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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen. As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has introduced a new JPEG library called Jpegli, which reduces noise and improves image quality over traditional JPEGs. Proponents of the technology said it has the potential to make the Internet faster and more beautiful. InfoWorld reports: Announced April 3 and accessible from GitHub, Jpegli maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio at high-quality compression settings, Google said. Jpegli works by using new techniques to reduce noise and improve image quality. New or improved features include adaptive quantization heuristics from the JPEG XL reference implementation, improved quantization matrix selection, calculation of intermediate results, and the possibility to use more advanced colorspace. The library provides an interoperable encoder and decoder complying with the original JPEG standard and its most convenient 8-bit formalism and API/ABI compatibility with libjeg-turbo and MozJPEG. When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psycho-visually effective computations are also performed; images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts. While improving on the density ratio of image quality and compression, Jpegli's coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches such as MozJPEG, according to Google. Web developers can thus integrate Jpegli into existing workflows without sacrificing coding speed, performance, or memory use. Jpegli can be encoded with 10-plus bits per component. The 10-bit encoding happens in the original 8-bit formalism and the resulting images are interoperable with 8-bit viewers. The 10-bit dynamics are available as an API extension and application code changes are necessary to apply it. Also, Jpegli compresses images more efficiently than traditional JPEG codecs; this can save bandwidth and storage space and make web pages faster, Google said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elizabeth Rayne reports via Ars Technica: Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO2 ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller. "Sublimation of CO2 ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars," Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment. [...] To recreate a part of the red planet's landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO2 ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO2 ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized. For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO2 ice. No flows were produced by either. "For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO2 sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions," the researchers said in the study. Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs' findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film. The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...] When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plex is a multi-functional streaming platform that allows users to watch, organize, and curate their favorite media entertainment. Sharing Plex libraries is also an option; one that comes with piracy concerns. In an effort to "avoid the growth of piracy," Plex asked GitHub to remove a repository that allows people to reshare libraries that were not originally theirs. TorrentFreak reports: The Swiss company, which is headquartered in the U.S., asked GitHub to remove a "Plex Reshare" repository, alleging that it may contribute to its piracy problem. "Plex Reshare" doesn't host any copyright-infringing material and, as far as we've seen, it doesn't reference any either. Its main purpose is to allow Plex users to make shared Plex directories browsable on the web, which allows people to "reshare" them without being the original owner. "The reason behind this project is to make available your PLEX shares to other friends unrelated to the person who owns the original library," Plex Reshare developer Peter explains. While the repository doesn't host or link to copyright-infringing material, Plex argues that it can be used to 'grow' piracy. "We have found infringing material in your website which indeed is OTHER 'Plex Server'. The material that is claimed to be infringing is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled immediately and avoid the growth of piracy," the takedown notice reads. The first part of the sentence is somewhat confusing. Plex-reshare is not a Plex server but the company may use "OTHER Plex Server" as an internal classification category. In any case, Plex alleges that the repository can contribute to the growth of piracy on its platform. Citing the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, Plex urges GitHub to take immediate action, or else it may be held liable. It's not clear what this liability claim rests on, as there are no actual copyright infringements mentioned in the takedown notice. Despite the broad nature of this claim, GitHub has indeed taken the repository offline, replacing it with a DMCA takedown reference. This likely wasn't a straightforward decision as GitHub is known to put developers first with these types of issues. In this case, it took more than three weeks before GitHub took action, which is much longer than usual. This suggests that GitHub allowed the developer to respond and may have sought legal advice from in-house lawyers, to ensure that the rights of all parties are properly considered. The report notes that the Plex-reshare code is listed on Docker Hub as well, which means it may face a similar fate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: An ASIC designed to display the infamous Rickroll meme is here, alongside 164 other assorted functions. The project is a product of Matthew Venn's Zero to ASIC Course, which offers prospective chip engineers the chance to "learn to design your own ASIC and get it fabricated." Since 2020, Zero to ASIC has accepted several designs that are incorporated into a single chip called a multi-project wafer (MPW), a cost-saving measure as making one chip for one design would be prohibitively expensive. Zero to ASIC has two series of chips: MPW and Tiny Tapeout. The MPW series usually includes just a handful of designs, such as the four on MPW8 submitted in January 2023. By contrast, the original Tiny Tapeout chip included 152 designs, and Tiny Tapeout 2 (which arrived last October) had 165, though could bumped up to 250. Of the 165 designs, one in particular may strike a chord: Design 145, or the Secret File, made by engineer and YouTuber Bitluni. His Secret File design for the Tiny Tapeout ASIC is designed to play a small part of Rick Astley's music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, also known as the Rickroll meme. Bitluni was a late inclusion on the Tiny Tapeout 2 project, having been invited just three days before the submission deadline. He initially just made a persistence-of-vision controller, which was revised twice for a total of three designs. "At the end, I still had a few hours left, and I thought maybe I should also upload a meme project," Bitluni says in his video documenting his ASIC journey. His meme of choice was of course the Rickroll. One might even call it an Easter egg. However, given that there were 250 total plots for each design, there wasn't a ton of room for both the graphics processor and the file it was supposed to render, a short GIF of the music video. Ultimately, this had to be shrunk from 217 kilobytes to less than half a kilobyte, making its output look similar to games on the Atari 2600 from 1977. Accessing the Rickroll rendering processor and other designs isn't simple. Bitluni created a custom circuit board to mount the Tiny Tapeout 2 chip, creating a device that could then be plugged into a motherboard capable of selecting specific designs on the ASIC. Unfortunately for Bitluni, his first PCB had a design error on it that he had to correct, but the revised version worked and was able to display the Rickroll GIF in hardware via a VGA port.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza, Eurogamer asked about the reputation Roblox has gained and the notion that it was exploitative of young developers, since it takes a cut from work sometimes produced by children. Here's what he had to say: "I don't know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?" Corazza said. "Like, you can say, 'Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,' right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life. "There's always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratized - and in this case, also with a younger audience," he continued. "I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there's people that are teenagers -- and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform. "For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn't feel like they were exploited! They felt like, 'Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.' So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal." At this point the PR present during the interview added that "the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18." "And imagine like, the millions of kids that learn how to code every month," Corazza said. "We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting," a programming language, "which is pretty close to Python - you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, 'Hey, I'm a programmer,' right? "I think that we are really focusing on the learning - the curriculum, if you want - and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Could you imagine discovering that your identity had been used to take out fraudulent loans and when you tried to resolve the issue by providing your state ID and Social Security card you were instead arrested, charged with multiple felonies, jailed for over a year, incarcerated in a mental hospital and given psychotropic drugs, eventually to be released with a criminal record and a judge's order that you could no longer use your real name? As dystopian as this might sound, it actually happened. And it was only after the victim learned his oppressor worked for The University of Iowa Hospital and contacted their security department was the investigation taken seriously leading to the perpetrator's arrest. The Gazette reports: Matthew David Keirans, 58, was convicted of one count of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution -- punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison -- and one count of aggravated identity theft -- punishable by up to two years in federal prison. Keirans worked as a systems architect in the hospital's IT department from June 28, 2013 to July 20, 2023, when he was terminated for misconduct related to the identity theft investigation. Keirans worked at the hospital under the name William Donald Woods, an alias he had been using since about 1988, when he worked with the real William Woods at a hot dog cart in Albuquerque, N.M. [...] By 2013, Keirans had moved to eastern Wisconsin. He started his IT job with UI Hospitals and worked remotely. He earned more than $700,000 in his 10 years working for the hospital. In 2023, his salary was $140,501, according to the hospital. In 2019, the real William Woods was homeless, living in Los Angeles. He went to a branch of the national bank and explained that he recently discovered someone was using his credit and had accumulated a lot of debt. Woods didn't want to pay the debt and asked to know the account numbers for any accounts he had open at the bank so he could close them. Woods gave the bank employee his real Social Security card and an authentic California Identification card, which matched the information the bank had on file. Because there was a large amount of money in the accounts, the bank employee asked Woods a series of security questions that he was unable to answer. The bank employee called Keirans, whose the phone number was connected to the accounts. He answered the security questions correctly and said no one in California should have access to the accounts. The employee called the Los Angeles Police Department, and officers spoke with Woods and Keirans. Keirans faxed the Los Angeles officers a copy of Woods' Social Security card and birth certificate, as well as a Wisconsin driver's license Keirans had acquired under Woods' name. The driver's license had the name William David Woods -- David is Keirans' real middle name -- rather than William Donald Woods. When questioned, Keiran told an LAPD officer he sometimes used David as a middle name, but his real name was William Donald Woods. The real Woods was arrested and charged with identity theft and false impersonation, under a misspelling of Keirans' name: Matthew Kierans. Because Woods continued to insist, throughout the judicial process, that he was William Woods and not Matthew Kierans, a judge ruled in February 2020 that he was not mentally competent to stand trial and he was sent to a mental hospital in California, where he received psychotropic medication and other mental health treatment. In March 2021, Woods pleaded no contest to the identity theft charges -- meaning he accepted the conviction but did not admit guilt. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment with credit for the two years he already served in the county jail and the hospital and was released. He was also ordered to pay $400 in fines and to stop using the name William Woods. He did not stop. Woods continued to attempt to regain his identity by filing customer disputes with financial organizations in an attempt to clear his credit report. He also reached out to multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Hartland Police Department in Wisconsin, where Keirans lived. Woods eventually discovered where Keirans was working, and in January 2023 he reached out to the University of Iowa Hospitals' security department, who referred his complaint to the University of Iowa Police Department. University of Iowa Police Detective Ian Mallory opened an investigation into the case. Mallory found the biological father listed on Woods' birth certificate -- which both Woods and Keirans had sent him an official copy of -- and tested the father's DNA against Woods' DNA. The test proved Woods was the man's son. On July 17, 2023, Mallory interviewed Keirans. He asked Keirans what his father's name was, and Keirans accidentally gave the name of his own adoptive father. Mallory then confronted Keirans with the DNA evidence, and Keirans responded by saying, "my life is over" and "everything is gone." He then confessed to the prolonged identity theft, according to court documents. The full story can be ready via The Gazette.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many investors are lining up to bet on the collapse of former President Donald J. Trump's social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which made its stock market debut last week under the ticker "DJT." The stock has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" since it is highly volatile and there are no fundamental underpinnings. It's being valued at roughly 1,600 times its annual revenue, at Wednesday's closing price. "By comparison, the stock of Facebook's owner trades at about eight times revenues, and Google's owner trades at six times," notes Fast Company. The New York Times reports: Trump Media is the most "shorted" special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit. The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet. "They are looking for this stock to crater and crater very quickly," said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3. Last month, traders lost $126 million betting against Trump Media, according to S3. On Monday, Trump Media published updated financial information, revealing little revenue, large losses and a statement from the company's independent auditor expressing "substantial doubt" about its financial viability. This appeared to galvanize investors betting against the company, as the stock slipped from its highs. But short-sellers are finding it difficult and costly to trade in Trump Media. There are roughly 137 million shares in the company, and only around five million of those are available to short-sellers. Mr. Trump owns about 60 percent of shares, and company executives also hold a chunk of the stock. Company insiders tend not to lend their shares to short-sellers. Big asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which regularly lend out shares, are not major holders of Trump Media, further crimping the supply. According to S3, 4.9 million of the roughly five million available shares are already on loan. As with any loan, when share owners lend their stock to a short-seller, they charge a fee, usually expressed as an annual interest rate on the stock's current value. Typically, the fee for borrowing stock is a fraction of a percentage point. For Trump Media, it has risen to 550 percent, Mr. Dusaniwsky said. Trump Media's stock currently trades at around $50. That means that shorting it for a month would cost more than $20 per share. For a short-seller to break even, the stock price would have to fall by almost half by early May. There is another wrinkle, too. One large broker said much of the short trading was not an outright bet against Trump Media. Since the advent of meme-stock trading and the vilification of short-sellers that win only if popular companies lose, large investors are wary of making such trades. Instead, the current trade driving demand is designed to capture the difference between DJT's stock price and outstanding "warrants," which will give the owners the right to new stock at a fixed price as long as regulators approve the new shares. Partly because of that uncertainty, those warrants currently trade below $19, with a list of hedge funds as recent holders. Even after the high cost to borrow stock is accounted for, they are still able to profit from the $30 difference between existing stock and what the warrants are worth, assuming the warrants become registered as shares.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After six months of work, DRM developer Maurice Heumann successfully cracked Hogwarts Legacy's Denuvo DRM protection system to learn more about the technology. According to Tom's Hardware, he's "left plenty of the details of his work vague so as not to promote illegal cracking." From the report: Heumann reveals in his blog post that Denuvo utilizes several different methods to ensure that Hogwarts Legacy is being run under appropriate (legal) conditions. First, the DRM creates a "fingerprint" of the game owner's system, and a Steam Ticket is used to prove game ownership. The Steam ticket is sent to the Steam servers to ensure the game was legitimately purchased. Heumann notes that he doesn't technically know what the Steam servers are doing but says this assumption should be accurate enough to understand how Denuvo works. Once the Steam ticket is verified, a Denuovo Token is generated that only works on a PC with the exact fingerprint. This token is used to decrypt certain values when the game is running, enabling the system to run the game. In addition, the game will use the fingerprint to periodically verify security while the game is running, making Denuvo super difficult to hack. After six months, Heumann was able to figure out how to hijack Hogwart Legacy's Denuvo fingerprint and use it to run the game on another machine. He used the Qiling reverse engineering framework to identify most of the fingerprint triggers, which took him two months. There was a third trigger that he says he only discovered by accident. By the end, he was able to hack most of the Denuvo DRM with ~2,000 of his own patches and hooks, and get the game running on his laptop using the token generated from his desktop PC. Heumann ran a bunch of tests to determine if performance was impacted, but he wasn't able to get a definitive answer. "He discovered that the amount of Denuvo code executed in-game is quite infrequent, with calls occurring once every few seconds, or during level loads," reports Tom's Hardware. "This suggests that Denuvo is not killing performance, contrary to popular belief."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, got a "copyright infringement notice" from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal: "We're reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in relation to an image connected to our client," it read. [...] In this case, though, the email didn't demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a "visible and clickable link" beneath the photo in question to a website called "tech4gods" or the law firm would "take action." Smith began looking into the law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images of its "lawyers" are AI generated. The threat to "activate the case No. 86342" is obviously nonsense. Beyond that, Commonwealth Legal's website looks generic and is full of stock photos, though I've seen a lot of generic template websites for real law firms. All of its lawyers have vacant, thousand-yard stares that are commonly generated by websites like This Person Does Not Exist, none of them come up in any attorney or LinkedIn searches, and the only reverse image search results for them are for a now-broken website called Generated.Photos, which offered a service to "use AI to generate people online that don't exist, change clothing and modify face and body traits. Download generated people in different postures." "All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model," Ali Shahriyari, cofounder and CTO of the AI detection startup Reality Defender told 404 Media. Commonwealth Legal's listed address is the fourth floor of a one-story building that looks nothing like the image on its website, and both of its phone numbers are disconnected. No one responded to the contact form that I filled out. Smith realized that what's happening here isn't a copyright enforcement or copyright trolling attempt at all. Instead, it's a backlink SEO scam, where a website owner tries to improve their Google ranking by asking, paying, or threatening someone to link to their website. Tech4Gods.com is a gadget review website run by a man named Daniel Barczak, whose content is "complemented by AI writing assistants." In this case, the photo that Smith had "infringed" was a photo downloaded from the royalty free, free-to-use website Unsplash, which 404 Media also sometimes uses. The image was not taken by Barczak, and has nothing to do with him, he told me in an email: "I certainly don't own any images on the web," he said. The original photographer did not respond to a request for comment sent through Unsplash. Barczak told me that he had been previously buying backlinks to his website for SEO, but said he wasn't aware of who was doing this or why. "I have no idea; it certainly has nothing to do with me," he said. "However, recently, someone has been building spammy links against my site that I have been dealing with." "I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately, I buy links due to a lack of time," he added. "In the past, I had a bad link builder. I wonder if it's him going mad at me for letting him go It's hard to say the web is massive, and everyone can link whenever they want." Link building is an SEO strategy devised to get outside websites to link to your website. He added that "bad links may damage [the site's] profile in Google's eyes." In this case, however, the "lawyers" were threatening a well-established tech blogger, and a link from Tedium would likely be treated as a positive in the search algorithm's eyes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a PC Gamer report: PCI Express 7.0 is coming. But don't feel as though you need to start saving for a new motherboard anytime soon. The PCI-SIG has just released the 0.5 version, with the final version set for release in 2025. That means supporting devices are not likely to land until 2026, with 2027-28 likely to be the years we see a wider rollout. PCIe 7.0 will initially be far more relevant to the enterprise market, where bandwidth-hungry applications like AI and networking will benefit. Anyway, it's not like the PC market is saturated with PCIe 5.0 devices, and PCIe 6.0 is yet to make its way into our gaming PCs. PCI Express bandwidth doubles every generation, so PCIe 7.0 will deliver a maximum data rate up to 128 GT/s. That's a whopping 8x faster than PCIe 4.0 and 4x faster than PCIe 5.0. This means PCIe 7.0 is capable of delivering up to 512GB/s of bi-directional throughput via a x16 connection and 128GB/s for an x4 connection. More bandwidth will certainly be beneficial for CPU to chipset links, which means multiple integrated devices like 10G networking, WiFi 7, USB 4, and Thunderbolt 4 will all be able to run on a consumer motherboard without compromise. And just imagine what all that bandwidth could mean for PCIe 7.0 SSDs. In the years to come, a PCIe 7.0 x4 SSD could approach sequential transfer rates of up to 60GB/s. We'll need some serious advances in SSD controller and NAND flash technologies to see speeds in that range, but still, it's an attractive proposition. Further reading: PCIe 7.0 first official draft lands, doubling bandwidth yet again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The use of YouTube videos to train OpenAI's text-to-video generator would be an infraction of the platform's terms of service, YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan said. Bloomberg: In his first public remarks on the topic, Mohan said he had no firsthand knowledge of whether OpenAI had, in fact, used YouTube videos to refine its artificial intelligence-powered video creation tool, called Sora. But if that were the case, it would be a "clear violation" of YouTube's terms of use, he said. "From a creator's perspective, when a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations," Mohan said Thursday. "One of those expectations is that the terms of service is going to be abided by. It does not allow for things like transcripts or video bits to be downloaded, and that is a clear violation of our terms of service. Those are the rules of the road in terms of content on our platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Document Foundation: Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: "Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. From a report: I was able to find the AI-generated books with the same method we've previously used to find AI-generated Amazon product reviews, papers published in academic journals, and online articles. Searching Google Books for the term "As of my last knowledge update," which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase. Some of the books are about ChatGPT, machine learning, AI, and other related subjects and include the phrase because they are discussing ChatGPT and its outputs. These books appear to be written by humans. However, most of the books in the first eight pages of results turned up by the search appear to be AI-generated and are not about AI. For example, the 2024 book Bears, Bulls, and Wolves: Stock Trading for the Twenty-Year-Old by Tristin McIver, bills itself as "a transformative journey into the world of stock trading" and "a comprehensive guide designed for beginners eager to unlock the mysteries of financial markets." In reality, it reads like ChatGPT-generated text with surface, Wikipedia-level analysis of complex financial events like Facebook's initial public offering or the 2008 financial crisis summed up in a few short paragraphs. [...] Other books appear to be outdated to the point of being useless at the time they are published because they are generated with a version of ChatGPT with an old "knowledge update."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney said Thursday it planned to crack down on password sharing [non-paywalled link] for its streaming services starting with a few countries in June before implementing a wider rollout in September. From a report: Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger unveiled the timeline to limit password sharing in a CNBC interview Thursday morning, a day after the company defeated activist Nelson Peltz in a bruising proxy fight. Iger didn't say which countries would be first. The company for months has said a crackdown was coming as it looks to cut costs and make Disney+ and Hulu profitable. Since Iger returned as CEO in 2022, the company has trimmed its streaming losses. Iger said the company is on track to have a profitable streaming business by the fourth quarter this year. "That's a huge, huge improvement," he said on CNBC. "Now what we have to do is turn it not just into a profitable business, into a growth business."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working on a new feature for its Edge browser that will let you limit the amount of RAM it uses. From a report: Leopeva64, who is one of the best at finding new Edge features, has spotted a new settings section in test builds of the browser that includes a slider so you can limit how much RAM Edge gets access to. The RAM slider appears to be targeted toward PC gamers, as there is a setting in Canary versions of Edge that lets you limit the amount of RAM when you're playing a PC game or all of the time. While the slider lets you pick between just 1GB and 16GB on a system with 16GB of RAM, Microsoft warns that "setting a low limit may impact browser speed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite making pledges to cut down on plastic packaging, a new report from the nonprofit conservation organization Oceana estimates that Amazon's plastic waste has continued to grow in the US. From a report: The company created 208 million pounds of plastic waste from its packaging in the US in 2022 alone, which Oceana says is enough trash to circle Earth more than 200 times in the form of plastic air pillows. That's a nearly 10 percent jump from the amount of plastic waste it generated the year before, according to the report. The US is a worrying outlier for Amazon, Oceana says. Globally, the e-commerce giant says that it reduced its use of plastic packaging 11.6 percent in 2022 compared to the prior year. But the US is the company's biggest market, and Oceana argues it's where Amazon needs to make a lot more progress.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The biggest ever 3D map of the universe, featuring more than 6m galaxies, has been revealed by scientists who said it raised questions about the nature of dark energy and the future of the universe. From a report: The map is based on data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi) in Arizona and contains three times as many galaxies as previous efforts, with many having their distances measured for the first time. Researchers said that by using this map, they have been able measure how fast the universe has been expanding at different times in the past with unprecedented accuracy. The results confirm that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, they added. However, the findings have also raised the tantalising possibility that dark energy -- a mysterious, repulsive force that drives the process -- is not constant throughout time as has previously been suggested. Dr Seshadri Nadathur, a co-author of the work and senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: "What we are seeing are some hints that it has actually been changing over time, which is quite exciting because it is not what the standard model of a cosmological constant dark energy would look like." Prof Carlos Frenk, from Durham University and a co-author of the research, said that if dark energy was indeed constant in time, the future of the universe was simple: it would expand on and on, for ever. But if the hints found in the map stood up, that would be called into question. The research, which has been published in a series of preprints a" meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed a" reveals how the team first created the 3D map, then measured patterns in the distribution of galaxies that relate to sound waves that occurred in the early universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has built one of the world's most efficient delivery systems. Yet people regularly ship junk back to sellers and claim they are returns, often with little to no penalty, merchants say. Amazon has long believed in a system based on pleasing customers above all, including easy returns, but that ethos has hurt the merchants who make up most of its online sales. Return theft represents one sore point in what has become an often contentious relationship between Amazon and its independent sellers. The Federal Trade Commission's continuing lawsuit against the retail giant deals in part with how the company treats its sellers. Amazon is also facing new competition for its merchants from other e-commerce firms. The National Retail Federation says return fraud has become a "major issue for our industry." About 13.7% of returns in 2023 were fraudulent, accounting for $101 billion in overall losses for retailers, the federation said. As more consumers have adopted online shopping, return theft has become prevalent and Amazon hasn't done enough to stop it, sellers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google parent Alphabet has been talking to its advisers about the possibility of making an offer for HubSpot, an online marketing software company with a market value of $32 billion, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: If Alphabet moves ahead with an offer, it would be a rare example of a major technology company attempting a mega deal amid heightened regulatory scrutiny of the sector under U.S. President Joe Biden's administration. The potential deal would also allow Alphabet to put some of its cash pile, which reached $110.9 billion as of the end of December, to work.Alphabet has met with Morgan Stanley investment bankers in recent days about a potential offer for HubSpot, the sources said. It has been discussing how much it should offer and whether antitrust regulators would clear such a tie-up, the sources added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year was the hottest on record and the Earth is headed towards a global warming of 2.7 degrees, yet top fossil fuel and cement producers show a disregard for climate change and actively make things worse. From a report: A new Carbon Majors Database report found that just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. Thirty-eight percent of total emissions during this period came from nation-states, 37 percent from state-owned entities and 25 percent from investor-owned companies. Nearly 200 parties adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, 58 of the 100 state- and investor-owned companies in the Carbon Majors Database have increased their production in the years since (The Climate Accountability Institute launched Carbon Majors in 2013 to hold fossil fuel producers accountable and is hosted by InfluenceMap). This number represents producers worldwide, including 87 percent of those assessed in Asia, 57 percent in Europe and 43 percent in North America. It's not a clear case of things slowly turning around, either. The International Energy Agency found coal consumption increased by eight percent over the seven years to 8.3 billion tons -- a record high. The report names state-owned Coal India as one of the top three carbon dioxide producers. Russia's state-owned energy company Gazprom and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco rounded out the trio of worst offenders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Google is considering charging for new "premium" features powered by generative artificial intelligence, in what would be the biggest ever shake-up of its search business. The proposed revamp to its cash cow search engine would mark the first time the company has put any of its core product behind a paywall, and shows it is still grappling with a technology that threatens its advertising business, almost a year and a half after the debut of ChatGPT. Google is looking at options including adding certain AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services, which already offer access to its new Gemini AI assistant in Gmail and Docs, according to three people with knowledge of its plans. Engineers are developing the technology needed to deploy the service but executives have not yet made a final decision on whether or when to launch it, one of the people said. Google's traditional search engine would remain free of charge, while ads would continue to appear alongside search results even for subscribers. But charging would represent the first time that Google -- which for many years offered free consumer services funded entirely by advertising -- has made people pay for enhancements to its core search product. "For years, we've been reinventing Search to help people access information in the way that's most natural to them," said Google. "With our generative AI experiments in Search, we've already served billions of queries, and we're seeing positive Search query growth in all of our major markets. We're continuing to rapidly improve the product to serve new user needs." It added: "We don't have anything to announce right now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SonicSpike shares a report from Scientific American: A day after the American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced that there were no signs of unsafe eclipse glasses or other solar viewers on the market in early March, astronomer and science communicator Rick Fienberg received an alarming call. Fienberg is project manager of the AAS Solar Eclipse Task Force, which is busy preparing for the total eclipse over North America on April 8. He's the creator of a list of vetted solar filters and viewers that will protect wearers' eyes as they watch the moon move in front of the sun. When a solar eclipse last crossed a major swath of the U.S. in 2017, Fienberg and his team spotted some counterfeit glasses entering the marketplace -- imitations that distributors claimed were manufactured by vetted companies. Testing at accredited labs indicated that many counterfeits were actually safe to use, however. This led the task force to describe such eclipse glasses as "misleading" but not "dangerous" in a March 11 statement meant to reassure the public. But then Fienberg's phone rang. The caller was "a guy who had bought thousands of eclipse glasses from a distributor who had been on our list at one point," Fienberg says. "Those glasses were not safe. They were no darker than ordinary sunglasses." Legitimate eclipse glasses are at least 1,000 times darker than the darkest sunglasses you can buy. Fienberg contacted Cangnan County Qiwei Craft, a Chinese factory that he knew manufactured safe glasses and had -- in the past -- sold them to the distributor in question. But this time, Fienberg says, factory representatives told him they hadn't sold to that distributor in a long while. "That's when we switched from being concerned about only counterfeits to being concerned about actual fakes," Fienberg says. The AAS does not have a confident estimate of how many fake or counterfeit glasses are for sale out there. And though Fienberg doesn't think this is a widespread problem, the situation is an "iceberg kind of concern," he says, because there are likely more examples than the ones he knows about. While counterfeit glasses may still be safe to use, completely fake glasses could put wearers in serious danger. [...] While lab tests are the best way to determine whether glasses meet the ISO standard, Fienberg says there is a three-part test people can do at home if they're concerned their eclipse viewers aren't up to the task. First, put your glasses on indoors and look around. The only things you should be able to see are very bright lights, such as a halogen bulb or a smartphone flashlight. Then, if the glasses pass the indoor test, bring them outside -- but don't look at the sun just yet. Look around: it should be too dark to see distant hills, trees or even the ground. If that second test is passed, keep the glasses on and quickly glance at the sun. You should comfortably see a bright, sharp-edged round disk. If your glasses pass all three tests, they are probably safe to wear. Still, Fienberg points out that it's best to use them for only a few seconds every minute or so during the eclipse; this cautious approach is how they're intended to be used. And if you don't trust your glasses for April's celestial event, you could try to find a reliable pair in the next two decades. "You only have to wait 20 years for another really good eclipse year in the [United] States," Fienberg says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA announced on Wednesday that they have selected three companies to develop preliminary designs for vehicles to take astronauts around the south polar region of the Moon. "After the astronauts return to Earth, these vehicles would be able to self-drive around as robotic explorers, similar to NASA's rovers on Mars," reports the New York Times. "The self-driving capability would also allow the vehicle to meet the next astronaut mission at a different location." From the report: The companies are Intuitive Machines of Houston, which in February successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon; Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo.; and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon. NASA had asked for proposals of what it called the lunar terrain vehicle, or L.T.V., that could drive at speeds up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel a dozen miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to drive around for eight hours. The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their designs. Then NASA will choose one of them for the demonstration phase. The L.T.V. will not be ready in time for the astronauts of Artemis III, the first landing in NASA's return-to-the-moon program, which is currently scheduled for 2026. The plan is for the L.T.V. to be on the lunar surface ahead of Artemis V, the third astronaut landing that is expected in 2030, said Lara Kearney, manager of the extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program at the NASA Johnson Space Center. "If they can get there earlier, we'll take it earlier," Ms. Kearney said. The L.T.V. contract will be worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years -- five years of development and then a decade of operations on the moon, most of it going to the winner of this competition. But Ms. Kearney said the contracts allow NASA to later finance the development of additional rovers, or allow other companies to compete in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: A Pittsburgh-based biotech company has started a one-of-a-kind trial in a patient with a failing liver. Their goal is to grow a functional second liver within the patient's body -- something never achieved before. If effective, it might be a life-saving therapy for those who require liver transplants but have to wait months for a compatible donor organ. LyGenesis is currently carrying out a trial in only one patient with end-stage liver disease (ESLD) to test the efficacy of their allogenic regenerative cell therapy. As per Nature, the experimental procedure was conducted in Houston on March 25. The report also states that the patient is "recovering well" after receiving the treatment. However, the formation of the new liver-like organ in the lymph node may take several months. Moreover, the individual will be kept on immunosuppressive drugs to prevent any initial rejection of the donor cells. The physicians will continue to monitor the patient's health closely. In this trial, scientists prepared donated hepatocyte cells for transplantation by suspending them in a solution. These cells were then transplanted into the patient's upper abdominal lymph nodes, which are tiny bean-shaped structures. These structures are an essential immune system component and filter waste from the body. Apart from the abdomen, lymph nodes are also found in the neck and chest. The team opted for a minimally invasive approach to inject the cells into the patient's lymph node via a catheter in the neck. "The lymph nodes then act as in vivo bioreactors, helping the hepatocytes to engraft, proliferate, and generate functional ectopic liver tissue," the press release noted. In simplest terms, these cells have the ability to multiply over the next several months. In a person with a failing liver, lymph nodes might operate as a second liver-like organ.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Isaac Schultz reports via Gizmodo: Nine years and 3.2 billion pixels later, it is complete: the LSST Camera stands as the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and will serve as the centerpiece of the Vera Rubin Observatory, poised to begin its exploration of the southern skies. The Rubin Observatory's key goal is the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a sweeping, near-constant observation of space. This endeavor will yield 60 petabytes of data on the composition of the universe, the nature and distribution of dark matter, dark energy and the expansion of the universe, the formation of our galaxy, our intimate little solar system, and more. The camera will use its 5.1-foot-wide optical lens to take a 15-second exposure of the sky every 20 seconds, automatically changing filters to view light in every wavelength from near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared. Its constant monitoring of the skies will eventually amount to a timelapse of the heavens; it will highlight fleeting events for other scientists to train their telescopes on, and monitor changes in the southern sky. To do this, the team needed a Rolls Royce of a digital camera. Mind you, the camera actually cost many million times that of an actual Royce Royce, and at 6,200 pounds (2,812 kilograms), it weighs a lot more than a fancy car. Each of the 21 rafts that makes up the camera's focal plane is the price of a Maserati, and are worth every penny if they collect the sort of data scientists expect them to. "I'm personally most excited to study the expansion of the Universe using gravitational lenses to better understand Dark Energy," said Aaron Roodman, a physicist at SLAC and lead on the camera program, in an email to Gizmodo. "That means two things: 1) measuring the brightness in all six of our filters of literally billions of galaxies and very carefully measuring their shape, which has been subtly altered by the bending of light by matter, and 2) discovering and studying very special objects where a distant quasar is almost perfectly lined up with a more nearby galaxy." Speaking through a SLAC release, Rodman said the camera's images could "resolve a golf ball from around 15 miles away, while covering a swath of the sky seven times wider than the full moon." The first images from the Rubin Observatory are slated to be publicly released in March 2025, which feels like a long way away. But several important agenda items still need to happen. For one, the SLAC team has to ship the LSST camera safely to Chile from its current lodgings in northern California. (Don't worry -- they've made a test run of the journey.) Then, the observatory's mirrors need to be readied for testing and the observatory's dome has to be completed, among some other tasks. But whenever all that is complete, the legacy survey will launch into a decade's worth of scientific discovery. Rubin Observatory estimates suggest that LSST could "increase the number of known objects by a factor of 10," according to a SLAC release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jessica Lyons reports via The Register: The FCC appears to finally be stepping up efforts to secure decades-old flaws in American telephone networks that are allegedly being used by foreign governments and surveillance outfits to remotely spy on and monitor wireless devices. At issue are the Signaling System Number 7 (SS7) and Diameter protocols, which are used by fixed and mobile network operators to enable interconnection between networks. They are part of the glue that holds today's telecommunications together. According to the US watchdog and some lawmakers, both protocols include security weaknesses that leave folks vulnerable to unwanted snooping. SS7's problems have been known about for years and years, as far back as at least 2008, and we wrote about them in 2010 and 2014, for instance. Little has been done to address these exploitable shortcomings. SS7, which was developed in the mid-1970s, can be potentially abused to track people's phones' locations; redirect calls and text messages so that info can be intercepted; and spy on users. The Diameter protocol was developed in the late-1990s and includes support for network access and IP mobility in local and roaming calls and messages. It does not, however, encrypt originating IP addresses during transport, which makes it easier for miscreants to carry out network spoofing attacks. "As coverage expands, and more networks and participants are introduced, the opportunity for a bad actor to exploit SS7 and Diameter has increased," according to the FCC [PDF]. On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers' locations. The FCC has also asked carriers to detail any exploits of the protocols since 2018. The regulator wants to know the date(s) of the incident(s), what happened, which vulnerabilities were exploited and with which techniques, where the location tracking occurred, and -- if known -- the attacker's identity. This time frame is significant because in 2018, the Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee to the FCC, issued several security best practices to prevent network intrusions and unauthorized location tracking. Interested parties have until April 26 to submit comments, and then the FCC has a month to respond.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paid ChatGPT users can now edit AI-generated images using text prompts from within ChatGPT. Axios reports: In a demo shared on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI showed off the new capability, using it to add bows to a poodle's ears in an image created by DALL-E. DALL-E will also begin letting people choose the aspect ratio of the desired image as well as to add styles, such as "motion blur" or "solarpunk."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall -- because he couldn't find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That's on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat. What's more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to anyone outside the startup interested in experimenting with Stability's models. One external researcher cited in the report estimated that a now-cancelled project was provided with at least $2.5 million worth of compute over the span of four months. Stability AI's infrastructure spending was not matched by revenue or fresh funding. The startup was projected to make just $11 million in sales for the 2023 calendar year. Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million. Google Cloud and CoreWeave were also not paid in full, with debts to the pair reaching $1.6 million as of October, it's reported. It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company -- once valued at a billion dollars -- weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties. The failing was pinned on Mostaque's inability to devise and execute a viable business plan. The company also failed to land deals with clients including Canva, NightCafe, Tome, and the Singaporean government, which contemplated a custom model, the report asserts. Stability's financial predicament spiraled, eroding trust among investors, making it difficult for the generative AI darling to raise additional capital, it is claimed. According to the report, Mostaque hoped to bring in a $95 million lifeline at the end of last year, but only managed to bring in $50 million from Intel. Only $20 million of that sum was disbursed, a significant shortfall given that the processor titan has a vested interest in Stability, with the AI biz slated to be a key customer for a supercomputer powered by 4,000 of its Gaudi2 accelerators. The report goes on to mention further fundraising challenges, issues retaining employees, and copyright infringement lawsuits challenging the company's future prospects. The full expose can be read via Forbes (paywalled).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall -- because he couldn't find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That's on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat. What's more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to anyone outside the startup interested in experimenting with Stability's models. One external researcher cited in the report estimated that a now-cancelled project was provided with at least $2.5 million worth of compute over the span of four months. Stability AI's infrastructure spending was not matched by revenue or fresh funding. The startup was projected to make just $11 million in sales for the 2023 calendar year. Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million. Google Cloud and CoreWeave were also not paid in full, with debts to the pair reaching $1.6 million as of October, it's reported. It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company -- once valued at a billion dollars -- weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties. The failing was pinned on Mostaque's inability to devise and execute a viable business plan. The company also failed to land deals with clients including Canva, NightCafe, Tome, and the Singaporean government, which contemplated a custom model, the report asserts. Stability's financial predicament spiraled, eroding trust among investors, making it difficult for the generative AI darling to raise additional capital, it is claimed. According to the report, Mostaque hoped to bring in a $95 million lifeline at the end of last year, but only managed to bring in $50 million from Intel. Only $20 million of that sum was disbursed, a significant shortfall given that the processor titan has a vested interest in Stability, with the AI biz slated to be a key customer for a supercomputer powered by 4,000 of its Gaudi2 accelerators. The report goes on to mention further fundraising challenges, issues retaining employees, and copyright infringement lawsuits challenging the company's future prospects. The full expose can be read via Forbes (paywalled).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple is exploring the development of personal home robots following the shut down of its electric vehicle project. CNBC reports: Engineers at Apple have been looking into a robot that can follow users around their homes and a tabletop device that uses robotics to adjust a display screen, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the research team. [...] Apple's hardware engineering division and its artificial intelligence and machine learning group are overseeing the work on personal robotics, Bloomberg reported. The home robot project is still in the early research and development phase, according to the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new ChromeOS update (M123) is rolling out that brings keyboard shortcuts and mouse buttons and enables hotspot connections on cellular Chromebooks. The Verge reports: The keyboard shortcut feature will work like it does in other operating systems, in which you can assign specific actions to specific key combinations. Google uses the examples of tweaking shortcuts to be easier to carry out one-handed or making them resemble those you're used to in, say, macOS. The same goes for mouse button customizing -- if your mouse has extra buttons besides just left and right clicks, and you want to turn that weird side button into a mute button, you can do that in ChromeOS with this update. The company also added per-app language preferences for Android apps that you're running in ChromeOS, and it says it has made its offline text-to-speech voices more natural-sounding. As is Google's way, these updates will be rolling out over the next few days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.