "to liberate human engineers from tuning performance for each individual workload. While making better decisions with historical data, which humans often struggle with. And, last, but never least, find better solutions than those we come up with using our current trial and error, heuristic methods. In short, ByteDance's system optimizes resource usage by making real-time adjustments to things like CPU frequency scaling and memory management.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning "significant gains in pay and benefits," reports the Associated Press:The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles... The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers. They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead. In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning." And this week the union's president said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" - and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles." In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes. "The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds - and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. - Honda, Toyota and Hyundai - "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam Altman will not be returning as CEO of OpenAI, after a furious weekend of negotiations. The Information reports:Sam Altman won't return as CEO of OpenAI, despite efforts by the company's executives to bring him back, according to co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever. After a weekend of negotiations with the board of directors that fired him Friday, as well as with its remaining leaders and top investors, Altman will not return to the startup he co-founded in 2015, Sutskever told staff. Emmett Shear, co-founder of Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch, will take over as interim CEO, Sutskever said.The decision "which flew in the face of comments OpenAI executives shared with staff on Saturday and early Sunday "could deepen a crisis precipitated by the board's sudden ouster of Altman and its removal of President Greg Brockman from the board Friday. Brockman, a key engineer behind the company's successes, resigned later that day, followed by three senior researchers, threatening to set off a broader wave of departures to OpenAI's rivals, including Google, and to a new AI venture Altman has been plotting in the wake of his firing. Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis predicts on X:The employees at OpenAI just lost billions of dollars in secondary share sales that were about to happen at a $90b valuation - that's over. Done.I think OpenAI will lose half their employees, the 12-18 month lead, and 90% of their valuation in 2024.Just insane value destruction What's your prediction for the future of OpenAI?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:Kyle Vogt, the serial entrepreneur who co-founded and led Cruise from a startup in a garage through its acquisition and ownership by General Motors, has resigned, according to an email sent to employees Sunday evening... The executive shakeup comes a less than a month after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's permits to operate self-driving vehicles on public roads after an October 2 incident that saw a pedestrian - who had been initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi - run over and dragged 20 feet by the AV. A video, which TechCrunch also viewed, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. The DMV's order of suspension stated that Cruise withheld about seven seconds of video footage, which showed the robotaxi then attempting to pull over and subsequently dragging the woman 20 feet...[M]ore layoffs are expected at the company that employs about 4,000 full-time employees. TechCrunch notes that Vogt previously co-founded Justin.tv Socialcam, Twitch, and shares this quote from an email that Vogt sent to all employees Sunday evening. "The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future... "The status quo on our roads sucks, but together we've proven there is something far better around the corner."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:Central bank digital currencies have the potential to replace cash, but adoption could take time, said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday. "CBDCs can replace cash which is costly to distribute in island economies," she said Wednesday at the Singapore FinTech Festival. "They can offer resilience in more advanced economies. And they can improve financial inclusion where few hold bank accounts." [...] "CBDCs would offer a safe and low-cost alternative [to cash]. They would also offer a bridge to go between private monies and a yardstick to measure their value, just like cash today which we can withdraw from our banks," the IMF chief said. The IMF has said that more than 100 countries are exploring CBDCs - or approximately 60% of countries in the world. "The level of global interest in CBDCs is unprecedented. Several central banks have already launched pilots or even issued a CBDC," the IMF said in a September report. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements, of the 86 central banks surveyed, 93% said they were exploring CBDCs, while 58% said they were likely to or may possibly issue a retail CBDC in either the short or medium term. But as of June, only 11 countries have adopted CBDCs, with an additional 53 in advanced planning stages and 46 researching the topic, according to data from the Atlantic Council... On Wednesday, the fund launched a CBDC handbook as a reference guide for policymakers around the world... Georgieva also said that artificial intelligence "could amplify some of the benefits of CBDCs" by providing accurate credit scoring and personalized support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today saw the end of IFComp.org's 29th annual text adventure competition (now administered by the charitable non-profit IF Technology Foundation). 74 new and original text adventures competed for a share of the $7,523 prize pool, with the winners announced in a special online ceremony on Twitch this afternoon. After all the votes were tabulated, the winning game was Dr Ludwig and the Devil, a 90-minute epic in which an esteemed mad scientist tries to double-cross Beelzebub himself - along with "the world's least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob!" Coming in second was LAKE Adventure. (Its premise? That it's a 13-year-old's 1993 game being revisited by its author 28 years later - complete with some gloriously retro artwork.) And finishing third was The Little Match Girl 4 (described as "a touching epic time travel fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.) But also this week, the owner of the web site 80sNostalgia.com has created a text adventure using nothing but inter-linked posts on Threads. "Think you can get under The Bridge?" its first post challenges. "Test your gaming skills with this Threads exclusive text-based game! "And then try to get your head around got much work it took to make it..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre. The Washington Post explains...McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...." About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...] Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to." McIntyre's post on X has now received 65,400 likes - and 3,086 reposts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Microsoft Security Response Center celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates. In a blog post they call the updates "an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world's approach to cybersecurity."Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it's worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats... Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence... This led to a shift from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products. Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats... As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon "is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model," reports Reuters, "hoping it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters."The model, codenamed as "Olympus", has 2 trillion parameters, the people said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, one of the best models available, is reported to have one trillion parameters... The team is spearheaded by Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to CEO Andy Jass... Amazon believes having homegrown models could make its offerings more attractive on AWS, where enterprise clients want to access top-performing models, the people familiar with the matter said, adding there is no specific timeline for releasing the new model. "While the parameter count doesn't automatically mean Olympus will outperform GPT-4, it's probably a good bet that it will, at minimum, be very competitive with its rival from OpenAI," argues a financial writer at the Motley Fool - as well as Googles nascent AI projects.Amazon could have a key advantage over its competition, one that CEO Andy Jassy alluded to in the company's third-quarter earnings call. Jassy said, "Customers want to bring the models to their data, not the other way around. And much of that data resides in AWS [Amazon Web Services] as the clear market segment leader in cloud infrastructure...." Amazon will likely also leverage Olympus in other ways. For example, the company could make its CodeWhisperer generative AI coding companion more powerful. Jassy noted in the Q3 call that all of Amazon's "significant businesses are working on generative AI applications to transform their customer experiences." Olympus could make those initiatives even more transformative. They point out that Amazon's profits more than tripled in the third quarter of 2023 from where they were in 2022. And Amazon's stock price has already jumped more than 40% in 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Linux Foundation "announced the intention to form the High Performance Software Foundation. "Through a series of technical projects, the High Performance Software Foundation aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts."As use of high performance computing becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated high performance computing to exploit the performance of this diversifying set of architectures. As an umbrella project under the Linux Foundation, HPSF intends to provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance software ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate together on the scientific software stack. The High Performance Software Foundation already benefits from strong support across the high performance computing landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon. Its first open source technical projects include:Spack: the high performance computing package managerKokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes.WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell PrizeTrilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification.Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing.VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world's largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers.E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software StackCharliecloud: high performance computing-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Free Sofware Foundation issued a clarifying blog post this week, saying the organization is "pleased when people use GNU licenses to distribute and license software." But "we condemn the use of unauthorized, confusing derivatives of the licenses."Unfortunately, some authors engage in confusing practices by drafting licenses using existing terms and conditions of GNU free software licenses, without the intention of granting all four freedoms to users. For example, we have long seen attempts to add restrictions to the license text itself, placed in the LICENSE file, or included elsewhere in the program's release. An example is the so-called "Commons Clause," which, when applied to a free software license, affirms that the program is covered by the license. But, at the same time, is contradicting in its meaning by asserting that selling copies of the program or implementing a commercial service with the program is prohibited. The immediate consequence of the practice of inserting a restriction into a GNU license in this way is the confusion it causes for the community. Users still see the name of the original license, with its preamble and terms and conditions intact, transmitting a strong message that the purpose of the license is to enable users - grant users - their essential software freedoms. This message is clear from the license's text, and is bolstered from the renown accrued by the FSF and GNU trademarks, and their decades of free software advocacy. At the same time, these same users see a contradictory statement of the "Commons Clause," which is clearly contrary to the sprit of the free software movement and the Free Software Definition... [T]o make it even clearer that added restrictions are incompatible with our license, we gave users the right to delete such added restrictions [in 2007] and preserve the program's freedom. But we at the FSF have another legal tool against attempts to release programs under GNU General Public Licenses that have been wrongly altered to become nonfree licenses. The FSF holds copyrights and common law trademarks to the GNU family of General Public Licenses. Moreover, the FSF holds registered trademarks for "FSF," "Free Software Foundation," and "GNU." [...] We can't control the drafting by others of proprietary software licenses, but we can and do forbid doing this in a way that misleadingly associates those licenses with GNU or GNU licenses... [W]e are entitled to legally enforce our copyright and trademark for FSF licenses that have been altered by added restrictions to a verbatim GNU license... Licenses that confuse users about the freedoms they grant are damaging to the free software movement because they threaten to dilute the value and power of these licenses. When GNU licenses are misused through such confusing practices, it harms the renown accrued by the GNU project and the FSF over decades of free software advocacy. It is our duty to all computer users to stop these practices, and, if necessary, we will use our legal rights to this end.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader deater writes: The Second Reality demoscene demo from 1993 is one of the most well known demos of all time, pushing a 486 running DOS to its limits. There have been remakes for other architectures over the years, including Atari ST, Gameboy color, and Commodore 64. At this past Demosplash 2023 demoparty a version for the Apple II was released (and won 1st place), which was quite a challenge as the Apple II graphics have essentially none of the hardware acceleration available on the other platforms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"And no, it's not COBOL," jokes long-time Slashdot reader schwit1, sharing this report from ScienceAlert:A secret text has been discovered in Turkiye, scattered among tens of thousands of ancient clay tablets, which were written in the time of the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BCE. No one yet knows what the curious cuneiform script says, but it seems to be a long-lost language from more than 3,000 years ago. Experts say the mysterious idiom is unlike any other ancient written language found in the Middle East, although it seems to share roots with other Anatolian-Indo-European languages. The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite - the oldest known Indo-European tongue - after an introduction that essentially translates to: "From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalasma"...Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it. Schwemer and his colleagues hope to publish their results along with images of their discovery sometime next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge reports that OpenAI's board "is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter." But one of those people said Altman "is 'ambivalent' about coming back and would want significant governance changes." In a possibly related development, Forbes reports that "A day after OpenAI's board of directors fired former CEO Sam Altman in a shock development, investors in the company are plotting how to restore him, in what would amount to an even more surprising counter-coup."Venture capital firms holding positions in OpenAI's for-profit entity have discussed working with Microsoft and senior employees at the company to bring back Altman, even as he has signaled to some that he intends to launch a new startup, four sources told Forbes. Whether the companies would be able to exert enough pressure to pull off such a move - and do it fast enough to keep Altman interested - is unclear. The playbook, a source told Forbes would be straightforward: make OpenAI's new management, under acting CEO Mira Murati and the remaining board, accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors. Facing such a combination, the thinking is that management would have to accept Altman back, likely leading to the subsequent departure of those believed to have pushed for Altman's removal, including cofounder Ilya Sutskever and board director Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora. Should such an effort not come together in time, Altman and OpenAI ex-president Greg Brockman were set to raise capital for a new startup, two sources said. "If they don't figure it out asap, they'd just go ahead with Newco," one source added. Also from the Verge: people close to OpenAI "say more departures are in the works". The Information confirms Altman "has been telling investors that he is planning to launch a new AI venture." They also report that Altman "has been in discussions with semiconductor executives, including chip designer Arm, on Friday morning about early efforts to design new chips that would lower costs for large-language model companies like OpenAI, a person familiar with the talks said. That effort would likely take years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Gates argues that when it comes to climate change, "there are more reasons to be hopeful than many people realize - and it's not just that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting cheaper. "And it's not just because many of the steps already taken to reduce carbon emissions are working: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels will probably peak in 2025."The main thing that makes me optimistic is all the innovation I'm seeing. As someone who has been funding climate solutions for years, I get to learn from ingenious scientists who are working on ideas that will help the world solve climate change. And their work makes me confident that innovation will help the world get on track to meet its climate goals. Some people are skeptical when a technology person like me says innovation is the answer. And it's true that new tools aren't the only thing we need. But we won't solve the climate problem without them. There are two reasons for this. First, we need to eliminate emissions from every sector of the economy. Although some behavior change will help, the world can't achieve its zero-emissions goals without inventing new ways of doing things. For example, the production of concrete and steel alone accounts for around 10 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gases, but right now, we don't have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide. The second reason is that, in a world with limited resources, innovations allow us to magnify the impact of our efforts... We couldn't solve the climate problem with existing technology even if we had unlimited resources - and, of course, we don't have unlimited resources. So we need to be as rigorous as possible about doing the most good with the funding that is available. In my view, that boils down to inventing and deploying new ways to cut emissions and to help people survive and thrive in a warming world. Gates believes we're at "the beginning of a Clean Industrial Revolution" --pointing readers to Breakthrough Energy's recent State of the Transition Report for more details. But Gates also provides some specific examples of optimism-fuleing breakthroughs" "To reduce emissions, we need to replace the synthetic fertilizers that release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, when broken down by microbes in the soil; Pivot Bio has genetically modified microbes to provide plants with the nitrogen they need without the excess greenhouse gases that synthetic alternatives produce.""Cement and steel are two of the biggest sources of emissions in this category. Boston Metal is well on the way to making steel with electricity (which can be generated without emissions) instead of coal. CarbonCure and Ecocem have developed low-carbon processes for making cement, and Brimstone has a way to do it while actually removing carbon from the air.""Because of inefficient windows and gaps in what's known as the building envelope, as much as 40% of heated or cooled air leaks out of the typical building. If we can drive that number down, buildings will require less heating and cooling - which will substantially lower our emissions. Aeroseal has developed a polymer that can seal ducts and other crevices; more than a quarter of a million buildings in the U.S. and Canada are already using their product. Another company, Luxwall, has developed a window that's many times more efficient than the single-pane windows used in most buildings. And unlike double-paned windows, it's thin enough to replace single-paned glass without having to rebuild the frame."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: Back in 2019, digital archivist Jason Scott released the source code to Infocom's classic text adventures. Now the other piece of the puzzle is available: the source code (mostly in assembly, with some C and Pascal) to their microcomputer interpreters. Infocom, publisher of the best-selling Zork series, ported their text adventures to most of the diverse microcomputer platforms of the 1980s by using an early virtual machine, known as the Z-machine or ZIP. This enabled them to sell games simultaneously for everything from the TI-99/4A to the Commodore 128. Hobbyists reverse-engineered the technology in the 1990s to create modern implementations, but now the original source code can be studied directly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet shares on update on "Rust in Linux: Where we are and where we're going next," citing a talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Richmond, Virginia by Linux/Rust developer Miguel Ojeda:In brief, Rust Linux is continuing to mature and is getting strong support from developers and vendors, such as Cisco, Samsung, and Canonical... Rust is taking the steps it needs to become - along with C - a fully-fledged member of the Linux language toolchain... That's not to say that we're ready to retire C for Rust just yet. In fact, that day is unlikely ever to come. But Rust is definitely on its way to becoming an important language for Linux development... As for the day-to-day work that's required to make Rust fully integrated with Linux, the "official" website of the initiative is now the self-explanatory Rust for Linux. This site is your one-stop source for all things Rust on Linux... However, the move forward has not been straightforward. Rust on Linux developers have discovered some problems along the way. For example, while deadlocks, when two or more threads are waiting on the other to finish, are safe in Rust, because they don't result in undefined behavior, they're not safe in the Linux kernel. The programmers are working on fixing this issue... A related issue is that there's growing interest in backporting Rust support into long-term support (LTS) versions of Linux, specifically 5.15 and 6.1. Some people are especially showing interest in the super LTS Linux 6.1 kernel. However, Linux doesn't generally allow backports into LTS Linuxes. So, if you really, really want fully featured Rust support in an older LTS kernel, you're going to need to pay for it in one way or the other. Another general rule that Rust developers have decided they're going to try to "break" is the rule against duplicate drivers. Usually, no one wants anyone wasting time reinventing the wheel, but some maintainers are open to the idea of experimenting with Rust, by starting simple with a driver they're already familiar with... These movements are small steps forward, but they're all critical for making Rust equal to C as a Linux programming language.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NFTs aren't gone yet," writes the Verge. "Disney will launch an 'all-new socially driven collectible experience' called Disney Pinnacle later this year, turning characters from Pixar, Star Wars, and its classic animated films into tradable digital pins."While announcing Pinnacle, Disney and its partner Dapper Labs won't even say the word "NFT." Dapper Labs still calls itself "the NFT company," but between a variety of scams, an eye-blistering episode at a recent Bored Ape event, and a market that has plunged since peaking in early 2021, that's a term they apparently will steer clear of. The only thing available on the site right now is a privacy policy that makes clear this is a Dapper Labs effort that's licensing content from Disney - not an in-house effort on the level of Disney Plus. The NFT collection is being launched through an iOS app, and a spokesperson tells CoinDesk that web and Android applications will come later. The Disney Pinnacle website has a few seconds of background animation showing the pins - and, of course, a waitlist signup form.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's stock price plumetted 16% after OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman - but appears to have immediately recovered most of the drop in after-hours trading. Yet OpenAI's move "also blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft," writes Ars Technica, "reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious." Tech reporter Kara Swisher called the firing a "badly managed coup de Sam," tweeting more details Friday night. "Sources tell me that the profit direction of the company under Altman and the speed of development, which could be seen as too risky, and the nonprofit side dedicated to more safety and caution were at odds. One person on the Sam side called it a 'coup,' while another said it was the the right move." Ars Technica fills in the story:Sources told reporter Kara Swisher that OpenAI's Dev Day event on November 6, with Altman front and center in a keynote pushing consumer-like products, was an "inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast." In a joint statement released Friday night, Altman and Brockman said they were "shocked and saddened" by the board's actions... OpenAI has an unusual structure where its for-profit arm is owned and controlled by a non-profit 501(c)(3) public charity... Insiders say the move was mostly a power play that resulted from a cultural schism between Altman and [cofounder/board member Ilya] Sutskever over Altman's management style and drive for high-profile publicity. On September 29, Sutskever tweeted, "Ego is the enemy of growth." The schism is causing further turmoil on the inside. Three AI researchers loyal to Altman departed the company as well on Friday, resigning in reaction to the news: Jakub Pachocki, GPT-4 lead and OpenAI's director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating AI risk, and Szymon Sidor, an open source baselines researcher. Rumors have already begun swirling about potential internal breakthroughs at OpenAI that may have intensified the slow/fast rift within the company, owing to Sutskever's role as co-lead of a "Superalignment" team that is tasked with figuring out how to control hypothetical superintelligent AI. At the APEC CEO Summit on Thursday, Altman said, "Four times now in the history of OpenAI - the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks - I've gotten to be in the room when we push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. And getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime." The concern here not necessarily being that OpenAI has developed superintelligence, which experts say is unlikely, but that the new breakthrough Altman mentioned may have added pressure to a company that is fighting within itself to proceed safely (from its non-profit branch) but also make money (from its for-profit subsidiary). Former Google CEO/chairman Eric Schmidt tweeted, "Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible." And reacting to the news, angel investor Ron Conway tweeted Friday that it looked like "a Board Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI." Addressing the charges of a "coup," OpenAI held "an impromptu all-hands meeting" Friday after the firing, according to a (paywalled) article from The Information:"You can call it this way," Sutskever said about the coup allegation. "And I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity...." When Sutskever was asked whether "these backroom removals are a good way to govern the most important company in the world?" he answered: "I mean, fair, I agree that there is not an ideal element to it. 100%." Reporter Kara Swisher predicted that Altman "will have a new company up by Monday." "If i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares," Sam Altman posted on X Saturday - although Swisher wondered if Altman was simply trolling the company that had fired him. "He has almost no shares, I believe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reportsSpaceX made a second attempt to successfully launch Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed. The uncrewed rocket took off just after 7 a.m. CT (8 a.m. ET). The rocket took off as intended, making it roughly 8 minutes into flight before SpaceX confirmed it had to intentionally explode the Starship spacecraft as it flew over the ocean... This mission comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators as SpaceX has awaited a launch license. The company is also grappling with pushback from environmentalists... After separating from the Super Heavy rocket booster, the Starship spacecraft soared to an altitude of approximately 93 miles (150 kilometers) before SpaceX lost contact, according to a statement issued by the company. For context, the U.S. government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface the edge of outer space... SpaceX is OK with rockets exploding in the early stages of development. That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA. The space agency focuses on building one rocket and strenuously designing and testing it on the ground before its first flight - taking years but all but guaranteeing success on the first launch. SpaceX, however, rapidly builds new prototypes and is willing to test them to their breaking point because there's usually a spare nearby. During a drive by the company's facilities on Friday - four Starship spacecraft and at least two Super Heavy boosters could be seen from public roadways. CNN reminds readers that "so far in 2023 alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more than 70 spaceflights... "Elon Musk described Starship as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX's founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time. NASA has its own plans for the rocket."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth," reports the New York Times magazine, "including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris." The article notes a threat assessment from U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch:What's most concerning isn't the swarm of satellites but the types. "We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles," Lerch said - for example, a Russian "nesting doll" satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia's, is launching unmanned "space planes" into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites. An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and "ASAT" antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch's assessment, space looked less like a grand "new ocean" for exploration - phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration - and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward. One interesting detail from the article. "[I]f a requirement to 'blind and deafen' an enemy's satellites were to arise from U.S. Space Command, the Space Force could help fulfill the order. The means would most likely not be "kinetic" - some form of physical or explosive contact - but electronic, a weapon of code-related stealth, or perhaps a kind of debilitating high-energy burst." And Space Force's highest-ranking officer, General Chance Saltzman, describes the kind of new military calculations made, for example, when Ukraine moved its communications to Starlink satellites:"The Russians are trying to interrupt it," he said, "and they're not having very good success." And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits... [W]hile small satellites in a large configuration could potentially be a more expensive investment than two or three megasatellites, the shift could be worthwhile. If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman remarked, it will hesitate to cross "a threshold of violence." No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Python community is staying busy.Three weeks ago a new podcast launched with Python core developer/steering council member Pablo Galindo and Python developer-in-residence Aukasz Langa.This month the Python Sofware Foundation announced its seventh Python Developers Survey. And for the fifth year in a row the foundation partnered with JetBrains to offer a 30% discount on JetBrains' dedicated Python Integrated Development Environment "PyCharm" - with all proceeds benefitting the Python Software Foundation ("The discount will be automatically applied when you check out. The promotion will only be available through November 27th...") A PSF blog post about the fundraiser notes you can also just make a direct donation to the Python Software Foundation, or sign up to become a foundation member to "help us sustain what we do."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Moving to clamp down on the growing scourge of SIM-swapping and port-out fraud, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unveiled new rules mandating telcos to give consumers greater control of their mobile phone accounts. Under the new rules, wireless carriers are required to notify customers of any SIM transfer requests, a measure designed to thwart fraudulent attempts by cybercriminals. The FCC has also revised its customer proprietary network information and local number portability rules, making it more challenging for scammers to access sensitive subscriber information. The new protective measures (PDF) are meant to address SIM-swapping and port-out attacks widely documented in cybercriminal attacks against businesses and consumers. The attack technique is used to hijack mobile accounts, change and steal passwords, bypass MFA roadblocks and raid bank accounts. Studies have found that major mobile carriers in the US are vulnerable to SIM-swapping with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) receiving thousands of consumer complaints every year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's largest single-site solar farm has gone online in the United Arab Emirates. Called the Al Dhafra solar farm, it features almost 4 million bifacial solar panels and will power nearly 200,000 homes -- all while eliminating 2.4 million tons of carbon emissions annually. Electrek reports: Now that Al Dhafra is online, the UAE's solar power production capacity has increased to 3.2 GW. In September, EWEC called for proposals to develop a 1.5 GW solar farm in Al Khazna near Abu Dhabi. UAE is aiming to triple its renewable energy capacity to 14 GW by 2030. The UAE is hosting COP28 in Dubai, which kicks off on November 30, so, understandably, its rulers would time the launch of the world's largest solar farm just ahead of that event -- it's simply good PR. UAE is rightly being criticized for putting the CEO of its state oil company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company -- the world's 12th-biggest oil company by production -- in charge of COP28. It's also being criticized for hosting COP28 yet having an all-of-the-above approach to energy. The UAE Energy Strategy 2050 targets an energy mix of 44% clean energy, 38% gas, 12% "clean coal" (yes, it really says that), and 6% nuclear. It says it will become carbon neutral by 2050, but how it will do that on 50% fossil fuels is anyone's guess.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, women in the U.S. are now projected to live about six years longer than U.S. men. TIME reports: [T]he 2021 data represent the largest gender-based life expectancy gap in the U.S. since 1996. The gulf began to widen before the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors note, but the trend accelerated from 2019 to 2021. Deaths from COVID-19 and unintentional injuries, a category that includes accidental drug overdoses, were the largest contributors to the widening of the gap, but differential rates of homicide, heart disease, and suicide deaths also played a role, according to the report. It's well-established that men die of these causes more frequently than women, and in recent years, they have been some of the most common causes of death overall. Heart disease, COVID-19, and unintentional injuries accounted for three of the top five in 2021. The gender gap would have been even wider, the authors note, but for factors including increases in maternal mortality and decreases in cancer deaths among men. Overall, the data underscore the continued importance of limiting COVID-19's spread, and of finding better ways to improve national mental health and prevent drug overdoses and suicides -- fatalities sometimes labeled by experts as "deaths of despair."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This Sunday, November 19, makes a full 25 years since the original Half-Life first hit (pre-Steam) store shelves. To celebrate the anniversary, Valve has uploaded a feature-packed "25th anniversary update" to the game on Steam, and made the title free to keep if you pick it up this weekend. Valve's 25th Anniversary Update page details a bevy of new and modernized features added to the classic first-person shooter, including: - Four new multiplayer maps that "push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine" - New graphics settings, including support for a widescreen field-of-view on modern monitors and OpenGL Overbright lighting (still no official ray-tracing support, though-leave that to the modders) - "Proper gamepad config out of the box" (so dust off that Gravis Gamepad Pro) - Steam networking support for easier multiplayer setup - "Verified" support for Steam Deck play ("We failed super hard" on the first verification attempt, Valve writes) - Proper UI scaling for resolutions up to 3840x1600 - Multiplayer balancing updates (because 25 years hasn't been enough to perfect the meta) - New entity limits that allow mod makers to build more complex mods - A full software renderer for the Linux version of the game - Various bug fixes - "Removed the now very unnecessary 'Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards' setting" In addition, the new update includes a host of restored and rarely seen content, including: - Three multiplayer maps from the "Half-Life: Further Data" CD-ROM: Double Cross, Rust Mill, and Xen DM - Four restored multiplayer models: Ivan the Space Biker, Proto-Barney (from the alpha build), a skeleton, and Too Much Coffee Man (from "Further Data") - Dozens of "Further Data" sprays to tag in your multiplayer matches - The original Half-Life: Uplink demo in playable formRead more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter doc1623 shares a report from Wired: Swedish workers are uniting against Tesla. [Starting Friday], cleaners will stop cleaning Tesla showrooms, electricians won't fix the company's charging points, and dockworkers will refuse to unload Tesla cargo at all Swedish ports. What started as a strike by Tesla mechanics is spreading, in something Swedish unions describe as an existential battle between Elon Musk's carmaker and the conventions they say make the country's labor market fair and efficient. The standoff in Sweden is the biggest union action the company has faced anywhere in the world. Sweden doesn't have laws that set working conditions, such as a minimum wage. Instead these rules are dictated by collective agreements, a type of contract that defines the benefits employees are entitled to, such as wages and working hours. For five years, industrial workers' union IF Metall, which represents Tesla mechanics, has been trying to persuade the company to sign a collective agreement. When Tesla refused, the mechanics decided to strike at the end of October. Then they asked fellow Swedish unions to join them. Some unions that joined the blockade are expanding their actions in an effort to be more effective. Since November 7, union members working at four Swedish ports have been refusing to unload Tesla cargo. Tomorrow, the blockade will be extended to all ports in Sweden. "We don't want to unload any Tesla cars," says Jimmy Asberg, who is president of the dockworkers' branch of Sweden's transport union and works at Gavle port. "We are going to allow every other car [to dock], but the Tesla cars, they will stay on the ship." He hopes Tesla will understand how important this issue is for workers in the country. "Not just dockworkers but for all workers in Sweden." The Swedish Building Maintenance Workers' Union will also join the Tesla blockade on Friday at 12 pm local time, "simply because the [IF] Metall Workers Trade Union asked us to," says ombudsman Torbjorn Jonsson, adding that the union has around 50 members who clean Tesla locations. Four showrooms and service centers will be affected -- three around Stockholm and one in the city of Umea. "Their workshops and showrooms will not be cleaned." Three days later, on November 20, the Seko union, which represents postal workers, will stop delivering letters, spare parts, and pallets to all of Tesla's addresses in Sweden. "Tesla is trying to gain competitive advantages by giving the workers worse wages and conditions than they would have with a collective agreement," said Seko's union president, Gabriella Lavecchia, in a statement. "It is of course completely unacceptable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The newly updated U.S. Department of Agriculture's "plant hardiness zone map" has gardeners across the nation researching what new plants they can grow in their warming regions, as the 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 2012 map. NPR reports: This week the map got its first update in more than a decade, and the outlook for many gardens looks warmer. The 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 2012 map across the contiguous U.S., says Chris Daly, director of the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University that jointly developed the map with the USDA. Daly says the new map means about half the country has shifted into a new half zone and half hasn't. In some locations, people may find they can grow new types of flowers, fruits, vegetables and plants. Daly says he is hesitant to explicitly attribute the specific changes from the 2012 map to the 2023 map to climate change because of the volatility of the key statistic they used to create this map. They were mapping "the coldest night of the year, each year, over the past 30 years", Daly says, and it's a highly variable figure. In an email, a press officer for the USDA says, "Changes to plant hardiness zones are not necessarily reflective of global climate change because of the highly variable nature of the extreme minimum temperature of the year." But Daly says, in the big picture, climate change is playing a role in changing what grows where in the US: "Over the long run, we will expect to see a slow shifting northward of zones as climate change takes hold."Read more of this story at Slashdot.