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AMD is reverting to a simpler, more traditional numbering scheme for its laptop processors, abandoning its recent complex "decoder ring" system. The new system for Ryzen AI laptop processors will use a three-digit model number to denote generation and SKU, aligning more closely with industry norms. Ars Technica reports: For its new Ryzen AI laptop processors, codenamed "Strix Point," AMD is still using the same broad Ryzen 3/5/7/9 number to communicate general performance level plus a one- or two-letter suffix to denote general performance and power level (U for ultraportables, HX for higher-performance chips, and so on). A new three-digit processor number will inform buyers of the chip's generation in the first digit and denote the specific SKU using the last two digits. In other words, the company is essentially hitting the undo button. Like Intel, AMD is shifting from four-digit numbers to three digits. The Strix Point processor numbers will start with the 300 series, which AMD says is because this is the third generation of Ryzen laptop processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Current 7040-series and 8040-series processors with NPUs are not being renamed retroactively, and AMD plans to stop using the 7000- and 8000-series numbering for processor introductions going forward. AMD wouldn't describe exactly how it would approach CPU model numbers for new products that used older architectures but did say that new processors that didn't meet the 40+ TOPS requirement for Microsoft's Copilot+ program would simply use the "Ryzen" name instead of the new "Ryzen AI" branding. That would include older architectures with slower NPUs, like the current 7040 and 8040-series chips. Desktop CPUs are, once again, totally unaffected by this change. Desktop processors' four-digit model numbers and alphabetic suffixes generally tell you all you need to know about their underlying architecture; the new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs and the Zen 5 architecture were also announced today. It seems like a lot of work to do to end up basically where we started, especially when the people at AMD who make and market the desktop chips have been getting by just fine with older model numbers for newly released products when appropriate. But to be fair to AMD, there just isn't a great way to do processor model numbers in a simple and consistent way, at least not given current market realities [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lawmakers in New York have reached a tentative agreement to "prohibit social-media companies from using algorithms to steer content to children without parental consent (source paywalled; alternative source)," according to the Wall Street Journal. "The legislation is aimed at preventing social-media companies from serving automated feeds to minors. The bill, which is still being completed but expected to be voted on this week, also would prohibit platforms from sending minors notifications during overnight hours without parental consent." Meanwhile, the results of New York's first mental health report were released today, finding that depression and anxiety are rampant among NYC's teenagers, "with nearly half of them experiencing symptoms from one of both in recent years," reports NBC New York. "In a recent survey conducted last year, 48% of teenagers reported feeling depressive symptoms ranging from mild to severe. The vast majority, however, reported feeling high levels of resilience. Frequent coping mechanisms include listening to music and using social media."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ansel Adams estate said it was "officially on our last nerve" after Adobe was caught selling AI-generated images imitating the late photographer's work. The Verge reports: While Adobe permits AI-generated images to be hosted and sold on its stock image platform, users are required to hold the appropriate rights or ownership over the content they upload. Adobe Stock's Contributor Terms specifically prohibits content "created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist." Adobe responded to the callout, saying it had removed the offending content and had privately messaged the Adams estate to get in touch directly in the future. The Adams estate, however, said it had contacted Adobe directly multiple times since August 2023. "Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists' estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms," said the Adams estate on Threads. "It's past time to stop wasting resources that don't belong to you." Adobe Stock Vice President Matthew Smith previously told The Verge that the company generally moderates all "crowdsourced" Adobe Stock assets before they are made available to customers, employing a "variety" of methods that include "an experienced team of moderators who review submissions." As of January 2024, Smith said the strongest action the company can take to enforce its platform rules is to block Adobe Stock users who violate them. Bassil Elkadi, Adobe's Director of Communications and Public Relations, told The Verge that Adobe is "actively in touch with Ansel Adams on this matter," and that "appropriate steps were taken given the user violated Stock terms." The Adams estate has since thanked Adobe for removing the images, and said that it expects "it will stick this time." "We don't have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel's photography," said the Adams estate. "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output -- regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: Like many other phone makers, Google has a self-repair program for servicing your damaged or malfunctioning Pixel device. As its support site explains, there are options to get repair tools, manuals, and certified parts so you can fix up your Pixel like new. Owners can also choose to simply send their device in to have it repaired professionally. As replacement parts can be expensive, some DIYers choose to use parts from third-party suppliers. But if you go down this route, you may want to avoid sending your device to Google if there's a problem you don't have the skills to fix on your own. As YouTuber Louis Rossmann discovered, Google's service and repair terms and conditions contain a concerning stipulation. The document states that Google will keep your device if a non-OEM part is found. Apparently, this rule has been in effect since July 19, 2023, as marked on the page. Last week, iFixit said they are parting ways with Samsung because the company "does not seem interested in enabling repair at scale." A separate report from 404 Media found that Samsung requires independent repair shops to give them the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops. "Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to 'immediately disassemble' any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to 'immediately notify' Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts," reports 404 Media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak's Ernesto Van der Sar recalls the rise and fall of Napster, the file-sharing empire that kickstarted a global piracy frenzy 25 years ago. Here's an excerpt from his report: At the end of the nineties, technology and the Internet were a playground for young engineers and 'hackers'. Some of them regularly gathered in the w00w00 IRC chatroom on the EFnet network. This tech-think-tank had many notable members, including WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and Shawn Fanning, who logged on with the nickname Napster. In 1998, 17-year-old Fanning shared an idea with the group. 'Napster' wanted to create a network of computers that could share files with each other. More specifically, a central music database that everyone in the world could access. This idea never left the mind of the young developer. Fanning stopped going to school and flanked by his friend Sean Parker, devoted the following months to making his vision a reality. That moment came on June 1, 1999, when the first public release of Napster was released online. Soon after, the software went viral. Napster was quickly embraced by millions of users, who saw the software as something magical. It was a gateway for musical exploration, one that dwarfed even the largest record stores in town. And all for free. It sounds mundane today, but some equated it to pure technological sorcery. For many top players in the music industry, Napster's sorcery was pure witchcraft. At the time, manufacturing CDs with high profit margins felt like printing money and Napster's appearance threatened to ruin the party. [...] At the start of 2001, Napster's user base reached a peak of more than 26.4 million worldwide. Yet, despite huge growth and backing from investors, the small file-sharing empire couldn't overcome the legal challenges. The RIAA lawsuit resulted in an injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court, which ordered the network to shut down. This happened during July 2001, little more than two years after Napster launched. By September that year, the case had been settled for millions of dollars. While the Napster craze was over, file-sharing had mesmerized the masses and the genie was out of the bottle. Grokster, KaZaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, and many others popped up and provided sharing alternatives, for as long as they lasted. Meanwhile, BitTorrent was also knocking on the door. "Napster paved the way for Apple's iTunes store, to serve the demand that was clearly there," notes Ernesto. "This music streaming landscape was largely pioneered by a Napster 'fan' from Sweden, Daniel Ek." "Like many others, Ek was fascinated by the 'all you can play' experience offered by file-sharing software, and that planted the seeds for the music streaming startup Spotify, where he still serves as CEO today. In fact, Spotify itself used file-sharing technology under the hood to ensure swift playback."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After growing concerned about potential stock manipulation, E*Trade is "considering telling meme-stock leader Keith Gill he can no longer use its platform," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. Gill, known online as "Roaring Kitty," gained notoriety for his role in the 2020 meme stock frenzy, where he encouraged amateur investors to buy GameStop shares, significantly driving up the stock price and challenging hedge funds. Just hours ago, Roaring Kitty announced he bought $116 million worth of GameStop options and stocks. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda apologized Monday for massive cheating on certification tests for seven vehicle models as the automaker suspended production of three of them. The wide-ranging fraudulent testing at Japan's top automaker involved the use of inadequate or outdated data in collision tests, and incorrect testing of airbag inflation and rear-seat damage in crashes. Engine power tests were also found to have been falsified. Toyota Motor Corp., based in Toyota city, central Japan, suspended production in the country of the Corolla Fielder, Corolla Axio and Yaris Cross. The deceptive tests were also found on discontinued models. The company said the wrongdoing does not affect the safety of the vehicles already on roads, which include the Corolla subcompact and Lexus luxury vehicles. "We sincerely apologize," Toyoda told reporters, bowing deeply and holding the position for several seconds, as is customary in Japan at news conferences where companies apologize for misbehavior. A Japanese government investigation into Toyota began in January. The issue does not affect Toyota's overseas production. Mazda and Honda also reported cheating on its vehicle testing. Mazda said incorrect engine control software was used in the tests. Meanwhile, the "improper tests" conducted by Honda included "those on noise levels and torque, on a range of models," according to the Associated Press. "Honda said affected older models -- the Accord, Odyssey and Fit -- are no longer in production. The safety of the vehicles is not affected, it said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung isn't waiting around for Oura to file any patent claims over its forthcoming smart ring. Instead, it's preemptively filed its own suit against Oura, seeking a "declaratory judgment" that states the Galaxy Ring doesn't infringe on five Oura patents. The suit alleges that Oura has a pattern of filing patent suits against competitors based on "features common to virtually all smart rings." In particular, the suit references sensors, electronics, batteries, and scores based on metrics gathered from sensors. The case lists instances in which Oura sued rivals like Ultrahuman, Circular, and RingConn, sometimes before they even entered the US market. For those reasons, Samsung says in the suit that it anticipates being the target of an Oura suit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The next "Spider-Verse" film may have a new animation style: AI. From a report: Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) CEO Tony Vinciquerra does not mince words when it comes to AI. He likes the tech -- or at the very least, he likes the economics. "We are very focused on AI. The biggest problem with making films today is the expense," Vinciquerra said at Sony's Thursday (Friday in Japan) investor event. "We will be looking at ways to...produce both films for theaters and television in a more efficient way, using AI primarily." That's about the strongest support for AI we've heard from a film studio head. "We had an 8-month strike over AI last year," Vinciquerra began his response to the first analyst question (from Nomura Securities) during his Q&A portion of the annual event. He also acknowledged that ongoing IATSE talks and the forthcoming Teamsters negotiations are "both over AI again." The sum total of those discussions between Hollywood's workers and its studios will inform just how far Vinciquerra and others can go. "The agreements that came out of last year's strikes and the agreements that come out of the IATSE and Teamsters [negotiations] will define roughly what we can do with AI," Vinciquerra said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has accidentally collected childrens' voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users' deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media. From the report: Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people's lives. The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google's own employees reported internally. These include issues with Google's own products or data collection practices; vulnerabilities in third party vendors that Google uses; or mistakes made by Google staff, contractors, or other people that have impacted Google systems or data. The incidents include everything from a single errant email containing some PII, through to substantial leaks of data, right up to impending raids on Google offices. When reporting an incident, employees give the incident a priority rating, P0 being the highest, P1 being a step below that. The database contains thousands of reports over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2018. In one 2016 case, a Google employee reported that Google Street View's systems were transcribing and storing license plate numbers from photos. They explained that Google uses an algorithm to detect text in Street View imagery.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CarbonBrief: China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 3% in March 2024, ending a 14-month surge that began when the economy reopened after the nation's "zero-Covid" controls were lifted in December 2022. The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, reinforces the view that China's emissions could have peaked in 2023. The drivers of the CO2 drop in March 2024 were expanding solar and wind generation, which covered 90% of the growth in electricity demand, as well as declining construction activity. Oil demand growth also ground to a halt, indicating that the post-Covid rebound may have run its course. A 2023 peak in China's CO2 emissions is possible if the buildout of clean energy sources is kept at the record levels seen last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Stock Exchange said Monday it was investigating a "technical issue" that was leading to large fluctuations in the prices of certain stocks including Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. From a report: According to a notice posted on its website, the issue involved "limit up, limit down bands," which are designed to limit volatility. Some 50 stocks were affected, the website indicated, and trades in those companies was halted. NYSE trading data incorrectly showed so-called Class A shares of Berkshire down 99% from its price above $620,000 a share.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zoom's CEO Eric Yuan predicts that AI will significantly transform the workplace, potentially ushering in a four-day workweek, he told The Verge in an interview. Yuan said Zoom is transitioning from a videoconferencing platform to a comprehensive collaboration suite called Zoom Workplace. He believes AI will automate routine tasks such as attending meetings, reading emails, and making phone calls, enabling employees to dedicate time to more creative and meaningful work. The Verge adds: The Verge: I'm asking you which meetings do you look at and think you would hand off?Yuan: I started with the problem first, right? And last but not least, after the meeting is over, let's say I'm very busy and missed the meeting. I really don't understand what happened. That's one thing. Another thing for a very important meeting I missed, given I'm the CEO, they're probably going to postpone the meeting. The reason why is I probably need to make a decision. Given that I'm not there, they cannot move forward, so they have to reschedule. You look at all those problems. Let's assume AI is there. AI can understand my entire calendar, understand the context. Say you and I have a meeting -- just one click, and within five seconds, AI has already scheduled a meeting. At the same time, every morning I wake up, an AI will tell me, "Eric, you have five meetings scheduled today. You do not need to join four of the five. You only need to join one. You can send a digital version of yourself." For the one meeting I join, after the meeting is over, I can get all the summary and send it to the people who couldn't make it. I can make a better decision. Again, I can leverage the AI as my assistant and give me all kinds of input, just more than myself. That's the vision.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British chip designer Arm expects to capture more than half of the Windows PC market within the next five years, CEO Rene Haas said in an interview. The company's optimism comes as Microsoft and its hardware partners gear up to introduce a new generation of AI-powered PCs running on Arm-designed chips, potentially reshaping the Intel-dominated industry. Haas attributed Microsoft's commitment to supporting Arm's technology through enhanced developer tools as a key factor in the anticipated market shift.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The highlight of AMD's presentation Sunday at Computex 2024 was "the introduction of AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series processors for laptops and the Ryzen 9000 Series for desktops," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (sharing his report at Beta News):AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series processors, designed for next-generation AI laptops, come with AMD's latest XDNA 2 architecture. This includes a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that delivers 50 TOPS of AI processing power, significantly enhancing the AI capabilities of laptops. Among the processors announced were the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which features 12 cores and 24 threads with a boost frequency of 5.1 GHz, and the Ryzen AI 9 365 with 10 cores and 20 threads, boosting up to 5.0 GHz... In the desktop segment, the Ryzen 9000 Series processors, based on the "Zen 5" architecture, demonstrated an average 16% improvement in IPC performance over their predecessors built on the "Zen 4" architecture. The Ryzen 9 9950X stands out with 16 cores and 32 threads, reaching up to 5.7 GHz boost frequency and equipped with 80MB of cache... AMD also reaffirmed its commitment to the AM4 platform by introducing the Ryzen 9 5900XT and Ryzen 7 5800XT processors. These models are compatible with existing AM4 motherboards, providing an economical upgrade path for users. The article adds that AMD also unveiled its Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot workstation graphics card - priced at $3,499 - "further broadening its impact on high-performance computing... "AMD also emphasized its strategic partnerships with leading OEMs such as Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, who are set to launch systems powered by these new AMD processors." And there's also a software collaboration with Microsoft, reportedly "to enhance the capabilities of AI PCs, thus underscoring AMD's holistic approach to integrating AI into everyday computing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonytmous reader shared a recent report from BleepingComputer:Cybercriminals are abusing Stack Overflow in an interesting approach to spreading malware - answering users' questions by promoting a malicious PyPi package that installs Windows information-stealing malware... "We further noticed that a StackOverflow account 'EstAYA G' [was] exploiting the platform's community members seeking debugging help [1, 2, 3] by directing them to install this malicious package as a 'solution' to their issue even though the 'solution' is unrelated to the questions posted by developers," explained Sonatype researcher Ax Sharma in the Sonatype report. Sonatype's researcher "noticed that line 17 was laden with ...a bit too many whitespaces," according to the report, "in turn hiding code much further to the right which would be easy to miss, unless you notice the scroll bar. The command executes a base64-encoded payload..." And then, reports BleepingComputer...When deobfuscated, this command will download an executable named 'runtime.exe' from a remote site and execute it. This executable is actually a Python program converted into an .exe that acts as an information-stealing malware to harvest cookies, passwords, browser history, credit cards, and other data from web browsers. It also appears to search through documents for specific phrases and, if found, steal the data as well. All of this information is then sent back to the attacker, who can sell it on dark web markets or use it to breach further accounts owned by the victim.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Computer Weekly:A former student at the Inns of Court College of Advocacy (ICCA) says he was hauled over the coals by the college for having acted responsibly and "with integrity" in reporting a security blunder that left sensitive information about students exposed. Bartek Wytrzyszczewski faced misconduct proceedings after alerting the college to a data breach exposing sensitive information on hundreds of past and present ICCA students... The ICCA, which offers training to future barristers, informed data protection regulator the Information Commissioner's Office of a breach "experienced" in August 2023 after Wytrzyszczewski alerted the college that sensitive files on nearly 800 students were accessible to other college users via the ICCA's web portal. The breach saw personal data such as email addresses, phone numbers and academic information - including exam marks and previous institutions attended - accessible to students at the college. Students using the ICCA's web portal were also able to access ID photos, as well as student ID numbers and sensitive data, such as health records, visa status and information as to whether they were pregnant or had children...After the college secured a written undertaking from Wytrzyszczewski not to disclose any of the information he had discovered, it launched misconduct proceedings against him. He had stumbled across the files in error, he said, and viewed a significant number to ensure he could report their contents with accuracy. "The panel cleared Wytrzyszczewski and found it had no jurisdiction to hear the matter," according to the article. But he "said the experience caused him to unenroll from the ICCA's course and restart his training at another provider."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI models can evaluate how similar voices are to each other. So NPR asked forensic voice experts at Arizona State University to compare the voice and speech patterns of OpenAI's "Sky" to Scarlett Johansson's...The researchers measured Sky, based on audio from demos OpenAI delivered last week, against the voices of around 600 professional actresses. They found that Johansson's voice is more similar to Sky than 98% of the other actresses. Yet she wasn't always the top hit in the multiple AI models that scanned the Sky voice. The researchers found that Sky was also reminiscent of other Hollywood stars, including Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell. The analysis of Sky often rated Hathaway and Russell as being even more similar to the AI than Johansson. The lab study shows that the voices of Sky and Johansson have undeniable commonalities - something many listeners believed, and that now can be supported by statistical evidence, according to Arizona State University computer scientist Visar Berisha, who led the voice analysis in the school's College of Health Solutions and the College of Engineering. "Our analysis shows that the two voices are similar but likely not identical," Berisha said... OpenAI maintains that Sky was not created with Johansson in mind, saying it was never meant to mimic the famous actress. "It's not her voice. It's not supposed to be. I'm sorry for the confusion. Clearly you think it is," Altman said at a conference this week. He said whether one voice is really similar to another will always be the subject of debate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gizmodo reports there's been progress on a male birth-control gel "being developed with the help of several organizations, including the U.S. government's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the larger NIH."It's now being tested in a larger-scale Phase IIB trial, which involves around 400 couples. [Five milliliters of gel - about a teaspon - is applied to each shoulder blade once a day, reports NBC News.] That trial is still ongoing, but researchers have already begun to pore through some of the available data, which has provided encouraging results. In the summer of 2022, for instance, Diana Blithe, chief of the NICHD's Contraceptive Development Program, reported that the NES/T gel's efficacy rate so far appeared to be on par or even better than contraceptive hormonal options for women... The findings are still preliminary, and it will take more time for the full Phase II data to be collected and analyzed. But Blithe and her team have been encouraged by everything they've seen to date. In the team's early assessments, the gel appears to be both effective and safe, with minimal side effects for men taking it... Blithe and her colleagues are set to meet with the FDA next year about the steps needed to begin a larger Phase III trial and are still seeking a commercial partner to help bring the NES/T gel to the market. Initial findings also showed that the contraceptive worked faster than expected, Blithe said, according to NBC News. They add that at least three other companies are also working on male birth control:Also at the Boston conference on Sunday, YourChoice Therapeutics said a very small trial in the U.K. - just 16 men - showed that its nonhormonal pill, YCT-529, was safe and free of side effects. The San Francisco company's nonhormonal pill works by blocking the vitamin A receptor important for male fertility.YourChoice is planning a larger trial, according to CEO Akash Bakshi.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Few computer keyboards are as iconic, as influential, or as beige as the IBM Model-M," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu adding that it's "no surprise then that it's been given a modern reimagining by 8BitDo."Following on from their Nintendo NES and Famicom and Commodore 64 homages, 8BitDo has unveiled its latest retro-inspired mechanical keyboard. This one pays tribute to a true computing classic: the IBM Model-M keyboard. Lest anyone familiar with the real thing get too excited I'll mention up front that 8BitDo's Keyboard-M is a mechanical keyboard, using Kailh Box V2 white switches (swappable, of course) and not the buckling spring mechanism synonymous with the original. On Linux you can enable a buckling spring sound effect for every key press though, should you buy this and want the clatter to accompany it...! Like 8BitDo's other retro keyboards you can use this over Bluetooth, 2.4G wireless (USB adapter sits underneath), or wired. It has a built-in rechargeable 2000mAh Li-on battery that's good for 200 hours between charges. "It certainly looks the business," writes the Verge, "especially with the slick new wireless numpad / calculator combo pad 8BitDo will sell alongside it for another $44.99." And Ars Technica adds that "The M Edition's color scheme, chunkier build, and typeface selection, including on the Tab key with arrows and elsewhere, are nods to IBM's Model M," (noting that the Model M first succeeded the Model F keyboard in 1985). "Of course, the keyboard's naming, and the IBM behemoth and floppy disks strategically placed in marketing images, are notes of that, too..." "The M Edition also comes with the detachable A and B "Super Buttons" that connect to the keyboard via a 3.5 mm jack and are programmable without software." "The paint job is pretty faithful to the original," notes Windows Central, "with a combination of gray and white throughout, right down to the accurately recreated LED status panel in the right-hand corner. There are even two key caps with an IBM-inspired blue font on them. It's just tremendous." Ars Technica offers this advice to unconvinced purists:If you want a real Model M, there's a market of found and restored models available online and in thrift stores and electronics stores. For a modern spin, like USB ports and Mac support, Unicomp also makes new Model M keyboards that are truer to the original IBM design, particularly in their use of buckling spring switches.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports that U.S. federal regulators "have given Amazon key permission that will allow it to expand its drone delivery program, the company announced Thursday."In a blog post published on its website, Seattle-based Amazon said that the Federal Aviation Administration has given its Prime Air delivery service the OK to operate drones "beyond visual line of sight," removing a barrier that has prevented its drones from traveling longer distances. With the approval, Amazon pilots can now operate drones remotely without seeing it with their own eyes. An FAA spokesperson said the approval applies to College Station, Texas, where the company launched drone deliveries in late 2022. Amazon said its planning to immediately scale its operations in that city in an effort to reach customers in more densely populated areas. It says the approval from regulators also "lays the foundation" to scale its operations to more locations around the country... Amazon, which has sought this permission for years, said it received approval from regulators after developing a strategy that ensures its drones could detect and avoid obstacles in the air. Furthermore, the company said it submitted other engineering information to the FAA and conducted flight demonstrations in front of federal inspectors. Those demonstrations were also done "in the presence of real planes, helicopters, and a hot air balloon to demonstrate how the drone safely navigated away from each of them," Amazon said. The article also points out that by the end of the decade, Amazon "has a goal of delivering 500 million packages by drone every year." To achieve this, Amazon said in its blog post, "we knew we had to design a system capable of serving highly populated areas and that was safer than driving to the store."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will appetite-suppressing drugs hurt the sugar industry? Executives from Walmart warned that Ozempic and Zepbound "are impacting food sales," reports Bloomberg, "and multiple analyst surveys have showed that less-hungry customers are spending fewer dollars at grocery stores and restaurants."The drugs, which cut cravings, will result in a decline in calorie consumption in the US of 1.5% to 2.5% by 2035, with a drop of as much as 5% in the consumption of sweets such as baked goods, confectionery and soda, Morgan Stanley analysts including Pamela Kaufman said in a report last month. Morgan Stanley forecast about a 10th of the US population will be on the so-called GLP-1 medications - originally designed to treat diabetes but being used by many as a powerful weight-loss tool - by 2035... Even with tight supplies and sky-high prices limiting uptake of the medications, sales of GLP-1 drugs for both obesity and diabetes already exceeded $19 billion in 2023. The global obesity market alone could top $100 billion by the end of the decade, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates, while Bloomberg Intelligence forecasts $80 billion of sales. More than 60% of US consumers taking the drugs said they had cut back on sweet treats like candy, ice cream and baked goods, and many said they had either significantly - or entirely - stopped eating those products, according to Morgan Stanley.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader storagedude shares a provocative post from the cybersecurity news blog of Cyble Inc. (a Ycombinator-backed company promising "AI-powered actionable threat intelligence"). The post delves into concerns that the new "Recall" feature planned for Windows (on upcoming Copilot+ PCs) is "a security and privacy nightmare."Copilot Recall will be enabled by default and will capture frequent screenshots, or "snapshots," of a user's activity and store them in a local database tied to the user account. The potential for exposure of personal and sensitive data through the new feature has alarmed security and privacy advocates and even sparked a UK inquiry into the issue. In a long Mastodon thread on the new feature, Windows security researcher Kevin Beaumont wrote, "I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade. Good luck to my parents safely using their PC." In a blog post on Recall security and privacy, Microsoft said that processing and storage are done only on the local device and encrypted, but even Microsoft's own explanations raise concerns: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry." Security and privacy advocates take issue with assertions that the data is stored securely on the local device. If someone has a user's password or if a court orders that data be turned over for legal or law enforcement purposes, the amount of data exposed could be much greater with Recall than would otherwise be exposed... And hackers, malware and infostealers will have access to vastly more data than they would without Recall. Beaumont said the screenshots are stored in a SQLite database, "and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.... Recall enables threat actors to automate scraping everything you've ever looked at within seconds." Beaumont's LinkedIn profile and blog say that starting in 2020 he worked at Microsoft for nearly a year as a senior threat intelligence analyst. And now Beaumont's Mastodon post is also raising other concerns (according to Cyble's blog post):"Sensitive data deleted by users will still be saved in Recall screenshots... 'If you or a friend use disappearing messages in WhatsApp, Signal etc, it is recorded regardless.'""Beaumont also questioned Microsoft's assertion that all this is done locally."The blog post also notes that Leslie Carhart, Director of Incident Response at Dragos, had this reaction to Beaumont's post. "The outrage and disbelief are warranted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "This is truly game-changing news!" exclaims Minecraft Education's Laylah Bulman in a LinkedIn post targeting high school CS educators. "We're thrilled to announce that the AP Computer Science Principles with Minecraft and MakeCode Curriculum has officially been approved by The College Board! And we are offering free professional learning for our inaugural cohort this summer...! "Minecraft's highly engaging environment makes complex coding concepts relatable and fun, fostering a deeper understanding and encouraging broader participation. Ready to empower your students? Don't miss this opportunity!" Recent Edsurge articles (sponsored by Minecraft Education) touted how Minecraft has found its way into computer science and other curricula in New York City and Broward County (Florida), two of the nation's largest school districts... Microsoft-backed nonprofit Code.org has also pushed Minecraft-themed CS tutorials into the nation's classrooms via its wildly-popular annual Hour of Code events since 2015, a year after Microsoft paid $2.5B to buy Minecraft. ("The best way to introduce anyone to STEM or get their curiosity going on, it's Minecraft," declared Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the time). Minecraft-related learning initiatives have also received millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"There is one big thing holding the United States back from a pollution-free electricity grid running on wind, solar and battery power," writes the Washington Post. "Not enough power lines... the nation's sagging, out-of-date power lines are being overwhelmed - slowing the transition to clean energy and the fight against climate change." But experts say that there is a remarkably simple fix: installing new wires on the high-voltage lines that already carry power hundreds of miles across the United States. Just upgrading those wires, new reports show, could double the amount of power that can flow through America's electricity grid... Most of America's lines are wired with a technology that has been around since the early 1900s - a core steel wire surrounded by strands of aluminum. When those old wires heat up - whether from power passing through them or warm outdoor temperatures - they sag. Too much sag in a transmission line can be dangerous, causing fires or outages. As a result, grid operators have to be careful not to allow too much power through the lines. But a couple of decades ago, engineers designed a new type of wire: a core made of carbon fiber, surrounded by trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. Those new, carbon-fiber wires don't sag as much in the heat. That means that they can take up to double the amount of power as the old lines. According to the recent study from researchers at UC-Berkeley and GridLab, replacing these older steel wires could provide up to 80 percent of the new transmission needed on the electricity grid - without building anything new. It could also cost half as much as building an entirely new line and avoid the headaches of trying to get every state, city and even landowner along the route to agree to a new project... If stringing new lines is so easy - and cheap - why hasn't it been done already? Part of the problem, experts say, is that utilities profit more from big infrastructure projects. Routine maintenance or larger-scale upgrades of the electricity grid don't help utilities make a lot of cash compared with building new transmission lines... Duncan Callaway, a professor of energy and resources at UC-Berkeley and one of the authors of the recent study, said that many transmission engineers are not used to thinking of rewiring as one of their tools. "But it's a much faster way," he said. Some changes are already underway to encourage this approach. For a long time, utilities had to undergo lengthy environmental reviews if they were rewiring a line longer than 20 miles. Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that those would no longer be necessary if utilities are simply replacing wires.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"To save itself, TikTok in 2022 offered the U.S. government an extraordinary deal," reports the Washington Post.The video app, owned by a Chinese company, said it would let federal officials pick its U.S. operation's board of directors, would give the government veto power over each new hire and would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department to monitor its source code, according to a copy of the company's proposal. It even offered to give federal officials a kill switch that would shut the app down in the United States if they felt it remained a threat. The Biden administration, however, went its own way. Officials declined the proposal, forfeiting potential influence over one of the world's most popular apps in favor of a blunter option: a forced-sale law signed last month by President Biden that could lead to TikTok's nationwide ban. The government has never publicly explained why it rejected TikTok's proposal, opting instead for a potentially protracted constitutional battle that many expect to end up before the Supreme Court... But the extent to which the United States evaluated or disregarded TikTok's proposal, known as Project Texas, is likely to be a core point of dispute in court, where TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, are challenging the sale-or-ban law as an "unconstitutional assertion of power." The episode raises questions over whether the government, when presented with a way to address its concerns, chose instead to back an effort that would see the company sold to an American buyer, even though some of the issues officials have warned about - the opaque influence of its recommendation algorithm, the privacy of user data - probably would still be unresolved under new ownership... A senior Biden administration official said in a statement that the administration "determined more than a year ago that the solution proposed by the parties at the time would be insufficient to address the serious national security risks presented. While we have consistently engaged with the company about our concerns and potential solutions, it became clear that divestment from its foreign ownership was and remains necessary." "Since federal officials announced an investigation into TikTok in 2019, the app's user base has doubled to more than 170 million U.S. accounts," according to the article. It also includes this assessment from Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor who researches international tech policy. "The government had a complete absence of faith in [its] ability to regulate technology platforms, because there might be some vulnerability that might exist somewhere down the line."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports on a program to forgive U.S. student loans from private lenders - a kind of private parallel to a federal program which "allows those who were seriously misled by their schools to have their federal student loans eliminated." The problem? Eight U.S. senators complain the loan discharge process remains "burdensome and confusing" - and most students don't even know it exists.Navient, a large owner of private student loan debt, has created, but not publicized, a program that allows borrowers to apply to have their loans forgiven.... A nonprofit group of lawyers has stepped in ease the process: On Thursday, the Project on Predatory Student Lending, an advocacy group in Boston, published Navient's application form and an instruction guide for borrowers with private loans who are seeking relief on the grounds that their school lied to them... For nearly a decade, in the early 2000s, Navient - then known as Sallie Mae - struck deals with for-profit schools to issue private loans to their students. Lawsuits from state attorneys general later accused Navient of making those loans knowing that most would never be repaid. Many schools indemnified Navient for the private loans, agreeing to defray the company's loss if the loans defaulted. In 2022, Navient settled with 40 state attorneys general and canceled $1.7 billion in debt on those private loans - but only for borrowers who had already defaulted. Because those debts were unlikely to ever be repaid, the deal cost Navient only $50 million, the company said in regulatory filings. Borrowers who had kept paying their bills... remained stuck. But a pressure campaign from lawmakers, federal regulators and lawyers representing borrowers prompted the company to create the "school misconduct discharge." Navient began sending a 12-page application form this year to some borrowers who complained about their private loans. The document lists dozens of types of impropriety by schools - such as inflating job placement rates and graduates' earnings, or misrepresenting their educational programs - and asks borrowers to choose which apply to their experience. Applicants are required to submit documentation for their claims... [Navient's CEO, David Yowan] told investors on a conference call in January that Navient had put $35 million in reserve for losses on school misconduct claims. He cited "new regulatory expectations" as the reason. Navient has not disclosed how much of its $16.6 billion private student loan portfolio consists of loans that could be eligible for the debt cancellation program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes," reads the headline from the world's second-most widely read English-language newspaper. ("Insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months.") The researchers' results were published earlier in May in Cell Discovery, and are now getting some serious scrutiny from the press. The Economic Times cites a University of British Columbia professor's assessment that the study "represents an important advance in the field of cell therapy for diabetes," in an article calling it a "breakthrough" that "marks a significant advancement in cell therapy for diabetes."Chinese scientists have successfully cured a patient's diabetes using a groundbreaking cell therapy... According to a South China Morning Post report, the patient underwent the cell transplant in July 2021. Remarkably, within eleven weeks, he no longer required external insulin. Over the next year, he gradually reduced and ultimately stopped taking oral medication for blood sugar control. "Follow-up examinations showed that the patient's pancreatic islet function was effectively restored," said Yin, one of the lead researchers. The patient has now been insulin-free for 33 months... The new therapy involves programming the patient's peripheral blood mononuclear cells, transforming them into "seed cells" to recreate pancreatic islet tissue in an artificial environment. Their article calls it "a significant medical milestone" - noting that 140 million people in China have diabetes (according to figures from the International Diabetes Federation). Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Chang'e-6 probe successfully lands on far side of the moonChina's moon probe has "successfully touched down on the far side of the moon," CNN reports, in "a significant step for the ambitious mission that could advance the country's aspirations of putting astronauts on the moon" by 2030. The mission's ultimate goal is to return to Earth the first samples from the moon's far side, CNN reports. And China's lunar lander "is now expected to use a drill and a mechanical arm to gather up to 2 kilograms of moon dust and rocks from the basin, a crater formed some 4 billion years ago." To complete its mission, the lander will need to robotically stow those samples in an ascent vehicle that made the landing with it. The ascent vehicle will then return to lunar orbit, where it will dock with and transfer the samples to a re-entry capsule, according to mission information provided by the China National Space Administration.The re-entry capsule and orbiter will then travel back to Earth's orbit and separate, allowing the re-entry capsule to make its expected return later this month to the Siziwang Banner Landing Site in China's rural Inner Mongolia region. The mission began with its launch on May 3 - and is expected to last 53 days. The landing marks the second time a mission has successfully reached the far side of the moon. China first completed that historic feat in 2019 with its Chang'e-4 probe... The technically complex mission is made more challenging due to where it is being conducted. The far side of the moon is out of range of normal communications, which means Chang'e-6 must also rely on a satellite that was launched into lunar orbit in March, the Queqiao-2.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'"As AI programs shake up the office, potentially making millions of jobs obsolete, one group of perpetually stressed workers seems especially vulnerable..." writes the New York Times. "The chief executive is increasingly imperiled by A.I."These employees analyze new markets and discern trends, both tasks a computer could do more efficiently. They spend much of their time communicating with colleagues, a laborious activity that is being automated with voice and image generators. Sometimes they must make difficult decisions - and who is better at being dispassionate than a machine? Finally, these jobs are very well paid, which means the cost savings of eliminating them is considerable... This is not just a prediction. A few successful companies have begun to publicly experiment with the notion of an A.I. leader, even if at the moment it might largely be a branding exercise... [The article gives the example of the Chinese online game company NetDragon Websoft, which has 5,000 employees, and the upscale Polish rum company Dictador.] Chief executives themselves seem enthusiastic about the prospect - or maybe just fatalistic. EdX, the online learning platform created by administrators at Harvard and M.I.T. that is now a part of publicly traded 2U Inc., surveyed hundreds of chief executives and other executives last summer about the issue. Respondents were invited to take part and given what edX called "a small monetary incentive" to do so. The response was striking. Nearly half - 47 percent - of the executives surveyed said they believed "most" or "all" of the chief executive role should be completely automated or replaced by A.I. Even executives believe executives are superfluous in the late digital age... The pandemic prepared people for this. Many office workers worked from home in 2020, and quite a few still do, at least several days a week. Communication with colleagues and executives is done through machines. It's just a small step to communicating with a machine that doesn't have a person at the other end of it. "Some people like the social aspects of having a human boss," said Phoebe V. Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School. "But after Covid, many are also fine with not having one." The article also notes that a 2017 survey of 1,000 British workers found 42% saying they'd be "comfortable" taking orders from a computer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The seemingly star-cross Boeing Starliner - within minutes of its long-delayed blastoff on the spacecraft's first piloted test flight - was grounded again Saturday," writes CBS News, "when one of three redundant computers managing the countdown from the base of the launch pad ran into a problem, triggering a last-minute scrub." More details from NPR:With 3:50 left in the countdown, the rocket's computer initiated a hold. The next launch attempt won't happen until at least Wednesday, NASA said. An issue with one of the three redundant computer systems at the base of the launch pad that are responsible for initiating the launch sequence prompted the automatic halt, said Tory Bruno, the head of United Launch Alliance, the government contractor trying to launch the Starliner. "We do require all three systems to be running - triple redundancy," ULA President and CEO Bruno said at a Saturday afternoon press briefing. "Those three big computers do a health check. ... Two came up normally. The third one came up, but it was slow to come up, and that tripped a red line that created an automatic hold." ULA engineers don't know why the computer halted, and will troubleshoot ground support equipment overnight, NASA said in an update on Saturday evening.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a critical security bug in Linux to its list of vulnerabilities known to be actively exploited in the wild," reported Ars Technica on Friday. "The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges."It's the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation. The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations... It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation. A deep-dive write-up of the vulnerability reveals that these exploits provide "a very powerful double-free primitive when the correct code paths are hit." Double-free vulnerabilities are a subclass of use-after-free errors...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." That's a quote from the BBC by a wrongly accused customer who was flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch. "She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology." Facewatch later wrote to her and acknowledged it had made an error - but declined to comment on the incident in the BBC's report:[Facewatch] did say its technology helped to prevent crime and protect frontline workers. Home Bargains, too, declined to comment. It's not just retailers who are turning to the technology... [I]n east London, we joined the police as they positioned a modified white van on the high street. Cameras attached to its roof captured thousands of images of people's faces. If they matched people on a police watchlist, officers would speak to them and potentially arrest them... On the day we were filming, the Metropolitan Police said they made six arrests with the assistance of the tech... The BBC spoke to several people approached by the police who confirmed that they had been correctly identified by the system - 192 arrests have been made so far this year as a result of it. Lindsey Chiswick, director of intelligence for the Met, told the BBC that "It takes less than a second for the technology to create a biometric image of a person's face, assess it against the bespoke watchlist and automatically delete it when there is no match." "That is the correct and acceptable way to do it," writes long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam, "without infringing unnecessarily on the freedoms of the average citizen. Just tell me they have appropriate rules, effective oversight, and a penalty system with teeth to catch and punish the inevitable violators." But one critic of the tech complains to the BBC that everyone scanned automatically joins "a digital police line-up," while the article adds that others "liken the process to a supermarket checkout - where your face becomes a bar code." And "The error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive..." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares the announcement of a new report from the International Energy Forum:The seemingly universal presumption persists that the copper needed for the green transition will somehow be available... This paper addresses this issue by projecting copper supply and demand from 2018 to 2050 and placing both in the historical context of copper mine output... Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed... Our main purpose... is to communicate the magnitude of the copper mining challenge to the broader public that is less familiar with upstream resource issues. "On the other hand, hybrid electric vehicle manufacture would require negligible extra copper mining..." the report points out. Wikipedia describes the non-profit as a 73-country organization promoting dialogue about the world's energy needs. The group's announcement ends with a hope that the report "will promote discussion and formulation of alternative policies to be certain the developing world can catch up with the developed world while global initiatives advance with the green energy transition."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Journalist Steven Brill has written a new book called The Death of Truth. Its subtitle? "How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World-And What We Can Do." An excerpt published by Wired points out that last year around the world, $300 billion was spent on "programmatic advertising", and $130 billion was spent in the United States alone in 2022. The problem? For over a decade there's been "brand safety" technology, the article points out - but "what artificial intelligence could not do was spot most forms of disinformation and misinformation..." The end result...In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin... Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News' global website network... No one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites? Geico's ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts... If Geico's advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers. Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company's ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News' sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others... Almost all advertising online - and even much of it on television (through streaming TV), or on podcasts, radio, mobile devices, and electronic billboards - is now done programmatically, which means the machine, not a planner, makes those placement decisions. Unless the advertiser uses special tools, such as what are called exclusion or inclusion lists, the publishers and content around which the ad appears, and which the ad is financing, are no longer part of the decision. "What I kept hearing as the professionals explained it to me was that the process is like a stock exchange, except that the buyer doesn't know what stock he is buying... the advertiser and its ad agency have no idea where among thousands of websites its ad will appear."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new article in the Washington Post argues that a phenomenon called "Quiet vacationing" has "joined 'quiet quitting' and 'quiet firing' as the latest (and least poetic) scourge of the modern workplace. "Also known as the hush trip, workcation, hush-cation, or bleisure travel - you get the idea - quiet vacationing refers to workers taking time off, even traveling, without notifying their employers."Taking advantage of work-from-anywhere technology, they are logging in from hotels, beaches and campgrounds, sometimes using virtual backgrounds and VPNs to cover their tracks. Given the difficulty many employers already have trusting remote workers to be productive anywhere outside the office, you can bet they are not keen on the idea of their employees pretending to have their head in the game while their toes are in the sand. But employers also have legitimate legal reasons for keeping tabs on their employees' location when they're on the clock. "Evil HR Lady" Suzanne Lucas, writing in Inc. magazine, recently highlighted the many tax, employment, business-operation and security laws that focus on an employee's location. Workers secretly performing their jobs in other states or countries can trigger compliance headaches for their employers, Lucas notes, giving the hypothetical of an employee seeking workers' compensation after sustaining an injury while on unauthorized travel.... As with declines in birthrates, home purchases and demand for mined diamonds, the quiet-vacationing trend is being attributed primarily, though not exclusively, to millennial workers. But before launching into generational finger-pointing and stereotyping, it's worth taking a look at why they might feel the need to take their PTO on the DL. The U.S. Travel Association in a 2016 report proclaimed millennials to be a generation of "work martyrs," entering the workforce around the time average U.S. vacation usage began declining and mobile technology began enabling round-the-clock attachment to jobs... The work-vacation boundaries most premillennial workers took for granted growing up have gone the way of defined-benefit pensions and good tomatoes. Inadequate paid leave is another driving force. The United States continues to be the only nation among its industrialized economic peers that does not guarantee paid vacation, sick leave or holidays for all workers, leaving such benefits to the discretion of employers. Workers with limited PTO - whether new to the workforce or stuck in lower-paying, low-benefit industries - generally want to keep as much paid leave banked as possible, especially if they may need it for unpredictable emergencies like illness or caretaking. If you can preserve those precious hours by packing your laptop alongside your flip-flops, why wouldn't you? The article also mentions employers who begrudge vacation and employees who fear "becoming a target for future cost-cutting..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How will Apple protect user data while their requests are being processed by AI in applications like Siri? Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Apple Insider:According to sources of The Information [four different former Apple employees who worked on the project], Apple intends to process data from AI applications inside a virtual black box. The concept, known as "Apple Chips in Data Centers" internally, would involve only Apple's hardware being used to perform AI processing in the cloud. The idea is that it will control both the hardware and software on its servers, enabling it to design more secure systems. While on-device AI processing is highly private, the initiative could make cloud processing for Apple customers to be similarly secure... By taking control over how data is processed in the cloud, it would make it easier for Apple to implement processes to make a breach much harder to actually happen. Furthermore, the black box approach would also prevent Apple itself from being able to see the data. As a byproduct, this means it would also be difficult for Apple to hand over any personal data from government or law enforcement data requests. Processed data from the servers would be stored in Apple's "Secure Enclave" (where the iPhone stores biometric data, encryption keys and passwords), according to the article. "Doing so means the data can't be seen by other elements of the system, nor Apple itself."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Washington Post reported that Americans "are more hesitant to buy EVs now than they were a year ago, according to a March Gallup poll, which found that just 44 percent of American adults say they'd consider buying an EV in the future, down from 55 percent last year. High prices and charging worries consistently rank as the biggest roadblocks for electric vehicles," they write, noting the concerns coincide with a slowdown in electric car and truck sales, while hybrids are increasing their market share. But something else happened this week. The chair of California's Air Resource Board and the chair of the state's Energy Commission teamed up for an op-ed piece arguing that "despite negative hype," electric cars are their state's future:When California's electric vehicle sales dipped at the end of last year, critics predicted the start of a new downward trend that would doom the industry and the state's broader effort to clean up the transportation sector, the single largest source of greenhouse gases and air pollution. But the latest numbers show that's not the case. Californians purchased 108,372 new zero-emission vehicles in the first three months of 2024 - nearly 7,000 more than the same time last year and the highest-ever first-quarter sales. Today, one in four new cars sold in the Golden State is electric, up from just 8% in 2020... California is now home to 56 manufacturers of zero-emission vehicles and related products, making our state a hub for cutting-edge automotive technology. Soon even raw materials will be sourced in-state, paving the way for domestic battery production... Challenges persist, and chief among them is the need for more widely available charging options. Many more charging stations need to be built as fast as possible to keep up with EV adoption. To address this, California is investing $4 billion over six years to rapidly build out the EV refueling network, on top of billions in investment by utilities. Equally essential is improved reliability of the EV charging network. Too many drivers today encounter faulty charging stations, which is why the California Energy Commission is developing the strongest charging reliability standards in the country and will require companies to be transparent with the public about their performance. They also point out that California "now boasts more EV chargers in the state than gasoline nozzles." And that it's become the first U.S. state whose best-selling car is electric.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A Swiss biocomputing startup has launched an online platform that provides remote access to 16 human brain organoids," reports Tom's Hardware:FinalSpark claims its Neuroplatform is the world's first online platform delivering access to biological neurons in vitro. Moreover, bioprocessors like this "consume a million times less power than traditional digital processors," the company says. FinalSpark says its Neuroplatform is capable of learning and processing information, and due to its low power consumption, it could reduce the environmental impacts of computing. In a recent research paper about its developments, FinalSpakr claims that training a single LLM like GPT-3 required approximately 10GWh - about 6,000 times greater energy consumption than the average European citizen uses in a whole year. Such energy expenditure could be massively cut following the successful deployment of bioprocessors. The operation of the Neuroplatform currently relies on an architecture that can be classified as wetware: the mixing of hardware, software, and biology. The main innovation delivered by the Neuroplatform is through the use of four Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEAs) housing the living tissue - organoids, which are 3D cell masses of brain tissue...interfaced by eight electrodes used for both stimulation and recording... FinalSpark has given access to its remote computing platform to nine institutions to help spur bioprocessing research and development. With such institutions' collaboration, it hopes to create the world's first living processor. FinalSpark was founded in 2014, according to Wikipedia's page on wetware computing. "While a wetware computer is still largely conceptual, there has been limited success with construction and prototyping, which has acted as a proof of the concept's realistic application to computing in the future." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Twice before, this Virginia carpenter had awoken in the predawn to start his work day only to find one of his vans broken into. Tools he depends on for a living had been stolen, and there was little hope of retrieving them. Determined to shut down thieves, he said, he bought a bunch of Apple AirTags and hid the locator devices in some of his larger tools that hadn't been pilfered. Next time, he figured, he would track them. It worked. On Jan. 22, after a third break-in and theft, the carpenter said, he drove around D.C.'s Maryland suburbs for hours, following an intermittent blip on his iPhone, until he arrived at a storage facility in Howard County. He called police, who got a search warrant, and what they found in the locker was far more than just one contractor's nail guns and miter saws. The storage unit, stuffed with purloined power tools, led detectives to similar caches in other places in the next four months - 12 locations in all, 11 of them in Howard County - and the recovery of about 15,000 saws, drills, sanders, grinders, generators, batteries, air compressors and other portable (meaning easily stealable) construction equipment worth an estimated $3 million to $5 million, authorities said. Some were stolen as long ago as 2014, a police spokesperson told the Washington Post, coming from "hundreds if not thousands" of victims...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: HP researchers have published a paper detailing a new modular monitor design they call "composable microLED monitors." Using advancing microLED tech to make smaller screens with no bezels, they imagine a Lego-like system that allows customers to buy different monitor modules and slot them together at home. In the paper, diagrams show "core units" with a direct connection to the host computer being expanded both horizontally and vertically with multiple extensions. The idea is that by choosing from flat or curved extension pieces and connecting them to the core unit, you can make a monitor in whatever size or shape you want. To keep assembly simple and effective, the design uses jigsaw-like connections alongside magnets to ensure each module automatically aligns correctly. And to prevent the number of possible configurations from getting out of hand, the design only allows extensions to attach to the sides or bottom of the square-shaped core unit. Once your strangely shaped monitor is complete, you would be able to choose how your operating system treats each part -- either as an extension of the core unit or as a separate screen. These settings would be controlled with physical switches on the modules that you could change whenever you wanted. As for the sizes of the modules, HP proposes a range of different possibilities, some more complicated than others. In an ideal situation, customers would be able to choose from either flat or curved core units and add flat or curved extensions of varying sizes. If that proved too difficult, curved monitor elements could be taken out of the picture completely, and customers would just add flat extensions to a flat core unit. As cool as this all sounds, there is a glaring problem -- how would the seams between each module look? Thanks to the bezel-less design, there at least wouldn't be a thick black divider between each part. However, a thin line or visible distortion would be inevitable. One approach HP proposes is minimizing the gap between each panel as much as possible and just accepting the thin line it creates. Alternatives include complicated techniques to disguise the joints using hardware or software solutions that modify the display of edge pixels to minimize visual joints. HP would have to find a balance between technical viability, cost, and customer feedback to determine the best overall solution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Benj Edwards and Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Axios broke the news that OpenAI had signed deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media that will allow the ChatGPT maker to license their editorial content to further train its language models. But some of the publications' writers -- and the unions that represent them -- were surprised by the announcements and aren't happy about it. Already, two unions have released statements expressing "alarm" and "concern." "The unionized members of The Atlantic Editorial and Business and Technology units are deeply troubled by the opaque agreement The Atlantic has made with OpenAI," reads a statement from the Atlantic union. "And especially by management's complete lack of transparency about what the agreement entails and how it will affect our work." The Vox Union -- which represents The Verge, SB Nation, and Vulture, among other publications -- reacted in similar fashion, writing in a statement, "Today, members of the Vox Media Union ... were informed without warning that Vox Media entered into a 'strategic content and product partnership' with OpenAI. As both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well-documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative AI." [...] News of the deals took both journalists and unions by surprise. On X, Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, who recently penned an expose about OpenAI's restrictive non-disclosure agreements that prompted a change in policy from the company, wrote, "I'm very frustrated they announced this without consulting their writers, but I have very strong assurances in writing from our editor in chief that they want more coverage like the last two weeks and will never interfere in it. If that's false I'll quit.." Journalists also reacted to news of the deals through the publications themselves. On Wednesday, The Atlantic Senior Editor Damon Beres wrote a piece titled "A Devil's Bargain With OpenAI," in which he expressed skepticism about the partnership, likening it to making a deal with the devil that may backfire. He highlighted concerns about AI's use of copyrighted material without permission and its potential to spread disinformation at a time when publications have seen a recent string of layoffs. He drew parallels to the pursuit of audiences on social media leading to clickbait and SEO tactics that degraded media quality. While acknowledging the financial benefits and potential reach, Beres cautioned against relying on inaccurate, opaque AI models and questioned the implications of journalism companies being complicit in potentially destroying the internet as we know it, even as they try to be part of the solution by partnering with OpenAI. Similarly, over at Vox, Editorial Director Bryan Walsh penned a piece titled, "This article is OpenAI training data," in which he expresses apprehension about the licensing deal, drawing parallels between the relentless pursuit of data by AI companies and the classic AI thought experiment of Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer," cautioning that the single-minded focus on market share and profits could ultimately destroy the ecosystem AI companies rely on for training data. He worries that the growth of AI chatbots and generative AI search products might lead to a significant decline in search engine traffic to publishers, potentially threatening the livelihoods of content creators and the richness of the Internet itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On June 3, a "planet parade" of six planets -- Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Mars, Neptune and Saturn -- will form a straight line through the pre-dawn sky. Astronomy.com reports: Some 20 minutes before sunrise, all six planets should be visible, though note that Uranus (magnitude 5.9) and Neptune (magnitude 7.8) will be too faint for naked-eye observing and, although they're present in the lineup, will need binoculars or a telescope to spot. But Jupiter (magnitude -2), Mercury (magnitude -1), Mars (magnitude 1), and Saturn (magnitude 1) will all stand out clearly to the naked eye in a line spanning some 73 degrees on the sky. What's more, a delicate waning crescent Moon is crashing the party as well, standing just to the lower left of Mars. Note, however, that our Moon is not perfectly in line -- that's because Luna's orbit is tilted some 5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. The next morning, June 4, the crescent Moon does a little better, falling more closely in line a bit farther from Mars. But now Mercury has stepped out of place and stands to Jupiter's lower right (south) as the two planets reach a close conjunction just 7 degrees apart -- not to be missed, especially in binoculars or telescopes! By June 5, Mercury lies to Jupiter's lower left, replacing the gas giant as the easternmost point in the planetary lineup. And the nearly New Moon (just 2 percent lit) stands above the pair. As June progresses, Mercury quickly ducks out of view, passing close to the Sun before reappearing in the evening sky and leaving us with only five planets in the pre-dawn sky. But those planets continue to form a nice, clean line, stretching nearly 80 degrees from Jupiter to Saturn (with Uranus, Mars, and Neptune in between) by June 30. On this morning, the Moon as rejoined the line, once again a delicate waning crescent about 33 percent lit, hanging perfectly in place to Mars' upper right.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not easy to find on the forest floor. "It doesn't catch the eye," said Dr. Pellicer, who works at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain. "You would probably step on it and not even realize it." The scientists eventually managed to spot the nondescript fern. When Dr. Pellicer and his colleagues studied it in the lab, they discovered it held an extraordinary secret. Tmesipteris oblanceolata has the largest known genome on Earth. As the researchers described in a study published on Friday, the fern's cells contain more than 50 times as much DNA as ours do. [The analysis revealed the species T. oblanceolata to have a record-breaking genome size of 160.45 Gbp, which is about 7% larger than that of P. japonica (148.89 Gbp). For comparison, the human genome contains about 3.1 Gbp distributed across 23 chromosomes and when stretched out like a ball of yarn, the length of DNA in each cell only measures about 2m.] "Surprisingly, having a larger genome is usually not an advantage," notes Phys.org in a report. "In the case of plants, species possessing large amounts of DNA are restricted to being slow growing perennials, are less efficient at photosynthesis (the process by which plants convert the sun's energy into sugars) and require more nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphates) to grow and compete successfully with their smaller-genomed neighbors. In turn, such effects may influence the ability of a plant to adapt to climate change and their risk of extinction." "In animals, some of the largest genomes include the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus) at 129.90 Gbp and the Neuse River waterdog (Necturus lewisi) at 117.47 Gbp," reports Phys.org. "In stark contrast, six of the largest-known eukaryotic genomes are held by plants, including the European mistletoe (Viscum album) at 100.84 Gbp."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

London's famed Evening Standard newspaper has announced plans to end its daily outlet, "bringing an end to almost 200 years of publication in the capital," reports The Guardian. Going forward, the company plans to launch "a brand new weekly newspaper later this year and consider options for retaining ES Magazine with reduced frequency," while also working to increase traffic to its website. "In its 197-year history the Evening Standard has altered its format, price, content and distribution models," notes The Guardian. "But giving up on producing a daily print newspaper is the biggest change yet." From the report: The newspaper said it has been hit hard by the introduction of wifi on the London Underground, a shortage of commuters owing to the growth of working from home and changing consumer habits. The Standard lost 84.5 million pounds in the past six years, according to its accounts, and is reliant on funding from its part-owner Evgeny Lebedev. Its other shareholders include a bank with close links to the Saudi government. Industry sources suggested Lebedev had been willing to consider selling the outlet in recent years but no buyer was found. Paul Kanareck, the newspaper's chair, told staff on Wednesday morning: "The substantial losses accruing from the current operations are not sustainable. Therefore, we plan to consult with our staff and external stakeholders to reshape the business, return to profitability and secure the long-term future of the number one news brand in London." Kanareck said there would be an "impact on staffing," with journalists bracing themselves for further job losses on top of years of redundancies, while design staff on the print edition are expected to be hit hard. Distributors who hand out the newspaper across London are also likely to be out of work, and billboards outside railway stations advertising the day's headline will stand empty on most days. He suggested there would be a change in focus for the weekly outlet: "A proposed new weekly newspaper would replace the daily publication, allowing for more in-depth analysis of the issues that matter to Londoners, and serve them in a new and relevant way by celebrating the best London has to offer, from entertainment guides to lifestyle, sports, culture and news and the drumbeat of life in the world's greatest city." Closing the Evening Standard will mean that for the first time in centuries, Londoners will have no general-interest daily print newspaper. The finance-focused City AM, which was recently saved by the billionaire Matthew Moulding, will continue to publish four days a week and has recently increased its distribution. Further reading: So it's goodbye to London's Standard, my old paper -- and to the heart of democracy, local news (Opinion; The Guardian)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last than two weeks after it was announced, "Windows enthusiasts have managed to crack Microsoft's flagship AI-powered Recall feature to run on unsupported hardware," reports The Verge. From the report: Recall leverages local AI models on new Copilot Plus PCs to run in the background and take snapshots of anything you've done or seen on your PC. You then get a timeline you can scrub through and the ability to search for photos, documents, conversations, or anything else on your PC. Microsoft positioned Recall as needing the very latest neural processing units (NPU) on new PCs, but you can actually get it running on older Arm-powered hardware. Windows watcher Albacore has created a tool called Amperage, which enables Recall on devices that have an older Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, Microsoft's SQ processors, or an Ampere chipset. You need to have the latest Windows 11 24H2 update installed on one of these Windows on Arm devices, and then the tool will unlock and enable Recall. [...] You can technically unlock Recall on x86 devices, but the app won't do much until Microsoft publishes the x64 AI components required to get it up and running. Rumors suggest both AMD and Intel are close to announcing Copilot Plus PCs, so Microsoft's AI components for those machines may well appear soon. I managed to get Recall running on an x64 Windows 11 virtual machine earlier today just to test out the initial first-run experience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California expects to avoid rolling blackouts this summer as new solar plants and large batteries plug into the state's grid at a rapid clip. The state's electricity system has been strained by years of drought, wildfires that knock out transmission lines and record-setting heat waves. But officials forecast Wednesday new resources added to the grid in the last four years would give California ample supplies for typical summer weather. Since 2020, California has added 18.5 gigawatts of new resources. Of that, 6.6 gigawatts were batteries, 6.3 gigawatts were solar and 1.4 gigawatts were a combination of solar and storage. One gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. In addition, the state's hydropower plants will be a reliable source of electricity after two wet winters in a row ended California's most recent drought. Those supplies would hold even if California experiences another heat wave as severe as the one that triggered rolling blackouts across the state in August 2020, officials said in a briefing Wednesday. In the most dire circumstances, the state now has backup resources that can supply an extra 5 gigawatts of electricity, including gas-fired power plants that only run during emergencies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times, owner of the once-viral, word game Wordle, is suing a geography-based spinoff called Worldle, accusing its similar name of "creating confusion" and attempting to capitalize on "the enormous goodwill" associated with its own brand. Worldle's creator, Kory McDonald, vows to fight back. The BBC reports: "There's a whole industry of [dot]LE games," he told the BBC. "Wordle is about words, Worldle is about the world, Flaggle is about flags," he pointed out. The New York Times disagrees. Worldle is "nearly identical in appearance, sound, meaning, and imparts the same commercial impression to... Wordle," it says in its legal document. The paper told the BBC it had no further comment to make beyond the contents of its legal submission. British inventor Josh Wardle developed Wordle in 2021 as a side project to keep his girlfriend entertained. But since then it has become a behemoth, reaching millions of people worldwide. By contrast, around 100,000 people play Worldle every month, according to Mr McDonald, who is based in Seattle. It is not available as an app and can only be played via a web browser. It contains ads, with an option to play ad-free for 10 pounds per year but Mr McDonald says that most of the money he makes from the game goes to Google because he uses Google Street View images, which players have to try to identify. Other popular [dot]LE games include:- Quordle, a set of four words to guess at the same time- Nerdle, a maths-based challenge- Heardle, which is based on identifying music "There's even another game called Worldle, which involves identifying countries by their outlines," notes the BBC. "The New York Times declined to say whether it intended to pursue them as well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided monthly internet bill credits for low-income Americans, will officially end on June 1 due to a lack of additional funding from Congress. This termination threatens nearly 60 million Americans with increased financial hardship, as the program's lapse leaves them without the subsidies that made internet access affordable. CNN reports: The 2.5-year-old ACP provided eligible low-income Americans with a monthly credit off their internet bills, worth up to $30 per month and as much as $75 per month for households on tribal lands. The pandemic-era program was a hit with members of both political parties and served tens of millions of seniors, veterans and rural and urban Americans alike. Program participants received only partial benefits in May ahead of the ACP's expected collapse. [...] On Friday, Biden reiterated his calls for Congress to pass legislation extending the ACP. He also announced a series of voluntary commitments by a handful of internet providers to offer -- or continue offering -- their own proprietary low-income internet plans.The list includes AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Charter's Spectrum and Verizon, among others. Those providers will continue to offer qualifying ACP households a broadband plan for $30 or less, the White House said, and together the companies are expected to cover roughly 10 million of the 23 million households relying on the ACP. "The Affordable Connectivity Program filled an important gap that provider low-income programs, state and local affordability programs, and the Lifeline program cannot fully address," said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement, referring to the name of another, similar FCC program that subsidizes wireless and home internet service. "The Commission is available to provide any assistance Congress may need to support funding the ACP in the future and stands ready to resume the program if additional funding is provided."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Hackers are attempting to sell what they say is confidential information belonging to millions of Santander staff and customers. They belong to the same gang which this week claimed to have hacked Ticketmaster. The bank -- which employs 200,000 people worldwide, including around 20,000 in the UK -- has confirmed data has been stolen. Santander has apologized for what it says is "the concern this will understandably cause" adding it is "proactively contacting affected customers and employees directly." "Following an investigation, we have now confirmed that certain information relating to customers of Santander Chile, Spain and Uruguay, as well as all current and some former Santander employees of the group had been accessed," it said in a statement posted earlier this month. "No transactional data, nor any credentials that would allow transactions to take place on accounts are contained in the database, including online banking details and passwords." It said its banking systems were unaffected so customers could continue to "transact securely." In a post on a hacking forum -- first spotted by researchers at Dark Web Informer- the group calling themselves ShinyHunters posted an advert saying they had data including: 30 million people's bank account details, 6 million account numbers and balances, 28 million credit card numbers, and HR information for staff. Santander has not commented on the accuracy of those claims.Read more of this story at Slashdot.