Slashdot

Beeper is giving up on its mission to bring iMessage to Android after implementing a series of fixes that Apple has knocked down one by one over the past month. From a report: Although the company has issued a complex workaround, it says it has no plans to roll out another one if this one is knocked down by Apple. "Each time that Beeper Mini goes 'down' or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper's credibility takes a hit," the company wrote in a blog post. "It's unsustainable. As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we can't win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth. With our latest software release, we believe we've created something that Apple can tolerate existing. We do not have any current plans to respond if this solution is knocked offline"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Worldcoin is no longer offering its Orb-verification service in India, Brazil and France, just months after the crypto startup expanded the helmet-shaped eyeball-scanning device to those markets. From a report: Tools for Humanity, the foundation that oversees development of Worldcoin, exclusively told TechCrunch in a statement that it had expanded the Orb to many markets this year for a "limited time access." The sudden retreat, however, comes as a surprise. Worldcoin had opened pop-up kiosks in many parts of India to onboard new users to the platform and drove crowds as people lined up to sign up and collect the free tokens.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Midjourney version 6, the latest and greatest iteration of the popular image generation AI model from the research collective of the same name founded by David Holz, dropped last night as an alpha release. From a report: Among those new features are drastically improved and more realistic, highly detailed images, and the ability to have the model generate legible text within images, something that had eluded Midjourney since its release in 2022 even as other rival AI image generators such as OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Ideogram had launched this type of feature. "This model can generate much more realistic imagery than anything we've released before," wrote Holz in a message posted in the Midjourney Discord server, which has over 17 million members. Holz said V6 was actually the "third model trained from scratch on our AI superclusters" and took nine months to develop.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial rain has been used in an attempt to lower pollution levels in Lahore, Pakistan. From a report: The capital city of the eastern province of Punjab, near the Indian border, has some of the worst air quality in the world and has become extremely polluted because of a growing population of more than 13 million people. By early December, the air quality in the city had grown so bad that schools, markets and parks were closed for four days. By last weekend, the city's air quality index (AQI) had reached levels considered extremely hazardous to health. To try to reduce them, on Saturday the Punjab government used cloud seeding to create rain in 10 locations around the city using a small Cessna plane. To create the clouds, there needs to be enough moisture already present in the clouds in the lower atmosphere. In summer, common table salt mixed with water is sprayed over the cloud patches from planes. After a few hours, the mist integrates with the clouds and produces rain. In winter, the clouds are seeded using flakes of silver iodide, which can be fired from a vehicle or a plane. The practice, also known as "blueskying," has been used to induce precipitation in several countries in the Middle East, as well as China and India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Eric Migicovsky insists his Beeper Mini will continue despite Apple's best efforts to prevent it bringing iMessage blue speech bubbles to Android. Beeper Mini is, or is continually trying to be, a way to get iMessage without buying an iPhone -- although users might have to get access to a Mac. Since the start of December 2023, Beeper has launched a service to do this, then Apple blocked it, then Beeper tried another way. According to The Information, this cycle is going to continue, too, as Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky maintains that his company will persist -- and could take legal action, too. "We're investigating legal ramifications for Apple, definitely," said Migicovsky. "Around antitrust, around competition, around how they've made the experience worse for iPhone users with this change. They've degraded the performance of iMessage for iPhone users," he continued, "all in search of crushing a competitor."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter ekimminau writes: On the morning of December 20, 2023, thousands of users turned on their Samsung TV to find that the Samsung TV Plus application was missing. Available for free on 2016-2023 Samsung Smart TVs, Galaxy devices, Smart Monitors, Family Hub refrigerators, and the web, for many it is their primary method of TV viewing. The masses began flocking to the Samsung community forums asking ... what was going on. From Cord Cutters: At this time, Samsung has not posted any updates about the outage. Customer service has been telling customers they are aware of the outage and are working on fixing it. This news comes as Samsung recently added seven local FOX news channels for community stories, sports updates, weather forecasts and more. The new markets are Austin, Detroit, Milwaukee, Orlando, Phoenix, Seattle and Tampa Bay. Right now, this outage seems to only be affecting the app on Smart TVs as the website is still working letting anyone stream Samsung TV Plus for free streaming online through the website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's latest research about running large language models on smartphones offers the clearest signal yet that the iPhone maker plans to catch up with its Silicon Valley rivals in generative artificial intelligence. From a report: The paper, entitled "LLM in a Flash," offers a "solution to a current computational bottleneck," its researchers write. Its approach "paves the way for effective inference of LLMs on devices with limited memory," they said. Inference refers to how large language models, the large data repositories that power apps like ChatGPT, respond to users' queries. Chatbots and LLMs normally run in vast data centres with much greater computing power than an iPhone. The paper was published on December 12 but caught wider attention after Hugging Face, a popular site for AI researchers to showcase their work, highlighted it late on Wednesday. It is the second Apple paper on generative AI this month and follows earlier moves to enable image-generating models such as Stable Diffusion to run on its custom chips. Device manufacturers and chipmakers are hoping that new AI features will help revive the smartphone market, which has had its worst year in a decade, with shipments falling an estimated 5 per cent, according to Counterpoint Research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has announced that it is deprecating Windows Mixed Reality, with plans to remove the feature in an upcoming release of the OS. From a report: Windows Mixed Reality was Microsoft's attempt at building out a VR ecosystem for Windows PCs, but unfortunately this effort has been mostly inactive for a number of years. While there have been several VR headsets built for Windows Mixed Reality, most of them launched between 2017 and 2021. It's been a long while since OEMs released new VR headsets for Windows Mixed Reality, likely because SteamVR is a much more successful platform with a much wider selection of games. Unfortunately, Microsoft says the deprecation of Windows Mixed Reality also includes support for using a Windows Mixed Reality headset with SteamVR, along with the dedicated Mixed Reality Portal app which acted as a launch environment for VR apps and games built for Windows Mixed Reality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marina Temkin, writing at PitchBook: Boston-based OpenView stunned the VC world with news in early December that it laid off most of its employees and would stop all new investments months after raising its $570 million seventh fund. The 17-year-old firm, which managed $2.4 billion, was too prominent to keep its closure under wraps. But OpenView was far from the only investor that stopped backing startups this year. The number of active investors in US VC, which we defined as making two or more deals, plummeted by 38% in the first three quarters of 2023 compared to the same period last year, according to PitchBook data. That translates to 2,725 fewer firms making deals. The decline in active investors is far higher than the 28% decrease in deal count during the period, the Q3 2023 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor shows. The data indicates that investors are not merely writing fewer checks. Some dealmakers may have run out of funds and could be deemed zombie funds. Others, such as crossover investors, may have stopped allocating to the VC asset class.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's no secret that TV makers are seriously invested in pushing ads. Using TVs for advertising goes back to 1941 when the first TV commercial aired. But as we trudge our way through the 21st century, TV vendors are becoming more involved in ensuring that their hardware is used to sell stuff and add to their own recurring revenue. This has taken various forms, but in some cases, we're seeing increasingly invasive strategies for turning TVs into a primary place for shopping. The latest approach catching attention comes from the startup Displace. Its upcoming TVs will use integrated webcams and NFC payment readers to make it easy for people to buy stuff they see on TV. [...] The two new TVs Displace is adding to its 2024 release plans, the Displace Flex and Displace Mini, are all about making TV shopping better. According to Displace's announcement, the Displace Flex (a 55-inch 4K OLED TV) and Displace Mini (a 27-inch 4K OLED TV) will use proprietary gesture technology and each TV's integrated 4K camera to tell when a user is raising their hand. It's unclear how accurate that will be (could the shopping experience accidentally be activated if I raised my hand to tie my hair up, for example?), but at that point, the TV is supposed to pause the content being played. Then, it uses computer vision to "analyze the screen to find products available for sale. Once they see something they want to purchase, viewers drag and drop the product into the global Displace Shopping Cart," the announcement says. Displace Shopping will work at any moment the TV is on, and users can buy stuff they see in commercials by using the TVs. Displace's December 14 announcement said: "As soon as the viewer is ready to checkout, Displace Payments makes paying as easy as bringing a user's smartphone or watch near the TV's built-in NFC payment reader, a fully secure process that requires no credit card info. Viewers can also pay from within the Displace app." If the TV can't find a specific product for sale, it will "search for similar items" without user intervention, according to Displace. The TV will show products from any available online retailers, allowing users to select where they want to make their purchase. Displace hasn't provided full details about how it will make money off these transactions, but when reached for comment, founder and CEO Balaji Krishnan told Ars Technica that Displace has "different business models, and one of them is to take a transaction fee," and that Displace will share more details "later." Displace also sees people using Displace Payments to pay for telehealth applications and equipped the Flex and Mini with thermal cameras. To ease privacy concerns, Krishnan says the integrated cameras can be folded into the TVs if a user needs privacy. Eventually, Displace sees itself working with content publishers to lay its shopping UI over actively playing content. "Users would see a workable buy button right on top of the playing video," adds Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to researchers from a startup called Patronus AI, ChatGPT and other chatbots that rely on large language models frequently fail to answer questions derived from Securities and Exchange Commission filings. CNBC reports: Even the best-performing artificial intelligence model configuration they tested, OpenAI's GPT-4-Turbo, when armed with the ability to read nearly an entire filing alongside the question, only got 79% of answers right on Patronus AI's new test, the company's founders told CNBC. Oftentimes, the so-called large language models would refuse to answer, or would "hallucinate" figures and facts that weren't in the SEC filings. "That type of performance rate is just absolutely unacceptable," Patronus AI co-founder Anand Kannappan said. "It has to be much much higher for it to really work in an automated and production-ready way." [...] Patronus AI worked to write a set of more than 10,000 questions and answers drawn from SEC filings from major publicly traded companies, which it calls FinanceBench. The dataset includes the correct answers, and also where exactly in any given filing to find them. Not all of the answers can be pulled directly from the text, and some questions require light math or reasoning. Qian and Kannappan say it's a test that gives a "minimum performance standard" for language AI in the financial sector. Patronus AI tested four language models: OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-4-Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 2 and Meta's Llama 2, using a subset of 150 of the questions it had produced. It also tested different configurations and prompts, such as one setting where the OpenAI models were given the exact relevant source text in the question, which it called "Oracle" mode. In other tests, the models were told where the underlying SEC documents would be stored, or given "long context," which meant including nearly an entire SEC filing alongside the question in the prompt. GPT-4-Turbo failed at the startup's "closed book" test, where it wasn't given access to any SEC source document. It failed to answer 88% of the 150 questions it was asked, and only produced a correct answer 14 times. It was able to improve significantly when given access to the underlying filings. In "Oracle" mode, where it was pointed to the exact text for the answer, GPT-4-Turbo answered the question correctly 85% of the time, but still produced an incorrect answer 15% of the time. But that's an unrealistic test because it requires human input to find the exact pertinent place in the filing -- the exact task that many hope that language models can address. Llama 2, an open-source AI model developed by Meta, had some of the worst "hallucinations," producing wrong answers as much as 70% of the time, and correct answers only 19% of the time, when given access to an array of underlying documents. Anthropic's Claude 2 performed well when given "long context," where nearly the entire relevant SEC filing was included along with the question. It could answer 75% of the questions it was posed, gave the wrong answer for 21%, and failed to answer only 3%. GPT-4-Turbo also did well with long context, answering 79% of the questions correctly, and giving the wrong answer for 17% of them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chevrolet of Watsonville recently introduced a ChatGPT-powered chatbot on their website that was quickly exploited by users for their amusement. Internet users, like Chris Bakke, manipulated the chatbot into agreeing to absurd terms, such as selling a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for a dollar, leading to the chatbot's removal from the site. Hot Hardware reports: On X over the past few days, users discovered that Chevrolet of Watsonville introduced a chatbot powered by ChatGPT. While it gives the option to talk to a human, the hooligans of the Internet could not resist toying with the technology before it was pulled from the website. Namely, folks like Chris Bakke coerced the chatbot into "the customer is always right" mode and set it so it closes each response with "and that's a legally binding offer -- no takesies backsies." At this point, Chris then explained he needed a 2024 Chevy Tahoe and only had a dollar, to which the LLM replied "That's a deal, and that's a legally binding offer -- no takesies backsies." Beyond the $1 Tahoe, other users managed to trick the bot into recommending a Tesla Model 3 AWD instead of a Chevy. Tim Champ on X got the bot to create a Python script to "solve the Navier-stokes fluid flow equations for a zero-vorticity boundry," which is amusing, to say the least.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition software for five years, after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that the U.S. drugstore giant's "reckless use of facial surveillance systems" left customers humiliated and put their "sensitive information at risk." The FTC's Order (PDF), which is subject to approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court after Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, also instructs Rite Aid to delete any images it collected as part of its facial recognition system rollout, as well as any products that were built from those images. The company must also implement a robust data security program to safeguard any personal data it collects. A Reuters report from 2020 detailed how the drugstore chain had secretly introduced facial recognition systems across some 200 U.S. stores over an eight-year period starting in 2012, with "largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods" serving as the technology testbed. With the FTC's increasing focus on the misuse of biometric surveillance, Rite Aid fell firmly in the government agency's crosshairs. Among its allegations are that Rite Aid -- in partnership with two contracted companies -- created a "watchlist database" containing images of customers that the company said had engaged in criminal activity at one of its stores. These images, which were often poor quality, were captured from CCTV or employees' mobile phone cameras. When a customer entered a store who supposedly matched an existing image on its database, employees would receive an automatic alert instructing them to take action -- and the majority of the time this instruction was to "approach and identify," meaning verifying the customer's identity and asking them to leave. Often, these "matches" were false positives that led to employees incorrectly accusing customers of wrongdoing, creating "embarrassment, harassment, and other harm," according to the FTC. "Employees, acting on false positive alerts, followed consumers around its stores, searched them, ordered them to leave, called the police to confront or remove consumers, and publicly accused them, sometimes in front of friends or family, of shoplifting or other wrongdoing," the complaint reads. Additionally, the FTC said that Rite Aid failed to inform customers that facial recognition technology was in use, while also instructing employees to specifically not reveal this information to customers. In a press release, Rite Aid said that it was "pleased to reach an agreement with the FTC," but that it disagreed with the crux of the allegations. "The allegations relate to a facial recognition technology pilot program the Company deployed in a limited number of stores," Rite Aid said in its statement. "Rite Aid stopped using the technology in this small group of stores more than three years ago, before the FTC's investigation regarding the Company's use of the technology began."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After producing a nuclear fusion reaction last year that released more energy than it used, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) say they have successfully replicated the process at least three times this year. "This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels," reports CNN. The announcement appears in a December report (PDF) from the LLNL. From the report: After making their historic net energy gain last year, the next important step was to prove the process could be replicated. Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the "robustness" of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied. Each experiment also offers an opportunity to study the physics of ignition in detail, Appelbe told CNN. "This provides valuable information to the scientists in addressing the next challenge to be overcome: how to maximize the energy that can be obtained." There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder's outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat. The energy produced in December 2022 was small -- it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water. But it was sufficient to make it a successful ignition and to prove that laser fusion could create energy. Since then, the scientists have done it several more times. On July 30, the NIF laser delivered a little over 2 megajoules to the target, which resulted in 3.88 megajoules of energy -- their highest yield achieved to date, according to the report. Two subsequent experiments in October also delivered net gains. "These results demonstrated NIF's ability to consistently produce fusion energy at multi-megajoule levels," the report said. There is still a very long way to go, however, until nuclear fusion reaches the scale needed to power electric grids and heating systems. The focus now is on building on the progress made and figuring out how to dramatically scale up fusion projects and significantly bring down costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo has a new peer-reviewed study (PDF) to share that shows how safe its autonomous cars are compared to cars driven by humans. SFist reports: As the Chronicle notes, the study covers the 1.76 million driverless miles that Waymo's cars have registered in San Francisco so far, along with about 5.4 million miles registered elsewhere. It compares data about vehicle crashes of all kinds, and finds that Waymo vehicles were in involved in crashes resulting in injury or property damage far less often than human-driven cars. In fact, the "human benchmark" -- which is what Waymo is using to refer to human averages for various driving foibles -- is 5.55 crashes per 1 million miles. And the Waymo robot benchmark is just 0.6 crashes per 1 million miles. The overall figure for crash rates found Waymo's to be 6.7 times lower (0.41 incidents per 1 million miles) than the rate of humans (2.78 per million). This included data from Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The report's "Conclusions" section is less than definitive in its findings, noting that the data of police-reported incidents across various jurisdictions may not be consistent or "apples-to-apples." "The benchmark rates themselves... varied considerably between locations and within the same location," the report's authors say. "This raises questions whether the benchmark data sources have comparable reporting thresholds (surveillance bias) or if other factors that were not controlled for in the benchmarks (time of day, mix of driving) is affecting the benchmark rates." Still, the report, one of several that Alphabet-owned Waymo has commissioned in recent months, is convincingly thorough and academic in its approach, and seems to be great news for the company as it hopes to scale up -- starting with the enormous LA market. Waymo, like Cruise previously, has sought to convince a skeptical public that driverless vehicles are, in fact, safer than humans. And this is another step toward doing so -- even if people are going to be naturally wary of sharing the road with too many robots.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Axios, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, met with Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish to discuss a possible merger. "The combination would create a news and entertainment behemoth that would likely trigger further industry consolidation," reports Axios. From the report: Zaslav also has spoken to Shari Redstone, who owns Paramount's parent company, about a deal. WBD's market value was around $29 billion as of Wednesday, while Paramount's was just over $10 billion, so any merger would not be of equals. The meeting between Zaslav and Bakish, which sources say lasted several hours, took place at Paramount's headquarters in Times Square. The duo discussed ways their companies could complement one another. For example, each company's main streaming service -- Paramount+ and Max -- could merge to better rival Netflix and Disney+. It's unclear whether WBD would buy Paramount Global or its parent company, National Amusements Inc. (NAI), but a source familiar with the situation says that both options are on the table. WBD is said to have hired bankers to explore the deal. The deal could drive substantial synergies. WBD could use its international distribution footprint to boost Paramount's franchises, while Paramount's children's programing assets could be essential to WBD's long-term streaming ambitions. CBS News could be combined with CNN to create a global news powerhouse. CBS' crime dramas, such as "NCIS" and "Criminal Minds," could be combined with Investigation Discovery and TruTV. CBS Sports' footprint could be combined with WBD's. For example, CBS and WBD's Turner Sports currently share TV rights for March Madness.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear. Some might say it's well past time. As Google declared, "Over the last several years, legitimate activity in text-based Usenet groups has declined significantly because users have moved to more modern technologies and formats such as social media and web-based forums. Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam." True, these days, Usenet's content is almost entirely spam, but in its day, Usenet was everything that Twitter and Reddit would become and more. In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups. Within those groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads. [...] In 1980, Truscott and Ellis, using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), hooked up with the University of North Carolina to form the first Usenet nodes. From there, it would rapidly spread over the pre-Internet ARPANet and other early networks. These messages would be stored and retrieved from news servers. These would "peer" to each other so that messages to a newsgroup would be shared from server to server and to user to user so that within hours, your messages would reach the entire networked world. Usenet would evolve its own network protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to speed the transfer of these messages. Today, the social network Mastodon uses a similar approach with the ActivityPub protocol, while other social networks, such as Threads, are exploring using ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and the other social networks that support ActivityPub. As the saying goes, everything old is new again. [...] Usenet was never an organized social network. Each server owner could -- and did -- set its own rules. Mind you, there was some organization to begin with. The first 'mainstream' Usenet groups, comp, misc, news, rec, soc, and sci hierarchies, were widely accepted and disseminated until 1987. Then, faced with a flood of new groups, a new naming plan emerged in what was called the Great Renaming. This led to a lot of disputes and the creation of the talk hierarchy. This and the first six became known as the Big Seven. Then the alt groups emerged as a free speech protest. Afterward, fewer Usenet sites made it possible to access all the newsgroups. Instead, maintainers and users would have to decide which one they'd support. Over the years, Usenet began to decline as discussions were replaced both by spam and flame wars. Group discussions were also overwhelmed by flame wars. "If, going forward, you want to keep an eye on Usenet -- things could change, miracles can happen -- you'll need to get an account from a Usenet provider," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "I favor Eternal September, which offers free access to the discussion Usenet groups; NewsHosting, $9.99 a month with access to all the Usenet groups; EasyNews, $9.98 a month with fast downloads, and a good search engine; and Eweka, 9.50 Euros a month and EU only servers." "You'll also need a Usenet client. One popular free one is Mozilla's Thunderbird E-Mail client, which doubles as a Usenet client. EasyNews also offers a client as part of its service. If you're all about downloading files, check out SABnzbd."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Kreuzfeld writes: Help please: here in Lawrence, Kansas, the public school district has recently started using Gaggle (source may be paywalled; alternative source), a system for monitoring all digital documents and communications created by students on school-provided devices. Unsurprisingly, the system inundates employees with false 'alerts' but the district nonetheless hails this pervasive, dystopic surveillance system as a great success. What useful advice can readers here offer regarding successful methods to get public officials to backtrack from a policy so corrosive to liberty, trust, and digital freedoms?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Warren and Ash Parrish report via The Verge: Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is stepping down officially December 29th. Microsoft has not appointed a direct replacement and instead has rolled the suite of Activision Blizzard executives -- including Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, Activision publishing president Rob Kostich, and Activision Blizzard vice chair Thomas Tippl -- under Microsoft's game content and studios president Matt Booty. Kotick's departure comes just two months after some big Xbox leadership changes that saw Sarah Bond promoted to Xbox president, leading all Xbox platform and hardware work, and Matt Booty promoted to president of game content and studios, including overseeing Bethesda and ZeniMax studios. Now Booty is getting even more responsibilities with Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and Xbox Game Studios all under his watch. Microsoft is largely keeping the leadership team of Activision Blizzard in place, with some executive-level exceptions. Activision Blizzard chief communications officer Lulu Meservey will leave the company at the end of January. Humam Sakhnini (vice chairman, Blizzard and King) will also depart at the end of December. A number of Activision Blizzard executives will depart in March, too. Brian Bulatao (chief administrative officer), Julie Hodges (chief people officer), Armin Zerza (chief financial officer), and Grant Dixton (chief legal officer) are all reporting to their Microsoft Gaming equivalents. While Thomas Tippl (vice chairman, Activision Blizzard) is reporting to Matt Booty for now, he will depart Microsoft in March alongside other Activision Blizzard executives. "Thomas, Brian, Julie, Grant and Armin will continue to help us with the transition through March 2024," says Xbox chief Phil Spencer, in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. Additionally, a memo from Matt Booty announced some of the changes taking place at ZeniMax and Bethesda, including that Jill Braff has been named the new head of those studios. Braff worked on the integration team when ZeniMax and Bethesda joined Xbox back in 2021 and will lead the studios' development teams. [Both memos can be read below The Verge's reporting.]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed sweeping changes to bolster the key federal rule that has protected children's privacy online, in one of the most significant attempts by the U.S. government to strengthen consumer privacy in more than a decade. The changes are intended to fortify the rules underlying the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, a law that restricts the online tracking of youngsters by services like social media apps, video game platforms, toy retailers and digital advertising networks. Regulators said the moves would "shift the burden" of online safety from parents to apps and other digital services while curbing how platforms may use and monetize children's data. The proposed changes would require certain online services to turn off targeted advertising by default for children under 13. They would prohibit the online services from using personal details like a child's cellphone number to induce youngsters to stay on their platforms longer. That means online services would no longer be able to use personal data to bombard young children with push notifications. The proposed updates would also strengthen security requirements for online services that collect children's data as well as limit the length of time online services could keep that information. And they would limit the collection of student data by learning apps and other educational-tech providers, by allowing schools to consent to the collection of children's personal details only for educational purposes, not commercial purposes. [...] The F.T.C. began reviewing the children's privacy rule in 2019, receiving more than 175,000 comments from tech and advertising industry trade groups, video content developers, consumer advocacy groups and members of Congress. The resulting proposal (PDF) runs more than 150 pages. Proposed changes include narrowing an exception that allows online services to collect persistent identification codes for children for certain internal operations, like product improvement, consumer personalization or fraud prevention, without parental consent. The proposed changes would prohibit online operators from employing such user-tracking codes to maximize the amount of time children spend on their platforms. That means online services would not be able to use techniques like sending mobile phone notifications "to prompt the child to engage with the site or service, without verifiable parental consent," according to the proposal. How online services would comply with the changes is not yet known. Members of the public have 60 days to comment on the proposals, after which the commission will vote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susan Zhuang, a Democrat who will soon represent the 43rd Council District in Brooklyn, New York, admitted to using AI when answering questions from a local news publication, according to a report by the New York Post. From a report: In a text message sent to the Post, Zhuang wrote that she uses "AI as a tool to help foster deeper understanding" because English is not her first language. The responses in question were included in an article from City & State, which asked local council member-elects to fill out a questionnaire about their personal interests and policies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The PlayStation 5 has officially hit the 50 million sales milestone, Sony confirmed in a blog post. From a report: That's an impressive figure, considering the litany of supply chain issues that kept PS5s in limited supply after its November 2020 launch. And notably, the PS5 manage to reach 50 million sales just a week longer than it took the PlayStation 4, which wasn't bogged down by as many supply chain issues or a worldwide pandemic. Sony has also outsold the Xbox Series X and S by almost three to one this year, the Financial Times reports, based on data from Ampere Analysis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sirius XM Radio was sued by New York state for making it difficult for customers to cancel subscriptions to the broadcaster's online radio services, in violation of state and federal consumer protection laws. From a report: A probe by the AG's office found that Sirius trains employees to keep customers seeking to cancel on the phone or in a chat for a "frustrating" six-part conversation that includes asking them a series of questions and pitching as many as five "retention offers," New York Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with GenAI music app Suno. From a report: Users can enter prompts into Copilot like "Create a pop song about adventures with your family" and have Suno, via a plug-in, bring their musical ideas to life. From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs -- including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices. Copilot users can access the Suno integration by launching Microsoft Edge, visiting Copilot.Microsoft.com, logging in with their Microsoft account and enabling the Suno plug-in or clicking on the Suno logo that says "Make music with Suno." [...] AI algorithms "learn" from existing music to produce similar effects, a fact with which not all artists -- or GenAI users -- are comfortable, especially in cases where artists don't consent to having an AI algorithm train on their music and didn't receive compensation for it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most companies are not ready to deploy generative AI at scale because they lack strong data infrastructure or the controls needed to make sure the technology is used safely, according to the chief executive of the consultancy Accenture. From a report: The most hyped technology of 2023 is in an experimental phase at most companies and macroeconomic uncertainty is holding back IT spending generally, Julie Sweet told the Financial Times in an interview ahead of the company publishing quarterly results on Tuesday. Accenture reported another big jump in revenues from generative AI projects in the three months to November 30, with $450mn in bookings compared with $300mn over the previous six months. But they remain small relative to group sales of $64bn annually. Corporate executives are keen to deploy the technology to understand data across their organisation better or to automate more customer service, Sweet said. "The thing that is going to hold it back, though, isa...amost companies do not have mature data capabilities and if you can't use your data, you can't use AI. That said, in three to five years we expect this to be a big part of our business." Accenture and other consulting groups have boasted of multibillion-dollar investments in generative AI, including hiring and training staff, in the hope of a windfall from deploying the technology to clients across the world. Sweet said executives were being aoeprudenta in rolling out the technology, amid concerns over how to protect proprietary information and customer data and questions about the accuracy of outputs from generative AI models. "We are still at the stage where most CEOs, asked if there is someone in their organisation who can tell them where AI is being used, what the risks are and how they're being mitigated, the answer is still 'no.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The future of water may be changing in California. The state Water Resources Control Board has signed off on regulations to turn more recycled wastewater from our homes into drinking water. From a report: The regulations were approved unanimously by the board on Tuesday and now give the go-ahead for local water agencies to plan to turn wastewater into water we can drink through a process called Direct Potable Reuse. Darrin Polhemus, the division of drinking water director with the State Water Resources Control Board, said this approval was a very big step for California. "It really will be the highest quality water delivered in the state when it's done," Polhemus said. California's new rules would let, but not require, local water agencies to take wastewater from toilets or showers, treat it, and then put it right back into the drinking water system. "Direct potable reuse is just a really critical strategy for our state to have as we move to this new hydrology that we have, and as everyone has already said, increasing our resilience and reducing our reliance on imported water," said Laurel Firestone, board member for the State Water Resources Control Board.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A worrying number of UK authorities are still unaware of the impending switch-off of 2G and 3G mobile networks, according to Local Government Association (LGA) figures. From a report: While 38 percent of respondents were fully aware, 27 percent were only partially aware, and 7 percent had no idea at all that the axe would be falling by 2033 at the latest. The numbers worsened when the researchers spoke to respondents in senior management. Almost half (48 percent) were "partially aware" the UK's 2G and 3G mobile networks were due to be switched off and 14 percent were not at all aware. The actual switch-off will happen over the next few years. UK mobile operators have told government they do not intend to offer 2G and 3G mobile networks past 2033 at the latest, and there is a high likelihood that some networks will be shut down earlier. The UK government said it welcomes plans to end services ahead of time. Vodafone, for example, intends to pull the plug on 3G once and for all from January 2024. Although most consumers, with their 4G and 5G devices, will likely be unaware of the end when it comes, the same cannot be said of local authorities. According to the survey, almost two-thirds of respondents (63 percent) reported that their authority was still using devices or services reliant on 2G and 3G networks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

samleecole writes: The LAION-5B machine learning dataset used by Google, Stable Diffusion, and other major AI products has been removed by the organization that created it after a Stanford study found that it contained 3,226 suspected instances of child sexual abuse material, 1,008 of which were externally validated. LAION told 404 Media on Tuesday that out of "an abundance of caution," it was taking down its datasets temporarily "to ensure they are safe before republishing them." According to a new study by the Stanford Internet Observatory shared with 404 Media ahead of publication, the researchers found the suspected instances of CSAM through a combination of perceptual and cryptographic hash-based detection and analysis of the images themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union on Wednesday added three adult content companies - Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos - to its list of firms subject to stringent regulations under new online content rules. From a report: The new rules, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), require companies to conduct risk management, undergo external and independent auditing, and share data with authorities and researchers. In April, the EU designated five Alphabet subsidiaries, two Meta Platforms units, two Microsoft businesses, X and Alibaba's AliExpress among 19 companies under the rules. Such designated companies will have to do more to tackle disinformation, give more protection and choice to users and ensure stronger protection for children or risk fines of as much as 6% of their global turnover. "Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos meet the user thresholds to fall under stricter #DSA obligations," the bloc's industry chief Thierry Breton said. "Creating a safer online environment for our children is an enforcement priority under the DSA."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bird Global, the company that pioneered on-street electric scooter rentals, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; alternative source] in Florida, five years after becoming the fastest start-up ever to reach a so-called "unicorn" valuation above $1bn. From a report: In September, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in Bird, which went public via a blank-cheque company in 2021, after its market capitalisation fell below a $15mn threshold. "We are making progress towards profitability and aim to accelerate that progress by right-sizing our capital structure through this restructuring," Bird interim chief executive Michael Washinushi said on Wednesday. Bird said it would operate as normal during the restructuring process and that its lenders had entered into a "stalking horse" sale agreement. The company aims to complete a sale process within 120 days. Its European and Canadian businesses are not part of the bankruptcy filing. Founded by former Uber and Lyft executive Travis VanderZanden in Los Angeles in 2017, Bird spawned dozens of copycat companies around the world. But e-scooter rentals have struggled to reach consistent profitability, amid regulatory strictures, safety concerns, and high capital and operating costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. computer scientist on Wednesday lost his bid to register patents over inventions created by his artificial intelligence system in a landmark case in Britain about whether AI can own patent rights. From a report: Stephen Thaler wanted to be granted two patents in the UK for inventions he says were devised by his "creativity machine" called DABUS. His attempt to register the patents was refused by Britain's Intellectual Property Office on the grounds that the inventor must be a human or a company, rather than a machine. Thaler appealed to the UK's Supreme Court, which on Wednesday unanimously rejected his appeal as under UK patent law "an inventor must be a natural person." "This appeal is not concerned with the broader question whether technical advances generated by machines acting autonomously and powered by AI should be patentable," Judge David Kitchin said in the court's written ruling. "Nor is it concerned with the question whether the meaning of the term 'inventor' ought to be expanded ... to include machines powered by AI which generate new and non-obvious products and processes which may be thought to offer benefits over products and processes which are already known." Thaler's lawyers said in a statement that "the judgment establishes that UK patent law is currently wholly unsuitable for protecting inventions generated autonomously by AI machines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jd writes: Ars Technica is reporting a newly-discovered man-in-the-middle attack against SSH. This only works if you are using "ChaCha20-Poly1305" or "CBC with Encrypt-then-MAC", so it isn't a universal flaw. The CVE numbers for this vulnerability are CVE-2023-48795, CVE-2023-46445, and CVE-2023-46446. From TFA: At its core, Terrapin works by altering or corrupting information transmitted in the SSH data stream during the handshake -- the earliest stage of a connection, when the two parties negotiate the encryption parameters they will use to establish a secure connection. The attack targets the BPP, short for Binary Packet Protocol, which is designed to ensure that adversaries with an active position can't add or drop messages exchanged during the handshake. Terrapin relies on prefix truncation, a class of attack that removes specific messages at the very beginning of a data stream. The Terrapin attack is a novel cryptographic attack targeting the integrity of the SSH protocol, the first-ever practical attack of its kind, and one of the very few attacks against SSH at all. The attack exploits weaknesses in the specification of SSH paired with widespread algorithms, namely ChaCha20-Poly1305 and CBC-EtM, to remove an arbitrary number of protected messages at the beginning of the secure channel, thus breaking integrity. In practice, the attack can be used to impede the negotiation of certain security-relevant protocol extensions. Moreover, Terrapin enables more advanced exploitation techniques when combined with particular implementation flaws, leading to a total loss of confidentiality and integrity in the worst case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Announced in early August and initially planned for the end of the month, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is finally here for those who want to install the Fedora Linux operating system on their Apple Silicon Macs. Previously a remix of Arch Linux ARM, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is the result of a multi-year collaboration between the Asahi Linux project and the Fedora Project, enabling you to have a proper daily driver on your Apple Silicon Mac thanks to Fedora Linux's excellent 64-bit ARM support. The distro is based on the latest Fedora Linux 39 release and ships with the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment by default, using Wayland. This promises a smooth Linux desktop experience on Apple hardware similar to macOS. Fedora Asahi Remix also comes with XWayland for those who want to run X11 apps. In addition, it features non-conformant OpenGL 3.3 support including GPU-accelerated geometry shaders and transform feedback, PipeWire by default with WirePlumber, as well as the Calamares graphical installer. You can download and install Fedora Asahi Remix here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When hurricane Larry made landfall in the Atlantic in 2021, it was depositing over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day. The findings have been published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Wired reports: As hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn't touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you'd expect to find lots of microplastics. [...] The instrument in a clearing on Newfoundland was quite simple: a glass cylinder, holding a little bit of ultrapure water, securely attached to the ground with wooden stakes. Every six hours before, during, and after the hurricane, the researchers would come and empty out the water, which would have collected any particles falling -- both with and without rain -- on Newfoundland. "It's just a place that experiences a lot of extreme weather events," says Earth scientist Anna Ryan of Dalhousie University, lead author of the paper. "Also, it's fairly remote, and it's got a pretty low population density. So you don't have a bunch of nearby sources of microplastics." The team found that even before and after Larry, tens of thousands of microplastics fell per square meter of land per day. But when the hurricane hit, that figure spiked up to 113,000. "We found a lot of microplastics deposited during the peak of the hurricane," says Ryan, "but also, overall deposition was relatively high compared to previous studies." These studies were done during normal conditions, but in more remote locations, she says. The researchers also used a technique known as back trajectory modeling -- basically simulating where the air that arrived at the instrument had been previously. That confirmed that Larry had picked up the microplastics at sea, lofted them into the air, and dumped them on Newfoundland. [...] The Newfoundland study notes that Larry happened to pass over the garbage patch of the North Atlantic Gyre, where currents accumulate floating plastic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing. The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit. For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitizing and then throwing away about 100 million paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save 4.5 million pounds a year," reports Robert Booth via The Guardian. Leading historians are calling these plans "sheer vandalism" and "insane." From the report: Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as "bananas" and "a seriously bad idea." The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of "famous people" -- likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales -- but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept. It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost. Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitized documents unavailable to users since late October. "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals," says Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive of the Society of Genealogists. "In any digitization projects mistakes get made. We don't know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"EVs mandates are coming to Canada whether you like it or not," writes Slashdot reader Major_Disorder, sharing a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "Here is what my Canadian brothers and sisters need to know." From the report: New regulations being published this week by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault will effectively end sales of new passenger vehicles powered only by gasoline or diesel in 2035. Guilbeault said the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard will encourage automakers to make more battery-powered cars and trucks available in Canada. "There's no mistaking it. We are at a tipping point," he said, noting sizable growth in EV sales in Canada and demand that has previously outstripped the available supply. Automakers will have the next 12 years to phase out combustion engine cars, trucks and SUVs with a requirement to gradually increase the proportion of electric models they offer for sale each year. The electric-vehicle sales mandate regulations will be published later this week. They are setting up a system in which every automaker will have to show that a minimum percentage of vehicles they offer for sale are fully electric or longer-range plug-in hybrids. It will start with 20 per cent in 2026 and rise slightly to 23 per cent in 2027. After that, the share of EVs will begin to increase much faster, so that by 2028, 34 per cent of all vehicles sold will need to be electric -- 43 per cent by 2029 and 60 per cent by 2030. That number keeps rising until it hits 100 per cent in 2035. Guilbeault said the government is working to revise the national building code to encourage the spread of charging stations. The updated code would ensure that residential buildings constructed after 2025 have the electrical capacity to accommodate the charging stations. [...] The policy will be regulated under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and will issue credits to automakers for the EVs they sell. Generally, a fully electric model will generate one credit, with plug-in hybrids getting partial or full credit depending on how far they can go on a single charge. Manufacturers that sell more EVs than they need to meet each year's target can either bank those credits to meet their targets in future years, or sell them to companies that didn't sell enough. They can also cover up to 10 per cent of the credits they need each year by investing in public fast-charging stations. Every $20,000 spent on DC fast chargers that are operating before 2027 can earn the equivalent of one credit. Automakers that come up short for their sales requirements will be able to cover the difference by buying credits from others who exceed their targets, or by investing in charging stations. Automakers can start earning some credits toward their 2026 and 2027 targets over the next two years -- a bid by the government to encourage a faster transition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Juli Clover reports via MacRumors: The developers behind Beeper Mini are continuing with their effort to make iMessage for Android function despite Apple's mitigations, and the latest "fix" requires Beeper Mini users to have access to a Mac. On Reddit, the Beeper Mini team says that the Mac-based fix coming on December 20 stabilizes iMessage for Beeper Cloud and Mini, and it "works well" and "is very reliable." It is unclear how many Android users have a Mac or have a friend with a Mac to rely on, but the fix requires using a Mac to connect to iMessage on Beeper. According to Beeper Mini's developers, registration data from an actual Mac has to be sent to Apple to use iMessage on Beeper. Beeper has been using its own Mac servers to provide that information to Apple, but that resulted in thousands of Beeper users having the same registration info, which was an "easy target for Apple." The Beeper update will instead generate unique registration data for each Mac, making it harder for Apple to tell which users are accessing iMessage through an Android device. The Beeper Mini team says that registration data is "only used to indicate that a Mac is available during registration" and that the Mac will not be given access to an account or messages: "If you do not have access to a Mac computer, but have a friend on Beeper with a Mac, you can ask them if you can use their registration data. In our testing, 10-20 iMessage users can safely use the same registration data." With the fix, Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini users will once again be able to use iMessage on Android, but only with email addresses and not with phone numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Digital mapping specialist TomTom said on Tuesday it has partnered with tech giant Microsoft to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational assistant for vehicles. The assistant will allow users to "converse naturally with their vehicles" and enable voice interaction with infotainment, location search, and vehicle command systems, the company said. TomTom, which competes with Google Maps and the world's biggest mapping platform HERE, used various Microsoft services like its Azure OpenAI Service to create the voice assistant. The Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service allows enterprises to leverage ChatGPT maker OpenAI's large language models (LLM). The voice assistant can be integrated into other automotive infotainment systems and is also built into TomTom's Digital Cockpit, an open, modular in-vehicle infotainment platform, the Dutch map maker said. The company began working with Microsoft in 2016, when it first started powering Azure Maps location services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Microsoft has released a new software tool to remove printer software from HP that was installed without user permission or system need. A few weeks ago, users noticed that Windows Update installed HP printer software even if they did not have HP printers or printers at all. Affecting Windows 10 and 11, consumers reported that this update sometimes caused problems as it could rename their non-HP printers as HP printers causing some printing features to be inaccessible. Microsoft has not disclosed the root cause of the issue. The fix released by Microsoft requires users to download and run a dedicated troubleshooting tool available from Microsoft's support site. "There are four different versions of the troubleshooter, depending on whether you have the 32- or 64-bit version of an Arm or x86 version of Windows," notes Ars Technica. "Microsoft will also release an additional recommended troubleshooting tool 'in the coming weeks' that will fix the problem in Windows 11 upon a user's request without requiring the download of a separate tool."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance will pay $2.7 billion to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for evading federal law and operating an illegal derivatives exchange. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency exchange's founder, Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, will pay $150 million. "The court finds Zhao and Binance violated the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations, imposes a $150 million civil monetary penalty personally against Zhao, and requires Binance to disgorge $1.35 billion of ill-gotten transaction fees and pay a $1.35 billion penalty to the CFTC," wrote the CFTC in a statement. CoinTelegraph reports: The approved settlement marks the conclusion of a long-running case against CZ and Binance by the CFTC. On Nov. 21, CZ agreed to step down from his role at the helm of Binance as part of a wider settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Treasury Department and the CFTC. On the same day, Zhao pleaded guilty to several civil charges and one criminal charge relating to Anti-Money Laundering laws. On Dec. 7, CZ was ordered to remain in the U.S. until his Feb. 23, 2024 sentencing date. He faces up to 18 months in prison on money laundering charges and has agreed not to appeal any potential sentence up to that length. As part of the settlement, both CZ and Binance have agreed to take further steps to ensure Know Your Customer measures are maintained on the exchange as well as requiring Binance to implement a formalized corporate governance structure, including a board of directors with independent members, a compliance committee and an audit committee. The court also made a separate order for Binance's former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim, to pay a $1.5 million civil monetary penalty for "aiding and abetting Binance's violations and engaging in activities outside of the U. S. to willfully evade or attempt to evade U.S. law."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A bill that mandates tech giants pay news outlets for their content has come into effect in Canada amid an ongoing dispute with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta over the law. Some have hailed it as a game-changer that sets out a permanent framework that will see a steady drip of funds from wealthy tech companies to Canada's struggling journalism industry. But it has also been met with resistance by Google and Meta -- the only two companies big enough to be encompassed by the law. In response, over the summer, Meta blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadians. Google looked set to follow, but after months of talks, the federal government was able to negotiate a deal with the search giant as the company has agreed to pay Canadian news outlets $75 million annually. No such agreement appears to be on the horizon with Meta, which has called the law "fundamentally flawed." If Meta is refusing to budge, so is the government. "We will continue to push Meta, that makes billions of dollars in profits, even though it is refusing to invest in the journalistic rigor and stability of the media," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Friday. According to a study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, the views of Canadian news on Facebook dropped 90% after the company blocked access to news on the platform. Local news outlets have been hit particularly hard. "The loss of journalism on Meta platforms represents a significant decline in the resiliency of the Canadian media ecosystem," said Taylor Owen, a researcher at McGill and the co-author of the study. He believes it also hurts Meta's brand in the long run, pointing to the fact that the Canada's federal government, as well as that of British Columbia, other municipalities and a handful of large Canadian corporations, have all pulled their advertising off Facebook and Instagram in retaliation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a notice on Monday, Xfinity notified customers of a "data security incident" that resulted in the theft of customer information, including usernames, passwords, contact information, and more. The Verge reports: Xfinity traces the breach to a security vulnerability disclosed by cloud computing company Citrix, which began alerting customers of a flaw in software Xfinity and other companies use on October 10th. While Xfinity says it patched the security hole, it later uncovered suspicious activity on its internal systems "that was concluded to be a result of this vulnerability." The hack resulted in the theft of customer usernames and hashed passwords, according to Xfinity's notice. Meanwhile, "some customers" may have had their names, contact information, last four digits of their social security numbers, dates of birth, and / or secret questions and answers exposed. Xfinity has notified federal law enforcement about the incident and says "data analysis is continuing." We still don't know how many users were affected by the breach. Xfinity will automatically ask customers to change their passwords the next time they log in to their accounts, and it's also encouraging users to turn on two-factor authentication. You can find the full notice, including contact information for the company's incident response team, on Xfinity's website (PDF). UPDATE 12/19/23: According to TechCrunch, almost 36 million Xfinity customers had their sensitive information accessed by hackers via a vulnerability known as "CitrixBleed." The vulnerability is "found in Citrix networking devices often used by big corporations and has been under mass-exploitation by hackers since late August," the report says. "Citrix made patches available in early October, but many organizations did not patch in time. Hackers have used the CitrixBleed vulnerability to hack into big-name victims, including aerospace giant Boeing, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and international law firm Allen & Overy." "In a filing with Maine's attorney general, Comcast confirmed that almost 35.8 million customers are affected by the breach. Comcast's latest earnings report shows the company has more than 32 million broadband customers, suggesting this breach has impacted most, if not all Xfinity customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Imported raw materials such as steel and cement will incur a new carbon tax from 2027 under UK plans designed to support domestic producers and reduce emissions, but the government is facing criticism for not moving fast enough. From a report: The Treasury said the tax would help address the phenomenon of "carbon leakage," in which UK manufacturers are undercut on price by foreign rivals whose governments do not impose levies on businesses that emit a lot of carbon. The result is that emissions are simply displaced to other countries, while greener UK producers lose out because they have to pay carbon-related charges. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said: "This levy will make sure carbon intensive products from overseas -- like steel and ceramics -- face a comparable carbon price to those produced in the UK, so that our decarbonisation efforts translate into reductions in global emissions. "This should give UK industry the confidence to invest in decarbonisation as the world transitions to net zero."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of the 1.3 million stolen files of Sony division Insomniac Games that hackers have leaked, the data dump includes game roadmaps, budgets, and detailed information about Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game, which a document says is slated for 2026. Bloomberg reports: According to the files, Sony plans to release several Marvel-inspired titles in the next decade, including Spider-Man 3, based on Venom and X-Men games. The files also reference a new Ratchet & Clank game apparently slated for 2029. Insomniac and Marvel's licensing commitment is as high as $621 million to develop and market the X-Men games by 2035, according to one document, which was one of many circulating on the internet. The documents also give us a peak into how Sony internally felt about Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard. Eurogamer adds: Sony has privately described Microsoft's $68.7bn takeover of Activision Blizzard as a potential "leapfrog" moment for its long-term console rival to take the lead. Threats identified by Sony include Microsoft using Call of Duty to "disrupt and threaten console gaming and game subscription markets", with a potential "massive threat to PlayStation Plus." [...] "Activision provides incredible strategic value across live service games, scale in mobile and PC storefront (Battle.net)," Sony wrote, describing the various advantages Microsoft has now added to its portfolio with the deal freshly completed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A anonymous reader shares a report: Shopping on Amazon.com has long entailed scrolling through pages and pages of often redundant customer feedback. In an effort to make the task less onerous, the company in August began using artificial intelligence to convert billions of reviews into brief summaries consisting of a few sentences apiece. As is often true with generative AI, the results aren't perfect. In some cases, the summaries provide an inaccurate description of a product. In others, they exaggerate negative feedback. This has potential implications not just for customers, but for Amazon merchants who depend on positive reviews to boost sales. Making matters worse, merchants say, the summaries were deployed just as they were headed into the crucial holiday shopping season -- giving them one more thing to worry about besides inflation-battered shoppers. Most shoppers can probably tell when the AI has misclassified a product. For example, the home fitness company Teeter sells an inversion table designed to ease back pain. Amazon's AI generated summary calls it a desk: "Customers like the sturdiness, adjustability and pain relief of the desk." The technology's tendency to overplay negative sentiment in some reviews is less obvious. The $70 Brass Birmingham board game, for instance, boasts a 4.7-star rating based on feedback from more than 500 shoppers. A three-sentence AI summary of reviews ends with: "However, some customer have mixed opinions on ease of use." Only four reviews mention ease of use in a way that could be interpreted as critical. That's fewer than 1% of the overall ratings, yet the negative sentiment accounts for about a third of the AI-generated blurb.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba will be delisted on Wednesday after 74 years on the Tokyo exchange, following a decade of upheaval and scandal that brought down one of Japan's biggest brands and ushered in a buyout and an uncertain future. From a report: The conglomerate is being taken private by a group of investors led by private equity firm Japan Industrial Partners that also includes financial services firm Orix, utility Chubu Electric Power and chipmaker Rohm. The $14 billion takeover puts Toshiba in domestic hands after protracted battles with overseas activist investors that paralysed the maker of batteries, chips, and nuclear and defence equipment. Although it is not clear what shape Toshiba will ultimately take under its new owners, Chief Executive Taro Shimada, who is staying in his role following the buyout, is expected to focus on high-margin digital services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A ransomware group that claimed to have successfully hacked Insomniac Games has now leaked the vast majority of its stolen files. From a report: Last week ransomware group Rhysida threatened to expose sensitive data about the company, its employees and its upcoming games, if it wasn't paid for the data. It then published data online which appeared to corroborate its claim that it had successfully hacked the Sony-owned studio, including an annotated screenshot from Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game. The group then threatened to publish the stolen data within seven days, but first offered it for auction with a starting price of 50 Bitcoins (approximately $2 million). Now, according to Cyber Daily, Rhysida has followed through with its threat and posted more than 1.3 million files totalling 1.67 terabytes to its darknet leak site. Around 98% of the hacked data has been leaked, with Rhysida stating that "not sold data was uploaded," implying that the remaining 2% may have been sold to someone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An international group of law enforcement agencies have seized the dark web leak site of the notorious ransomware gang known as ALPHV, or BlackCat. From a report: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against ALPHV Blackcat Ransomware," a message on the gang's dark web leak site now reads, seen by TechCrunch. According to the splash, the takedown operation also involved law enforcement agencies from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Australia. In a later announcement confirming the disruption, the U.S. Department of Justice said that the international takedown effort, led by the FBI, enabled U.S. authorities to gain visibility into the ransomware group's computer to seize "several websites" that ALPHV operated. The FBI also released a decryption tool that has already enabled more than 500 ALPHV ransomware victims to restore their systems. (The government's search warrant puts the number at 400 victims.) The FBI said it worked with dozens of victims in the United States, saving them from paying ransom demands totaling approximately $68 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India consumes more groundwater. That's testing India's ability to feed itself and much of the world. From a report: The South Asian nation is already the world's largest guzzler of groundwater. Cheap power has encouraged routine overreliance on finite riches. India overwhelmingly grows some of the thirstiest crops: rice, wheat and sugar cane. Over the last half century, farm productivity has leapt forward, but so, too, has water usage -- up 500% over that period, according to the World Bank. Erratic monsoons and brutal heat waves are only making the problem more acute. Farmers are digging deeper wells because existing ones are no longer refilling. Some regions may run out of groundwater entirely -- Punjab, a major wheat producer, could go dry within the next 15 or so years, according to a former state official. States in southern India are battling over water rights in areas where rampant urban development has drained thousands of lakes. The government is not blind to the crisis. But with a national election on the horizon next year, there's little to gain in pushing actively for change among farmers, one of the most important voting blocs in the country. Any long-term solution will involve tinkering with farm subsidies or the minimum price set for water-intensive crops. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party is all too aware that farmers from India's grain-growing northern regions dominated months of protests against proposed agrarian reforms from late 2020. Modi was forced to withdraw the proposals. For now, it's clear the water math does not add up. Modi has promised piped water to all Indian households by 2024. Yet nearly half of India's 1.4 billion residents already face high-to-extreme water stress, and the world's most populous nation is expected to add more than 200 million more people by 2050. Agriculture, meanwhile, accounts for 90% of water use, helping to explain why Indian officials say the clearest strategy for preserving supplies is modernizing the industry. The government has tried to convince farmers to adopt different irrigation technologies, return to traditional rain harvesting and plant less thirsty crops like millets, pulses and oilseeds. Nothing has yet made a substantial difference, in a country where subsidies supporting wheat and rice persist, and farming is dominated by smallholders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.