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At this year's SXSW festival, discussions on artificial intelligence's future sparked controversy during screenings of premiers like "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate." Variety reports: The quick-turnaround video editors at SXSW cut a daily sizzle reel highlighting previous panels, premieres and other events, which then runs before festival screenings. On Tuesday, the fourth edition of that daily video focused on the wide variety of keynotes and panelists in town to discuss AI. Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently. Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FAA today awarded a launch license to SpaceX for Starship's third-ever test flight on March 14. "The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency wrote in a post on X this afternoon. Space.com reports: The megarocket has two test flights under its belt so far, which took place in April and November of last year. Starship's two stages failed to separate as planned on the April flight, however, which ended after just four minutes. Things went better in November -- stage separation occurred as planned, for example -- but both stages ended up exploding high in the sky on that mission as well. The FAA wrapped up its investigation into what happened on the November flight late last month. But the agency took some additional time before awarding a license for launch number three today. Thursday's flight will be different, and bolder, than its predecessors. "The third flight test aims to build on what we've learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship's payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage's coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship," SpaceX wrote in a mission description. In addition, Thursday's test launch will aim to bring Starship's upper stage down in the Indian Ocean. The target splashdown zone for the first two test missions, by contrast, was the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Underwater speakers that broadcast the hustle and bustle of thriving coral could bring life back to more damaged and degraded reefs that are in danger of becoming ocean graveyards, researchers say. Scientists working off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean found that coral larvae were up to seven times more likely to settle at a struggling reef where they played recordings of the snaps, groans, grunts and scratches that form the symphony of a healthy ecosystem. "We're hoping this may be something we can combine with other efforts to put the good stuff back on the reef," said Nadeege Aoki at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "You could leave a speaker out for a certain amount of time and it could be attracting not just coral larvae but fish back to the reef." The world has lost half its coral reefs since the 1950s through the devastating impact of global heating, overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and outbreaks of disease. The hefty declines have fueled efforts to protect remaining reefs through approaches that range from replanting with nursery-raised corals to developing resilient strains that can withstand warming waters. Aoki and her colleagues took another tack, building on previous research which showed that coral larvae swim towards reef sounds. They set up underwater speakers at three reefs off St John, the smallest of the US Virgin Islands, and measured how many coral larvae, held in sealed containers of filtered sea water, settled on to pieces of rock-like ceramic in the containers up to 30 meters from the speakers. While the researchers installed speakers at all three sites, they only played sounds from a thriving reef at one: the degraded Salt Pond reef, which was bathed in the marine soundscape for three nights. The other two sites, the degraded Cocoloba and the healthier Tektite reefs were included for comparison. When coral larvae are released into the water column they are carried on the currents, and swim freely, before finding a spot to settle. Once they drop to the ocean floor, they become fixed to the spot and -- if they survive -- mature into adults. Writing in the Royal Society Open Science journal, the researchers describe how, on average, 1.7 times more coral larvae settled at the Salt Pond reef than at the other sites where no reef sounds were played. The settlement rates at Salt Pond dropped with distance from the speaker, suggesting the broadcasts were responsible. While the results are promising, Aoki said more work is afoot to understand whether other coral species respond to reef sounds in the same way, and whether the corals thrive after settling. "You have to be very thoughtful about the application of this technology," Aoki added. "You don't want to encourage them to settle where they will die. It really has to be a multi-pronged effort with steps in place to ensure the survival of these corals and their growth over time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. [...] In a blog post today on Cognition's website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin's chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. [...] According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end -- without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here. "The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier. That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995. His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study from the Institute for the Future of Work, contemporary technology often has a negative impact on workers' quality of life. The think tank surveyed over 6,000 people to learn how four categories of workplace technologies affected their wellbeing. TechSpot reports the findings: The study found that increased exposure to three of the categories tended to worsen workers' mental state and health. The three areas that negatively impact people most are wearable and remote sensing technologies, which covers CCTV cameras and wearable trackers; robotics, consisting of automated machines, self-driving vehicles, and other equipment; and, unsurprisingly, technologies relating to AI and ML, which includes everything from decision management to biometrics. Only one of the categories was found to be beneficial to employees, and it's one that has been around for decades: ICT tech such as laptops, tablets, phones, and real-time messaging tools.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: We are often told that setting the bar high is key to success. After all, if you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you'll land with the stars. But Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wants privileged Gen Z grads to lower their expectations. "People with very high expectations have very low resilience -- and unfortunately, resilience matters in success," Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations." Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe. The university is one of the most selective in the United States -- it ranks third best in the country, according to the QS World University Rankings, and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, not even the best universities in the world can teach you resilience. "I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you," Huang added. [...] For those fortunate enough to never have personally experienced hardship growing up, Huang doesn't have any advice on how to welcome more of it into your life now. But he did have some advice on embracing tough times. "I don't know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said. "Greatness comes from character and character isn't formed out of smart people -- it's formed out of people who suffered."It's why despite Nvidia's success -- the company has a $2 trillion market cap -- Huang would still welcome hardship at his organization."To this day I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee," he added. "I mean that in a happy way because you want to refine the character of your company." Essentially, if you want your workforce to always be on their A game, don't let them rest on their laurels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roman Sterlingov, the founder of a $400 million crypto-mixing service called Bitcoin Fog, has been convicted of money laundering in a United State District Court on Tuesday. Other charges include money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act. CoinTelegraph reports: Sterlingov, however, had argued throughout the trial that he was only a user of the service, and not its operator. His attorney, Tok Ekeland said in a March 12 X post that his team will appeal the verdict. According to evidence presented at the trial, Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog from October 2011 to April 2021, which acted as a money laundering service for "criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement." The service moved over 1.2 million Bitcoin over the decade-long operation -- worth $400 million at the time of the transactions -- with the bulk of cryptocurrency coming from darknet marketplaces tied to narcotics, computer fraud abuse and identity theft, the government said. Bitcoin Fog also served distributors of child sexual abuse material. Evidence used to convict Sterlingov found that the "vast majority" of crypto deposited to his crypto exchange accounts came from "Bitcoin clusters" associated with Bitcoin Fog. "Evidence presented at trial clearly showed that the defendant laundered hundreds of millions of illicit funds from the dark web through Bitcoin Fog in an attempt to conceal the origin of those funds," said Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation Chief Jim Lee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months. Keen readers of El Reg may remember the story breaking toward the end of October 2023 after Akira posted Stanford to its shame site, with the university subsequently issuing a statement simply explaining that it was investigating an incident, avoiding the dreaded R word. Well, surprise, surprise, ransomware was involved, according to a data breach notice sent out to the 27,000 people affected by the attack. Akira targeted the university's Department of Public Safety (DPS) and this week's filing with the Office of the Maine Attorney General indicates that Stanford became aware of the incident on September 27, more than four months after the initial breach took place. According to Monday's filing, the data breach occurred on May 12 2023 but was only discovered on September 27 of last year, raising questions about whether the attacker(s) was inside the network the entire time and why it took so long to spot the intrusion. It's not fully clear what information was compromised, but the draft letters include placeholders for three different variables. However, the filing with Maine's AG suggests names and social security numbers are among the data types to have been stolen. All affected individuals have been offered 24 months of free credit monitoring, including access to a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy and ID theft recovery services. Akira's post dedicated to Stanford on its leak site claims it stole 430 GB worth of data, including personal information and confidential documents. It's all available to download via a torrent file and the fact it remains available for download suggests the research university didn't pay whatever ransom the attackers demanded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...] Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end affirmative action in college admissions, there has been increased scrutiny on legacy admissions -- the practice of giving special considerations to the relatives of alumni. Critics say this practice disproportionately benefits white students from wealthy backgrounds. Much of the discussion and research on legacy admissions focuses on Ivy League and other highly selective schools, but these colleges enroll only a small share of students. How widespread is the practice of legacy admissions? Is it common among public colleges? Brookings: In this report, we document the prevalence of legacy admissions, as reported by colleges, across higher education around the time of the SFFA decision. Legacy admissions were more often used at selective and private institutions, but a substantial minority of public and less selective institutions also considered legacy status in admissions. The use of legacy preferences appears to have been most common in the Northeast and South and least common in the West. There is substantial -- but incomplete -- overlap in the colleges that considered legacy status and those that practiced affirmative action (AA) prior to SFFA. A number of colleges, including some public colleges, said they considered relationships to alumni but not racial identity in admissions. While most state flagships don't consider legacy status in admissions, half have at least one scholarship opportunity that is catered to legacy students. Because the data are available with a lag, we do not know how many colleges have changed their legacy admissions policies in response to the Court's decision on affirmative action, but press reports and our conversations with admissions representatives indicate that some colleges have changed course in the past few years, including at least five state flagships. The effect of legacy preferences on who enrolls at a particular university may not be substantial overall. Many of the colleges that use legacy admissions are not that selective, and the scholarships for relatives of alumni are typically small. Still, even if the number of students directly displaced by legacies who had a leg up is ultimately not that large, the practice sends students the wrong signal about what's important and is contrary to the mission of a public university. In a recent survey, half of first-generation college students said they thought legacy admissions practices may have hurt their chances. Perceptions of an unfair admissions process might also make some students less likely to apply or undermine the perceived legitimacy of higher education, though we did not find research on this topic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, U.S. inventors sent in models with their patent applications -- gizmos that reveal a secret history of unmet needs and relentless innovation. The New Yorker: The ruins of American invention have been recently resurrected in a former textile mill in Wilmington, Delaware. The Henry Clay Mill, now better known as Hagley Museum and Library Visitor Center, is perched on the banks of Brandywine Creek, at the southern edge of a sprawling estate once owned by the du Pont family; just upstream lies the oldest of the dynasty's several stately homes in the region, as well as the remains of the gunpowder works upon which its fortune was built. One morning, Chris Cascio, a curator, welcomed me into the mill, where the space once occupied by cotton-picking and carding machines now houses a curious exhibit: the scavenged remainders of a much larger, long-lost museum. From 1790 to 1880, Cascio explained, the U.S. Patent Office first encouraged and then required an inventor to submit a model along with each application. These models -- thousands of miniature devices, often exquisitely detailed -- were then exhibited in Washington, D.C., in the office's model gallery. Sometimes called the "Temple of Invention," the gallery was a bustling landmark: it regularly attracted up to ten thousand visitors a month and was ranked as "the greatest permanent attraction in the city," according to one newspaper. But by the late nineteenth century it had effectively shut its doors. Hagley's latest exhibit, "Nation of Inventors," is the largest permanent public display of patent models since that time. [...] The U.S. system was also unique in that no other country required a model to accompany a patent application. The reasons why soon became clear. As early as the eighteen-thirties, the collection had outgrown the Patent Office's cramped headquarters at the former Blodgett's Hotel. In 1836, a fire destroyed at least seven thousand models, but, rather than abandon the requirement, the Patent Office doubled down, securing congressional funding to reconstruct the models and laying the foundations for a truly monumental building, with a facade modelled after the Parthenon. The structure, which now houses the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, occupies an entire city block. In the engineer Pierre L'Enfant's master plan for the capital, it was intended to serve as a kind of nondenominational "church of the republic," between the White House on one side and the Capitol on the other.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Games, which makes the popular video game "Fortnite," on Wednesday accused Apple of violating an injunction governing its lucrative App Store, and asked a U.S. judge to hold Apple in contempt and end its "sham" compliance. From a report: A September 2021 injunction by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, let developers provide links and buttons that direct consumers to other means to pay for digital content. In a filing with the California court, Epic alleged that Apple is in "blatant violation" of that injunction, despite the Cupertino, California-based company's assurance in a Jan. 16 court notice that it had "fully complied." Epic said Apple has imposed new rules and a new 27% fee on developers for some purchases, which taken together make the links "commercially unusable." The Cary, North Carolina-based developer also said Apple continues to "categorically prohibit" buttons, and still forbids some apps from telling users they have other purchasing options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo will begin offering a robotaxi service to the public in Los Angeles this week and in Austin by the end of the year, the company's co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said Wednesday at SXSW. From a report: The Alphabet company has been testing and validating its driverless vehicles across about 43 square miles around downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin and Hyde Park neighborhoods. The announcement comes about a week after Waymo started letting its autonomous vehicles traverse Austin without a safety operator behind the wheel, a critical step before the company opens the program up to the public. Opening up a robotaxi service means the public will be able to hail a ride in a driverless car via the Waymo One app. Importantly, Waymo will be able to charge for those rides. Austin will become the fourth city where Waymo operates a commercial driverless service. Waymo also operates a robotaxi service in Phoenix, San Francisco and soon Los Angeles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethereum has successfully completed a major software upgrade that should make using the blockchain network ecosystem cheaper. The update enables transactions that previously cost $1 on linked Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base to be executed for just a cent. The Dencun upgrade, a combination of the "Deneb" and "Cancun" portions of the update, introduces a new data storage system for Ethereum. Currently, most Layer 2 blockchains store data on Ethereum, and because this data is stored permanently on every Ethereum node, storage costs often account for around 90% of Layer 2 expenses. These costs are typically passed on to applications, which in turn charge consumers. With Dencun, Layer 2s can now store data in a new type of repository called blobs, which will be cheaper as the data will only be stored for approximately 18 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You'll soon get to try out OpenAI's buzzy text-to-video generator for yourself. From a report: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati says Sora will be available "this year" and that it "could be a few months." OpenAI first showed off Sora, which is capable of generating hyperrealistic scenes based on a text prompt, in February. The company only made the tool available for visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to start, but that didn't stop some Sora-generated videos from making their way onto platforms like X. In addition to making the tool available to the public, Murati says OpenAI has plans to "eventually" incorporate audio, which has the potential to make the scenes even more realistic. The company also wants to allow users to edit the content in the videos Sora produces, as AI tools don't always create accurate images. "We're trying to figure out how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with," Murati tells the Journal. When pressed on what data OpenAI used to train Sora, Murati didn't get too specific and seemed to dodge the question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Knight, writing for Wired: Goat Simulator 3 is a surreal video game in which players take domesticated ungulates on a series of implausible adventures, sometimes involving jetpacks. That might seem an unlikely venue for the next big leap in artificial intelligence, but Google DeepMind today revealed an AI program capable of learning how to complete tasks in a number of games, including Goat Simulator 3. Most impressively, when the program encounters a game for the first time, it can reliably perform tasks by adapting what it learned from playing other games. The program is called SIMA, for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, and it builds upon recent AI advances that have seen large language models produce remarkably capable chabots like ChatGPT. [...] DeepMind's latest video game project hints at how AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could soon do more than just chat and generate images or video, by taking control of computers and performing complex commands. "The paper is an interesting advance for embodied agents across multiple simulations," says Linxi "Jim" Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who works on AI gameplay and was involved with an early effort to train AI to play by controlling a keyboard and mouse with a 2017 OpenAI project called World of Bits. Fan says the Google DeepMind work reminds him of this project as well as a 2022 effort called VPT that involved agents learning tool use in Minecraft. "SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games," he says. "The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track." [...] For the SIMA project, the Google DeepMind team collaborated with several game studios to collect keyboard and mouse data from humans playing 10 different games with 3D environments, including No Man's Sky, Teardown, Hydroneer, and Satisfactory. DeepMind later added descriptive labels to that data to associate the clicks and taps with the actions users took, for example whether they were a goat looking for its jetpack or a human character digging for gold. The data trove from the human players was then fed into a language model of the kind that powers modern chatbots, which had picked up an ability to process language by digesting a huge database of text. SIMA could then carry out actions in response to typed commands. And finally, humans evaluated SIMA's efforts inside different games, generating data that was used to fine-tune its performance. Further reading: DeepMind's blog post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under 50 worldwide, with the number of early-onset cancer cases predicted to rise by around 30% between 2019 and 2030. Investigators are searching for explanations, considering factors such as obesity, early-cancer screening, gut microbiome, and tumor genomes. Despite increased screening and awareness, mortality from early-onset cancers has risen by nearly 28% between 1990 and 2019 globally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Wednesday that would give TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app used by about 170 million Americans or face a ban. From a report: The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps that could pose security concerns. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not indicated how he plans to proceed. TikTok's fate has become a major issue in Washington. Democratic and Republican lawmakers said their offices had received large volumes of calls from teenaged TikTok users who oppose the legislation, with the volume of complaints at times exceeding the number of calls seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The measure is also the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports.The vote comes just over a week since the bill was proposed following one public hearing with little debate, and after action in Congress had stalled for more than a year. Last month, President Joe Biden's re-election campaign joined TikTok, raising hopes among TikTok officials that legislation was unlikely this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European lawmakers approved the world's most comprehensive legislation yet on AI (non-paywalled link), setting out sweeping rules for developers of AI systems and new restrictions on how the technology can be used. From a report: The European Parliament on Wednesday voted to give final approval to the law after reaching a political agreement last December with European Union member states. The rules, which are set to take effect gradually over several years, ban certain AI uses, introduce new transparency rules and require risk assessments for AI systems that are deemed high-risk. The law comes amid a broader global debate about the future of AI and its potential risks and benefits as the technology is increasingly adopted by companies and consumers. Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for allegedly breaking the company's founding agreement by prioritizing profit over AI's benefits for humanity. Altman has said AI should be developed with great caution and offers immense commercial possibilities. The new legislation applies to AI products in the EU market, regardless of where they were developed. It is backed by fines of up to 7% of a company's worldwide revenue. The AI Act is "the first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI," said Brando Benifei, an EU lawmaker from Italy who helped lead negotiations on the law. The law still needs final approval from EU member states, but that process is expected to be a formality since they already gave the legislation their political endorsement. While the law only applies in the EU it is expected to have a global impact because large AI companies are unlikely to want to forgo access to the bloc, which has a population of about 448 million people. Other jurisdictions could also use the new law as a model for their AI regulations, contributing to a wider ripple effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Rainbow reports via SpaceNews: SpaceX has secured conditional approval to use extremely high-frequency E-band radio waves to improve the capacity of its low Earth orbit Starlink broadband constellation. The Federal Communications Commission said March 8 it is allowing SpaceX to use E-band frequencies between second-generation Starlink satellites and gateways on the ground, alongside already approved spectrum in the Ka and Ku bands. Specifically, SpaceX is now also permitted to communicate between 71 and 76 gigahertz from space to Earth, and 81-86 GHz Earth-to-space, using the up to 7,500 Gen2 satellites SpaceX is allowed to deploy. SpaceX has plans for 30,000 Gen2 satellites, on top of the 4,400 Gen1 satellites already authorized by the FCC. However, the FCC deferred action in December 2022 on whether to allow SpaceX to deploy the other three-quarters of its Gen2 constellation, which includes spacecraft closer to Earth to improve broadband speeds. The regulator also deferred action at the time on SpaceX's plans to use E-band frequencies, citing a need to first establish ground rules for using them in space. In a March 8 regulatory filing, the FCC said it found "SpaceX's proposed operations in the E-band present no new or increased frequency conflicts with other satellite operations." But the order comes with multiple conditions, including potentially forcing SpaceX to modify operations if another satellite operator also seeks to use the radio waves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12P/Pons-Brooks, a Halley-type comet larger than Mount Everest and with a 71.3-year orbit, is expected to become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it makes its closest approach to the sun on April 21. The Guardian reports: While some reports suggest 12P/Pons-Brooks was spotted as far back as the 14th century, it is named after the French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons who discovered it in 1812 and the British-American astronomer William Robert Brooks who observed it on its next orbit in 1883. Thought to have a nucleus about 30km (20 miles) in diameter, it is classed as a cryovolcanic comet, meaning it erupts with dust, gases and ice when pressure builds inside as it is heated. One such outburst last year caused it to brighten a hundredfold and garnered it the sobriquet of "the Devil Comet" after the haze that surrounds it formed a horned shape. While the comet -- and its green tinge -- has already been spotted in the night sky, experts say it is expected to become even brighter in the coming weeks. "The comet is expected to reach a magnitude of 4.5 which means it ought to be visible from a dark location in the UK," said Dr Paul Strom, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. "The comet moves from the constellation of Andromeda to Pisces. As it does so it passes by bright stars which will make it easier to spot on certain dates. In particular, on March 31 12P/Pons-Brooks will be only 0.5 a degree from the bright star called Hamal," he said. But Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said even if the comet did become brighter it could still be difficult to see, adding that basic instruments such as small telescopes would greatly help. "If you have a half-decent pair of binoculars, certainly attempt to look for it with those," said Massey, adding that apps that map the sky were also useful. The best views of the comet are currently to be found in the northern hemisphere. Massey said those who wanted to catch a glimpse should venture out on a clear evening and look low in the west-north-west as twilight came to an end. "You want to avoid haze, you want to avoid moonlight, you want to avoid light pollution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions. For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S. Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services. Though this is lower than the $12 million Google's Vulnerability Reward Program paid to researchers in 2022, the amount is still significant, showcasing a high level of community participation in Google's security efforts. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program's launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the world's most popular and widely used mobile operating system, the program awarded over $3.4 million. Google also increased the maximum reward amount for critical vulnerabilities concerning Android to $15,000, driving increased community reports. During security conferences like ESCAL8 and hardwea.io, Google awarded $70,000 for 20 critical discoveries in Wear OS and Android Automotive OS and another $116,000 for 50 reports concerning issues in Nest, Fitbit, and Wearables. Google's other big software project, the Chrome browser, was the subject of 359 security bug reports that paid out a total of $2.1 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two top executives from the crypto exchange Binance have been arrested in Nigeria for allegedly destabilizing the national currency. Quartz reports: According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tigran Gambaryan, head of financial-crime compliance at Binance who previously worked at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan national and Binance's regional manager for Africa, have been held against their will for the past two weeks in the country. As per reports, Nigerian government officials invited Binance executives to discuss an ongoing dispute about the world's largest crypto exchange allegedly driving down the value of their national currency. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla arrived in Nigeria on February 25th; after their meeting with government officials, both were taken to their hotels. Later, they were instructed to pack their belongings and move to a guesthouse run by Nigeria's National Security Agency, as stated by their families, per reports. The Nigerian government has accused Binance of exacerbating the country's foreign exchange challenges through rate manipulation for profit. The authorities have also accused the crypto exchange of illegal operations and have restricted access to the company's website. There are also reports that Nigeria sought a $10 billion penalty from Binance for processing around $26 billion in untraceable funds in the country. [...] The reason why and how Nigeria's economic crisis is linked with Binance is yet to be found out. Binance is hoping to resolve the matter soon, according to CoinDesk. The report notes that Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in recent years due to inflation and the devaluation of their currency, the naira.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), the Pentagon has reportedly scrapped its plan to allocate $2.5 billion in grants to Intel, causing the firm's stock to slip in extended-hours trading. From a report: The decision now leaves the U.S. Commerce Department, which is responsible for doling out the funds from the U.S. CHIPs and Science Act, to make up the shortfall, the news outlet said. The Commerce Dept. was initially only supposed to cover $1B of the $3.5B that Intel is slated to receive for advanced defense and intelligence-related semiconductors. The deal is slated to position Intel as the dedicated supplier for processors used for military and intelligence applications and could result in a Secure Enclave inside Intel's chip factory, the news outlet said. With the Pentagon reportedly pulling out, it could alter how much Intel and other companies receive from the CHIPs Act, the news outlet said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia's biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week. Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the blocsaidlast year to justify its decision. "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation." In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions "misguided." [...] The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech's most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. "They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land." Yandex is widely known as "Russia's Google" because it monopolizes the Russian search market and offers many other services, including Yandex Music for streaming, Yandex Navigator for maps, and Yandex Go for hailing a ride. "Over the past 18 months, [Dutch-based Yandex NV] has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech," reports Wired. Last month, Yandex NV reached a "binding agreement" to sell its operations in the country for $5.2 billion -- a price that reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After 10 years and billions of dollars spent in development, Apple abruptly canceled its ambitious car project known as "Titan," shifting its focus and resources on the company's artificial intelligence division. In a recent Q&A on Monday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled) shared some new insights about the project and how involved the Apple Silicon team was before it was shut down. According to Gurman, Apple was planning to power the "AI brain" of the car with a custom Apple Silicon chip that would have the equivalent power of four M2 Ultra chips (the most powerful Apple has to date) combined. 9to5Mac reports: A single M2 Ultra chip consists of 134 billion transistors and features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and a dedicated 32-core Neural Engine. M2 Ultra powers the current generation of Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Interestingly, Gurman says that the development of this new chip for the car was "nearly finished" before the project was discontinued. As some of the engineers working on the car project were reassigned to other teams at Apple, the company could reuse the engineering of this new chip for future projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps. Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they've been limited to select developers so far. The SDK will open up this Activities section of Discord to many more developers, so we're bound to see a lot more minigames that can be played directly inside Discord chats. [...] Discord is also experimenting with a way to allow users to add apps to their accounts so they roam across servers. Developers will be able to enable their apps for accounts, and the experiment will launch alongside the app SDK on March 18th. Discord is also bringing back its app pitches, where developers can pitch prototype app ideas and secure up to $30,000 in funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The New York Times has denied claims by OpenAI that it "hacked" the company's artificial intelligence systems to create misleading evidence of copyright infringement, calling the accusation as "irrelevant as it is false." The Times in a court filing on Monday said OpenAI was "grandstanding" in its request to dismiss parts of the newspaper's lawsuit alleging its articles were misused for artificial intelligence training. The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users. The newspaper is among several prominent copyright owners including authors, visual artists and music publishers that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training. The Times' complaint cited several instances in which programs like OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT gave users near-verbatim excerpts of its articles when prompted. OpenAI responded last month that the Times had paid an unnamed "hired gun" to manipulate its products into reproducing the newspaper's content. It asked the court to dismiss parts of the case, including claims that its AI-generated content infringes the Times' copyrights. "In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will," OpenAI said. The company also said it would eventually prove that its AI training made fair use of copyrighted content. The Times replied on Monday that it had simply used the "first few words or sentences" of its articles to prompt ChatGPT to recreate them."OpenAI's true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times's content on an unprecedented scale -- a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute," the Times said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is using AI in the operation of its 45,000km (28,000-mile) high-speed rail network, with the technology achieving several milestones, according to engineers involved in the project. From a report: An AI system in Beijing is processing vast amounts of real-time data from across the country and can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within 40 minutes, with an accuracy as high as 95 per cent, they said in a peer-reviewed paper. "This helps on-site teams conduct reinspections and repairs as quickly as possible," wrote Niu Daoan, a senior engineer at the China State Railway Group's infrastructure inspection centre, in the paper published by the academic journal China Railway. In the past year, none of China's operational high-speed railway lines received a single warning that required speed reduction due to major track irregularity issues, while the number of minor track faults decreased by 80 per cent compared to the previous year. According to the paper, the amplitude of rail movement caused by strong winds also decreased -- even on massive valley-spanning bridges -- with the application of AI technology. [...] According to the paper, after years of effort Chinese railway scientists and engineers have "solved challenges" in comprehensive risk perception, equipment evaluation, and precise trend predictions in engineering, power supply and telecommunications. The result was "scientific support for achieving proactive safety prevention and precise infrastructure maintenance for high-speed railways," the engineers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video. Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game. From a report: A new installment of Silicon Valley's most exciting game, Are We in a Bubble?!, has begun. This time around the game's premise hinges on whether AI technology is poised to change the world as the consumer internet did -- or even more dramatically -- or peter out and leave us with some advances but not a new global economy. This game isn't easy to play, and the available data points often prove more confusing than enlightening. Take the case of Cognition AI Inc. You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin. Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written.The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is restricting AI chatbot Gemini from answering questions about the global elections set to happen this year, the Alphabet-owned firm said on Tuesday, as it looks to avoid potential missteps in the deployment of the technology. From a report: The update comes at a time when advancements in generative AI, including image and video generation, have fanned concerns of misinformation and fake news among the public, prompting governments to regulate the technology. When asked about elections such as the upcoming U.S. presidential match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini responds with "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search".Google had announced restrictions within the U.S. in December, saying they would come into effect ahead of the election. "In preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution, we are restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A six-week audit by the Federal Aviation Administration of Boeing's production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems (non-paywalled link) throughout the manufacturing process at the plane maker and one of its key suppliers, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times. From the report: The air-safety regulator initiated the examination after a door panel blew off a 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Last week, the agency announced that the audit had found "multiple instances" in which Boeing and the supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, failed to comply with quality-control requirements, though it did not provide specifics about the findings. The presentation reviewed by The Times, though highly technical, offers a more detailed picture of what the audit turned up. Since the Alaska Airlines episode, Boeing has come under intense scrutiny over its quality-control practices, and the findings add to the body of evidence about manufacturing lapses at the company. For the portion of the examination focused on Boeing, the F.A.A. conducted 89 product audits, a type of review that looks at aspects of the production process. The plane maker passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them, with a total of 97 instances of alleged noncompliance, according to the presentation. The F.A.A. also conducted 13 product audits for the part of the inquiry that focused on Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage, or body, of the 737 Max. Six of those audits resulted in passing grades, and seven resulted in failing ones, the presentation said. At one point during the examination, the air-safety agency observed mechanics at Spirit using a hotel key card to check a door seal, according to a document that describes some of the findings. That action was "not identified/documented/called-out in the production order," the document said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new analysis of the subscription app economy from mobile subscription toolkit provider RevenueCat, the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is under $50 USD. From a report: The "State of Subscription Apps" report offers a bird's-eye view into the subscription app universe, as RevenueCat has nearly 30,000 apps using its platform's tools to manage their monetization. Outside of Apple and Google, that makes RevenueCat the largest collection of subscription app developers on one platform. This report specifically looks at data from over 29,000 apps and over 18,000 developers who collectively generate over $6.7 billion in tracked revenue and have over 290 million subscribers. After crunching its data, the company found that only 17.2% of apps will reach even $1,000 in monthly revenue, but after they hit that point, the odds of them growing further increase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

None of the big oil and gas producers surrounding the North Sea plan to stop drilling soon enough to meet the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating target, a report has found. From a report: The five countries -- the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark -- have failed to align their oil and gas policies with their climate promises under the Paris agreement, according to the campaign group Oil Change International. North Sea governments must act urgently, said Silje Ask Lundberg from Oil Change International, who co-wrote the report. "Failure to address these issues not only undermines international climate goals, but also jeopardises the liveability of our planet." The report found that policies in Norway and the UK were furthest from the Paris climate agreement because the countries were "aggressively" exploring and licensing new oil and gas fields. In 2021, the International Energy Agency found there was no room for new oil exploration in its pathway to net zero emissions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is planning to make further changes in EU countries to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from a website. From a report: The new web distribution feature will be available with a software update "later this spring," according to Apple, providing developers with a key new way to distribute iOS apps in EU markets without the need for a separate app store -- as long as they're willing to adhere to Apple's strict rules. While Apple is opening up iOS to more third-party apps here, these are still some key security protections around how apps are distributed via websites -- namely, you'll still have to work within the strict Apple app development ecosystem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Contributors from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, writing for BrowserBench: Since the initial version of the Speedometer benchmark was released in 2014 by the WebKit team, it has become a key tool for browser engines to drive performance optimizations as users and developers continue to demand richer and smoother experiences online. We're proud to release Speedometer 3.0 today as a collaborative effort between the three major browser engines: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. Like previous releases (Speedometer 2 in 2018 and Speedometer 1 in 2014), it's designed to measure web application responsiveness by simulating user interactions on real web pages. Today's release of Speedometer 3.0 marks a major step forward in web browser performance testing: it introduces a better way of measuring performance and a more representative set of tests that reflect the modern Web. This is the first time the Speedometer benchmark, or any major browser benchmark, has been developed through a cross-industry collaboration supported by each major browser engine: Blink/V8, Gecko/SpiderMonkey, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore. It's been developed under a new governance model, driven by consensus, and is hosted in a shared repository that's open to contribution. This new structure involves a lot of collective effort: discussions, research, debates, decisions, and hundreds of PRs since we announced the project in December 2022. Speedometer 3 adds many new tests. We started designing this new benchmark by identifying some key scenarios and user interactions that we felt were important for browsers to optimize. In particular, we added new tests that simulate rendering canvas and SVG charts (React Stockcharts, Chart.js, Perf Dashboard, and Observable Plot), code editing (CodeMirror), WYSIWYG editing (TipTap), and reading news sites (Next.js and Nuxt.js).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A anonymous reader shares a report: Personal artificial intelligence assistants that know our health status and legal history inside out. The ability to transfer your data from one place to another seamlessly without any roadblocks. These are just some of the predictions for the future of the web from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the 35th anniversary of its invention. [...] Another thing Berners-Lee says might happen in the future is a big tech company being forced to break up. [...] Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies "do the right thing by themselves" before regulators step in. "That's always been the spirit of the internet." He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple, and Meta, to encourage portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms. "Maybe the companies were prompted a bit by the possibility of regulation," Berners-Lee said. "But this was an independent thing." However, he added: "Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web. Maybe at some point in the future, agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don't know which company that will be."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled. Get ready for an even bigger display of China's solar energy dominance. The New York Times: While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies fend off bankruptcy, China is racing far ahead. At the annual session of China's legislature this week, Premier Li Qiang, the country's second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects. With China's economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China's leaders say that a "new trio" of industries -- solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries -- has replaced an "old trio" of clothing, furniture and appliances. The goal is to help offset a steep slump in China's housing construction sector. China hopes to harness emerging industries like solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as "new productive forces," to re-energize an economy that has slowed for more than a decade. The emphasis on solar power is the latest installment in a two-decade program to make China less dependent on energy imports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After weeks of testing, an electronic system for filing returns directly to the IRS is now available for taxpayers from 12 selected states. From a report: The new system, called Direct File, is a free online tool. Taxpayers in the selected states who have very simple W-2s and claim a standard deduction may be eligible to use it this tax season to file their federal income taxes. The program will also offer a Spanish version, which will be available starting at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday. The Treasury Department estimates that one-third of all federal income tax returns filed could be prepared using Direct File and that 19 million taxpayers may be eligible to use the tool this tax season. "Direct File will offer millions of Americans a free and simple way to file their taxes, with no expensive and unnecessary filing fees and no upselling, putting hundreds of dollars back in the pocket of working families each year, consistent with President Biden's pledge to lower costs," said National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard. Certain taxpayers in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York can participate. Direct File can only be used to file federal income taxes, taxpayers from states that require filing state taxes will need to do so separately.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Chalk up another milestone for Stratolaunch, the air-launch venture created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen: The company's mammoth airplane deployed a winged test vehicle for its first rocket-powered flight. Stratolaunch's single-use TA-1 test vehicle blazed a trail for future reusable hypersonic test vehicles that are expected to help the U.S. military catch up on one of the frontiers of aerial combat. TA-1 went supersonic, according to Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO -- but based on his comments, it may not have quite hit the hypersonic standard of five times the speed of sound. "While I can't share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers," Krevor said in a news release. Today's test flight took place in the skies above California's Mojave Air and Space Port, where Stratolaunch keeps its twin-fuselage Roc airplane. Roc is the world's biggest operational aircraft, with a wingspan of 385 feet. It's designed to serve as a flying launch pad for rocket-powered vehicles like the TA-1 and its successors. The air-launch concept makes it possible for launch missions to be flown from any airport with a runway that's big enough to accommodate Roc. It's similar to the concept that was used back in 2004 to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight with financial backing from Paul Allen. [...] This flight was the 14th test mission for Roc, coming after an unpowered separation test of its TA-0 vehicle and two captive-carry test flights for TA-1. Today's test also marked the first in-flight use of Ursa Major's Hadley rocket engine. The primary test objectives included a safe release of TA-1, engine ignition, acceleration, sustained climb in altitude and a controlled splashdown into the Pacific.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Astronomers have made new measurements of the Hubble Constant, a measure of how quickly the Universe is expanding, by combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Their results confirmed the accuracy of Hubble's earlier measurement of the constant's value, according to their recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with implications for a long-standing discrepancy in values obtained by different observational methods known as the "Hubble tension." There was a time when scientists believed the Universe was static, but that changed with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Alexander Friedmann published a set of equations showing that the Universe might actually be expanding in 1922, with Georges Lemaitre later making an independent derivation to arrive at that same conclusion. Edwin Hubble confirmed this expansion with observational data in 1929. Prior to this, Einstein had been trying to modify general relativity by adding a cosmological constant in order to get a static universe from his theory; after Hubble's discovery, legend has it, he referred to that effort as his biggest blunder. The article notes how scientists have employed different methods to calculate the Hubble Constant, including observing nearby celestial objects, analyzing gravitational waves from cosmic events, and examining the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, these approaches yield differing values, highlighting the challenge in pinning down the constant precisely. A recent effort involved making additional observations of Cepheid variable stars, correlating them with the Hubble data. The results further confirmed the accuracy of the Hubble data. "We've now spanned the whole range of what Hubble observed, and we can rule out a measurement error as the cause of the Hubble Tension with very high confidence," said co-author and team leader Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. "Combining Webb and Hubble gives us the best of both worlds. We find that the Hubble measurements remain reliable as we climb farther along the cosmic distance ladder. With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The openVertebrate (oVert) project is now complete, offering free online access to incredibly detailed 3D images of over 13,000 vertebrates. New Atlas reports: More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling. Over the course of six years, project members took CT scans of more than half the classes, or genera, of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals, rendering models that provide an intimate look at the creatures, inside and out. [...] For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He's never been responsible for an accident. So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor. LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a "Risk Solutions" division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl's request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page "consumer disclosure report," which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn't have is where they had driven the car. On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking. According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt. LexisNexis analyzed that driving data to create a risk score "for insurers to use as one factor of many to create more personalized insurance coverage," according to a LexisNexis spokesman, Dean Carney. Eight insurance companies had requested information about Mr. Dahl from LexisNexis over the previous month. "It felt like a betrayal," Mr. Dahl said. "They're taking information that I didn't realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance." In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But "drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs," as Ford Motor put it in apatent application (PDF) that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry. Sometimes this is happening with a driver's awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what's called usage-based insurance -- where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits -- it's easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people's driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis. Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers' permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read. Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature -- called OnStar Smart Driver -- and that their insurance rates went up as a result.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is reportedly considering buying TikTok. PCMag reports: Kotick floated the idea at a dinner at an Allen & Co. conference earlier this week with a group of potential partners, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the Journal says. Kotick left Activision in late December after more than 30 years following the approval of the Microsoft merger and a tumultuous period that included a damaging discrimination lawsuit. And while he got a hefty golden parachute, it's probably not enough to buy TikTok, so he'll need partners with deep pockets. The report comes amid a vote in the House that would require TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over 15,000 Roku customers were hacked and used to make fraudulent purchases of hardware and streaming subscriptions. According to BleepingComputer, the threat actors were "selling the stolen accounts for as little as $0.50 per account, allowing purchasers to use stored credit cards to make illegal purchases." From the report: On Friday, Roku first disclosed the data breach, warning that 15,363 customer accounts were hacked in a credential stuffing attack. A credential stuffing attack is when threat actors collect credentials exposed in data breaches and then attempt to use them to log in to other sites, in this case, Roku.com. The company says that once an account was breached, it allowed threat actors to change the information on the account, including passwords, email addresses, and shipping addresses. This effectively locked a user out of the account, allowing the threat actors to make purchases using stored credit card information without the legitimate account holder receiving order confirmation emails. "It appears likely that the same username/password combinations had been used as login information for such third-party services as well as certain individual Roku accounts," reads the data breach notice. "As a result, unauthorized actors were able to obtain login information from third-party sources and then use it to access certain individual Roku accounts. "After gaining access, they then changed the Roku login information for the affected individual Roku accounts, and, in a limited number of cases, attempted to purchase streaming subscriptions." Roku says that it secured the impacted accounts and forced a password reset upon detecting the incident. Additionally, the platform's security team investigated for any charges due to unauthorized purchases performed by the hackers and took steps to cancel the relevant subscriptions and refund the account holders. A researcher told BleepingComputer last week that the threat actors have been using a Roku config to perform credential stuffing attacks for months, bypassing brute force attack protections and captchas by using specific URLs and rotating through lists of proxy servers. Successfully hacked accounts are then sold on stolen account marketplaces for as little as 50 cents, as seen below where 439 accounts are being sold. The seller of these accounts provides information on how to change information on the account to make fraudulent purchases. Those who purchase the stolen accounts hijack them with their own information and use stored credit cards to purchase cameras, remotes, soundbars, light strips, and streaming boxes. After making their purchases, it is common for them to share screenshots of redacted order confirmation emails on Telegram channels associated with the stolen account marketplaces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surgeons in the United Kingdom have performed the first operation in the country using Apple's Vision Pro headset. TechSpot reports: During a recent operation to repair a patient's spine at the private Cromwell Hospital in London, a scrub nurse working alongside the surgeon used the Vision Pro to help prepare, keep track of the procedure, and choose the right tools, reports the Daily Mail. This marked the first operation in the UK where the Vision Pro was used. The software running on Apple's headset during the operation comes from US company eXeX, which has made similar programs for Microsoft's HoloLens. It offers nurses and technicians both holographic and touch-free access to the surgical setup and the procedural guides from within the sterile field of the operating room, according to the press release. The software also tracks each stage of an operation and can measure how well the op went compared to previous procedures performed by other surgeons. "It eliminates human error and eliminates the guesswork," said Suvi Verho, lead scrub nurse at London Independent Hospital. "It gives you confidence in surgery." While this marked the first time that the Vision Pro was used during a UK surgery, the first-ever time the device was used in an operating room was last month, just three days after its release, when Orlando resident and world-renowned Neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Masson wore it during several spine reconstruction surgeries. "We are in a new era of surgery, and for the first time, our surgical teams have the brilliance of visual holographic guidance and maps, improving visuospatial and temporal orientation for each surgical team and for each surgery in all specialties," said Masson.Read more of this story at Slashdot.