Last Monday shares of Reddit's stock soared 30%, reports CNBC - and then another 8.8% on Tuesday. But the moves happened "even after New Street Research issued a neutral rating on the company" - and by the end of the week, CNBC was reporting that "Reddit shares are plummeting..."Shares closed at $49.32, ending the week below their closing price on Reddit's first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange [on March 21st, when they closed at $50.44 ]... Stock markets are closed on Good Friday. Reddit shares began their downward spiral on Wednesday, when they sank about 11% to $57.75 at market close. That day, Hedgeye Risk Management described Reddit's stock as "grossly overvalued" in a report cited by Bloomberg News, adding the company was on the firm's "short bench." The article notes Reddit's CEO sold 500,000 shares in the company - nearly 40% of his holdings - which Ben Silverman, vice president of research at Verity, told CNBC was expected - while Reddit's COO sold another 514,000 shares. "There's always a bit of a disconnect," Silverman said in the interview, because bringing a company public "is not just to generate liquidity for the company itself so that it can expand and grow. In these situations, it often allows insiders to cash out to generate liquidity. "And that's something investors have to consider here. If the prospects are so bright, why are insiders selling?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Subscribers of both Disney+ and Hulu can now access Hulu content through the Disney+ app," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as the Burbank media and entertainment giant launched its one-app integration of the two streaming services Wednesday..."The move is part of Disney's plan to increase viewer engagement and reduce churn on Disney+, which has 111.3 million subscribers globally. Disney has lost billions on its direct-to-consumer business as it tries to compete with Netflix, but the company has told investors that its streaming segment will begin to turn a profit by the end of fiscal 2024. Streaming losses have been a key component of a nasty activist shareholder campaign ahead of next week's annual meeting. Disney+ has typically served up family-friendly content and major brands such as Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, whereas Hulu's offering has been the streaming home of more adult-oriented programming. Disney executives described the combined app experience as the most extensive technical advancement to the Disney+ streaming platform since it launched in November 2019... The price of the bundle plan starts at $9.99 with ads... Upgrading to the bundle of Hulu on Disney+ will start at $2 more per month, Disney said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As a department of America's federal Health agency, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for public health rules, including prescription medicines. And the FDA "has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19," they confirmed to CNN this week. "The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19." But there was also a lawsuit. In "one of its more popular pandemic-era social media campaigns," the agency tweeted out "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it." The post attracted nearly 106,000 likes - and over 46,000 reposts, and was followed by another post on Instagram. "Stop it with the #ivermectin. It's not authorized for treating #COVID." Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that the posts triggered a "groundless" lawsuit:It was those latter two lines that exercised three physicians who had been prescribing ivermectin for patients. They sued the FDA in 2022, asserting that its advisory illegally interfered with the practice of medicine - specifically with their ability to continue prescribing the drug. A federal judge in Texas threw out their case, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals - the source of a series of chuckleheaded antigovernment rulings in recent years - reinstated it last year, returning it to the original judge for reconsideration. Now the FDA has settled the case by agreeing to delete the horse post and two similar posts from its accounts on the social media platforms X, LinkedIn and Facebook. The agency also agreed to retire a consumer advisory titled "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19." In defending its decision, the FDA said it "has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old." That sounds reasonable enough, but it's a major blunder. It leaves on the books the 5th Circuit's adverse ruling, in which a panel of three judges found that the FDA's advisory crossed the line from informing consumers, which they said is all right, to recommending that consumers take some action, which they said is not all right... That's a misinterpretation of the law and the FDA's actions, according to Dorit Rubinstein Reiss of UC College of the Law in San Francisco. "The FDA will seek to make recommendations against the misuse of products in the future, and having that decision on the books will be used to litigate against it," she observed after the settlement. "A survey by Boston University and the University of Michigan estimated that Medicare and private insurers had wasted $130 million on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID in 2021 alone."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New documents from a class action against Meta "reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years," reports the Observer. "One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too."Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data. In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs' attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo's software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat. According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed "Ghostbusters" - in reference to the Snapchat logo - where they developed "kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains," allowing them "to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage." The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track "detailed in-app activity" by "parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo's program...." The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. "The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook's then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat," the document alleged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Godzilla x Kong "stomped all over expectations," writes Deadline, "with an $80M opening, the second best start of the year so far, $2.5M behind the $82.5M opening of Legendary's other big pic this spring, Dune: Part Two... "EntTelligence reports that GxK is expected to pull in more than 5.5M admissions this weekend, the most attended opening weekend for any movie year-to-date." No one saw this coming... International delivered $114M for a great $194M global start. The Adam Wingard directed movie, not including preview night, commanded 56% of all foot traffic and 89% of all premium format admissions. Imax and PLF drove 38% of the gross with 3D responsible for 19%... Beamed Warner Bros Domestic Distribution Boss Jeff Goldstein, "This is a huge, fun Easter movie for the whole family...." For a fifthquel to bounce back the franchise, GxK being the second best start in the Legendary Monsterverse after Godzilla's $93.1M ten years ago, is pretty remarkable. The article speculates that the first installments (of both the Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong franchise) underperformed because of their mid-pandemic release dates, with their sequels earning more in 2024. The pure theatricality of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire "clearly underscores the value of the IP on the big screen, and moviegoers' preference to see such monster mashing in no other place but a theater." (Deadline calls the movie "a really fun creature feature with a lot of heart; heck, it's even better than Jurassic World: Dominion. Seriously.") It also earned "the fifth best Easter weekend opening ever," the article points out, coming in behind Batman v. Superman ($181M), Super Mario Bros Movie ($166.4M), Furious 7 ($161.2M) and The Fate of the Furious ($107.3M), according to the article. Their headline? "They Have Risen: 'Godzilla x Kong' Conquers Easter Box Office..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Google is testing the ability to automatically archive and delete inactive tabs in Chrome on Android," writes Windows Report:The experimental feature, called Tab Declutter, aims to simplify tab management by automating the process... After a set period of inactivity, Chrome will automatically archive inactive tabs. You will no longer see the archived tabs but you will be able to retrieve them if needed. As for deleting the tabs, you can set Chrome to remove them after a longer period of inactivity. This feature will free up memory and improve the browser's performance. Obviously, you will have control over the archival threshold and the period of time after which the browser takes action... obviously, you will have control over the archival threshold and the period of time after which the browser takes actionRead more of this story at Slashdot.
"What a time we live in," writes Phoronix, "where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support..."Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho has sent out the latest patches working on Allocation APIs for the Rust Linux kernel code and also in leveraging those proposed APIs [as] a means of allowing in-place module initialization for Rust kernel modules. Wedson Almeida Filho has been a longtime Rust for Linux contributor going back to his Google engineering days and at Microsoft the past two years has shown no signs of slowing down on the Rust for Linux activities... The Rust for Linux kernel effort remains a very vibrant effort with a wide variety of organizations contributing, even Microsoft engineers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Personal data from 73 million AT&T customers has leaked onto the dark web, reports CNN - both current and former customers. AT&T has launched an investigation into the source of the data leak... In a news release Saturday morning, the telecommunications giant said the data was "released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago," and contains information such as account holders' Social Security numbers. ["The information varied by customer and account," AT&T said in a statement, " but may have included full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode."] "It is not yet known whether the data ... originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company added. "Currently, AT&T does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in exfiltration of the data set." The data seems to have been from 2019 or earlier. The leak does not appear to contain financial information or specifics about call history, according to AT&T. The company said the leak shows approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders were affected. CNN says the first reports of the leak came two weeks ago from a social media account claiming "the largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers. Reached for a comment by CNN, AT&T had said at the time that "We have no indications of a compromise of our systems." AT&T's web site now includes a special page with an FAQ - and the tagline that announces "We take cybersecurity very seriously..." "It has come to our attention that a number of AT&T passcodes have been compromised..." The page points out that AT&T has already reset the passcodes of "all 7.6 million impacted customers." It's only further down in the FAQ that they acknowledge that the breach "appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders."Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation... We encourage customers to remain vigilant by monitoring account activity and credit reports. You can set up free fraud alerts from nationwide credit bureaus - Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can also request and review your free credit report at any time via Freecreditreport.com... We will reach out by mail or email to individuals with compromised sensitive personal information and offering complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services... If your information was impacted, you will be receiving an email or letter from us explaining the incident, what information was compromised, and what we are doing for you in response.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A CNN opinion piece looks at "the moaning about manual transmission's demise," noting that "it's not just Europeans (literally) clinging on. In the U.S., there's apparently a young (also predominantly male) demographic that is embracing manual driving - championing it as retro, much like Gen Z's affinity to typewriters and vintage cameras. "They feel there's something authentic about it: a connection between driver and vehicle that automatization cuts out." But CNN's writer argues the case against stick shifts...[Automatic vehicles] chalk up better mileage and drive faster than their stick-shift counterparts. The explanation: automatics select the right gear for the vehicle, usually the highest gear possible. The average manual driver is not always so proficient. In getting the gear right, automatics consume less fuel, save money and emit fewer emissions. These are among the reasons why it's ever harder to buy a new manual-transmission model of any kind in many countries. In the US, less than 1% of new models have stick shifts (compared to 35% in 1980), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It's really only sports cars, off-road truck SUVs and a handful of small pickups that still have clutches.... While all gasoline-run cars and trucks are climate killers with stick shifts being the slightly worse of two evils, combustion-engine automatics themselves are on their way out. They are tooling along the highway side-by-side with their stick-and-clutch counterparts toward the junkyard of history. Electric vehicles have gear systems, too: a single speed transmission that transmits energy from the motor to the wheels. But because only one gear exists, there is no switching of gears, neither automatically nor manually... Road transportation accounts for 15% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World Data, as well as being a huge contributor to the air pollution that claims around nine million deaths a year from respiratory and lung diseases. Transportation noise, though less deadly, also contributes to stress and sleep disorders. Thankfully, there's a convenient way to circumvent these blights: electric vehicles... But for those aficionados who really can't go without a clutch and gear shifter, Toyota is planning a realistic-feeling fake manual transmission for some EV models. It serves no purpose whatsoever - save to comfort bruised egos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the outlawing of sports betting in America. But the Wall Street Journal reports that since then all the major professional sports bodies "now realize just how much they have to lose as the new era unfolds.""All it takes is for a reasonable fan to go, 'Am I just watching theater, or is this actually sport?' for the credibility of a sport to start crumbling,'" said Declan Hill, an expert on match fixing at the University of New Haven. Since the prohibition on sports gambling was lifted, leagues that had once viewed betting as an existential threat to their integrity scrambled to partner with gambling companies and brought them into the tent.... The NBA itself also announced a new feature designed to mesh the betting experience with live action: Fans watching games on League Pass, the flagship streaming platform, would be able to opt in to view betting odds on the app's interface and click through to place wagers... Cleveland Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said that gambling had "gone too far... I personally have had my own instances with some of the sports gamblers," he added, "where they got my telephone number, were sending me crazy messages about where I live, and my kids and all that stuff." NBA spokesman Mike Bass said that instances of reported harassment related to sports betting are investigated. Then, just days after Haliburton and Bickerstaff's complaints, the NBA found itself grappling with a new case... The league is investigating suspicious activity around [Toronto Raptors forward Jontay] Porter, after app users placed sizable wagers that his totals for points, rebounds and assists in a pair of games would all come in under the lines set by oddsmakers. When Porter's numbers fell below those marks and the bets paid out, it raised a red flag signaling possible irregularities.... The NCAA has turned to state legislatures to impose regulations that would take single players out of gamblers' crosshairs. The group is lobbying to ban player-specific proposition bets that aren't directly related to the final score of the game - the exact kind of wagers at the center of the Porter situation in the NBA After noticing "the gambling-related negativity taking over his social-media feeds," pro basketball player Tyrese Haliburton gave the Journal his own assessment of how it's affecting the fan base. "To half the world, I'm just helping them make money on DraftKings." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
404 Media claims to have identified "the fundamental flaw with the age verification bills and laws" that have already passed in eight state legislatures (with two more taking effect in July): "the delusional, unfounded belief that putting hurdles between people and pornography is going to actually prevent them from viewing porn." They argue that age verification laws "drag us back to the dark ages of the internet." Slashdot reader samleecole shared this excerpt:What will happen, and is already happening, is that people - including minors - will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex. Meanwhile, performers and companies that are trying to do the right thing will suffer.... The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what's actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors." The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet. Yet new legislation is advancing in Kentucky and Nebraska, while the state of Kansas just passed a law which even requires age-verification for viewing "acts of homosexuality," according to a report:Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000. This means that the state can "require age verification to access LGBTQ content," according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who said on Threads that "Kansas residents may soon need their state IDs" to access material that simply "depicts LGBTQ people." One newspaper opinion piece argues there's an easier solution: don't buy your children a smartphone:Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law.Not only do age verification laws reduce parental freedom, but they also create myriad privacy risks. Requiring platforms to collect government IDs and face scans opens the door to potential exploitation by hackers and enemy governments. The very information intended to protect children could end up in the wrong hands, compromising the privacy and security of millions of users... Ultimately, age verification laws are a misguided attempt to address the complex issue of underage social media use. Instead of placing undue burdens on users and limiting parental liberty, lawmakers should look for alternative strategies that respect privacy rights while promoting online safety. This week a trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced plans to petition America's Supreme Court to intervene.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix:NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years. Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9. "A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did." Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Today's most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress..." writes the Wall Street Journal. Instead the lobbying sector "now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you."[Lobbyists] teamed up with PR gurus, social-media experts, political pollsters, data analysts and grassroots organizers to foment seemingly organic public outcries designed to pressure lawmakers and compel them to take actions that would benefit the lobbyists' corporate clients... By the middle of 2011, an army of lobbyists working for the pillars of the corporate lobbying establishment - the major movie studios, the music industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - were executing a nearly $100 million campaign to win approval for the internet bill [the PROTECT IP Act, or "PIPA"]. They pressured scores of lawmakers to co-sponsor the legislation. At one point, 99 of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate appeared ready to support it - an astounding number, given that most bills have just a handful of co-sponsors before they are called up for a vote. When lobbyists for Google and its allies went to Capitol Hill, they made little headway. Against such well-financed and influential opponents, the futility of the traditional lobbying approach became clear. If tech companies were going to turn back the anti-piracy bills, they would need to find another way. It was around this time that one of Google's Washington strategists suggested an alternative strategy. "Let's rally our users," Adam Kovacevich, then 34 and a senior member of Google's Washington office, told colleagues. Kovacevich turned Google's opposition to the anti-piracy legislation into a coast-to-coast political influence effort with all the bells and whistles of a presidential campaign. The goal: to whip up enough opposition to the legislation among ordinary Americans that Congress would be forced to abandon the effort... The campaign slogan they settled on - "Don't Kill the Internet" - exaggerated the likely impact of the bill, but it succeeded in stirring apprehension among web users. The coup de grace came on Jan. 18, 2012, when Google and its allies pulled off the mother of all outside influence campaigns. When users logged on to the web that day, they discovered, to their great frustration, that many of the sites they'd come to rely on - Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist - were either blacked out or displayed text outlining the detrimental impacts of the proposed legislation. For its part, Google inserted a black censorship bar over its multicolored logo and posted a tool that enabled users to contact their elected representatives. "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" a message on Google's home page read. With some 115,000 websites taking part, the protest achieved a staggering reach. Tens of millions of people visited Wikipedia's blacked-out website, 4.5 million users signed a Google petition opposing the legislation, and more than 2.4 million people took to Twitter to express their views on the bills. "We must stop [these bills] to keep the web open & free," the reality TV star Kim Kardashian wrote in a tweet to her 10 million followers... Within two days, the legislation was dead... Over the following decade, outside influence tactics would become the cornerstone of Washington's lobbying industry - and they remain so today. "The 2012 effort is considered the most successful consumer mobilization in the history of internet policy," writes the Washington Post - agreeing that it's since spawned more app-based, crowdsourced lobbying campaigns. Sites like Airbnb "have also repeatedly asked their users to oppose city government restrictions on the apps." Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig work companies also blitzed the apps' users with scenarios of higher prices or suspended service unless people voted for a 2020 California ballot measure on contract workers. Voters approved it." The Wall Street Journal also details how lobbyists successfully killed higher taxes for tobacco products, the oil-and-gas industry, and even on private-equity investors - and note similar tactics were used against a bill targeting TikTok. "Some say the campaign backfired. Lawmakers complained that the effort showed how the Chinese government could co-opt internet users to do their bidding in the U.S., and the House of Representatives voted to ban the app if its owners did not agree to sell it. "TikTok's lobbyists said they were pleased with the effort. They persuaded 65 members of the House to vote in favor of the company and are confident that the Senate will block the effort." The Journal's article was adapted from an upcoming book titled "The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government." But the Washington Post argues the phenomenon raises two questions. "How much do you want technology companies to turn you into their lobbyists? And what's in it for you?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Linux Foundation subsidiary has developed a free and open-source 3D game engine distributed under the Apache license. And last week the Open 3D Foundation announced "a big step forward, showcasing the power of open-source technologies in giving gamers around the globe unforgettable gaming experiences." "We are proud to unveil MadWorld as the first mobile title powered by O3DE," said Joe Bryant, Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation, "demonstrating the large potential of open-source technologies in game development." And then this week Los Angeles Business Journal reported that El Segundo-based gaming studio Carbonated Inc. "has raised $11 million of series A funding to finance the development and release of its debut game title... Prior to its most recent round, Carbonated closed an $8.5 million seed funding round in 2020, which also included participation from Andreessen and Bitkraft."Since its founding [in 2015], the company has been focusing on research and development for its upcoming first title, called "MadWorld." The third-person, multiplayer shooter game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment features. Players of the game will battle for land control in a dystopian setting. Using a combination of open-source mapping tools and Carbonated's proprietary custom operations technology, called Carbyne, the game's world is designed around real-life cities and locations. Players are initially dropped into the game's version of their own real-time location. The game allows players to optionally engage using blockchain technology with a digital asset-ownership layer powered by a blockchain network called XPLA. Earlier this month Madworld "opened up for Early Access registration," reports the egamers web site, arguing that the game "is set to redefine the gaming landscape and will make its public debut later this year."After a catastrophic event named "The Collapse," MadWorld takes place in a desolate Earth where players engage in a battle for survival, highlighting the game's unique setting and immersive experience. The game's world is intricately designed with 250,000 land plots mapped out on a hexagonal grid, each presenting unique resources and strategic benefits. This innovative approach to game design enhances the gameplay experience and introduces a new layer of strategy and competition. MadWorld's gameplay is centered around integrating Web3 technologies, which allows for the ownership, enhancement, and trading of tokenized representations of real-world locations. This feature encourages players to create clans and work together or compete for essential resources that are spread across the vast game world. Clans can acquire these resources by paying tributes to NFT landowners using "Rounds," the in-game currency. This mechanism not only fosters a sense of community and teamwork but also creates unique economic opportunities within the game by blending traditional gaming elements with the emerging field of digital assets. "With its use of O3DE, Carbonated can enhance the game's visual fidelity, performance, and scalability," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement, "in order to deliver a fast-paced adventure on mobile platforms."O3DE is an open-source game engine developed by a collaborative community of industry experts. It includes state-of-the-art rendering capabilities, dynamic lighting, and realistic physics simulation. These features have enabled Carbonated to build realistic dystopian environments and create action-packed gameplay in MadWorld. According to its official site, MadWorld "is set to be released to the public sometime in 2024 and is currently being tested on iOS and Android operating systems." Carbonated's CEO Travis Boatman made this prediction to the site Decrypt. "We think mobile is where the breakout will happen for Web3."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This week every U.S. agency was ordered to appoint a "chief AI officer". But that wasn't the only AI policy announced. According to CNN, "By the end of the year, travelers should be able to refuse facial recognition scans at airport security screenings without fear it could delay or jeopardize their travel plans."That's just one of the concrete safeguards governing artificial intelligence that the Biden administration says it's rolling out across the U.S. government, in a key first step toward preventing government abuse of AI. The move could also indirectly regulate the AI industry using the government's own substantial purchasing power... The mandates aim to cover situations ranging from screenings by the Transportation Security Administration to decisions by other agencies affecting Americans' health care, employment and housing. Under the requirements taking effect on December 1, agencies using AI tools will have to verify they do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people. In addition, each agency will have to publish online a complete list of the AI systems it uses and their reasons for using them, along with a risk assessment of those systems... [B]ecause the government is such a large purchaser of commercial technology, its policies around procurement and use of AI are expected to have a powerful influence on the private sector. CNN notes that Vice President Harris told reporters that the administration intends for the policies to serve as a global model. "Meanwhile, the European Union this month gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law, once again leapfrogging the United States on regulating a critical and disruptive technology." CNN adds that last year, "the White House announced voluntary commitments by leading AI companies to subject their models to outside safety testing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Several big businesses have published source code that incorporates a software package previously hallucinated by generative AI," the Register reported Thursday "Not only that but someone, having spotted this reoccurring hallucination, had turned that made-up dependency into a real one, which was subsequently downloaded and installed thousands of times by developers as a result of the AI's bad advice, we've learned." If the package was laced with actual malware, rather than being a benign test, the results could have been disastrous. According to Bar Lanyado, security researcher at Lasso Security, one of the businesses fooled by AI into incorporating the package is Alibaba, which at the time of writing still includes a pip command to download the Python package huggingface-cli in its GraphTranslator installation instructions. There is a legit huggingface-cli, installed using pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]". But the huggingface-cli distributed via the Python Package Index (PyPI) and required by Alibaba's GraphTranslator - installed using pip install huggingface-cli - is fake, imagined by AI and turned real by Lanyado as an experiment. He created huggingface-cli in December after seeing it repeatedly hallucinated by generative AI; by February this year, Alibaba was referring to it in GraphTranslator's README instructions rather than the real Hugging Face CLI tool... huggingface-cli received more than 15,000 authentic downloads in the three months it has been available... "In addition, we conducted a search on GitHub to determine whether this package was utilized within other companies' repositories," Lanyado said in the write-up for his experiment. "Our findings revealed that several large companies either use or recommend this package in their repositories...." Lanyado also said that there was a Hugging Face-owned project that incorporated the fake huggingface-cli, but that was removed after he alerted the biz. "With GPT-4, 24.2 percent of question responses produced hallucinated packages, of which 19.6 percent were repetitive, according to Lanyado..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schneidafunk for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
America's Department of Homeland Security "is expected to stop buying access to data showing the movement of phones," reports the U.S. news site NOTUS. They call the purchasers "a controversial practice that has allowed it to warrantlessly track hundreds of millions of people for years."Since 2018, agencies within the department - including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Secret Service - have been buying access to commercially available data that revealed the movement patterns of devices, many inside the United States. Commercially available phone data can be bought and searched without judicial oversight. Three people familiar with the matter said the Department of Homeland Security isn't expected to buy access to more of this data, nor will the agency make any additional funding available to buy access to this data. The agency "paused" this practice after a 2023 DHS watchdog report [which had recommended they draw up better privacy controls and policies]. However, the department instead appears to be winding down the use of the data... "The information that is available commercially would kind of knock your socks off," said former top CIA official Michael Morell on a podcast last year. "If we collected it using traditional intelligence methods, it would be top-secret sensitive. And you wouldn't put it in a database, you'd keep it in a safe...." DHS' internal watchdog opened an investigation after a bipartisan outcry from lawmakers and civil society groups about warrantless tracking... "Meanwhile, U.S. spy agencies are fighting to preserve the same capability as part of the renewal of surveillance authorities," the article adds. "A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, led by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in the Senate and Republican Rep. Warren Davidson in the House, is pushing to ban U.S. government agencies from buying data on Americans."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Researchers have successfully transformed CO2 into methanol," reports SciTechDaily, "by shining sunlight on single atoms of copper deposited on a light-activated material, a discovery that paves the way for creating new green fuels."Tara LeMercier, a PhD student who carried out the experimental work at the University of Nottingham, School of Chemistry, said: "We measured the current generated by light and used it as a criterion to judge the quality of the catalyst. Even without copper, the new form of carbon nitride is 44 times more active than traditional carbon nitride. However, to our surprise, the addition of only 1 mg of copper per 1 g of carbon nitride quadrupled this efficiency. Most importantly the selectivity changed from methane, another greenhouse gas, to methanol, a valuable green fuel." Professor Andrei Khlobystov, School of Chemistry, University of Nottingham, said: "Carbon dioxide valorization holds the key for achieving the net-zero ambition of the UK. It is vitally important to ensure the sustainability of our catalyst materials for this important reaction. A big advantage of the new catalyst is that it consists of sustainable elements - carbon, nitrogen, and copper - all highly abundant on our planet." This invention represents a significant step towards a deep understanding of photocatalytic materials in CO2 conversion. It opens a pathway for creating highly selective and tuneable catalysts where the desired product could be dialed up by controlling the catalyst at the nanoscale. "The research has been published in the Sustainable Energy & Fuels journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry."Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"If you want to see what the cutting edge of next-gen clean energy innovation looks like, it'd be hard to find a place better than Texas," Bill Gates wrote recently on his blog," saying "amazing companies" are breaking ground across the state. "Each one represents a huge boon for the local economy, America's energy security, and the fight against climate change."The world is undergoing an energy transition right now, fueled by the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies. The pace of innovation at the heart of this transition is happening faster than many people (including me!) dared hope. The progress makes me optimistic about the future - and excited about the role that American communities will play, especially in places like Texas. Breakthrough Energy and I have invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs, institutions, and projects. It's a big bet, but it's one I'm confident in. Why? Because of the people. Nearly half a million Texans work in the oil and gas industry, and their skills are directly transferrable to next-generation industries. This workforce will help form the backbone of the world's new clean energy economy, and it will cement Texas's energy leadership for generations to come. Many of the companies I'm seeing on this trip already employ or plan to employ oil and gas workers. One of those companies is Infinium, which is working on next-generation clean fuels for trucks, ships, and even planes. I'm visiting their first demonstration plant in Corpus Christi, where they're turning waste CO2 and renewable energy into electrofuels - or eFuels - for trucks. They've already signed a deal with Amazon, and sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get a delivery supported by Infinium eDiesel. The key to Infinium's approach is that their fuels can be dropped into existing engines... I'm especially excited about the work they're doing on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF - which could reduce emissions from air travel by as much as 90 percent, according to company estimates. Infinium is in the process of converting an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas into a new facility that will increase the company's capacity for producing eFuels ten-fold. Breakthrough Energy's Catalyst program has invested in this first-of-its-kind plant, and I can't wait to see it when it's done. Another company I'll see is Mars Materials. They're a Breakthrough Energy Fellows project working on a different way to reuse CO2. The company is developing a clever technique for turning captured carbon into one of the key components in carbon fiber, an ultra-light, ultra-strong material that is used in everything from clothing to car frames... The Mars Materials team relocated from California to Texas in part because of the skilled oil and gas talent that they could access in the state, and they aren't the first Breakthrough Energy company to do that. I'm going to check out their lab, where their scientists are hard at work optimizing the conversion process. Both companies assume abundant CO2, Gates writes, but "fortunately for them, Texas is also in the process of becoming a capital for direct air capture... A recent study found that Texas has the greatest DAC deployment potential in the country and could create as many as 400,000 jobs by 2050." Already a direct air capture "hub" in Kingsville, Texas is expected to create 2,500 jobs over the next five years, while Houston has been selected as the site for one of America's seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs. "If you want to catch a glimpse of our country's clean energy future," Gates writes, "you should head on down to the Lone Star State."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The New York Times has an occasional series called "Overlooked," whereby notable people whose deaths were overlooked at the time receive the obituary they deserve. Their latest installment eulogizes Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who passed away in 1921 at age 53. From the report: "In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was... Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women [computers] who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it." Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars. The relationship, now known as Leavitt's Law, is a crucial rung in the cosmic distance ladder, the methods for measuring the distance to stars, galaxies, and across the visible universe. From the report: "[Leavitt's Law] underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system's place in the cosmos. Leavitt's Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth. 'She cracked into something that was not only impressive scientifically but shifted an entire paradigm of thinking...'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy). And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026. So why is it that right now - more than two years after the bill's passage - why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process - states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds - has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added. "We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...." Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers - some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles - are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful. Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program - but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish.... "States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are." The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations - but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars. "States just have to build them first."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsen. The so-called "Lenna image," (Forsen added an extra "n" to her name in her Playboy appearance to aid pronunciation) has been used in image processing research since 1973 and has attracted criticism for making some women feel unwelcome in the field. In an email from the IEEE Computer Society sent to members on Wednesday, Technical & Conference Activities Vice President Terry Benzel wrote, "IEEE's diversity statement and supporting policies such as the IEEE Code of Ethics speak to IEEE's commitment to promoting an including and equitable culture that welcomes all. In alignment with this culture and with respect to the wishes of the subject of the image, Lena Forsen, IEEE will no longer accept submitted papers which include the 'Lena image.'" An uncropped version of the 512*512-pixel test image originally appeared as the centerfold picture for the December 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine. Usage of the Lenna image in image processing began in June or July 1973 (PDF) when an assistant professor named Alexander Sawchuck and a graduate student at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute scanned a square portion of the centerfold image with a primitive drum scanner, omitting nudity present in the original image. They scanned it for a colleague's conference paper, and after that, others began to use the image as well. The image's use spread in other papers throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and it caught Playboy's attention, but the company decided to overlook the copyright violations. In 1997, Playboy helped track down Forsen, who appeared at the 50th Annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science in Technology, signing autographs for fans. "They must be so tired of me ... looking at the same picture for all these years!" she said at the time. VP of new media at Playboy Eileen Kent told Wired, "We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon." The image, which features Forsen's face and bare shoulder as she wears a hat with a purple feather, was reportedly ideal for testing image processing systems in the early years of digital image technology due to its high contrast and varied detail. It is also a sexually suggestive photo of an attractive woman, and its use by men in the computer field has garnered criticism over the decades, especially from female scientists and engineers who felt that the image (especially related to its association with the Playboy brand) objectified women and created an academic climate where they did not feel entirely welcome. Due to some of this criticism, which dates back to at least 1996, the journal Nature banned the use of the Lena image in paper submissions in 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia's government to explore the development of a series of homegrown consoles to compete with PlayStation and Xbox. Game Rant reports: Russia has taken issue with Western games and developers in recent years, leading the country to threaten the banning of certain titles like Apex Legends and The Last of Us Part 2. This is due to what the Russian government perceives as pro-LGBTQ messaging, which it openly opposes. In February, Russia's Organization for Developing the Video Game Industry (RVI) laid out a long-term plan that ended with the creation of a fully capable gaming console in 2026-2027. It seems that the Russian government may be attempting to follow through with this plan. Following a meeting on the economic development of Kaliningrad, Putin requested government officials to research the requirements for domestic production of stationary and portable gaming consoles. The Russian president also ordered the planning of an appropriate operating system and cloud system for the consoles. The deadline for these plans is set for June 15, 2024, and Russia's prime minister was designated as the official overseeing these tasks. A Kremlin spokesperson confirmed that the orders intend to develop Russia's homegrown gaming industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Record reports: Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge who is widely recognized for his contributions to computing, passed away at home on Thursday according to friends and colleagues who have been in touch with his family and the University. Anderson, who also taught at Edinburgh University, was one of the most respected academic engineers and computer scientists of his generation. His research included machine learning, cryptographic protocols, hardware reverse engineering and breaking ciphers, among other topics. His public achievements include, but are by no means limited to, being awarded the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal in 2015, and publishing several editions of the Security Engineering textbook. Anderson's security research made headlines throughout his career, with his name appearing in over a dozen Slashdot stories...2023: Researchers Warn of 'Model Collapse' As AI Trains On AI-Generated Content 2021: 'Trojan Source' Bug Threatens the Security of All Code 2015: Factory Reset On Millions of Android Devices Doesn't Wipe Storage 2012: UK Web Snooping Plan Invades Privacy, Despite Claims To the Contrary 2010: Why "Verified By Visa" System Is Insecure 2008: Researchers Expose New Credit Card Fraud Risk 2006: "Security Engineering" Is Now Online. [The link from that 2006 post still works. Slashdot called Anderson's book "arguably the best information security book ever written" in one of two reviews, published in 2002 and 2010.] 2002:Security of Open vs. Closed Source Software.2002: Analyzing Palladium My favorite story? UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication. "Cambridge University has resisted the demands and has sent a response to the bankers explaining why they will keep the page online..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Biden administration on Friday announced a regulation designed to turbocharge sales of electric or other zero-emission heavy vehicles, from school buses to cement mixers, as part of its multifront attack on global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the new rule could mean that 25 percent of new long-haul trucks, the heaviest on the road, and 40 percent of medium-size trucks, like box trucks and landscaping vehicles, could be nonpolluting by 2032. Today, fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold in the United States fit that bill. The regulation would apply to more than 100 types of vehicles including tractor-trailers, ambulances, R.V.s, garbage trucks and moving vans. The rule does not mandate the sales of electric trucks or any other type of zero or low-emission truck. Rather, it increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from trucks across a manufacturer's product line over time, starting in model year 2027. It would be up to the manufacturer to decide how to comply. Options could include using technologies like hybrids or hydrogen fuel cells or sharply increasing the fuel efficiency of the conventional trucks. The truck regulation follows another rule made final last week that is designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032, up from just 7.6 percent last year. Together, the car and truck rules are intended to slash carbon dioxide pollution from transportation, the nation's largest source of the fossil fuel emissions that are driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden's strategy to confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation's emissions in half by the end of this decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The U.S. House has set a strict ban on congressional staffers' use of Microsoft Copilot, the company's AI-based chatbot, Axios reported Friday. From the report: The House last June restricted staffers' use of ChatGPT, allowing limited use of the paid subscription version while banning the free version. The House's Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor, in guidance to congressional offices obtained by Axios, said Microsoft Copilot is "unauthorized for House use." "The Microsoft Copilot application has been deemed by the Office of Cybersecurity to be a risk to users due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services," it said. The guidance added that Copilot "will be removed from and blocked on all House Windows devices."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google is preparing to introduce a significant change to its ChromeOS platform by decoupling the Chrome browser from the operating system, AndroidCentral writes. The project, known as "Lacros" (Linux And Chrome OS), aims to solve several issues, including the inability to receive browser updates after a Chromebook reaches its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date. This change will allow users to install updates for the browser separately, potentially extending the lifespan of their devices and reducing e-waste. Additionally, Lacros will bring a consistent user experience across all platforms, including features like profile switching without the need to log out of accounts. Google has yet to announce the exact release date of the change, however, the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Decades of buried trash is releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, at higher rates than previously estimated, the researchers said. From a report: These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The study measured methane emissions at about 20 percent of about 1,200 large, operating landfills in the United States. It adds to a growing body of evidence that landfills are a significant driver of climate change, said Riley Duren, founder of the public-private partnership Carbon Mapper, who took part in the study. "We've largely been in the dark, as a society, about actual emissions from landfills," said Mr. Duren, a former NASA engineer and scientist. "This study pinpoints the gaps." Methane emissions from oil and gas production, as well as from livestock, have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Like carbon dioxide the main greenhouse gas that's warming the world, methane acts like a blanket in the sky, trapping the sun's heat. And though methane lasts for a shorter time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is more potent. Its warming effect is more than 80 times as powerful as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the United States, emitting as much greenhouse gas as 23 million gasoline cars driven for a year. Organic waste like food scraps can emit copious amounts of methane when they decompose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: In a recent security announcement, Red Hat's Information Risk and Security and Product Security teams have identified a critical vulnerability in the latest versions of the 'xz' compression tools and libraries. The affected versions, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, contain malicious code that could potentially allow unauthorized access to systems. Fedora Linux 40 users and those using Fedora Rawhide, the development distribution for future Fedora builds, are at risk. The vulnerability, designated CVE-2024-3094, impacts users who have updated to the compromised versions of the xz libraries. Red Hat urges all Fedora Rawhide users to immediately cease using the distribution for both work and personal activities until the issue is resolved. Plans are underway to revert Fedora Rawhide to the safer xz-5.4.x version, after which it will be safe to redeploy Fedora Rawhide instances. Although Fedora Linux 40 builds have not been confirmed to be compromised, Red Hat advises users to downgrade to a 5.4 build as a precautionary measure. An update reverting xz to 5.4.x has been released and is being distributed to Fedora Linux 40 users through the normal update system. Users can expedite the update by following instructions provided by Red Hat. Further reader submissions: xz/liblzma Backdoored, Facilitating ssh Compromise;Malicious Code Discovered in Popular XZ Utils.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LinkedIn is testing support for short-form videos to help it compete with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and other social media platforms. "[W]e are testing new ways to help members more easily discover timely, relevant videos to watch on LinkedIn," Suzi Owens, a company spokesperson, tells Axios in an email. From the report: A new "Video" option will appear next to the "Home" button at the bottom of the app's navigation bar, per a demo of the feature shared online by Austin Null, strategy director at creative agency McKinney. After tapping it, viewers are led to a feed of short-form videos similar to Instagram Reels and TikTok.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Victoria Song reports via The Verge: When Gmail launched with a goofy press release 20 years ago next week, many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gargantuan 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive quantity in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fools' Day, portending some kind of prank. But soon, invites to Gmail's very real beta started going out -- and they became a must-have for a certain kind of in-the-know tech fan. At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids' table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn't know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever. Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail did revolutionize email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users -- about 1/7 of the global population -- and these days, it's a practical necessity to do anything online. It often feels like Gmail has always been here and always will be. But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's champing at the bit to open up Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate how we communicate online. What was once a game-changing tool sometimes feels like it's been sidelined. In another 20 years, will Gmail still be this central to our lives? Or will it -- and email -- be a thing of the past?Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NYC's "MyCity" ChatBot was rolled out as a "pilot" program last October. The announcement touted the ChatBot as a way for business owners to "save ... time and money by instantly providing them with actionable and trusted information from more than 2,000 NYC Business web pages and articles on topics such as compliance with codes and regulations, available business incentives, and best practices to avoid violations and fines." But a new report from The Markup and local nonprofit news site The City found the MyCity chatbot giving dangerously wrong information about some pretty basic city policies. To cite just one example, the bot said that NYC buildings "are not required to accept Section 8 vouchers," when an NYC government info page says clearly that Section 8 housing subsidies are one of many lawful sources of income that landlords are required to accept without discrimination. The Markup also received incorrect information in response to chatbot queries regarding worker pay and work hour regulations, as well as industry-specific information like funeral home pricing. Further testing from BlueSky user Kathryn Tewson shows the MyCity chatbot giving some dangerously wrong answers regarding treatment of workplace whistleblowers, as well as some hilariously bad answers regarding the need to pay rent. MyCity's Microsoft Azure-powered chatbot uses a complex process of statistical associations across millions of tokens to essentially guess at the most likely next word in any given sequence, without any real understanding of the underlying information being conveyed. That can cause problems when a single factual answer to a question might not be reflected precisely in the training data. In fact, The Markup said that at least one of its tests resulted in the correct answer on the same query about accepting Section 8 housing vouchers (even as "ten separate Markup staffers" got the incorrect answer when repeating the same question). The MyCity Chatbot -- which is prominently labeled as a "Beta" product -- does tell users who bother to read the warnings that it "may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content" and that users should "not rely on its responses as a substitute for professional advice." But the page also states front and center that it is "trained to provide you official NYC Business information" and is being sold as a way "to help business owners navigate government." NYC Office of Technology and Innovation Spokesperson Leslie Brown told The Markup that the bot "has already provided thousands of people with timely, accurate answers" and that "we will continue to focus on upgrading this tool so that we can better support small businesses across the city."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to The Information (paywalled), Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100 billion datacenter project that will include an artificial intelligence supercomputer called "Stargate." Reuters reports: The Information reported that Microsoft would likely be responsible for financing the project, which would be 100 times more costly than some of the biggest current data centers, citing people involved in private conversations about the proposal. OpenAI's next major AI upgrade is expected to land by early next year, the report said, adding that Microsoft executives are looking to launch Stargate as soon as 2028. The proposed U.S.-based supercomputer would be the biggest in a series of installations the companies are looking to build over the next six years, the report added. The Information attributed the tentative cost of $100 billion to a person who spoke to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about it and a person who has viewed some of Microsoft's initial cost estimates. It did not identify those sources. Altman and Microsoft employees have spread supercomputers across five phases, with Stargate as the fifth phase. Microsoft is working on a smaller, fourth-phase supercomputer for OpenAI that it aims to launch around 2026, according to the report. Microsoft and OpenAI are in the middle of the third phase of the five-phase plan, with much of the cost of the next two phases involving procuring the AI chips that are needed, the report said. The proposed efforts could cost in excess of $115 billion, more than three times what Microsoft spent last year on capital expenditures for servers, buildings and other equipment, the report stated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
U.S. users have just a few more days to make the transition from Google Podcasts as the company moves forward with the process of discontinuing the service globally. From a report: Google is currently sending in-app notifications to users in the U.S. that starting April 2nd they will no longer be able to use Google Podcasts and is recommending to export subscriptions to YouTube Music. The Google Podcasts streaming service launched six years ago. It's app has more than 500 million downloads on Google Play and apart from offering a large selection of podcasts it also allows subscribing to favorite channels, downloading and playing on various devices. The service integrates with Google's ecosystem, providing users with personalized recommendations based on interests, listening history, and preferences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: About half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. This has prompted Baikal Electronics, a Russian processor developer, to expand the number of packaging partners in the country, according to a report in Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily newspaper published in Moscow (hat tip to Cnews). In addition to GS Group based in Kaliningrad, the company will now use Milandr and Mikron, which are based in Zelenograd, a town near Moscow. What remains unclear is which foundry initially produces the chips for Baikal. [...] There are no contract chipmakers in Russia that can process wafers on 28nm-class fabrication technologies, so Baikal is likely using a Chinese foundry to make its processors. Since 2021, the company has been experimenting with localizing chip packaging at GS Group in Kaliningrad. But transitioning to local packaging has not been smooth. The process is intricate and costly, leading to a high rate of defects. According to industry insiders, more than half of the chip batches end up being defective due to issues with equipment calibration and the lack of skilled personnel. It turns out that GS Group cannot fulfill the demands of Baikal, which has now tapped Milandr and Mikron to assist with chip packaging. Apparently, it hasn't helped much. "More than half of the chip batches turn out to be defective," a source familiar with the matter told Vedomosti. "The reasons lie in both the equipment of the enterprises, which needs to be properly configured, and the insufficient competencies of the people involved in chip packaging." "Russia can package a small number of processors, but when it comes to a series, a lot of defects appear," explained one of the newspaper's sources. "Manufacturers cannot maintain a consistently high level across all products."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: OpenAI said on Friday it's allowed a small number of businesses to test a new tool that can recreate a person's voice from just a 15-second recording. The company said it is taking "a cautious and informed approach" to releasing the program, called Voice Engine, more broadly given the high risk of abuse presented by synthetic voice generators. Based on the 15-second recording, the program can create a "emotive and realistic" natural-sounding voice that closely resembles the original speaker. This synthetic voice can then be used to read text inputs, even if the text isn't in the original speaker's native language. In one example offered by the company, an English speaker's voice was translated into Spanish, Mandarin, German, French and Japanese while preserving the speaker's native accent. OpenAI said Voice Engine has so far been used to provide reading assistance to non-readers, translate content and to help people who are non-verbal. It said the program has already been used in its text-to-speech application and its ChatGPT Voice and Read Aloud tool. "We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities," the company said. "Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Abstract of a paper on Nature: Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N=22,743). Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated 5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows. Nature: The findings, published on 27 March in Nature, are "extremely exciting," says Li-Huei Tsai, a neurobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. They contribute to the picture that forming memories is a "risky business," she says. Normally, breaks in both strands of the double helix DNA molecule are associated with diseases including cancer. But in this case, the DNA damage-and-repair cycle offers one explanation for how memories might form and last. It also suggests a tantalizing possibility: this cycle might be faulty in people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, causing a build-up of errors in a neuron's DNA, says study co-author Jelena Radulovic, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. [...] To better understand the part these DNA breaks play in memory formation, Radulovic and her colleagues trained mice to associate a small electrical shock with a new environment, so that when the animals were once again put into that environment, they would 'remember' the experience and show signs of fear, such as freezing in place. Then the researchers examined gene activity in neurons in a brain area key to memory -- the hippocampus. They found that some genes responsible for inflammation were active in a set of neurons four days after training. Three weeks after training, the same genes were much less active.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Algorithms might help hotels illegally collude on prices, even if no humans from those businesses actually talk to each other about them, according to US antitrust enforcers. From a report: The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission jointly submitted a statement of interest in Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment, a case brought before the US District Court of New Jersey. The class action case was brought by New Jersey residents who rented rooms in Atlantic City hotels and alleged that several of those hotels engaged in an illegal price-fixing conspiracy through the use of a common pricing algorithm. The plaintiffs are trying to show that the hotels violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and is used to prosecute illegal price-fixing. They say that the hotels allegedly used a pricing algorithm platform called Rainmaker, knowing that their competitors were also using the platform and choosing it for that reason. The agencies really care about how this issue is handled. "Judicial treatment of the use of algorithms in price fixing has tremendous practical importance," the DOJ and FTC write in their statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hillary Clinton and U.S. election officials said they are concerned disinformation generated and spread by AI could threaten the 2024 presidential election [non-paywalled link]. WSJ: Clinton, a former secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate, said she thinks foreign actors like Russian President Vladimir Putin could use AI to interfere in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere. Dozens of countries are running elections this year. "Anybody who's not worried is not paying attention," Clinton said Thursday at Columbia University, where election officials and tech executives discussed how AI could impact global elections. She added: "It could only be a very small handful of people in St. Petersburg or Moldova or wherever they are right now who are lighting the fire, but because of the algorithms everyone gets burned." Clinton said Putin tried to undermine her before the 2016 election by spreading disinformation on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat about "all these terrible things" she purportedly did. "I don't think any of us understood it," she said. "I did not understand it. I can tell you my campaign did not understand it. The so-called dark web was filled with these kinds of memes and stories and videos of all sorts portraying me in all kinds of less than flattering ways." Clinton added: "What they did to me was primitive and what we're talking about now is the leap in technology."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US has seen a significant increase in student absenteeism since the pandemic closed schools four years ago, with an estimated 26% of public school students considered chronically absent in the last school year, up from 15% before the pandemic, according to data from 40 states and Washington, D.C. A report adds: The increases have occurred in districts big and small, and across income and race. For districts in wealthier areas, chronic absenteeism rates have about doubled, to 19 percent in the 2022-23 school year from 10 percent before the pandemic, a New York Times analysis of the data found. Poor communities, which started with elevated rates of student absenteeism, are facing an even bigger crisis: Around 32 percent of students in the poorest districts were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, up from 19 percent before the pandemic. Even districts that reopened quickly during the pandemic, in fall 2020, have seen vast increases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, now on the board of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, believes that while AI has the potential to revolutionize the economy, its impact will take time to materialize. However, Summers maintains that AI could be the biggest economic development since the Industrial Revolution, eventually replacing most forms of human labor, particularly cognitive tasks. He said: "If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,"he added. "This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor." From building homes to making medical diagnoses, Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to do nearly every human job, particularly white collar workers' "cognitive labor."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Mutterings of alarm are emerging from the cloisters of Red Hat after the world's largest management consultancy was hired to help the IBM subsidiary focus engineers on their highest-value work. Red Hat confirmed the partnership with McKinsey & Company to The Reg, sharing this extract from an email from CTO Chris Wright to the Global Engineering Team: "Hey everyone -- as I mentioned during the recent Q1 All Hands, my goal is to have Global Engineering recognized as the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization. This team is already doing amazing work, and we have several initiatives in progress to help us achieve the goal I've set. One of those is a partnership with McKinsey. The objective of this project is to help us understand and incorporate learnings on working models, development practices, and tooling from across the software industry. "We've heard your feedback in person, during All Hands, and through RHAS [the annual Red Hat Associate Survey]. This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work a" to make your job better. The work with McKinsey is one piece of the overall plan to help us become the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamingOnLinux: After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions. I've covered the issues with the Snap Store a few times now like on March 19th when ten scam crypto apps appeared, got taken down and then reappeared under a different publisher. Also earlier back in February there was an issue where a user actually lost their wallet as a result of a fake app. Multiple fake apps were also put up back in October last year as well, so it was a repeating issue that really needed dealing with properly. So to try and do something about it, Canonical's Holly Hall has posted on their Discourse forum about how "The Store team and other engineering teams within Canonical have been continuously monitoring new snaps that are being registered, to detect potentially malicious actors" and that they will now do manual reviews whenever people try to register "a new snap name." On top of that soon they will also be releasing a new policy regarding "crypto-wallet and other sensitive snaps" with "guidelines for how to publish such a snap." Currently all of this is not supposed to be long-term, as it's an evolving situation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Lyle Smith reports via StorageReview.com: Proxmox has introduced a new import wizard for Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), aiming to simplify the migration process for importing VMware ESXi VMs. This new feature comes at an important time in the industry, as it aims to ease the transition for these organizations looking to move away from VMware's vSphere due to high renewal costs. The new import wizard is integrated into Proxmox VE's existing storage plugin system, allowing for direct integration into the platform's API and web-based user interface. It offers users the ability to import VMware ESXi VMs in their entirety, translating most of the original VM's configuration settings to Proxmox VE's configuration model (all while minimizing downtime). Currently, the import wizard is in a technical preview state, having been added during the Proxmox VE 8.2 development cycle. Although it is still under active development, early reports suggest the wizard is stable and holds considerable promise for future enhancements, including the planned addition of support for other import sources like OVF/OVA files. [...] This tool represents Proxmox's commitment to providing accessible, open-source virtualization solutions. By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust (a safe, fast, and modern programming language ideal for system-level tasks), Proxmox aims to ensure that this new feature can be integrated smoothly into its broader ecosystem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple has sued its former employee Andrew Aude for leaking information about more than a half-dozen Apple products and policies, including its then-unannounced Journal app and Vision Pro headset, product development policies, strategies for regulatory compliance, employee headcounts, and more. MacRumors reports: Aude joined Apple as an iOS software engineer in 2016, shortly after graduating college. He worked on optimizing battery performance, making him "privy to information regarding dozens of Apple's most sensitive projects," according to the complaint. In April 2023, for example, Apple alleges that Aude leaked a list of finalized features for the iPhone's Journal app to a journalist at The Wall Street Journal on a phone call. That same month, The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Tilley published a report titled "Apple Plans iPhone Journaling App in Expansion of Health Initiatives." Using the encrypted messaging app Signal, Aude is said to have sent "over 1,400" messages to the same journalist, who Aude referred to as "Homeboy." He is also accused of sending "over 10,000 text messages" to another journalist at the website The Information, and he allegedly traveled "across the continent" to meet with her. Other leaks relate to the Vision Pro and other hardware: "As another example, an October 2020 screenshot on Mr. Aude's Apple-issued work iPhone shows that he disclosed Apple's development of products within the spatial computing space to a non-Apple employee. Mr. Aude made this disclosure even though Apple's development efforts were confidential and not known to the public. Over the following months, Mr. Aude disclosed additional Apple confidential information -- including information concerning unannounced products, and hardware information." Apple believes that Aude's actions were "extensive and purposeful," with Aude allegedly admitting that he leaked information so he could "kill" products and features with which he took issue. The company alleges that his wrongful disclosures resulted in at least five news articles discussing the company's confidential and proprietary information. Apple says these public revelations impeded its ability to "surprise and delight" with its latest products. Apple said it learned of Aude's wrongful disclosures in late 2023, and the company fired him for his alleged misconduct in December of that year. [...] Apple is seeking both compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, and it is also seeking other legal remedies. The full complaint can be read here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: They're vast expanses that can be as big as towns: open landfills where household waste ends up, whether it's vegetable scraps or old appliances. These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. For the new study, scientists gathered data from airplane flyovers using a technology called imaging spectrometers designed to measure concentrations of methane in the air. Between 2018 and 2022, they flew planes over 250 sites across 18 states, about 20 percent of the nation's open landfills. At more than half the landfills they surveyed, researchers detected emissions hot spots, or sizable methane plumes that sometimes lasted months or years. That suggested something had gone awry at the site, like a big leak of trapped methane from layers of long-buried, decomposing trash, the researchers said. "You can sometimes get decades of trash that's sitting under the landfill," said Daniel H. Cusworth, a climate scientist at Carbon Mapper and the University of Arizona, who led the study. "We call it a garbage lasagna." Many landfills are fitted with specialized wells and pipes that collect the methane gas that seeps out of rotting garbage in order to either burn it off or sometimes to use it to generate electricity or heat. But those wells and pipes can leak. The researchers said pinpointing leaks doesn't just help scientists get a better picture of emissions, it also helps landfill operators fix leaks. Keeping more waste out of the landfill, for example by composting food scraps, is another fix. "The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the United States, emitting as much greenhouse gas as 23 million gasoline cars driven for a year," notes the NYT. "Overseas, the picture can be less clear, particularly in countries where landfills aren't strictly regulated. Previous surveys using satellite technology have estimated that globally, landfill methane makes up nearly 20 percent of human-linked methane emissions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan has won a $1.5 billion conditional federal loan to reopen after being closed for decommissioning in 2022. Canary Media reports: If the loan is granted (subject to Holtec meeting closing conditions) and the 800-megawatt reactor located on Lake Michigan is repowered, it would be the first nuclear plant in the U.S. to reopen after being closed for decommissioning. Surprisingly, it would be just the second or third reactor to restart in the history of global civil nuclear power, according to Mycle Schneider, lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023, in an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Holtec purchased Palisades a month after it shut down with plans to mothball the site, but plans changed. Now the firm, which specializes in nuclear waste management and decommissioning (as opposed to rebuilding and operating nuclear plants), intends to revive the plant instead. Holtec plans to get the power plant restarted by the end of 2025, a breathtakingly aspirational target given nuclear's history of missing construction and cost targets. The Palisades plant was closed by utility Entergy in May 2022 due to financial issues after operating for more than a half-century. And while the plant had a strong operational performance record in recent years, it also has a sobering history of shutdowns due to failures of critical equipment, as well as broken fuel rods and fuel-spill incidents. The site was shut down for the final time a few days ahead of schedule due to concerns about the reliability of a key piece of equipment. When it was operating at its peak, the plant provided more than 600 high-paying jobs, many unionized. If restarted, the plant could drive up to $363 million in regional economic impact, according to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. That's why Whitmer and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers back resurrecting the retired reactor. Local business owners and residents are "largely supportive" of the plan as well, according to local news site MLive. The state's 2024 budget devotes $150 million to the project. Still, the revival of the dormant Palisades faces its share of headwinds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Cloud server provider Vultr has rapidly revised its terms-of-service after netizens raised the alarm over broad clauses that demanded the "perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free" rights to customer "content." The red tape was updated in January, as captured by the Internet Archive, and this month users were asked to agree to the changes by a pop-up that appeared when using their web-based Vultr control panel. That prompted folks to look through the terms, and there they found clauses granting the US outfit a "worldwide license ... to use, reproduce, process, adapt ... modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit, and distribute" user content. It turned out these demands have been in place since before the January update; customers have only just noticed them now. Given Vultr hosts servers and storage in the cloud for its subscribers, some feared the biz was giving itself way too much ownership over their stuff, all in this age of AI training data being put up for sale by platforms. In response to online outcry, largely stemming from Reddit, Vultr in the past few hours rewrote its ToS to delete those asserted content rights. CEO J.J. Kardwell told The Register earlier today it's a case of standard legal boilerplate being taken out of context. The clauses were supposed to apply to customer forum posts, rather than private server content, and while, yes, the terms make more sense with that in mind, one might argue the legalese was overly broad in any case. "We do not use user data," Kardwell stressed to us. "We never have, and we never will. We take privacy and security very seriously. It's at the core of what we do globally." [...] According to Kardwell, the content clauses are entirely separate to user data deployed in its cloud, and are more aimed at one's use of the Vultr website, emphasizing the last line of the relevant fine print: "... for purposes of providing the services to you." He also pointed out that the wording has been that way for some time, and added the prompt asking users to agree to an updated ToS was actually spurred by unrelated Microsoft licensing changes. In light of the controversy, Vultr vowed to remove the above section to "simplify and further clarify" its ToS, and has indeed done so. In a separate statement, the biz told The Register the removal will be followed by a full review and update to its terms of service. "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell added. "We're very focused on being responsive to the community and the concerns people have and we believe the strongest thing we can do to demonstrate that there is no bad intent here is to remove it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Starting next month, Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses will support multimodal AI features to perform translation, along with object, animal, and monument identification. The Verge reports: Users can activate the glasses' smart assistant by saying "Hey Meta," and then saying a prompt or asking a question. It will then respond through the speakers built into the frames. The NYT offers a glimpse at how well Meta's AI works when taking the glasses for a spin in a grocery store, while driving, at museums, and even at the zoo. Although Meta's AI was able to correctly identify pets and artwork, it didn't get things right 100 percent of the time. The NYT found that the glasses struggled to identify zoo animals that were far away and behind cages. It also didn't properly identify an exotic fruit, called a cherimoya, after multiple tries. As for AI translations, the NYT found that the glasses support English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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