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A group of venture capital firms including Tiger Global and Union Square Ventures on Tuesday set up an alliance aimed at making private tech investing more climate-friendly. From a report: Called the Venture Climate Alliance (VCA), the coalition of more than 20 climate tech and generalist funds seeks to get the VC industry to increase its commitments to climate tech, a branch of technology devoted to finding solutions to the climate crisis. The alliance lays out guidance that its VC members and their portfolio companies must follow to ensure they meet the requirements to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. According to a statement, the VCA's stated aim is to "ensure that methodology and metrics are at the heart of how we determine what is a good climate investment, and what investment will have the greatest positive effect on the mission to build tech for a regenerative world." Portfolio companies are given guidance on how they should decarbonize their operations, such as using emission-free data centers, deploying less energy-intensive software in their tech stack, or rebuilding supply chains around low-carbon alternatives, the statement said. Other funds signed up to the VCA include climate VCs World Fund, 2150, and Prelude Venture. Collectively, the investment firms involved manage a combined $62.3 billion in assets, according to Crunchbase figures. [...] The U.N. approved the VCA as part of its Race to Zero campaign aimed at mobilizing climate action. The alliance will fall under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group formed during the COP26 climate conference.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's cloud business has turned profitable for the first time in the three years it's been reporting operating metrics. CNBC reports: The segment generated $191 million in operating income on $7.45 billion in revenue in the first quarter, according to Alphabet's earnings statement. In the year-ago quarter, the unit reported a $706 million loss on $5.82 billion in revenue. The cloud business includes the Google Cloud Platform, which rents out cloud infrastructure and services that companies can use to build and run their own applications, as well as Google Workspace productivity software subscriptions. Cloud customers include Deutsche Bank, Major League Baseball, PayPal and UPS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act." Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando. Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include: - Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling; - Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently;- Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them; - Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate. Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's Edge browser appears to be sending URLs you visit to its Bing API website. Reddit users first spotted the privacy issues with Edge last week, noticing that the latest version of Microsoft Edge sends a request to bingapis.com with the full URL of nearly every page you navigate to. Microsoft tells The Verge it's investigating the reports. From a report: "Searching for references to this URL give very few results, no documentation on this feature at all," said hackermchackface, the Reddit user who first discovered the issue. While Reddit users weren't able to uncover why Microsoft Edge is sending the URLs you visit to its Bing API site, we asked Rafael Rivera, a software engineer and one of the developers behind EarTrumpet, to investigate, and he discovered it's part of a poorly implemented new feature in Edge. "Microsoft Edge now has a creator follow feature that is enabled by default," says Rivera in a conversation with The Verge. "It appears the intent was to notify Bing when you're on certain pages, such as YouTube, The Verge, and Reddit. But it doesn't appear to be working correctly, instead sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than half the public would like to see a ban on gambling advertising, according to a new poll taken as ministers prepare to unveil an overhaul of the industry. In the survey, carried out for the charity Gambling with Lives, 52% of respondents said they supported a ban on all gambling advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and nearly two-thirds wanted new limits on online stakes. From a report: Ministers are expected to reject a blanket ban on gambling advertising in a white paper that could be published this week. The Premier League recently announced that its clubs would end shirt sponsorship by gambling firms by the end of the 2025/26 season. Will Prochaska of Gambling with Lives, which supports families bereaved by gambling-related suicide, said: "This poll displays the strength of public sentiment on gambling advertising. The Premier League's decision to remove ads from shirts but leave them all over stadiums and across broadcasts, is a cynical attempt to avoid regulation. This data shows the public won't be tricked into thinking it's enough. If gambling reforms fail to significantly restrict gambling advertising, they'll be woefully out of step with a public that expects action." The Survation poll of 1,009 adults found that 68% of respondents thought under-18s should not be exposed to gambling advertising, 64% supported affordability checks for those wanting to bet more than $124 a month, and 60% saw gambling as a danger to family life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. officials on Tuesday warned financial firms and others that use of artificial intelligence (AI) can heighten the risk of bias and civil rights violations, and signaled they are policing marketplaces for such discrimination. From a report: Increased reliance on automated systems in sectors including lending, employment and housing threatens to exacerbate discrimination based on race, disabilities and other factors, the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Justice Department's civil rights unit, Federal Trade Commission and others said. The growing popularity of AI tools, including Microsoft-backed Open AI's ChatGPT, has spurred U.S. and European regulators to heighten scrutiny of their use and prompted calls for new laws to rein in the technology. "Claims of innovation must not be cover for lawbreaking," Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, told reporters. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is trying to reach tech sector whistleblowers to determine where new technologies run afoul of civil rights laws, said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japanese startup ispace assumed failure in its attempt to make the first private moon landing on Tuesday as engineers struggled to regain contact with the company's Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander long after it was due for a lunar touchdown. From a report: "We lost the communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said on a company live stream, as mission control engineers in Tokyo continued to try regaining contact with the lander. The M1 lander appeared set to touch down around 12:40 p.m. Eastern time (1640 GMT Tuesday) after coming as close as 295 feet from the lunar surface, a live animation of the lander's telemtry showed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daniel Shin, the co-founder of Terraform Labs, was indicted in South Korea in connection with the collapsed Terra and Luna cryptocurrencies. From a report: According to reports from Bloomberg and the local Yonhap News Agency, Shin was charged on Tuesday with offenses including fraud, breach of duty, and embezzlement. Prosecutors at Seoul Southern District Court also indicted nine other people with ties to Terra, some of whom had roles in marketing, systems development, and management, as reported by Bloomberg. The outlet also reports that prosecutors have frozen a total of 246.8 billion won (about $184.7 million) in assets from the individuals they charged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is letting people opt to withhold their ChatGPT conversations from use in training the artificial intelligence company's models. The move could be a privacy safeguard for people who sometimes share sensitive information with the popular AI chatbot. From a report: The startup said Tuesday that ChatGPT users can now turn off their chat histories by clicking a toggle switch in their account settings. When people do this, their conversations will no longer be saved in ChatGPT's history sidebar (located on the left side of the webpage), and OpenAI's models won't use that data to improve over time. OpenAI is aiming to make people feel more comfortable using the chatbot for all kinds of applications. For example, during a demo of the feature on Monday, the company used the example of planning a surprise birthday party. "We want to move more in this direction where people who are using our products can decide how their data is being used -- if it's being used for training or not," OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman is at it again, sharing insider details about Apple's upcoming mixed-reality headset. This time, Gurman shared new details in his weekly newsletter about the headset's controversial tethered battery pack design. Previous reports from Gurman, supply chain analyst Ming Chi-Kuo, and The Information revealed that after much internal debate, Apple decided to move forward with a headset design that works with an external battery pack connected by a wire. This is because including the battery inside the headset would make it too bulky and heavy for some users. Apple employees against this approach argued that it made the headset clunky to use, especially in public. Now, for the first time, we have some details on exactly what this will look like. Gurman writes that the headset will have two ports: USB-C and a new proprietary power port. The USB-C port will be used just for data, whereas the proprietary port will be used for "a charging cable that goes into the headset and has a round tip that inserts magnetically."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp users are no longer restricted to using their account on just a single phone. Today, the Meta-owned messaging service is announcing that its multi-device feature -- which previously allowed you to access and send messages from additional Android tablets, browsers, or computers alongside your primary phone -- is expanding to support additional smartphones. From a report: "One WhatsApp account, now across multiple phones" is how the service describes the feature, which it says is rolling out to everyone in the coming weeks. Setting up a secondary phone to use with your WhatsApp account happens after doing a fresh install of the app. Except, rather than entering your phone number during setup and logging in as usual, you instead tap a new "link to existing account" option. This will generate a QR code to be scanned by your primary WhatsApp phone via the "link a device" option in settings. The new feature works across both iOS and Android devices. WhatsApp is pitching the feature as a useful tool for small businesses that might want multiple employees to be able to send and receive messages from the same business number via different phones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major tech firms face the threat of multibillion-pound fines for breaching consumer protection rules under new legislation that will tackle issues including fake online reviews and subscriptions that are difficult to cancel. From a report: The digital markets, competition and consumers bill will empower the UK's competition watchdog to tackle the "excessive dominance" that a small number of tech firms hold over consumers and businesses. Firms that are deemed to have "strategic market status" -- such as tech firms Google and Apple, and online retailer Amazon -- will be given strict rules on how to operate under the bill and face a fine representing up to 10% of global turnover if they breach the new regime. Without naming these companies, the government said firms could be required to open up their data to rival search engines or increase the transparency of how their app stores and review systems work. Oversight of major tech firms will be carried out by an arm of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the Digital Markets Unit, which will also decide which firms receive strategic market status. The bill, which will be tabled in parliament on Tuesday, is expected to become law next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a strange twist to the long history of the Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox has announced the donation of the lab's Silicon Valley headquarters and related assets to SRI International, another well-established tech research center. From a report: Opened in 1970, PARC was a pioneering developer of technologies like the graphic user interface, laser printing and Ethernet networking. PARC has recently been doing work in areas like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, clean tech and 3-D printing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Russo, the co-director of Avengers: Endgame, in an interview on the impact he thinks AI is going to play out in the world of video games, movies and television. He said: This is like a mind-bending question, right? I mean, we've had conversations about how it can be used, and look, Gen Z is very unique because it's a generation that has -- If there were incremental movements in technology over the last, say, 100 years, 150 years, they were the first generation with an exponential movement, right? So there's a real possibility now for technology to become a really important factor in our lives because it's been embraced by Gen Z, and they grew up with it, they understand it, they know how to use it. That's important, right? We're not in a world where, you know, your uncle doesn't know how to send emails anymore. We're in a world where the entire generation has a facile expertise in it, and is also not afraid of it. So potentially, what you could do with it is obviously use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling. So you have a constantly evolving story, either in a game or in a movie, or a TV show. You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. âoeHey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day," and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long. So you can curate your story specifically to you. That's one thing that it can do, but it can also, on a communal level, populate the world of the game, have intelligence behind character choice, you know, the computer-run characters in the game that can make decisions learn your play style, make it a little harder for you, make it a little easier for you, curate the story. Say you want Fortnite to be more of a horror game, right? Then you could ask the AI to ramp up the horror elements of it. So again, you could curate your experience.I think that's where it's going. How quickly we get there, I don't know, but that's where it's going.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has developed a new superalloy called GRX-810 that could lead to stronger, more durable parts for airplanes and spacecraft. SciTechDaily reports: GRX-810 is an oxide dispersion strengthened alloy. In other words, tiny particles containing oxygen atoms spread throughout the alloy enhance its strength. Such alloys are excellent candidates to build aerospace parts for high-temperature applications, like those inside aircraft and rocket engines, because they can withstand harsher conditions before reaching their breaking points. Current state-of-the-art 3D printed superalloys can withstand temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared to those, GRX-810 is twice as strong, over 1,000 times more durable, and twice as resistant to oxidation. "This new alloy is a major achievement," said Dale Hopkins, deputy project manager of NASA's Transformational Tools and Technologies project. "In the very near future, it may well be one of the most successful technology patents NASA Glenn has ever produced." GRX-810 was developed under NASA's Transformational Tools and Technologies project, with support from the agency's Game Changing Development Program. The peer-reviewed paper has been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of ten bipartisan lawmakers from Nevada and California have asked the Biden administration to quickly provide federal funding for a private company to construct a high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area. The Associated Press reports: All six of Nevada's elected federal lawmakers and four House members from California sent the letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. They said they're on board with a proposal from Brightline West to spend more than $10 billion to lay tracks along the Interstate 15 corridor. The Mojave Desert is largely open space, and the electric-powered trains could potentially cut the four-hour trip in half, carrying passengers at speeds of nearly 200 mph (322 kph). "This project is a major priority because it will make southern Nevada more accessible to millions of visitors each year," said U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, the Nevada Democrat leading the group. She said it "will boost our economy and create more good-paying jobs." Union labor will be used during construction, the company and the Southern Nevada Building Trades Union have announced in recent weeks. Brightline West is seeking $3.75 billion in federal funding from the Biden administration-backed federal infrastructure law. The project could be "the blueprint for how we can connect major city pairs that are too short to fly and too far to drive," said Mike Reininger, CEO of Florida-based Brightline Holdings LLC, the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger railroad in the United States. The lawmakers' letter pointed to company projections of 35,000 construction jobs, 1,000 permanent jobs and reduced planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee in Sacramento is expected to consider a new bill called "The Delete Act," or SB 362, which aims to give Californians the power to block data tracking. "The onus is on individuals to try to protect their data from an estimated 2,000-4,000 data brokers worldwide -- many of which have no other relationship with consumers beyond the trade in their data," reports KQED. "This lucrative trade is also known as surveillance advertising, or the 'ad tech' industry." From the report: EFF supports The Delete Act, or SB 362, by state Sen. Josh Becker, who represents the Peninsula. "I want to be able to hit that delete button and delete my personal information, delete the ability of these data brokers to collect and track me," said Becker, of his second attempt to pass such a bill. "These data brokers are out there analyzing, selling personal information. You know, this is a way to put a stop to it." Tracy Rosenberg, a data privacy advocate with Media Alliance and Oakland Privacy, said she anticipates a lot of pushback from tech companies, because "making [the Delete Act] workable probably destroys their businesses as most of us, by now, don't really see the value in the aggregating and sale of our data on the open market by third parties... "It is a pretty basic-level philosophical battle about whether your personal information is, in fact, yours to share as you see appropriate and when it is personally beneficial to you, or whether it is property to be bought and sold," Rosenberg said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to new research published last month in PLOS ONE, moths are more efficient pollinators at night than day-flying pollinators such as bees. Phys.Org reports: Studying 10 sites in the South East of England throughout July 2021, [researchers from the University of Sussex] found that 83% of insect visits to bramble flowers were made during the day. While the moths made fewer visits during the shorter summer nights, notching up only 15% of the visits, they were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly. As a result, the researchers concluded that moths are more efficient pollinators than day-flying insects such as bees, which are traditionally thought of as "hard-working." While day-flying insects have more time available to transfer pollen, moths were making an important contribution during the short hours of darkness. Professor Fiona Mathews, Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex and co-author this latest research, says, "Bees are undoubtedly important, but our work has shown that moths pollinate flowers at a faster rate than day-flying insects. Sadly, many moths are in serious decline in Britain, affecting not just pollination but also food supplies for many other species ranging from bats to birds. Our work shows that simple steps, such as allowing patches of bramble to flower, can provide important food sources for moths, and we will be rewarded with a crop of blackberries. Everyone's a winner!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Phoronix citing multiple local North Carolina news outlets, Red Hat is cutting "hundreds of jobs" in an initial round of layoffs announced today. From the report: According to WRAL, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks is said to have told employees in an email "we will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products," which is hopefully good news for their many upstream Linux developers they employ that ultimately build Red Hat Enterprise Linux and associated software products. Red Hat will begin notifying affected employees today in some countries while the process will continue through the end of the quarter. IBM, which acquired Red Hat in 2019, has already slashed some five thousand positions so far in 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is suing the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to force the commission to respond to a petition (PDF) requesting them to draft and approve a rule specific to digital assets. "The lawsuit aims to force the agency to provide a yes or no to Coinbase's ask," adds The Block. From the report: Since that request by Coinbase, the SEC has reopened custody and exchange rules to explicitly say that they apply to digital assets, but has not engaged in drafting a rule specific to digital assets. The agency has also engaged in several enforcement actions against crypto companies, including an investigation into Coinbase. "From the SEC's public statements and enforcement activity in the crypto industry, it seems like the SEC has already made up its mind to deny our petition. But they haven't told the public yet. So the action Coinbase filed today simply asks the court to ask the SEC to share its decision," the company's chief legal officer Paul Grewal wrote in a blog post about the filing. The suit filed by Coinbase is a writ of mandamus, a type of lawsuit for "exceptional circumstances" in which a court can force federal officials to act. If the SEC declines to make a new rule, Coinbase can file another lawsuit in an attempt to make a federal court force them to do so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase has been granted a license by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, allowing the US crypto exchange to operate as a digital asset business there. The exchange is also in the process of obtaining a license in Abu Dhabi. Reuters reports: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on Tuesday that crypto firms will develop in "offshore" havens unless the U.S. and UK create "clarity about regulation" for crypto. Coinbase is planning to launch a crypto derivatives exchange in Bermuda as soon as next week, Fortune reported on Wednesday, citing a person close to the company. U.S. SEC Chair Gary Gensler told lawmakers on Tuesday that he had "never seen a field that's so non-complying with laws." Crypto firms say they need clarity about regulations, but Gensler has said that crypto markets "suffer from a lack of regulatory compliance, not a lack of regulatory clarity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: California is far and away the country's largest adopter of plug-in electric vehicles. Because of the state's ability to regulate its own air quality and spurred on by a large economy and plenty of affluent residents, the EV has gained plenty of traction in the Golden State. So much so that last month, California met its goal of having more than 1.5 million clean vehicles on the road two years ahead of schedule. California's Air Resources Board (CARB) began its Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) program in 1990 with the intent of ameliorating the state's severe smog problem. By the early years of this century, air quality had improved to the point where CARB could begin using the ZEV regulations to help drive down climate emissions. It has accomplished that with goals that are more ambitious than the ones adopted by the US Environmental Protection Agency at the federal level and despite political interference from the previous administration, which wanted pollution to continue almost unabated. A number of other states -- Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington -- have adopted CARB's ZEV program within their own borders. But none are as far down the road to EV adoption; in the first three months of this year, 21.1 percent of all new light-duty vehicles bought in California were zero-emissions vehicles. That's a 153-percent increase year on year, according to the nonprofit Veloz. Battery EVs made up the vast majority, with 95,946 sold. Unsurprisingly, Tesla was most well-represented on the sales list, with the Model Y accounting for 33,205 units by itself. (The Model 3 was next, at 19,989 sold in Q1 2023.) BMW was the best of the rest of the OEMs in total sales numbers thanks to healthy plug-in hybrid EV sales. Los Angeles County was responsible for the highest number of new EVs added to the roads, with 36,670 registered in Q1. Orange County was next, at 15,289 new ZEVs registered, followed by Santa Clara County (11,428 new ZEVs registered). Cumulatively, that brings California to 1,523,966 ZEVs deployed by the end of Q1 2023; for context, there were just 773 ZEVs in total sold before 2011. The state had hoped to reach that milestone by the end of 2025. More than two-thirds of those 1.5 million ZEVs are BEVS -- 1,051,456, according to the California Energy Commission, with most of the remaining cars being plug-in hybrid EVs. The data shows that the hydrogen fuel cell revolution is not really accelerating, though -- only 15,432 have been registered in the state.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung is expected to report its worst profit in 14 years due to falling prices for memory chips -- the company's biggest business -- and weak demand. CNBC reports: The South Korean technology giant guided earlier this month that it would post operating profit of 600 billion Korean won ($449 million) for the first quarter. If Samsung reports this number, it would be the company's lowest profit since the first quarter of 2009. Samsung releases preliminary earnings guidance, but does not give detailed figures. It reports its full first quarter earnings on Thursday. Samsung is the world's largest maker of memory chips, which go into everything from PCs to servers in data centers. During the height of the pandemic, demand for consumer electronics was high, as people stayed home. Electronics companies piled up chips to go into these products. But buyers are now cutting back on purchases of these goods due to inflation and macroeconomic concerns, leading to somewhat of a memory chip glut.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes has invited her fans to create music using her voice, stating that she would split 50% of royalties for any successful AI-generated song using her voice. On Sunday night she tweeted: "I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings." She also said she welcomes the open sourcing of art and an end to copyright. "Im just curious what even happens and interested in being a Guinea pig." From a report: Grimes has long embraced AI as a techno artist. In 2020, her first album to top the Billboard dance charts was Miss Anthropocene, named for the effects of technology on Earth's ecology and climate in the post-Industrial Revolution era. It was also in 2020 that she teamed up with the algorithmic mood music startup Endel to create an AI-generated lullaby for her first child with SpaceX founder Elon Musk who they named X AE A-12 with the Elven spelling of AI, according to Grimes. "Everyday I thank the overlords of Ableton for cleaning up my tracks, but I do worry though that AI will outpace us and make musicians obsolete. It's inevitable," she warned at Web Summit 2020. With millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram and Twitter and hits like Oblivion, Kill V. Maim and Go, her call for AI collaboration could be a game changer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Stability AI released a new family of open source AI language models called StableLM. Stability hopes to repeat the catalyzing effects of its Stable Diffusion open source image synthesis model, launched in 2022. With refinement, StableLM could be used to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT. StableLM is currently available in alpha form on GitHub in 3 billion and 7 billion parameter model sizes, with 15 billion and 65 billion parameter models to follow, according to Stability. The company is releasing the models under the Creative Commons BY-SA-4.0 license, which requires that adaptations must credit the original creator and share the same license. Stability AI Ltd. is a London-based firm that has positioned itself as an open source rival to OpenAI, which, despite its "open" name, rarely releases open source models and keeps its neural network weights -- the mass of numbers that defines the core functionality of an AI model -- proprietary. "Language models will form the backbone of our digital economy, and we want everyone to have a voice in their design," writes Stability in an introductory blog post. "Models like StableLM demonstrate our commitment to AI technology that is transparent, accessible, and supportive." Like GPT-4 -- the large language model (LLM) that powers the most powerful version of ChatGPT -- StableLM generates text by predicting the next token (word fragment) in a sequence. That sequence starts with information provided by a human in the form of a "prompt." As a result, StableLM can compose human-like text and write programs. Like other recent "small" LLMs like Meta's LLaMA, Stanford Alpaca, Cerebras-GPT, and Dolly 2.0, StableLM purports to achieve similar performance to OpenAI's benchmark GPT-3 model while using far fewer parameters -- 7 billion for StableLM verses 175 billion for GPT-3. Parameters are variables that a language model uses to learn from training data. Having fewer parameters makes a language model smaller and more efficient, which can make it easier to run on local devices like smartphones and laptops. However, achieving high performance with fewer parameters requires careful engineering, which is a significant challenge in the field of AI. According to Stability AI, StableLM has been trained on "a new experimental data set" based on an open source data set called The Pile, but three times larger. Stability claims that the "richness" of this data set, the details of which it promises to release later, accounts for the "surprisingly high performance" of the model at smaller parameter sizes at conversational and coding tasks. According to Ars' "informal experiments," they found StableLM's 7B model "to perform better (in terms of outputs you would expect given the prompt) than Meta's raw 7B parameter LLaMA model, but not at the level of GPT-3." They added: "Larger-parameter versions of StableLM may prove more flexible and capable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Public sector workers in an eastern Chinese city are set to be paid fully in digital yuan, as the country makes a significant push to popularize the currency. From a report: Changshu, located in the province of Jiangsu, will start the new payment process in May, according to an official document widely posted on government websites. This is the biggest rollout of the currency, also known as the e-CNY, in China so far, according to state media. Government employees as well as staff at state-owned companies and public institutions such as schools, hospitals, libraries, research institutes and media organizations in the city will be affected. Changshu, a city of 1.7 million residents, was already experimenting with the digital yuan, a form of money that exists only online and is managed and backed by China's central bank. Like cryptocurrency, the digital yuan incorporates some elements of blockchain technology: Every transaction is recorded and traceable in a digital ledger. Since last October, Changshu has been paying the transit subsidies for some government employees in digital yuan. China is already on the verge of becoming a cashless society, but the vast majority of electronic transactions happen on privately owned apps (Alipay and WeChat Pay), outside of the immediate purview of the state.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Authenticator just got an update that should make it more useful for people who frequently use the service to sign in to apps and websites. From a report: As of today, Google Authenticator will now sync any one-time two-factor authentication (2FA) codes that it generates to users' Google Accounts. Previously, one-time Authenticator codes were stored locally, on a single device, meaning losing that device often meant losing the ability to sign in to any service set up with Authenticator's 2FA. To take advantage of the new sync feature, simply update the Authenticator app. If you're signed in to a Google Account within Google Authenticator, your codes will automatically be backed up and restored on any new device you use. You can also manually transfer your codes to another device even if you're not signed in to a Google Account by following the steps on this support page. Some users might be wary of syncing their sensitive codes with Google's cloud -- even if they did originate from a Google product. But Christiaan Brand, a group product manager at Google, asserts it's in the pursuit of convenience without sacrificing security. "We released Google Authenticator in 2010 as a free and easy way for sites to add 'something you have' 2FA that bolsters user security when signing in," Brand wrote in the blog post announcing today's change. "With this update we're rolling out a solution to this problem, making one time codes more durable by storing them safely in users' Google Account."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alexander De Croo (the prime minister of Belgium), Mark Rutte (the prime minister of the Netherlands), Xavier Bettel (the prime minister of Luxembourg), Emmanuel Macron (the president of France), Olaf Scholz (the chancellor of Germany), Leo Varadkar (the prime minister of Ireland), Jonas Gahr Store (the prime minister of Norway), Rishi Sunak (the prime minister of the United Kingdom), and Mette Frederiksen (the prime minister of Denmark), writing at Politico: We need offshore wind turbines -- and we need a lot of them. We need them to reach our climate goals, and to rid ourselves of Russian gas, ensuring a more secure and independent Europe. Held for the first time last year, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands came together for the inaugural North Sea Summit in the Danish harbor town of Esbjerg, setting historic goals for offshore wind with the Esbjerg Declaration. It paved the way for making the North Seas a green power plant for Europe, as well as a major contributor to climate neutrality and strengthening energy security. This Monday, nine countries will meet for the next North Sea Summit -- this time in the Belgian town of Ostend -- where France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway and the United Kingdom will also put their political weight behind developing green energy in the North Seas, including the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish and Celtic Seas. Together, we will combine and coordinate our ambitions for deploying offshore wind and developing an offshore electricity grid, putting Europe on the path toward a green economy fueled by offshore green power plants. Collectively, our target for offshore wind in the North Seas is now 120 gigawatts by 2030, and a minimum of 300 gigawatts by 2050 -- larger than any of the co-signatories' existing generation capacity at a national level. And to deliver on this ambition, we are committing to building an entire electricity system in the North Seas based on renewable energy by developing cooperation projects. This is a massive undertaking and a true example of the green transition in the making. It also requires huge investments in infrastructure, both offshore and on land. It presents us with a political and environmental dilemma as well: We are facing a climate crisis at the same time some of our ecosystems are in decline, and offshore wind is an integral part of both climate action and safeguarding our energy security. Thus, time is of the essence, and we must follow up on the progress already made on reining in the burden of bureaucracy for renewable projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will stop forcing customers of its popular Office software to also have its Teams video conferencing and messaging app automatically installed on their devices, in a move designed to prevent an official antitrust probe by EU regulators. From a report: The US tech giant has made the concession to avoid a formal investigation, said two people with direct knowledge of the decision, following a 2020 complaint by rival Slack which claimed Microsoft's practice of bundling the two services together was anti-competitive. These people said that, in future, when companies buy Office they can do it with or without Teams if they wished, but the mechanism on how to do this remains unclear. The people stressed talks are still ongoing and a deal is not certain. The move is part of an effort by Microsoft to try to avoid what would be its first antitrust probe in more than a decade, having sought to avoid legal battles with the European Commission that have proved bruising in the past.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, users on Reddit and YouTube began posting about problems with AMD's newest Ryzen 7000X3D processors. In some cases, the systems simply stopped booting. But in at least one instance, a Ryzen 7800X3D became physically deformed, bulging out underneath and bending the pins on the motherboard's processor socket. In a separate post, motherboard maker MSI indicated that the damage "may have been caused by abnormal voltage issues." Ryzen 7000X3D processors already impose limits on overclocking and power settings, but new BIOS updates from MSI specifically disallow any kind of "overvolting" features that could give the CPUs more power than they were built to handle. You can still undervolt your CPU to attempt to reduce temperatures and energy usage by giving the CPU a bit less power than it was designed for. The Ryzen 7000X3D processors are set to a lower voltage than regular Ryzen 7000 CPUs by default because the extra L3 cache layered on top of the processor die can raise temperatures and make the CPU more difficult to cool. This has also made the chips much more power-efficient than the standard Ryzen chips, but that efficiency comes at the cost of overclocking settings and other features that some enthusiasts use to squeeze more performance out of their PCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple won an appeals court ruling upholding its App Store's policies in an antitrust challenge brought by Epic Games. From a report: Monday's ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower-court judge's 2021 decision largely rejecting claims by Epic, the maker of Fortnite, that Apple's online marketplace policies violated federal law because they ban third-party app marketplaces on its operating system. The appeals panel upheld the judge's ruling in Epic's favor on California state law claims. The ruling comes as Apple has been making changes to the way the App Store operates to address developer concerns since Epic sued the company in 2020. The dispute began after Apple expelled the Fortnite game from the App Store because Epic created a workaround to paying a 30% fee on customers' in-app purchases. "There is a lively and important debate about the role played in our economy and democracy by online transaction platforms with market power," the three-judge panel said. "Our job as a federal court of appeals, however, is not to resolve that debate -- nor could we even attempt to do so. Instead, in this decision, we faithfully applied existing precedent to the facts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The early user reviews for Snapchat's "My AI" feature are in -- and they're not good. From a report: Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only addition, Snapchat's new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI's GPT technology is now pinned to the top of the app's Chat tab where users can ask it questions and get instant responses. But following the chatbot's rollout to Snapchat's wider community, Snapchat's app has seen a spike in negative reviews amid a growing number of complaints shared on social media. Over the past week, Snapchat's average U.S. App Store review was 1.67, with 75% of reviews being 1-star, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. For comparison, across Q1 2023, the Snapchat average U.S. App Store review was 3.05 with only 35% of reviews being 1-star. The number of daily reviews has also increased by 5 times over the last week, the firm noted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is leaning into flexibility as part of a new strategy to stymie the impact of belt-tightening among cyber chiefs. From a report: Google Cloud and Mandiant, the threat intelligence unit it acquired last year, unveiled at the RSA Conference in San Francisco today that they're opening their security products to integrations from competitors, as well as offering new Google plug-ins for other vendors' tools. The news, which was shared first with Axios, means that Google customers will now have more options to embed Google's tools in partner companies' products, like CrowdStrike, Trellix and SentinelOne. Other companies, like Accenture and login management company Okta, will also be integrating their products into Google's as part of the plan. Chief information security officers are facing increasing board pressure during a wobbly economy to cut down the number of vendors they work with and simplify their security programs. As a result, vendors have started to intertwine their competitors' products into their own tools in recent years to reach more customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to issue patents for inventions his AI system created. From a report: The justices turned away Thaler's appeal of a lower court's ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that he has said it generated. Thaler founded Imagination Engines Inc, an advanced artificial neural network technology company based in Saint Charles, Missouri. According to Thaler, his DABUS system, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, created unique prototypes for a beverage holder and emergency light beacon entirely on its own. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and a federal judge in Virginia rejected his patent applications for the inventions on the grounds that DABUS is not a person. The patent-focused U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld those decisions last year and said U.S. patent law unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings. Thaler told the Supreme Court that AI is being used to innovate in fields ranging from medicine to energy, and that rejecting AI-generated patents "curtails our patent system's ability - and thwarts Congress's intent - to optimally stimulate innovation and technological progress."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court, exploring free speech rights in the social media era, on Monday agreed to consider whether the Constitution's First Amendment bars government officials from blocking their critics on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. From a report: The justices took up an appeal by two members of a public school board from the city of Poway in Southern California of a lower court's ruling in favor of school parents who sued after being blocked from Facebook pages and a Twitter account maintained by the officials. The justices also took up an appeal by a Michigan man of a lower court's ruling against him after he sued a city official in Port Huron who blocked him on Facebook following critical posts made by the plaintiff about the local government's COVID-19 response. At issue is whether a public official's social media activity can amount to governmental action bound by First Amendment limits on government regulation of speech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When the U.S. Supreme Court decides in the coming months whether to weaken a powerful shield protecting internet companies, the ruling also could have implications for rapidly developing technologies like artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. From a report: The justices are due to rule by the end of June whether Alphabet's YouTube can be sued over its video recommendations to users. That case tests whether a U.S. law that protects technology platforms from legal responsibility for content posted online by their users also applies when companies use algorithms to target users with recommendations. What the court decides about those issues is relevant beyond social media platforms. Its ruling could influence the emerging debate over whether companies that develop generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft is a major investor, or Bard from Alphabet's Google should be protected from legal claims like defamation or privacy violations, according to technology and legal experts. That is because algorithms that power generative AI tools like ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 operate in a somewhat similar way as those that suggest videos to YouTube users, the experts added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers, particularly state-sponsored and organized cybercriminals, wreak havoc worldwide. However, their aliases, such as Fancy Bear and Refined Kitten, often undermine the seriousness of their actions, Wired argues. Microsoft's cybersecurity division recently revamped its naming taxonomy for the hundreds of hacker groups it tracks, adopting two-word names with a weather-based term to indicate the hackers' suspected country and affiliation. For instance, the Iranian group Phosphorous is now dubbed Mint Sandstorm, while Russia's Iridium (Sandworm) goes by Seashell Blizzard. Critics, like Rob Lee, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Dragos, argue that the whimsical new names could hinder the perception of the profession and be counterproductive for cybersecurity analysis. Furthermore, the new naming scheme forces analysts and customers to revise their databases and products to align with Microsoft's terminology. The revised system also risks cementing educated guesses about hackers' national loyalties without clarity on the confidence of those assessments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 spotted this story in today's New York Times. (Also re-published in the Seattle Times.) In early 2020 a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists "released critical data" on the speedy spread and lethality of the coronavirus, remembers Times, "cited in health warnings around the world... Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it... "What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science." It's not the only retraction. The Times also points out a paper published on March 9 of 2020 relying on patient samples from mid-December of 2019, which "added to evidence that the virus was spreading widely before the Chinese government took action." Two months later the journal that published an update that "said that the Wuhan samples were not collected in December after all, but weeks later, in January... After Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle tweeted about the discrepancy, the journal's editors posted a third version of the paper, adding yet another timeline. This revision says the samples were collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1."Beijing's stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found. Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found. This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded: The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus. The article notes an international team's discovery last month of genetic sequence data collected in January of 2020 at Wuhan market, "withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that global health officials called 'inexcusable.'"The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, a finding consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals... Soon after the group alerted Chinese researchers to their findings, the genetic sequences temporarily disappeared from a global database. "It's just pathetic that we're in this stage where we're having cloak-and-dagger conversations about deleted data," said Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney biologist who was part of the group that analyzed the sequences containing raccoon dog DNA. The Times cites retracted coronavirus papers flagged by Retraction Watch, which tracks withdrawn research. Amid tighting government censorship in 2020, Chinese researchers began asking journals to retract their work, the Times reports, and "a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad."Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government's demands. "Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests," he said... The journal retractions continued, and for unusual reasons. One group of authors noted that "our data is not perfect enough." Another warned that its paper "cannot be used as the basis for the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2." A third said its findings were "incomplete and not ready for publication." Several scientists promised in retraction notices to update their findings but never did.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this recent report from Bloomberg:Amazon continued blocking sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites, despite assuring antitrust enforcers it ended its policy that artificially inflated prices for consumers, according to newly unsealed filings in California's antitrust lawsuit against the e-commerce giant. The Seattle-based company planned to expand penalties on sellers who presented lower prices outside Amazon, even after it claimed in 2019 that it stopped punishing third-party merchants who posted better deals on Walmart, Target, eBay, and, in some instances, their own websites, according to previously redacted portions of the suit that were made public. The newly unsealed filings include an internal document in which Amazon states point-blank that despite "the recent removal of the price parity clause in our Business Solutions Agreement... our expectations and policies have not changed." "Many of the complaint's allegations are inaccurate," an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg. "We look forward to presenting the facts to the court."California Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking a court order blocking Amazon from continuing to engage in what he alleged is anticompetitive behavior, as well as compensation for consumers in the most populous U.S. state. A similar suit filed by Washington, D.C., was dismissed in 2021... The 2022 suit came three years after Bloomberg reported that the company's policies were forcing sellers to charge more on competing sites like Walmart because Amazon would bury their products in search results if they offered lower prices elsewhere... California's probe into Amazon's practices also highlighted concerns that ads on the platform are unhelpful for customers. Amazon advertising revenue grew 19% in the fourth quarter, to $11.6 billion. The fast-growing revenue source helps prop up Amazon's otherwise low-margin online retail business that carries the high expense of operating warehouses around the country and delivering orders to shoppers' homes. California's attorney general issued an official statement arguing that Amazon "has orchestrated the substantial market power it now enjoys through agreements at the retail and wholesale level that prevent effective price competition in the online retail marketplace." And it includes this fierce denunciation attributed directly to attorney general Bonta: "As California families struggle to make ends meet, we're in court to stop Amazon from engaging in anticompetitive practices that keep prices artificially high and stifle competition. There is no shortage of evidence showing that the 'Everything store' is costing consumers more for just about everything. Amazon coerces merchants into agreements that keep prices artificially high, knowing full well that they can't afford to say no. With other e-commerce platforms unable to compete on price, consumers turn to Amazon as a one-stop shop for all their purchases. This perpetuates Amazon's market dominance, allowing the company to make increasingly untenable demands on its merchants and costing consumers more at checkout across California. We won't stand by while Amazon uses coercive contracting practices to dominate the market at the expense of California consumers, small business owners, and the economy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this recent report from Bloomberg:Amazon continued blocking sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites, despite assuring antitrust enforcers it ended its policy that artificially inflated prices for consumers, according to newly unsealed filings in California's antitrust lawsuit against the e-commerce giant. The Seattle-based company planned to expand penalties on sellers who presented lower prices outside Amazon, even after it claimed in 2019 that it stopped punishing third-party merchants who posted better deals on Walmart, Target, eBay, and, in some instances, their own websites, according to previously redacted portions of the suit that were made public. The newly unsealed filings include an internal document in which Amazon states point-blank that despite "the recent removal of the price parity clause in our Business Solutions Agreement... our expectations and policies have not changed." "Many of the complaint's allegations are inaccurate," an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg. "We look forward to presenting the facts to the court."California Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking a court order blocking Amazon from continuing to engage in what he alleged is anticompetitive behavior, as well as compensation for consumers in the most populous U.S. state. A similar suit filed by Washington, D.C., was dismissed in 2021... The 2022 suit came three years after Bloomberg reported that the company's policies were forcing sellers to charge more on competing sites like Walmart because Amazon would bury their products in search results if they offered lower prices elsewhere... California's probe into Amazon's practices also highlighted concerns that ads on the platform are unhelpful for customers. Amazon advertising revenue grew 19% in the fourth quarter, to $11.6 billion. The fast-growing revenue source helps prop up Amazon's otherwise low-margin online retail business that carries the high expense of operating warehouses around the country and delivering orders to shoppers' homes. California's attorney general issued an official statement arguing that Amazon "has orchestrated the substantial market power it now enjoys through agreements at the retail and wholesale level that prevent effective price competition in the online retail marketplace." And it includes this fierce denunciation attributed directly to attorney general Bonta: "As California families struggle to make ends meet, we're in court to stop Amazon from engaging in anticompetitive practices that keep prices artificially high and stifle competition. There is no shortage of evidence showing that the 'Everything store' is costing consumers more for just about everything. Amazon coerces merchants into agreements that keep prices artificially high, knowing full well that they can't afford to say no. With other e-commerce platforms unable to compete on price, consumers turn to Amazon as a one-stop shop for all their purchases. This perpetuates Amazon's market dominance, allowing the company to make increasingly untenable demands on its merchants and costing consumers more at checkout across California. We won't stand by while Amazon uses coercive contracting practices to dominate the market at the expense of California consumers, small business owners, and the economy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Thousands of stunned guests were on hand Saturday night to watch a Disneyland malfunction for the ages," writes SFGate — when a 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon burst into flames, and continued burning for several minutes in front of the stunned crowd. SFGate reports:The fire occurred during the 10:30 p.m. performance of Fantasmic, a show staged on the Rivers of America. The elaborate show uses ships, barges, projections on the water and fire effects to tell the story of Mickey Mouse's dreams and nightmares. Near the end of the show, the dragon form of Maleficent from "Sleeping Beauty," emerges from the island. The big finale went awry Saturday, and flames engulfed the entire dragon. Video taken by shocked spectators shows the fire beginning on the dragon's face and rapidly spreading down its body as chunks of flaming debris fall to the ground. Smoke and heavy flames billow from the prop as firefighters begin hosing down the dragon. The remainder of the show was canceled, and guests were escorted out of the immediate area... The dragon, one of the most memorable parts of Disneyland's beloved nighttime spectacular, has jokingly been referred to as Murphy, a reference to Murphy's law. Over the decades, it's been part of countless malfunctions and mishaps, although none quite so destructive as this. Though it is supposed to breathe fire, there are times when the effect doesn't work at all. "Disneyland employees armed with garden hoses and fire extinguishers were no match for the inferno," reports the Orange County Register. "The dragon's head erupted into a fireball and a flamethrower effect from the dragon's mouth shot directly toward the stage, according to MiceChat." The newspaper has a picture of the charred mechanical skeleton that was still lying on the ground Sunday on Tom Sawyer Island — and a 146-second video of the blaze. (Apparently realizing they're witnessing an unplanned fire, one spectator can be heard telling another one wryly, "Happy birthday, Danny.") "Some spectators thought it was part of the show," reports the New York Times. One visitor told the newspaper, "My sister and I were talking about how it was impressive. I was like, 'Man, they can set that head on fire and it just stays perfectly intact?' So we were kind of amazed at Disney at first..." When interviewed by the Associated Press, Ryan Laux, a frequent Disneyland visitor, "said Mickey vanished from the stage as soon as the dragon's head became engulfed in flames." Then a voice over a loudspeaker announced the show wouldn't continue "due to unforeseen circumstances..." (as heard in the video). "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause — and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening here at Disneyland. Once again, this performance cannot continue due to unforeseen circumstances. Thank you." At that moment the head burst into more flames, some members of the audience gasped in unison — and the announcement continued playing in Spanish. ("No podemos continuar con este presentacion...") Then cheery banjo music began playing. At least six workers were eventually treated for smoke inhalation from the burning dragon prop, reports the New York Times. In a statement Disney said they were now "temporarily suspending fire effects" in "select" shows in their parks around the world — "out of an abundance of caution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year Python's massive PyPI repository of pre-written software packages had 235.7 billion downloads — a 57% annual growth in its download counts and bandwidth. So now Python's nonprofit Python Software Foundation has an announcement. Their director of infrastructure said today that they're rolling out "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI, while simultaneously giving our users one of our most requested features: organization accounts."Organizations on PyPI are self-managed teams, with their own exclusive branded web addresses. Our goal is to make PyPI easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages. We're making organizations available to community projects for free, forever, and to corporate projects for a small fee. Additional priority support agreements will be available to all paid subscribers, and all revenue will go right back into PyPI to continue building better support and infrastructure for all our users... Having more people using and contributing to Python every year is an fantastic problem to have, but it is one we must increase organizational capacity to accommodate. Increased revenue for PyPI allows it to become a staffed platform that can respond to support requests and attend to issues in a timeframe that is significantly faster than what our excellent (but thinly spread) largely volunteer team could reasonably handle. We want to be very clear — these new features are completely optional. If features for larger projects don't sound like something that would be useful to you as a PyPI maintainer, then there is no obligation to create an organization and absolutely nothing about your PyPI experience will change for you. We look forward to discussing what other features PyPI users would like to see tackled next...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press visited a 100-foot barge moored in Los Angeles where engineers built "a kind of floating laboratory to answer a simple question: Is there a way to cleanse seawater of carbon dioxide and then return it to the ocean so it can suck more of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to slow global warming?"The technology, dubbed SeaChange, developed by the University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty, is meant to seize on the ocean's natural abilities, said Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA's Institute for Carbon Management. The process sends an electrical charge through seawater flowing through tanks on the barge. That then sets off a series of chemical reactions that trap the greenhouse gas into a solid mineral that includes calcium carbonate — the same thing seashells are made of. The seawater is then returned to the ocean and can pull more carbon dioxide out of the air. The calcium carbonate settles to the sea floor. Plans are now underway to scale up the idea with another demonstration site starting this month in Singapore. Data collected there and at the Port of Los Angeles will help in the design of larger test plants. Those facilities are expected to be running by 2025 and be able to remove thousands of tons of CO2 per year. If they are successful, the plan is to build commercial facilities to remove millions of tons of carbon annually, Sant said... Scientists estimate at least 10 billion metric tons of carbon will need to be removed from the air annually beginning in 2050, and the pace will need to continue over the next century... According to the UCLA team, at least 1,800 industrial-scale facilities would be needed to capture 10 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year, but fewer could still make a dent. The article notes alternate ideas from other researchers — including minerals on beaches that increase the ocean's alkalinity so it can absorb more carbon dioxide. But this SeaChange process also produces hydrogen. So the director of UCLA's Carbon Management institute also founded a startup that generates revenue from that hydrogen (and from "carbon credits" sold to other companies) — hoping to lower the cost of removing atmospheric carbon to below $100 per metric ton.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Once-booming demand for cloud-computing services is slowing..." reports Bloomberg. "When Microsoft and Amazon report results next week, analysts are anticipating the slowest revenue growth for their cloud-computing businesses since the firms started breaking out performance last decade."For years, demand for cloud-computing services has steadily driven growth at both Microsoft and Amazon... Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud unit, which is home to its Azure cloud-services business, accounted for 38% of its revenue and 39% of operating income in 2022. Amazon Web Services was the fastest-growing of the Seattle-based company's major businesses last year and generated $22.8 billion in operating income. The rest of Amazon's businesses combined posted a $10.6 billion operating loss. For both companies, cracks are starting to appear. In the first three months of 2023, growth for Microsoft's Azure unit and Amazon Web Services is expected to fall to 31% and 14%, respectively, excluding currency fluctuations, according to the average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. A year ago, Azure sales expanded 49% and Amazon Web Services 37%. In a shareholder letter released last week, Amazon said AWS "faces short-term head winds" related to the economic backdrop that will "soften" the growth rate. This echoed what it said in its most recent results. Microsoft also warned of a slowdown in cloud software sales last quarter. Wall Street has been getting more cautious. UBS lowered growth estimates for Azure last week, warning "customer efforts to optimize/trim their cloud spend will be deeper and last longer than most think...." Jefferies [financial services company] sees slowing cloud demand as "a key concern" for Amazon. Analyst Brent Thill said that because AWS generates so much of Amazon's operating income, "a stabilization in cloud is crucial for shares to outperform." For Alec Young, chief investment strategist at MAPsignals, Microsoft and Amazon remain attractive despite the slowdown, which he expects to be a temporary pause before growth re-accelerates. "There's still a lot of runway ahead for cloud computing, so I don't think investors should obsess too much over the level of growth over a couple quarters," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this scathing rant from the Verge:It's a truth universally acknowledged that smart speakers should just shut up. I don't want to know when Siri / Alexa / Google has locked my front door — I just asked it to do that and I expect it to happen. (We'll put a pin in the fact that it doesn't always do this). So Google's announcement this week that it's taking more steps to stop its Google Assistant from chattering away to you every time you send a command to a Nest smart speaker is a welcome one. The Assistant already stays schtum when you ask it to turn the lights off in the room you're in, sending a gentle chime to let you know it was successful. (You know, in case THE LIGHTS TURNING OFF didn't alert you to this fact.) However, it still loves to have a good old chat when you ask it to do something like change the temperature of your thermostat. "Okay, setting the living room AC to 76 degrees." This new change will, according to a community blog post from Google, roll out over the next few weeks. It will make the speaker chime instead of starting a conversation when you ask it to control smart devices, including switches, plugs, fans, blinds, TVs, and speakers. However, this is still only for the room you and the speaker are in. So, when I'm in bed at night and softly request my Nest Hub to turn off the living room lights, it will still loudly respond, "TURNING OFF LIVING ROOM LIGHTS." Sigh. The article argues the problem is specific to Google's speakers. "Knowing when to be silent is something every other smart speaker manufacturer figured out a while back."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Arm is developing its own chip," reports the Financial Times, "to showcase the capabilities of its designs, as the SoftBank-owned group seeks to attract new customers and fuel growth following a blockbuster IPO later this year."The company will team up with manufacturing partners to develop the new chip, according to people briefed on the move who describe it as the most advanced chipmaking effort the Cambridge-headquartered group has ever embarked upon. The effort comes just as SoftBank seeks to drive up Arm's profits and attract investors to a planned listing on New York's Nasdaq exchange... The hope is that the prototype will allow it to demonstrate the power and capabilities of its designs to the wider market. Arm has previously built some test chips with partners including Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, largely aimed at enabling software developers to gain familiarity with new products. However, multiple industry executives told the FT that its newest chip — on which it started work in the past six months — is "more advanced" than ever before. Arm has also formed a bigger team that will execute the effort and is targeting the product at chip manufacturers more than software developers, they said... Rumblings about Arm's chipmaking moves have stoked fears in the semiconductor industry that if it makes a good enough chip, it could seek to sell it in the future and thereby become a competitor to some of its biggest customers, such as MediaTek or Qualcomm. People close to Arm insist there are no plans to sell or license the product and that it is only working on a prototype. Arm declined to comment. The article cites "people briefed on the move" as saying that Arm plans to build prototype chips for laptops, mobile devices, and other electronics. "The team will also expand on Arm's existing efforts to enhance the performance and security of designs, as well as bolster developer access to its products. " The article points out that the head of Arm's engineering team previously oversaw the development of Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week there was some good news for startups working on commercial nuclear fusion in the U.S. And it came from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC), the top governing body for America's nuclear power plants nuclear materials, reports CNBC:The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the U.S. voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win. As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won't apply to fusion plants. (Fusion reactors cannot melt down....) Other differences include looser requirements around foreign ownership of nuclear fusion plants, and the dispensing of mandatory hearings at the federal level during the licensing process, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association... The approach to regulating fusion is akin to the regulatory regime that is currently used to regulate particle accelerators, which are machines that are capable of making elementary nuclear particles, like electrons or protons, move really fast, the Fusion Industry Association says... Technically speaking, fusion will be regulated under Part 30 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Jeff Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner, told CNBC. The regulatory structure for nuclear fission is under Part 50 of that code. "The regulatory structure needed to regulate particle accelerators under Part 30, is far simpler, less costly and more efficient than the more complicated rules imposed on fission reactors under Part 50," Merrifield told CNBC. "By making this decision to use the Part 30, the commission recognized the decreased risk of fusion technologies when compared with traditional nuclear reactors and has imposed a framework that more appropriately aligns the risks and the regulations," he said. "Private fusion companies have raised about $5 billion to commercialize and scale fusion technology," the article points out, "and so the decision from the NRC on how the industry would be regulated is a big deal for companies building in the space." And they shared three reactions from the commercial fusion industry:The CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC the decision was"extremely important."The scientific director for fusion startup Focused Energy told CNBC the decision "removes a major area of uncertainty for the industry."The general counsel for nuclear fusion startup Helion told CNBC. "It is now incumbent on us to demonstrate our safety case as we bring fusion to the grid, and we look forward to working with the public and regulatory community closely on our first deployments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: According to Google Trends, peak "Lean to Code" occurred in early 2019 when laid-off Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists were taunted with the phrase on Twitter...As Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently put it, "We're in a different world." Indeed. Encouraging kids to pursue CS careers in Code.org's viral 2013 launch video, Zuckerberg explained, "Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find." In Learning to Code Isn't Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system." But is that really true? Vox does note that the latest round of layoffs at Meta "is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach." Yet while that's also true at other companies, those laid-off tech workers also seem to be finding similar positions by working in other industries:Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies. "Early layoffs were dominated by recruiters, which is forgoing future hiring," Revelio senior economist Reyhan Ayas told Vox. "Whereas in 2023 we see a shift toward more core engineering and software engineering, which signals a change in focus of current business priorities." In other words, tech companies aren't just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They're also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they're known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to... The latest monthly jobs report by tech industry association CompTIA found that even though employment at tech companies (which includes all roles at those companies) declined slightly in March, employment in technical occupations across industry sectors increased by nearly 200,000 positions. So even if tech companies are laying off tech workers, other industries are snatching them up. Unfortunately for software engineers and the like, that means they might also have to follow those industries' pay schemes. The average software engineer base pay in the US is $90,000, according to PayScale, but can be substantially higher at tech firms like Facebook, where such workers also get bonuses and stock options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

9to5Linux reports:KDE-focused and Arch Linux-inspired independent distribution KaOS Linux celebrates today 10 years of existence with a new stable ISO release that brings some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and a preview of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment. Yes, you're reading it right, KaOS is one of the very first GNU/Linux distributions to offer you a live ISO image with a pre-release version of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop, which, of course, is compiled against the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework... Since this is a special ISO release, the devs also added an option to play music during the installation process. "KaOS uses the Systemd-provided Systemd-boot for UEFI installs," according to the release notes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Gates believes AI chatbots "are on track to help children learn to read and hone their writing skills in 18 months time," reports CNBC:Historically, teaching writing skills has proven to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer, Gates noted. When teachers give feedback on essays, they look for traits like narrative structure and clarity of prose — a "high-cognitive exercise" that's "tough" for developers to replicate in code, he said. But AI chatbots' ability to recognize and recreate human-like language changes that dynamic, proponents say... AI technology must improve at reading and recreating human language to better motivate students before it can become a viable tutor, Gates said... It may take some time, but Gates is confident the technology will improve, likely within two years, he said. Then, it could help make private tutoring available to a wide swath of students who might otherwise be unable to afford it... "This should be a leveler," he said. "Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you've done and look across your entire body of work." Gates isn't the only billionaire thinking about how AI will affect education. Mark Cuban recently retweeted a prediction that GPT-4 "will revolutionize homeschooling."Read more of this story at Slashdot.