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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The George Carlin estate has settled its lawsuit with Dudesy, the podcast that purportedly used a "comedy AI" to produce an hour-long stand-up special in the style and voice of the late comedian. Dudesy's "George Carlin: Dead and Loving It" special, which was first uploaded in early January, gained hundreds of thousands of views and plenty of media attention for its presentation as a creation of an AI that had "listened to all of George Carlin's material... to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today." But even before the Carlin estate lawsuit was filed, there were numerous signs that the special was not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail in a feature report. Shortly after the Carlin estate filed its lawsuit against Dudesy in late January, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso told The New York Times that the special had actually been "completely written by [Dudesy co-host] Chad Kultgen." Regardless of the special's actual authorship, though, the lawsuit also took Dudesy to task for "capitaliz[ing] on the name, reputation, and likeness of George Carlin in creating, promoting, and distributing the Dudesy Special and using generated images of Carlin, Carlin's voice, and images designed to evoke Carlin's presence on a stage." The resulting "association" between the real Carlin and this ersatz version put Dudesy in potential legal jeopardy, even if the contentious and unsettled copyright issues regarding AI training and authorship weren't in play. Court documents note that shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Dudesy had already "taken reasonable steps" to remove the special and any mention of Carlin from all of Dudesy's online accounts. The settlement restrains the Dudesy podcast (and those associated with it) from re-uploading the special anywhere and from "using George Carlin's image, voice, or likeness" in any content posted anywhere on the Internet. Archived copies of the special are still available on the Internet if you know where to look. While the settlement notes that those reposts are also in "violat[ion] of this order," Dudesy will not be held liable for any reuploads made by unrelated third parties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How do you get an AI to answer a question it's not supposed to? There are many such "jailbreak" techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model (LLM) can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen less-harmful questions first. From a report: They call the approach "many-shot jailbreaking" and have both written a paper about it [PDF] and also informed their peers in the AI community about it so it can be mitigated. The vulnerability is a new one, resulting from the increased "context window" of the latest generation of LLMs. This is the amount of data they can hold in what you might call short-term memory, once only a few sentences but now thousands of words and even entire books. What Anthropic's researchers found was that these models with large context windows tend to perform better on many tasks if there are lots of examples of that task within the prompt. So if there are lots of trivia questions in the prompt (or priming document, like a big list of trivia that the model has in context), the answers actually get better over time. So a fact that it might have gotten wrong if it was the first question, it may get right if it's the hundredth question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Communications Commission has scheduled an April 25 vote to restore net neutrality rules similar to the ones introduced during the Obama era and repealed under former President Trump. The text of the pending net neutrality order wasn't released today. The FCC press release said it will prohibit broadband providers "from blocking, slowing down, or creating pay-to-play Internet fast lanes" and "bring back a national standard for broadband reliability, security, and consumer protection." [...] Numerous consumer advocacy groups praised the FCC for its plan today. Lobby groups representing Internet providers expressed their displeasure. While there hasn't been a national standard since then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal in 2017, Internet service providers still have to follow net neutrality rules because California and other states impose their own similar regulations. The broadband industry's attempts to overturn the state net neutrality laws were rejected in court. Although ISPs seem to have been able to comply with the state laws, they argue that the federal standard will hurt their businesses and consumers. "Reimposing heavy-handed regulation will not just hobble network investment and innovation, it will also seriously jeopardize our nation's collective efforts to build and sustain reliable broadband in rural and unserved communities," cable lobbyist Michael Powell said today. Powell, the CEO of cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, was the FCC chairman under President George W. Bush. Powell said the FCC must "reverse course to avoid years of litigation and uncertainty" in a reference to the inevitable lawsuits that industry groups will file against the agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union and the US plan to enlist AI in the search for replacements to so-called forever chemicals that are prevalent in semiconductor manufacturing, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing a draft statement. From the report: The pledge forms part of the conclusions to this week's joint US-EU Trade and Technology Council taking place in Leuven, Belgium. "We plan to continue working to identify research cooperation opportunities on alternatives to the use of per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) in chips," the statement says. "For example, we plan to explore the use of AI capacities and digital twins to accelerate the discovery of suitable materials to replace PFAS in semiconductor manufacturing," it says. PFAS, sometimes known as forever chemicals, have been at the center of concerns over pollution in both the US and Europe. They have a wide range of industrial applications but also show up in our bodies, in food and water supplies, and -- as their moniker suggests -- they don't break down for a very long time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deadline: Drew Goddard, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Martian who also directed The Cabin in the Woods, has been set to write and direct a new Matrix movie at Warner Bros. The franchise's original co-scribe and co-director Lana Wachowski is executive producing. It's still early days in regards to whether core cast members Keanu Reeves, Carrie Anne-Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving and Jada Pinkett Smith are coming back. Goddard will produce with partner Sarah Esberg (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) via their Goddard Textiles banner. "Drew came to Warner Bros with a new idea that we all believe would be an incredible way to continue the Matrix world, by both honoring what Lana and Lilly began over 25 years ago and offering a unique perspective based on his own love of the series and characters," said Jesse Ehrman, Warner Bros Motion Pictures President of Production. "The entire team at Warner Bros Discovery is thrilled for Drew to be making this new Matrix film, adding his vision to the cinematic canon the Wachowskis spent a quarter of a century building here at the studio."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft announced an extended support program for Windows 10 last year that would allow users to pay for continued security updates beyond the October 2025 end of support date. Today, the company has unveiled the pricing structure for that program, which starts at $61 per device, and doubles every year for three years. Windows Central: Security updates on Windows are important, as they keep you protected from any vulnerabilities that are discovered in the OS. Microsoft releases a security update for Windows 10 once a month, but that will stop when October 2025 rolls around. Users still on Windows 10 after that date will officially be out of support, unless you pay. The extended support program for Windows 10 will let users pay for three years of additional security updates. This is handy for businesses and enterprise customers who aren't yet ready to upgrade their fleet of employee laptops and computers to Windows 11. For the first time, Microsoft is also allowing individual users at home to join the extended support program, which will let anyone running Windows 10 pay for extended updates beyond October 2025 for three years. The price is $61 per device, but that price doubles every year for three years. That means the second year will cost you $122 per device, and the third year will cost $244 per device.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Top business schools are integrating AI into their curricula to prepare students for the changing job market. Schools like the Wharton School, American University's Kogod School of Business, Columbia Business School, and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business are emphasizing AI skills across various courses, WSJ reported Wednesday. Professors are encouraging students to use AI as a tool for generating ideas, preparing for negotiations, and pressure-testing business concepts. However, they stress that human judgment remains crucial in directing AI and making sound decisions. An excerpt from the story: Before, engineers had an edge against business graduates because of their technical expertise, but now M.B.A.s can use AI to compete in that zone, said Robert Bray, who teaches operations management at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. He encourages his students to offload as much work as possible to AI, treating it like "a really proficient intern." Ben Morton, one of Bray's students, is bullish on AI but knows he needs to be able to work without it. He did some coding with ChatGPT for class and wondered: If ChatGPT were down for a week, could he still get work done? Learning to code with the help of generative AI sped up his development. "I know so much more about programming than I did six months ago," said Morton, 27. "Everyone's capabilities are exponentially increasing." Several professors said they can teach more material with AI's assistance. One said that because AI could solve his lab assignments, he no longer needed much of the class time for those activities. With the extra hours he has students present to their peers on AI innovations. Campus is where students should think through how to use AI responsibly, said Bill Boulding, dean of Duke's Fuqua School. "How do we embrace it? That is the right way to approach this -- we can't stop this," he said. "It has eaten our world. It will eat everyone else's world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

smooth wombat writes: Chase bank announced a new program that will allow brands to target Chase customers based on the customer's purchases. According to the press release, the new program is called Chase Media Solutions and "serves as a key conduit for brands, connecting them with consumers' personal passions and interests. In turn, Chase customers benefit from personalized offers and the ability to earn cash back with brands they love or are discovering for the first time." The bank is hoping to combine insights from its large customer base and 6 million small business customers as part of its efforts to build out its own two-sided commerce platform and bring in benefits to both business clients and banking customers. Chase Media Solutions follows from the integration of card-linked marketing platform Figg, which JPMorgan Chase & Co. acquired in 2022, the bank said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November. A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back. Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft and Quantinuum today announced a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Using Quantinuum's ion-trap hardware and Microsoft's new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. From a report: This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying the logical qubits. This, the two companies say, has now moved the state-of-the-art of quantum computing out of what has typically been dubbed the era of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. "Noisy" because even the smallest changes in the environment can lead a quantum system to essentially become random (or "decohere"), and "intermediate scale" because the current generation of quantum computers is still limited to just over a thousand qubits at best. A qubit is the fundamental unit of computing in quantum systems, analogous to a bit in a classic computer, but each qubit can be in multiple states at the same time and doesn't fall into a specific position until measured, which underlies the potential of quantum to deliver a huge leap in computing power. It doesn't matter how many qubits you have, though, if you barely have time to run a basic algorithm before the system becomes too noisy to get a useful result -- or any result at all. Combining several different techniques, the team was able to run thousands of experiments with virtually no errors. That involved quite a bit of preparation and pre-selecting systems that already looked to be in good shape for a successful run, but still, that's a massive improvement from where the industry was just a short while ago. Further reading: Microsoft blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

vik writes: According to this BBC article Tennessee just passed a bill banning the dispersion of chemicals in the air that affect weather and temperature. Sponsored by the chemtrail and anti-geoengineering crowds, if signed into law it seems it would ban atmospheric CO2 emissions:The bill forbids "intentional injection, release, or dispersion" of chemicals into the air.It doesn't explicitly mention chemtrails, which conspiracy theorists believe are poisons spread by planes.Instead it broadly prohibits "affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight".The Republican-sponsored bill passed along party lines on Monday. If it is signed by Tennessee's governor, Republican Bill Lee, it will go into effect on 1 July.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quonset shares a report: In a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency, a Biden administration-appointed review board issued a report Tuesday saying "a cascade of errors" by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The Cyber Safety Review Board, created in 2021 by executive order, describes shoddy cybersecurity practices, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company's knowledge of the targeted breach, which affected multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China. It concluded that "Microsoft's security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul" given the company's ubiquity and critical role in the global technology ecosystem. Microsoft products "underpin essential services that support national security, the foundations of our economy, and public health and safety." The panel said the intrusion, discovered in June by the State Department and dating to May "was preventable and should never have occurred," blaming its success on "a cascade of avoidable errors." What's more, the board said, Microsoft still doesn't know how the hackers got in. [...] It said Microsoft's CEO and board should institute "rapid cultural change" including publicly sharing "a plan with specific timelines to make fundamental, security-focused reforms across the company and its full suite of products."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jackson County, Missouri, has declared a state of emergency and closed key offices indefinitely as it responds to what officials believe is a ransomware attack that has made some of its IT systems inoperable. "Jackson County has identified significant disruptions within its IT systems, potentially attributable to a ransomware attack," officials wrote Tuesday. "Early indications suggest operational inconsistencies across its digital infrastructure and certain systems have been rendered inoperative while others continue to function as normal." The systems confirmed inoperable include tax and online property payments, issuance of marriage licenses, and inmate searches. In response, the Assessment, Collection and Recorder of Deeds offices at all county locations are closed until further notice. The closure occurred the same day that the county was holding a special election to vote on a proposed sales tax to fund a stadium for MLB's Kansas City Royals and the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs. Neither the Jackson County Board of Elections nor the Kansas City Board of Elections have been affected by the attack; both remain open. The Jackson County website says there are 654,000 residents in the 607-square-mile county, which includes most of Kansas City, the biggest city in Missouri. The response to the attack and the investigation into it have just begun, but so far, officials said they had no evidence that data had been compromised. Jackson County Executive Frank White, Jr. has issued (PDF) an executive order declaring a state of emergency. The County has notified law enforcement and retained IT security contractors to help investigate and remediate the attack. "The potential significant budgetary impact of this incident may require appropriations from the County's emergency fund and, if these funds are found to be insufficient, the enactment of additional budgetary adjustments or cuts," White wrote. "It is directed that all county staff are to take whatever steps are necessary to protect resident data, county assets, and continue essential services, thereby mitigating the impact of this potential ransomware attack."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK and US have signed a landmark deal to work together on testing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and develop "robust" safety methods for AI tools and their underlying systems. "It is the first bilateral agreement of its kind," reports the BBC. From the report: UK tech minister Michelle Donelan said it is "the defining technology challenge of our generation." "We have always been clear that ensuring the safe development of AI is a shared global issue," she said. "Only by working together can we address the technology's risks head on and harness its enormous potential to help us all live easier and healthier lives." The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology added that the agreement builds upon commitments made at the AI Safety Summit held in Bletchley Park in November 2023. The event, attended by AI bosses including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and tech billionaire Elon Musk, saw both the UK and US create AI Safety Institutes which aim to evaluate open and closed-source AI systems. [...] Gina Raimondo, the US commerce secretary, said the agreement will give the governments a better understanding of AI systems, which will allow them to give better guidance. "It will accelerate both of our Institutes' work across the full spectrum of risks, whether to our national security or to our broader society," she said. "Our partnership makes clear that we aren't running away from these concerns - we're running at them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwan's biggest earthquake in 25 years has disrupted production at the island's semiconductor companies, raising the possibility of fallout for the technology industry and perhaps the global economy. From a report: The potential repercussions are significant because of the critical role Taiwan plays in the manufacture of advanced chips, the foundation of technologies from artificial intelligence and smartphones to electric vehicles. The 7.4-magnitude earthquake led to the collapse of at least 26 buildings, four deaths and the injury of 57 people across Taiwan, with much of the fallout still unknown. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest maker of advanced chips for customers like Apple and Nvidia, halted some chipmaking machinery and evacuated staff. Local rival United Microelectronics also stopped machinery at some plants and evacuated certain facilities at its hubs of Hsinchu and Tainan. Taiwan is the leading producer of the most advanced semiconductors in the world, including the processors at the heart of the latest iPhones and the Nvidia graphics chips that train AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT. TSMC has become the tech linchpin because it's the most advanced in producing complex chips. Taiwan is the source of an estimated 80% to 90% of the highest-end chips -- there is effectively no substitute. Jan-Peter Kleinhans, director of the technology and geopolitics project at Berlin-based think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, has called Taiwan "potentially the most critical single point of failure" in the semiconductor industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

artmancc writes: The White House has directed NASA and other federal agencies to get to work on a plan to implement precision timekeeping and dissemination on the moon and elsewhere in space. Reuters cited a memo from the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that "instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC). The name of the proposed time standard is similar to the terrestrial time standard known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). "OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar's memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time," Reuters reported. An unidentified OSTP official said the lunar time standard is needed for secure and synchronized communication between astronauts, satellites orbiting the moon, and Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes an opinion piece from the Washington Post, published by the Editorial Board: A just-published investigation by Russian, American and German journalists has unearthed startling new information about the so-called Havana syndrome, or "Anomalous Health Incidents," as the government calls the unexplained bouts of painful disorientation that U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers have suffered in recent years. The new information suggests but does not prove that Russia's military intelligence agency is responsible. Earlier, agencies in the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that "it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible." They need to look again. [...] [T]he new investigation by the Insider, a Russian investigative news outlet, in collaboration with CBS's "60 Minutes" and Germany's Der Spiegel, paints a different picture. It identifies the possible culprit as Unit 29155, a "notorious assassination and sabotage squad" of the GRU, Moscow's military intelligence service. Senior members of the unit received "awards and political promotions for work related to the development of 'non-lethal acoustic weapons'" -- a term used in the Russian military-scientific literature to describe both sound- and radiofrequency-based directed energy devices. The investigation found documentary evidence that Unit 29155 "has been experimenting with exactly the kind of weaponized technology" experts suggest is a plausible cause. Moreover, the Insider reported, geolocation data shows that operators attached to Unit 29155, traveling undercover, were present in places where Havana syndrome struck, just before the incidents took place. Even more concerning, the investigation found that a commonality among the Americans targeted was their work history on Russia issues. This included CIA officers who were helping Ukraine build up its intelligence capabilities in the years before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. One veteran of the CIA Kyiv station was named the new chief of station in Vietnam and was hit there. A second veteran of the CIA in Ukraine was hit in his apartment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Both these intelligence officers had to be medevaced and were treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The wife of a third CIA officer who had served in Kyiv was hit in London. "Of all the cases" examined by the news organizations, they said, "the most well-documented involve U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel with subject matter expertise in Russia or operational experience in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine," both of which were the scene of popular pro-Western uprisings in the past two decades. The news organizations point out that Russian President Vladimir Putin has often blamed these "color revolutions" on the CIA and the State Department. They conclude, "Putin would have every interest in neutralizing scores of U.S. intelligence officers he deemed responsible for his loss of the former satellites." The Editorial Board is advocating for a thorough and aggressive investigation by the U.S. intelligence community that "takes into account all aspects of the incidents." "If the incidents are a deliberate attack, the perpetrator must be identified and held to account. Along with sending a message to those who might harm American personnel, the United States needs to show all those who might join the diplomatic and intelligence services that the government will protect them abroad and at home from foreign adversaries, no matter what."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel on Tuesday disclosed $7 billion in operating losses for its foundry business in 2023, "a steeper loss than the $5.2 billion in operating losses the year before," reports Reuters. "The unit had revenue of $18.9 billion for 2023, down 31% from $63.05 billion the year before." From the report: Intel shares were down 4.3% after the documents were filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). During a presentation for investors, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said that 2024 would be the year of worst operating losses for the company's chipmaking business and that it expects to break even on an operating basis by about 2027. Gelsinger said the foundry business was weighed down by bad decisions, including one years ago against using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines from Dutch firm ASML. While those machines can cost more than $150 million, they are more cost-effective than earlier chip making tools. Partially as a result of the missteps, Intel has outsourced about 30% of the total number of wafers to external contract manufacturers such as TSMC, Gelsinger said. It aims to bring that number down to roughly 20%. Intel has now switched over to using EUV tools, which will cover more and more production needs as older machines are phased out. "In the post EUV era, we see that we're very competitive now on price, performance (and) back to leadership," Gelsinger said. "And in the pre-EUV era we carried a lot of costs and (were) uncompetitive."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sara Fischer reports via Axios: Jon Stewart on Monday told Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan that Apple wouldn't let him interview her for a podcast. "I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it," "The Daily Show" host said to Khan, in reference to his former podcast that was an extension of his Apple TV+ comedy show "The Problem With Jon Stewart." "They literally said 'please don't talk to her,' having nothing to do with what you do for a living. I think they just... I didn't think they cared for you is what happened," he added during his conversation with Khan. "They wouldn't let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI. Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?" Stewart returned to "The Daily Show" in February after leaving in 2015 as its executive producer and host on Monday evenings through the 2024 election cycle. Stewart's Apple TV+ show ended late last year after Stewart and Apple executives parted ways over creative differences, including the comedian's desire to cover topics such as China and AI, the New York Times reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin fell more than 4.76% on Tuesday to $66,134 amid rising Treasury yields and strength in the U.S. dollar. CNBC reports: On Monday morning, it was trading at about $70,000 before data came out showing growth in the manufacturing sector for the first time since September 2022 and investor bets on June rate cuts began to cool. Bitcoin is now off its all-time high, reached on March 14, by about 11%. Ether went down with it, losing 5.6% to trade at $3,240.27. Meanwhile, the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield hit its highest level of the year and the dollar, which has an inverse relationship with bitcoin, hit a five-month high. Bitcoin's move may have been exacerbated by a large bitcoin holder, or "whale," who transferred more than 4,000 bitcoin to the Bitfinex exchange late Monday night. Data from CryptoQuant shows a spike in that exchange's reserves -- which typically signals a boost in selling activity -- that coincides with the sudden drop in bitcoin price late Monday night. Stocks tied to the performance of bitcoin were dragged down but traded off their lows to end the day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden has become the first sitting U.S. president to post on a decentralized networking protocol. As reported by The Verge, President Biden's Threads account "has begun using Meta's ActivityPub integration," which allows for content, data, and followers to be ported between networks -- the basis that makes up the "fediverse." From the report: The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan. Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse -- and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts -- as those features weren't part of Threads' integration when it opened up beta testing last month. But his posts are available, and he'll see likes coming in from there. Or whoever is running the Presidential Threads account will, anyway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump, the agency's chair said. The FCC told advocates on Tuesday of the plan to vote on the final rule at its April 25 meeting. The commission voted 3-2 in October on the proposal to reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 and re-establish the commission's authority over broadband internet. Net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed the planned commission vote in an interview with Reuters. "The pandemic made clear that broadband is an essential service, that every one of us -- no matter who we are or where we live -- needs it to have a fair shot at success in the digital age," she said. "An essential service requires oversight and in this case we are just putting back in place the rules that have already been court-approved that ensures that broadband access is fast, open and fair."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI news app from Instagram's co-founders that failed to make it big on its own. The Verge reports: The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact's tech rather than its team. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact's co-founders, will be "special advisors" for Yahoo but won't be joining the company. Artifact's remaining five employees have either gotten other jobs or are planning to take some time off. The acquisition comes a bit more than a year after Artifact's launch and about three months after Systrom and Krieger announced its death. [...] Artifact, the app, will go away once the acquisition is complete. But Artifact's underlying tech for categorizing, curating, and personalizing content will soon start to show up on Yahoo News -- and eventually on other Yahoo platforms, too. "You'll see that stuff flowing into our products in the coming months," says Downs Mulder. It sounds like there's also a good chance that Yahoo's apps might get a bit of Artifact's speed and polish over time, too. Both Systrom and Downs Mulder say the integration will take time, that you can't just drop an Artifact algorithm into Yahoo News and call it a day. But they see a possibility to get everybody into the future a little faster. Yahoo can develop a personalized content ecosystem, the "TikTok for text" that was so alluring to Artifact users. And Artifact can power a news service of the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Firmware security firm Binarly has released a free online scanner to detect Linux executables impacted by the XZ Utils supply chain attack, tracked as CVE-2024-3094. CVE-2024-3094 is a supply chain compromise in XZ Utils, a set of data compression tools and libraries used in many major Linux distributions. Late last month, Microsoft engineer Andres Freud discovered the backdoor in the latest version of the XZ Utils package while investigating unusually slow SSH logins on Debian Sid, a rolling release of the Linux distribution. The backdoor was introduced by a pseudonymous contributor to XZ version 5.6.0, which remained present in 5.6.1. However, only a few Linux distributions and versions following a "bleeding edge" upgrading approach were impacted, with most using an earlier, safe library version. Following the discovery of the backdoor, a detection and remediation effort was started, with CISA proposing downgrading the XZ Utils 5.4.6 Stable and hunting for and reporting any malicious activity. Binarly says the approach taken so far in the threat mitigation efforts relies on simple checks such as byte string matching, file hash blocklisting, and YARA rules, which could lead to false positives. This approach can trigger significant alert fatigue and doesn't help detect similar backdoors on other projects. To address this problem, Binarly developed a dedicated scanner that would work for the particular library and any file carrying the same backdoor. [...] Binarly's scanner increases detection as it scans for various supply chain points beyond just the XZ Utils project, and the results are of much higher confidence. Binarly has made a free API available to accomodate bulk scans, too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025. Both releases will show off Broadcom's plan to make the package easier to implement and operate, and hopefully assuage customer concerns about price rises. More on that later. First, the updates. One release is currently scheduled to debut in July, according to Paul Turner, vice-president of product management and the leader of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. The release will allow use of a single license key for all the components of Cloud Foundation, improve OAuth support as a step towards single sign-on across the VMware range, and add an NSX overlay that will allow implementation of software-defined networks without requiring IP address changes. Turner explained those features as exemplifying the sort of simplification VMware by Broadcom thinks is needed to make Cloud Foundation easier to implement. A bigger release Turner hopes will debut in early 2025 -- though he would commit to only a H1 launch -- will be a "unified" release in which more of VCF is better integrated. Today, Turner admitted, VMware customers may have implemented vSphere and the Aria management suite, but might still need or choose discrete storage for each. Future VCF releases will increasingly unify the products so that silos aren't needed. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president for VMware by Broadcom's cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing, told The Register the release will be called VCF 9 and will represent "the fullest expression of Broadcom's vision for product integration." "When customers deploy VCF there are seams -- when they deploy networking and storage, they feel like they do not have a unified developer or operator experience," Shenoy admitted. VCF 9 will tidy that sort of thing up and make the process "seamless." Buyers can also expect improved log file analysis, the ability to acquire templates from a marketplace and adopt them as PaaS, and plenty more. Turner and Shenoy told The Register that the two releases are hoped to make VCF adoption easier, and by doing so demonstrate the value of the bundle. Today, they argue, would-be hybrid cloud adopters using VCF are in reality integrating siloed products -- which doesn't prove the value of the vStack well. VCF 9's planned integrations, they argue, should demonstrate the power of the stack and the wisdom of Broadcom's decision to create a VMware unit dedicated to VCF. That team, they explained, means developers for each of the bundle's components work together on a unified experience, rather than to create their own product. It may also demonstrate the value of VMware by Broadcom's new licenses - which some users have complained are considerably more expensive now that subscriptions are required, and products are only sold in bundles. Sylvain Cazard, president of Broadcom Software for Asia-Pacific, told The Register that complaints about higher prices are unwarranted since customers using at least two components of VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation will end up paying less. He also noted that the new pricing includes support, which VMware didn't include previously.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Personal computing and console gaming revenue growth is expected to remain below pre-pandemic levels through 2026 as gamers record fewer hours of playtime, according to research firm Newzoo. From a report: The market is expected to grow 2.7% from 2023-end to 2026, below the 7.2% growth rate from 2015 to 2021, according to the report. Gamers have been recording fewer hours of play, with the average quarterly playtime falling 26% from 2021 to 2023. The trend is expected to continue this year due to weaker gaming release schedules, with playtime falling around 10% in January. "Slower player growth rates will impact the industry's capacity to 'expand the pie' via net organic growth," Newzoo said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Burnout, quiet quitting, strikes -- the news (and likely your schedule) is filled with markers that workers are overwhelmed and too much is expected of them. There's little regulation in the United States to prevent employers from forcing workers to be at their desks or on call at all hours, but that might soon change. California State Assemblyman Matt Haney has introduced AB 2751, a "right to disconnect" proposition, The San Francisco Standard reports. The bill is in its early stages but, if passed, would make every California employer lay out exactly what a person's hours are and ensure they aren't required to respond to work-related communications while off the clock. Time periods in which a salaried employee might have to work longer hours would need to be laid out in their contract. Exceptions would exist for emergencies. The Department of Labor would monitor adherence and fine companies a minimum of $100 for wrongdoing -- whether that's forcing employees to be on Zoom, their inbox, answering texts or monitoring Slack when they're not getting paid to do so. "I do think it's fitting that California, which has created many of these technologies, is also the state that introduces how we make it sustainable and update our protections for the times we live in and the world we've created," Haney told The Standard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House plans to renew a push in April to convince Congress to extend an internet subsidy program used by 23 million American households just weeks before it runs out of money, officials said. From a report: In October, the White House asked for $6 billion to extend the program through December 2024, but Congress has not funded it, potentially putting millions of households at risk of losing their internet service. Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel told lawmakers in a letter that April is the last month participants will get the full subsidy, with partial subsidies in May. Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher to use toward internet service. "We have come too far to allow this successful effort to promote internet access for all to end," Rosenworcel said on Tuesday. "Despite the breadth of this support and the urgent need to continue this program to ensure millions of households nationwide do not lose essential internet access, no additional funding has yet been appropriated."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with "Just Walk Out" technology. The company's senior vice president of grocery stores says they're moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with. From a report: Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. Instead, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen are embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out, whose impressive technology was truly ahead of its time. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren't Amazon members.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 200 musical artists -- including Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Smokey Robinson -- have penned an open letter to AI developers, tech firms and digital platforms to "cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists." From a report: Unlike other advocacy efforts from creators around AI, this letter specifically addresses tech firms about the concerns of musical artists, such as replicating artist's voices, using their work to train AI models without compensation and diluting royalty pools that are paid out to artists. Jen Jacobsen, executive director at The Artist Rights Alliance (ARA), the trade group representing the artists signing the letter, told Axios, "We're not thinking about legislation here." "We're kind of calling on our technology and digital partners to work with us to make this a responsible marketplace, and to keep the quality of the music sound, and not to replace human artists." The letter, penned by dozens of well-known musicians within ARA, specifically calls on tech firms and AI developers to stop the "predatory use of AI to steal professional artists' voices and likenesses, violate creators' rights, and destroy the music ecosystem." Signatories include Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Nicki Minaj, Camila Cabello, Kacey Musgraves, Jon Batiste, Ja Rule, Jason Isbell, Pearl Jam, Sam Smith and dozens more spanning every musical genre.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said. "In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AWS has expanded its free credits program for startups to cover the costs of using major AI models. From a report: In a move to attract startup customers, Amazon now allows its cloud credits to cover the use of models from other providers including Anthropic, Meta, Mistral AI, and Cohere. "This is another gift that we're making back to the startup ecosystem, in exchange for what we hope is startups continue to choose AWS as their first stop," said Howard Wright, vice president and global head of startups at AWS. [...] As part of the deal, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Trainium and Inferentia chips to build and train its models. Wright said Amazon's free credit will contribute to revenue of Anthropic, one of the most popular models on Bedrock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. From a report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an "embodied AI character" that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services. The Xbox AI chatbot is connected to Microsoft's support documents for the Xbox network and ecosystem, and can respond to questions and even process game refunds from Microsoft's support website. "This agent can help you with your Xbox support questions," reads a description of the Xbox chatbot internally at Microsoft. Microsoft expanded the testing pool for its Xbox chatbot more broadly in recent days, suggesting that this prototype "Xbox Support Virtual Agent" may one day handle support queries for all Xbox customers. Microsoft confirmed the existence of its chatbot to The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: In the average American house, any download rate above roughly 242 Mbs is considered a solidly speedy broadband internet connection. That's pretty decent, but across the Atlantic, researchers at UK's Aston University recently managed to coax about 1.2 million times that rate using a single fiber optic cable -- a new record for specific wavelength bands. As spotted earlier today by Gizmodo, the international team achieved a data transfer rate of 301 terabits, or 301,000,000 megabits per second by accessing new wavelength bands normally unreachable in existing optical fibers -- the tiny, hollow glass strands that carry data through beams of light. According to Aston University's recent profile, you can think of these different wavelength bands as different colors of light shooting through a (largely) standard cable. Commercially available fiber cabling utilizes what are known as C- and L-bands to transmit data. By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands. "Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider," Ian Phillips, the optical processor's creator, said in a statement. "Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way." But in terms of new tech, the processor was basically it for the team's experiment. "Broadly speaking, data was sent via an optical fiber like a home or office internet connection," Phillips added. What's particularly impressive and promising about the team's achievement is that they didn't need new, high-tech fiber optic lines to reach such blindingly fast speeds. Most existing optical cables have always technically been capable of reaching E- and S-bands, but lacked the equipment infrastructure to do so. With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As political pressure mounts, TikTok says it's committed to fostering educational content on its app. "The company announced on Tuesday that it's expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The STEM feed will begin to automatically appear alongside the "For You" and "Following" feeds for users under the age of 18. Users above the age of 18 can enable the STEM feed via the app's "content preferences" settings. The feed includes English-speaking content with auto-translate subtitles. TikTok says that since launching the feed in the U.S. last year, 33% of users have the STEM feed enabled and a third of teens go to the STEM feed every week. The app has seen a 24% growth in STEM-related content in the U.S. since the feed launched. Over the past three years, almost 15 million STEM-related videos have been published on the app globally. The company is expanding its partnerships with Common Sense Networks and Poynter to assess all of the content appearing on the STEM feed. Common Sense Networks will examine the content to ensure it's appropriate for the STEM feed, while Poynter will assess the reliability of the information. Content that doesn't pass both of these checkpoints will not be eligible for the STEM feed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nearly two-pound piece of trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida. Alejandro Otero said it "tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida," reports Ars Technica. "Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there." From the report: A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time -- 2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC) -- that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida. This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry. Otero's likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson. Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object "as soon as possible to determine its origin," Finch told Ars. "More information will be available once the analysis is complete." [...] In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from "the responsible agencies" to resolve the cost of damages to his home. If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. "It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused." This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan's space agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: India's hydroelectricity output fell at the steepest pace in at least 38 years during the year ended March 31, a Reuters analysis of government data showed, as erratic rainfall forced further dependence on coal-fired power amid higher demand. The 16.3% drop in generation from the country's biggest clean energy source coincided with the share of renewables in power generation sliding for the first time since Prime Minister Narendra Modi made commitments to boost solar and wind capacity at the United Nations climate talks at Paris in 2015. Renewables accounted for 11.7% of India's power output in the year that ended in March, down from 11.8% a year earlier, a Reuters analysis of daily load despatch data from the federal grid regulator Grid-India showed. India is the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the government often points to lower per-capita emissions compared to developed nations to defend rising coal use. A five-year low in reservoir levels means hydro output will likely remain low during the hottest months of April-June, experts say, potentially boosting dependence on coal during a period of high demand before the monsoon starts in June. [...] Globally, hydropower output fell for only the fourth time since 2000 due to lower rainfall and warmer temperature brought about by the El Nino weather pattern, according to energy think tank Ember. Hydro output in India, the sixth-biggest hydropower producer, fell nearly seven times faster than the global average, Ember data showed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Analytics platform Databricks has launched an open source foundational large language model, hoping enterprises will opt to use its tools to jump on the LLM bandwagon. The biz, founded around Apache Spark, published a slew of benchmarks claiming its general-purpose LLM -- dubbed DBRX -- beat open source rivals on language understanding, programming, and math. The developer also claimed it beat OpenAI's proprietary GPT-3.5 across the same measures. DBRX was developed by Mosaic AI, which Databricks acquired for $1.3 billion, and trained on Nvidia DGX Cloud. Databricks claims it optimized DBRX for efficiency with what it calls a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture a" where multiple expert networks or learners divide up a problem. Databricks explained that the model possesses 132 billion parameters, but only 36 billion are active on any one input. Joel Minnick, Databricks marketing vice president, told The Register: "That is a big reason why the model is able to run as efficiently as it does, but also runs blazingly fast. In practical terms, if you use any kind of major chatbots that are out there today, you're probably used to waiting and watching the answer get generated. With DBRX it is near instantaneous." But the performance of the model itself is not the point for Databricks. The biz is, after all, making DBRX available for free on GitHub and Hugging Face. Databricks is hoping customers use the model as the basis for their own LLMs. If that happens it might improve customer chatbots or internal question answering, while also showing how DBRX was built using Databricks's proprietary tools. Databricks put together the dataset from which DBRX was developed using Apache Spark and Databricks notebooks for data processing, Unity Catalog for data management and governance, and MLflow for experiment tracking.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telegram is enhancing its platform for businesses with the introduction of Telegram Business, offering specialized features like customizable start pages, business hours, and chat management tools, while also initiating an ad-revenue sharing model for public channels with at least 1,000 subscribers. "As a whole, the features could introduce competition into a market where Meta's apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have a hold on business communication," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The features arrived just a couple of weeks after Telegram founder Pavel Durov told the Financial Times in an interview that he expected the app, which now has over 900 million users, to become profitable by 2025. Telegram Business is clearly part of that push, leading up to a future IPO, as it's an offering that requires users to subscribe to the paid Premium version to access. Telegram Premium is a bundle of upgraded features that cost $4.99 per month on iOS and Android and is also available as a three-month, six-month or one-year plan. Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code. For instance, businesses can choose to display their hours of operation and location on a map, and greet customers with a customized start page for empty chats where they can choose the text and sticker users see before beginning a conversation. Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer "quick replies," which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files. Businesses can also set their own custom greeting messages for customers who engage with the company for the first time, and they can specify a period after which the greeting would be shown again. They can manage their availability using away messages while the business is closed or the owner is on vacation. Plus, the businesses can categorize their chats using colored labels based on what chat folders they're in, like delivery, claim, orders, VIP, feedback, or any others that make sense for them. In addition, businesses can create links to chat that will instantly open a Telegram chat with a request to take an action like tracking an order or reserving a table, among other things. Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf. The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting this week, Discord will show ads on the site from video game companies, some of which will offer users gifts for carrying out in-game tasks. According to the Wall Street Journal, Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings. From a report: The sources said Discord aims to hire more than a dozen ad sales people. WSJ said the addition of ads marks a pivot for Discord, whose CEO Jason Citron has repeatedly said the company would not rely on advertisers the way platforms like Facebook and Instagram do.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth has a long-running fever that shows little signs of easing. The planet has set high temperature records in each of the last nine months, and March is poised to become the 10th. From a report: Multiple locations around the world observed unprecedented heat on the month's final weekend, as if to put an exclamation mark on this exceptional run of warmth. The weekend heat was most widespread in Europe, where many countries set national high temperature records for March. But it was also unusually warm in Asia, parts of Central America and West Africa. Human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is fueling this warmth, with an assist from the El NiAo climate pattern. It felt more like summer than early spring in Eastern Europe over the weekend, with temperatures soaring into the 70s and 80s, about 20 to 35 degrees above normal. Eight countries set national records for March warmth. Further reading: India Predicts Searing Heat in Threat to Lives, Power Supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++. Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language. Bergstrom said that while Dropbox in 2016 and Figma in 2018 offered early accounts of rewriting code in memory-safe Rust - and doubts about productivity and the language have subsided - concerns have lingered about its reliability and security. "Even six months ago, this was a really tough conversation," he said. "I would go and I would talk to people and they would say, 'Wait, wait you have an `unsafe` keyword. That means we should all write C++ until the heat death of the Universe.'" But there's been a shift in awareness across the software development ecosystem, Bergstrom argued, about the challenges of using non-memory safe languages. Such messaging is now coming from government authorities in the US and other nations who understand the role software plays in critical infrastructure. The reason is that the majority of security vulnerabilities in large codebases can be traced to memory security bugs. And since Rust code can largely if not totally avoid such problems when properly implemented, memory safety now looks a lot like a national security issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The management-consulting giant McKinsey is dangling career-coaching services and nine months' worth of pay to staffers keen on leaving the firm, the British newspaper The Times reported on Saturday. The Times reported that managers for McKinsey's UK offices could spend up to nine months searching for a job instead of working on client projects. Besides continuing to receive their salary, managers would have access to McKinsey's resources and career-coaching services, per The Times. But staffers would still have to leave McKinsey even if their job hunt proved unsuccessful. The offer has been extended to managers working at McKinsey's US offices, though the pay duration could be different, The Times said, citing people familiar with the situation. A spokesperson for McKinsey did not confirm the specifics of The Times' reporting but told the outlet that the company's mission was to help staffers "grow into leaders, whether they stay at McKinsey or continue their careers elsewhere." "These actions are part of our ongoing effort to ensure our performance management and development approach is as effective as possible, and to do so in a caring and supportive way," the spokesperson continued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a new way to combat the impersonation scams that it says cost people $1.1 billion last year alone. Effective today, the agency's rule "prohibits the impersonation of government, businesses, and their officials or agents in interstate commerce." The rule also lets the FTC directly file federal court complaints to force scammers to return money stolen by business or government impersonation. From a report: Impersonation scams are wide-ranging -- creators are on the lookout for fake podcast invites that turn into letting scammers take over their Facebook pages via a hidden "datasets" URL, while Verge reporters have been impersonated by criminals trying to steal cryptocurrency via fake Calendly meeting links. Linus Media Group was victimized by a thief who pretended to be a potential sponsor and managed to take over three of the company's YouTube channels. Some scams can also be very intricate, as in The Cut financial columnist Charlotte Cowles' story of how she lost a shoebox holding $50,000 to an elaborate scam involving a fake Amazon business account, the FTC, and the CIA. (See also: gift card scams.) The agency is also taking public comment until April 30th on changes to the rule that would allow it to also target impersonation of individuals, such as through the use of video deepfakes or AI voice cloning. That would let it take action against, say, scams involving impersonations of Elon Musk on X or celebrities in YouTube ads. Others have used AI for more sinister fraud, such as voice clones of loved ones claiming to be kidnapped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police, written by Dhruv Bhutani: As someone who is an early adopter of all things smart and has invested a significant amount of money in building a fancy smart home, it saddens me to say that I feel cheated by the thousands of dollars I've spent on smart devices. And it's not a one-off. Amazon's recent move to block off local ADB connections on Fire TV devices is the latest example in a long line of grievances. A brand busy wrestling away control from the consumer after they've bought the product, the software update gimps a feature that has been present on the hardware ever since it launched back in 2014. ADB-based commands let users take deep control of the hardware, and in the case of the Fire TV hardware, it can drastically improve the user experience. [...] A few years ago, I decided to invest in the NVIDIA Shield. The premium streamer was marketed as a utopia for streaming online and offline sources with the ability to plug in hard drives, connect to NAS drives, and more. At launch, it did precisely that while presenting a beautiful, clean interface that was a joy to interact with. However, subsequent updates have converted what was otherwise a clean and elegant solution to an ad-infested overlay that I zoom past to jump into my streaming app of choice. This problem isn't restricted to just the Shield. Even my Google TV running Chromecast has a home screen that's more of an advertising space for Google than an easy way to get to my content. But why stop at streaming boxes? Google's Nest Hubs are equal victims of feature deterioration. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Nest Hubs and outfitted them in most of my rooms and washrooms. However, Google's consistent degradation of the user experience means I use these speakers for little more than casting music from the Spotify app. The voice recognition barely works on the best of days, and when it does, the answers tend to be wildly inconsistent. It wasn't always the case. In fact, at launch, Google's Nest speakers were some of the best smart home interfaces you could buy. You'd imagine that the experience would only improve from there. That's decidedly not the case. I had high hopes that the Fuchsia update would fix the broken command detection, but that's also not the case. And good luck to you if you decided to invest in Google Assistant-compatible displays. Google's announcement that it would no longer issue software or security updates to third-party displays like the excellent Lenovo Smart Display, right after killing the built-in web browser, is pretty wild. It boggles my mind that a company can get away with such behavior. Now imagine the plight of Nest Secure owners. A home security system isn't something one expects to switch out for many many years. And yet, Google decided to kill the Nest Secure home monitoring solution merely three years after launching the product range. While I made an initial investment in the Nest ecosystem, I've since switched over to a completely local solution that is entirely under my control, stores data locally, and won't be going out of action because of bad decision-making by another company. "It's clear to me that smart home devices, as they stand, are proving to be very poor investments for consumers," Bhutani writes in closing. "Suffice it to say that I've paused any future investments in smart devices, and I'll be taking a long and hard look at a company's treatment of its current portfolio before splurging out more cash. I'd recommend you do the same."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zac Hall reports via 9to5Mac: In a newly published research paper (PDF), Apple's AI gurus describe a system in which Siri can do much more than try to recognize what's in an image. The best part? It thinks one of its models for doing this benchmarks better than ChatGPT 4.0. In the paper (ReALM: Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), Apple describes something that could give a large language model-enhanced voice assistant a usefulness boost. ReALM takes into account both what's on your screen and what tasks are active. [...] If it works well, that sounds like a recipe for a smarter and more useful Siri. Apple also sounds confident in its ability to complete such a task with impressive speed. Benchmarking is compared against OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4.0: "As another baseline, we run the GPT-3.5 (Brown et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022) and GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023) variants of ChatGPT, as available on January 24, 2024, with in-context learning. As in our setup, we aim to get both variants to predict a list of entities from a set that is available. In the case of GPT-3.5, which only accepts text, our input consists of the prompt alone; however, in the case of GPT-4, which also has the ability to contextualize on images, we provide the system with a screenshot for the task of on-screen reference resolution, which we find helps substantially improve performance." So how does Apple's model do? "We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it." Substantially outperforming it, you say? The paper concludes in part as follows: "We show that ReaLM outperforms previous ap- proaches, and performs roughly as well as the state- of-the-art LLM today, GPT-4, despite consisting of far fewer parameters, even for onscreen references despite being purely in the textual domain. It also outperforms GPT-4 for domain-specific user utterances, thus making ReaLM an ideal choice for a practical reference resolution system that can exist on-device without compromising on performance."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Today, more than two decades have passed and most of the files shared on The Pirate Bay in the early years are no longer available. BitTorrent requires at least one person to share a full file copy, which is hard to keep up for decades. Surprisingly, however, several torrents have managed to stand the test of time and remain available today. A few days ago the site's longest surviving torrent turned 20 years old. While a few candidates have shown up over the years, we believe that an episode of "High Chaparral" has the honor of being the oldest Pirate Bay torrent that's still active today. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and several people continue to share it today. The screenshot [here] only lists one seeder but according to information passed on by OpenTrackr.org, there are four seeders with a full copy. This is quite a remarkable achievement, especially since people complained about a lack of seeders shortly after it was uploaded. Over the years, the "High Chaparral" torrent achieved cult status among a small group of people who likely keep sharing it, simply because it's the oldest surviving torrent. This became evident in the Pirate Bay comment section several years ago, when TPB still had comments. Record or not, other old torrents on The Pirate Bay also continue to thrive. On March 31, 2004, someone uploaded a pirated copy of the documentary "Revolution OS" to the site which is alive and kicking today. While these torrents are quite old, they're not the oldest active torrents available on the Internet. That honor goes to "The Fanimatrix", which was created in September 2003 and, after being previously resurrected, continues to be available today with more than 100 people seeding. Ten years ago, we were surprised to see that any of the mentioned torrents were still active. By now, however, we wouldn't be shocked to see these torrents survive for decades. Whether The Pirate Bay will still be around then is another question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a filing with the SEC, OpenAI has removed CEO Sam Altman's ownership and control of the company's venture capital fund that backs AI startups. Reuters reports: The change, documented in the March 29 filing, came after Altman's ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund raised eyebrows for its unusual structure--while being marketed similar to a corporate venture arm, the fund was raised by Altman from outside limited partners and he made investment decisions. OpenAI has said Altman does not have financial interest in the fund despite the ownership. Axios first reported on the ownership change on Monday. In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said the fund's initial general partner (GP) structure was a temporary arrangement, and "this change provides further clarity." The OpenAI Startup Fund is investing $175 million raised from OpenAI partners such as Microsoft, although OpenAI itself is not an investor. Control of the fund has been moved over to Ian Hathaway, a partner at the fund since 2021, according to the filing. Altman will no longer be a general partner at the fund. OpenAI said Hathaway has overseen the fund's accelerator program and led investments in such companies as Harvey, Cursor and Ambience Healthcare.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven't bothered making an account. From a report: It won't be quite the same experience, however -- and of course all your chats will still go into their training data unless you opt out. Starting today in a few markets and gradually rolling out to the rest of the world, visiting chat.openai.com will no longer ask you to log in -- though you still can if you want to. Instead, you'll be dropped right into conversation with ChatGPT, which will use the same model as logged-in users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Chinese scientist who was imprisoned for his role in creating the world's first genetically edited babies says he has returned to his laboratory to work on the treatment of Alzheimer's and other genetic diseases. From a report: In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, He Jiankui said he had resumed research on human embryo genome editing, despite the controversy over the ethics of artificially rewriting genes, which some critics predicted would lead to demand for "designer babies." "We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both domestic and international rules," He told the Mainichi Shimbun, adding that he had no plans to produce more genome-edited babies. Previously, He had used a tool known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite DNA in embryos. In 2019 a court in China sentenced He to three years in prison for violating medical regulations after he claimed the previous year that he had created genetically modified twin sisters, Lulu and Nana, before birth. His experiments sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific world. He was widely condemned for having gone ahead with the risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified procedure with inadequate consent from the families involved. The court found that He had forged documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for his research. He said he had used a gene-editing procedure known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite the DNA in the sisters' embryos -- modifications he claimed would make the children immune to HIV. He has continued to defend his work, despite widespread criticism, saying he was "proud" of having created Lulu and Nana. A third girl was born in 2019 as a result of similar experiments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.