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General Motors' Cruise robotaxi unit announced today that it will lay off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce. The news follows the departure of nine executives amid an ongoing safety investigation following an inccident in which a pedestrian was dragged by one of the company's self-driving cars. CNBC reports: The company had 3,800 employees before Thursday's cuts, which also follow a round of contractor layoffs at Cruise last month. Affected employees will receive paychecks until Feb. 12 and at least an additional eight weeks of pay, plus severance based on tenure. A Cruise representative also told CNBC that the company's goal is now to work on a fully driverless L4 service, as well as relaunching ride-hailing in one city to start. In a statement, a Cruise spokesperson said, "We shared the difficult news that we are reducing our workforce, primarily in commercial operations and related corporate functions. These changes reflect our decision to focus on more deliberate commercialization plans with safety as our north star. We are supporting impacted Cruisers with strong severance and benefits packages and are grateful to the departing employees who played important roles in building Cruise and supporting our mission." GM added, "GM supports the difficult employment decisions made by Cruise as it reflects their more deliberate path forward, with safety as the north star. We are confident in the team and committed to supporting Cruise as they set the company up for long-term success with a focus on trust, accountability and transparency."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe said US regulators are probing the company's cancellation rules for software subscriptions, an issue that has long been a source of ire for customers. From a report: The company has been cooperating with the Federal Trade Commission on a civil investigation of the issue since June 2022, Adobe said Wednesday in a filing. A settlement could involve "significant monetary costs or penalties," the company said. Users of Adobe programs including Photoshop and Premiere have long complained about the expense of canceling a subscription, which can cost more than $700 annually for individuals. Subscribers must cancel within two weeks of buying a subscription to receive a full refund; otherwise, they incur a prorated penalty. Some other digital services such as Spotify and Netflix don't charge a cancellation fee. Digital subscriptions have been a recent focus for the FTC. It proposed a rule in March that consumers must be able to cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up for them. "Too often, companies make it difficult to unsubscribe from a service, wasting Americans' time and money on things they may not want or need," President Joe Biden said in a social media post at the time. Adobe said the FTC alerted the company in November that commission staff say "they had the authority to enter into consent negotiations to determine if a settlement regarding their investigation of these issues could be reached. We believe our practices comply with the law and are currently engaging in discussion with FTC staff."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Economist reports: "Shake, shake, shake, shake," Taylor Swift sings from the stage of Lumen Field in Seattle at 10.35 in the evening on July 22nd. The fans respond, enthusiastically; the stadium duly shakes; a nearby seismometer takes note. To pop aficionados "Shake it off" is an empowering up-tempo anthem played at 160 beats per minute. To the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which is designed to monitor earthquakes, it is a 2.6 hertz signal in which the amplitude of the acceleration was as large as one centimetre per second, per second. The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as "Beast Mode." The "Beast Quake" went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco. [...] Dr Caplan-Auerbach wanted to see whether such resonant amplification might also be at play elsewhere, and to distinguish between the effect of the music itself and the audience's response. Her concert-night data showed two distinct sets of signals, one in higher frequencies (30-80hz), one in lower frequencies (1-8hz). The higher-frequency signals were present during the sound check, when the band were on stage but the stadium empty, and absent during the concerts' "surprise songs," played without the band by Ms Swift alone. The lower frequencies were absent when the audience had yet to arrive. Clearly those higher frequencies were from the music itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Information: In the future, [Google] plans to use Gemini across nearly its entire line of products, from its search engine to its productivity applications and an AI assistant called Pixie that will be exclusive to its Pixel devices, two people familiar with the matter said. [...] The rollout of Pixie, an AI assistant exclusively for Pixel devices, could boost Google's hardware business at a time when tech companies are racing to integrate their hardware with new AI capabilities. Pixie will use the information on a customer's phone -- including data from Google products like Maps and Gmail -- to evolve into a far more personalized version of the Google Assistant, according to one of the people with knowledge of the project. The feature could launch as soon as next year with the Pixel 9 and the 9 Pro, this person said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel launched its Intel Core Ultra processors for AI-powered PCs at its AI Everywhere event today. From a report: The big chip maker said these processors spearhead a new era in computing, offering unparalleled power efficiency, superior compute and graphics performance, and an unprecedented AI PC experience to mobile platforms and edge devices. Available immediately, these processors will be used in over 230 AI PCs coming from renowned partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, and more. The Intel Core Ultra processors represent an architectural shift for Intel, marking its largest design change in 40 years. These processors harness the Intel 4 process technology and Foveros 3D advanced packaging, leveraging leading-edge processes for optimal performance and capabilities. The processors boast a performance-core (P-core) architecture enhancing instructions per cycle (IPC). Efficient-cores (E-cores) and low-power Efficient-cores (LP E-cores). They deliver up to 11% more compute power compared to competitors, ensuring superior CPU performance for ultrathin PCs. Features of Intel Core Ultra Intel Arc GPU: Featuring up to eight Xe-cores, this GPU incorporates AI-based Xe Super Sampling, offering double the graphics performance compared to prior generations. It includes support for modern graphics features like ray tracing, mesh shading, AV1 encode and decode, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.1 20G.AI Boost NPU: Intel's latest NPU, Intel AI Boost, focuses on low-power, long-running AI tasks, augmenting AI processing on the CPU and GPU, offering 2.5x better power efficiency compared to its predecessors.Advanced Performance Capabilities: With up to 16 cores, 22 threads, and Intel Thread Director for optimized workload scheduling, these processors boast a maximum turbo frequency of 5.1 GHz and support for up to 96 GB DDR5 memory capacity.Cutting-edge Connectivity: Integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6E and support for discrete Intel Wi-Fi 7 deliver blazing wireless speeds, while Thunderbolt 4 ensures connectivity to multiple 4K monitors and fast storage with speeds of 40 Gbps.Enhanced AI Performance: OpenVINO toolkits, ONNX, and ONNX Runtime offer streamlined workflow, automatic device detection, and enhanced AI performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pope Francis has called for a legally binding international treaty to regulate AI, saying algorithms must not be allowed to replace human values and warning of a "technological dictatorship" threatening human existence. From a report: The pope made his call on Thursday in a message for the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Peace, which is celebrated on Jan. 1. The title of the message, which is traditionally sent to world leaders and heads of institutions such as the United Nations, is "Artificial Intelligence and Peace." [...] "The global scale of artificial intelligence makes it clear that, alongside the responsibility of sovereign states to regulate its use internally, international organizations can play a decisive role in reaching multilateral agreements and coordinating their application and enforcement," Francis wrote in the message. "I urge the global community of nations to work together in order to adopt a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms," the pope said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After investigating reports that some users aren't getting iMessages on Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud, Beeper says that Apple seems to be "deliberately blocking" iMessages from being delivered to about five percent of Beeper Mini users. From a report: The company says that uninstalling and reinstalling the app fixes the issue and that it's working on a broader fix. Apple didn't immediately reply to a request for comment about Beeper's new claim, and it hasn't replied to my original request for comment, either. But given that the company has already blocked Beeper Mini before, it's not too surprising that it seems to be taking action against the app again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn has set aside an effort to relocate its data center technology out of its physical facilities and into Microsoft's Azure cloud, CNBC reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The decision not to proceed with the project, code-named "Blueshift," marks a major reversal for LinkedIn, which announced its plan to move to Azure in 2019, three years after Microsoft acquired the company for $27 billion. LinkedIn had been using Azure for specific tasks. The U-turn represents a setback for Microsoft, which is chasing Amazon Web Services in the lucrative cloud infrastructure market and has been counting on cloud technology and services to fuel much of its growth. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ran the cloud business before elevation to his current job in 2014. Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn's vice president of engineering, wrote in a 2019 blog post announcing Blueshift that "moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale." Staffers started to learn of the decision not to follow through with the Azure migration last year, said the sources, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality. Executives stressed that the project was being put on hold, rather than getting canceled altogether, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dropbox has enabled a default setting to share user data with OpenAI for an AI search feature, but says it's only accessed when the feature is used, not to train models, and deleted in 30 days. From a report: Even with assurances of data privacy laid out by Dropbox on an AI privacy FAQ page, the discovery that the setting had been enabled by default upset some Dropbox users. The setting was first noticed by writer Winifred Burton, who shared information about the Third-party AI setting through Bluesky on Tuesday, and frequent AI critic Karla Ortiz shared more information about it on X. Wednesday afternoon, Drew Houston, the CEO of Dropbox, apologized for customer confusion in a post on X and wrote, "The third-party AI toggle in the settings menu enables or disables access to DBX AI features and functionality. Neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third-party AI service."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association have no trouble envisioning an AI-centered future, but developments over the past year are reason for concern. The association takes offense when AI models exploit the generosity of science fiction writers, who share their work without DRM and free of charge. [...] Over the past few months, we have seen a variety of copyright lawsuits, many of which were filed by writers. These cases target ChatGPT's OpenAI but other platforms are targeted as well. A key allegation in these complaints is that the AI was trained using pirated books. For example, several authors have just filed an amended complaint against Meta, alleging that the company continued to train its AI on pirated books despite concerns from its own legal team. This clash between AI and copyright piqued the interest of the U.S. Copyright Office which launched an inquiry asking the public for input. With more than 10,000 responses, it is clear that the topic is close to the hearts of many people. It's impossible to summarize all opinions without AI assistance, but one submission stood out to us in particular; it encourages the free sharing of books while recommending that AI tools shouldn't be allowed to exploit this generosity for free. The submission was filed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), which represents over 2,500 published writers. The association is particularly concerned with the suggestion that its members' works can be used for AI training under a fair use exception. SFWA sides with many other rightsholders, concluding that pirated books shouldn't be used for AI training, adding that the same applies to books that are freely shared by many Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. [...] Many of the authors strongly believe that freely sharing stories is a good thing that enriches mankind, but that doesn't automatically mean that AI has the same privilege if the output is destined for commercial activities. The SFWA stresses that it doesn't take offense when AI tools use the works of its members for non-commercial purposes, such as research and scholarship. However, turning the data into a commercial tool goes too far. AI freeloading will lead to unfair competition and cause harm to licensing markets, the writers warn. The developers of the AI tools have attempted to tone down these concerns but the SFWA is not convinced. [...] The writers want to protect their rights but they don't believe in the extremely restrictive position of some other copyright holders. They don't subscribe to the idea that people will no longer buy books because they can get the same information from an AI tool, for example. However, authors deserve some form of compensation. SFWA argues that all stakeholders should ultimately get together to come up with a plan that works for everyone. This means fair compensation and protection for authors, without making it financially unviable for AI to flourish. "Questions of 'how' and 'when' and 'how much money' all come later; first and foremost the author must have the right to say how their work is used," their submission reads. "So long as authors retain the right to say 'no' we believe that equitable solutions to the thorny problems of licensing, scale, and market harm can be found. But that right remains the cornerstone, and we insist upon it," SFWA concludes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Grunge music: a source of validation for a generation of disaffected youth. And a surprising source of scientific inspiration for Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. While listening to Soundgarden's 1994 hit Black Hole Sun 2 years ago, he contemplated a curious question: Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? A new study by Bellinger and colleagues suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. Astronomers could detect these trapped black holes by the vibrations they cause on the star's surface. And if there's enough of them out there, they could function as the mysterious dark matter that holds the universe together. The researchers found that the black holes would sink to the star's core where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion to produce heat and light. At first, very little would happen. Even a dense stellar core is mostly empty space. The most microscopic of the black holes would have a hard time finding matter to consume and its growth would be extremely slow, Bellinger says. "It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe to eat the star." But larger ones, roughly as massive as the asteroid Ceres or the dwarf planet Pluto, would get bigger on timescales of only a few hundred million years. Material would spiral onto the black hole, forming a disk that would heat up through friction and emit radiation. Once the black hole was about as massive as Earth, it would produce significant amounts of radiation, shining brightly and churning up the star's core like pot of boiling water. "It will become a black hole -- powered object rather than fusion-powered object," says study co-author Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University. He and his colleagues have dubbed these entities "Hawking stars." The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has spotted about 500 such anomalously cool giant stars, known as red stragglers, Bellinger says. To figure out whether these might actually be hiding a black hole, he says, astronomers could tune in to the particular frequencies at which the stars vibrate. Because a Hawking star would churn throughout its interior, rather than just in the topmost layers like an ordinary red giant, it would be expected to thrum with a particular combination of frequencies. Such waves can be detected in the way the star's light pulses and throbs. Bellinger is applying for funding to study the known red stragglers and see whether any display the characteristic vibrations of a black hole. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists are exploring infrasound, low-frequency sound waves produced by tornadoes to develop more accurate early warning systems for these destructive storms. The hope is that eavesdropping on infrasound signals, which travel for hundreds of miles, could provide up to two hours of advance warning. The BBC reports: Scientists have been listening to tornadoes and trying to work out whether they produce a unique sound since the 1970s. Experimental evidence suggests that low-frequency infrasound, with a frequency range of 1-10Hz , is produced while a tornado is taking shape and throughout its life. One recent set of measurements from a tornado near Lakin, Kansas in May 2020 revealed that the twister produced a distinct, elevated signal between 10Hz and 15Hz. In some cases arrays of infrasound detecting microphones have been shown to pick up the noise produced by tornadoes from more than 100km (60 miles) away and have also indicated that the infrasound is produced before tornadogenesis even begins. Researchers hope that by eavesdropping on these noises, it may be possible to not only hear a tornado coming but perhaps even predict them up to two hours before they form. Since 2020, a team from Oklahoma State University has been testing infrasound's predictive powers using equipment installed in tornado-chasing vehicles. Their portable kit, the Ground-based Local Infrasound Data Acquisition, or "Glinda", system, references a character from The Wizard of Oz. They hope the equipment will help storm chasers to better monitor the development of tornadoes in real time, but requires the equipment to be deployed to the right place at the right time. Some researchers, however, are working on systems that can be left to permanently monitor for tornadoes. One group, led by Roger Waxler, principal scientist at the National Centre for Physical Acoustics (NCPA) based at the University of Mississippi, are planning to deploy four permanent arrays of high-tech sensors in south Mississippi to detect infrasound signals. They hope the system will provide a way of consistently monitoring and detecting tornadoes. [...] Waxler and his team hope their decade-long experiment will lead to an effective early warning system for tornadoes, particularly when combined with other sources such as doppler radar. "It's not unreasonable that we could localize a tornado to half a football field," adds Waxler. "I envision seeing a map on an app with a dot that shows there's a tornado coming up South Lamar [Avenue, for example]." Warnings have improved in recent decades: from 2003 to 2017, 87% of deadly tornadoes were preceded by an advance warning, but people still have an average of just 10-15 minutes to find shelter. A study based on interviews with 23 survivors of two deadly tornadoes found that people tried to evaluate and respond to the risk of a tornado as the situation evolved, but some did not have a place to shelter easily. Experts believe tornado warnings are too often ignored due to "warning fatigue" created by false alarms and hours of televised storm coverage. One study found 37% of people surveyed did not understand the need for taking precautionary measures during a tornado warning. Waxler hopes that a more accurate early warning system could change the way people respond when they hear a storm is approaching. "Rather than going to hide in your bathtub or cellar, it might be a better idea to get in your car and drive if you know where a tornado is. "The goal is to save lives."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Brain organoids, clumps of human brain cells grown in a dish, can be hooked up to an electronic chip and carry out simple computational tasks, a new study shows. Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, known as Brainoware, to an AI tool. They found that this hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition. The work, published today in Nature Electronics, could one day lead to new kinds of bio-computers that are more efficient than conventional computers. "This is a first demonstration of using brain organoids [for computing]," says Guo. "It's exciting to see the possibilities of organoids for biocomputing in the future." With Brainoware, Guo aimed to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation to the hybrid system they'd built, Brainoware responded to those signals, and changes occurred in its neural networks. According to the researchers, this result suggests that the hybrid system did process information, and could perhaps even perform computing tasks without supervision. Guo and his colleagues then attempted to see if Brainoware could perform any useful tasks. In one test, they used Brainoware to try to solve mathematical equations. They also gave it a benchmark test for speech recognition, using 240 audio clips of eight people pronouncing Japanese vowels. The clips were converted into electrical signals and applied to the Brainoware system. This generated signals in the neural networks of the brain organoid, which were then fed into an AI tool for decoding. The researchers found that the brain organoid -- AI system could decode the signals from the audio recordings, which is a form of speech recognition, says Guo. "But the accuracy was low," he says. Although the system improved with training, reaching an accuracy of about 78%, it was still less accurate than artificial neural networks, according to the study. Lena Smirnova, an assistant professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, points out that brain organoids do not have the ability to truly hear speech but simply exhibit "a reaction" to pulses of electrical stimulation from the audio clips. And the study did not demonstrate whether Brainoware can process and store information over the long term or learn multiple tasks. Generating brain cell cultures in a lab and maintaining them long enough to perform computations is also a huge undertaking. Still, she adds, "it's a really good demonstration that shows the capabilities of brain organoids."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Maps will soon give you the option to store your location data on your device instead of in the cloud. Android Police reports: In the coming year, Google is planning to switch things up by defaulting to saving your Timeline directly on your device instead of the cloud. You'll also have the option to wipe out bits or the whole information dossier whenever you want and disable location history completely. When you're jumping ship to a new device and want to keep your data close, you always have the option to back it up in the cloud. Google assures you that it'll lock it up with encryption. Another significant update is the shorter default amount of time before your location history is auto-deleted. Soon, when you turn on location history, the default auto-delete time shrinks to three months. In the past, it used to hang around for 18 months by default. If you're the sentimental type, you can extend the Timeline's lifespan or turn off the auto-delete option. Google Maps has another nifty trick up its sleeve: soon, you can erase all traces of your trips with just a few taps. Say you've got a favorite hangout spot and you want to keep it to yourself. You can wipe the slate clean right from the app, whether it's searches, directions, visits, or shares. This handy feature is making its debut on Maps for Android and iOS in the next few weeks. Finally, you will soon be able to click on the blue dot on the map to view your Location History and Timeline at a glance. It allows you to tweak what you share and store on Maps, all without having to dive into the settings. Currently, the blue dot only gives you some neat shortcuts for parking saves and location sharing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Reuters, General Motors' Cruise robotaxi unit dismissed nine executives amid an ongoing safety investigation, which the company confirmed included Chief Operating Officer Gil West. The company conducted a full safety review following an incident in San Francisco where a pedestrian was struck and dragged by one of its cars. GM already halted service nationwide and removed its cars from public roads. Reuters reports: CEO Kyle Vogt and co-founder Dan Kan both resigned in recent weeks and Cruise is preparing for a round of layoffs this month. "Following an initial analysis of the October 2 incident and Cruise's response to it, nine individuals departed Cruise," according to the memo. "We are committed to full transparency and are focused on rebuilding trust and operating with the highest standards when it comes to safety, integrity, and accountability," the memo said. "As a result, we believe that new leadership is necessary to achieve these goals." The Cruise spokesperson confirmed that among those dismissed was also Chief Legal and Policy Officer Jeff Bleich and Senior Vice President of Government Affairs David Estrada. Cruise's troubles are also a setback for an industry dependent on public trust and the cooperation of regulators. The unit had in recent months touted ambitious plans to expand to more cities, offering fully autonomous taxi rides. The investigation, led by law firm Quinn Emmanuel, is expected to last until January, GM has said. "The personnel decisions made today are a necessary step for Cruise to move forward as it focuses on accountability, trust and transparency," GM said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A beta version of the Xbox Cloud Gaming app is now available for the Meta Quest headsets, allowing you to stream hundreds of Xbox games with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. The Verge reports: The beta app is available from the Meta Quest Store, and you'll simply need to pair a supported Bluetooth controller to start playing. You can use an Xbox controller (that supports Bluetooth), a PS4 one, or even Nintendo's Switch Pro controllers. Support for PS5 controllers is "coming in the future," according to Meta. There are a variety of display sizes for an immersive VR environment to stream Xbox games in or even an Xbox-themed virtual space on the latest Quest 3 and Pro headsets that takes advantage of full-color passthrough.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Some two years of talking about gig worker rights later and European Union lawmakers have finally reached a deal on the final shape of the Platform Worker Directive. [...] The Commission presented its original plan to reform labor laws to boost protections for platform workers back in December 2021, setting out a presumption of employment for workers in a bid to flip the odds on gig economy exploitation. But the proposal proved contentious, with heavy industry lobbying from tech platforms such as Uber pushing for gig workers to be carved out of Europe's employment protections. There were also divisions between Member States over how much worker protection vs platform shielding they were prepared to commit to. But after a final trilogue, lasting more than 12 hours, a provisional agreement has been clinched. The deal that's been provisionally agreed means a presumption of an employment relationship between a gig worker and a platform will be triggered when two out of a list of five "indicators of control or direction are present," as the parliament's press release puts it. "This list can be expanded by Member States. The presumption can be triggered by the worker, by their representatives, and by the competent authorities on their own initiative. This presumption can be rebutted if the platform proves that the contractual relationship is not an employment relationship," it adds. The agreement also contains transparency provisions that will require platforms to provide information to individuals performing platform work (and to their representatives) about how the algorithms that manage them work; and how their behavior affects decisions taken by automated systems. [...] The provisionally agreed new rules will also ban platforms from taking "certain important decisions," such as dismissals or decisions to suspend an account, without human oversight. Per the parliament, the agreed text also ensures "more human oversight on the decisions of systems that directly affect the persons performing platform work"; and obliges platforms to "assess the impact of decisions taken or supported by automated monitoring and decision-making systems on working conditions, health and safety and fundamental rights". So conducting data protection impact assessments looks set to be a hard requirement for complying with the new law. Another prohibition that's been agreed is a ban on platforms from processing certain types of personal data of workers, including personal beliefs, private exchanges with colleagues, or when a worker is not at work -- with the Directive billed as beefing up data protection rights for platform workers. Other provisions in the provisional deal include a requirement for platforms to share information on self-employed workers in their employ with competent national authorities and representatives of those performing platform work, such as trade unions. Measures to prevent platforms from circumventing the rules by using intermediaries has also been agreement -- a practice that's stepped up considerably in Spain since the country introduced its own labor reform, back in 2021, with the aim of forcing platforms to hire delivery workers. Some key details of exactly what's been agreed remain under wraps -- and full visibility and analysis of the ramifications will likely have to wait for a consolidated text to emerge in the coming weeks/months. [...] The final text still needs to be voted on by the Council and Parliament before it can be adopted as pan-EU law. What implementation period has been agreed also isn't yet clear. But today's political deal signals the train has now left the station.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, General Motors announced plans to phase out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, shifting instead to built-in infotainment systems developed with Google. Now, the company has explained why it made that decision to MotorTrend: Tim Babbitt, GM's head of product for infotainment, gave MT a better explanation at a press event for the new Chevrolet Blazer EV, the flagship vehicle in the no CarPlay or Android Auto strategy. According to him, there's an important factor that didn't make it into the fact sheet: safety. Specifically, he cited driver distraction caused by cell phone usage behind the wheel. According to Babbitt, CarPlay and Android Auto have stability issues that manifest themselves as bad connections, poor rendering, slow responses, and dropped connections. And when CarPlay and Android Auto have issues, drivers pick up their phones again, taking their eyes off the road and totally defeating the purpose of these phone-mirroring programs. Solving those issues can sometimes be beyond the control of the automaker. You can start to see GM's frustration. Babbitt's thesis is that if drivers were to do everything through the vehicle's built-in systems, they'd be less likely to pick up their phones and therefore less distracted and safer behind the wheel. He admits, though, GM hasn't tested this thesis in the lab or real world yet but believes it has potential, if customers go for it. The issues Babbitt cited with CarPlay and Android Auto seem like they'd be mostly linked to using those programs wirelessly, and while he says that's true, just plugging the phone into a USB data port doesn't solve all the problems. Babbitt says even when using a physical connection, Android phones are prone to compatibility issues between the vehicle and all the various phone manufacturers running Android. iPhones, meanwhile, suffer from backwards compatibility issues that cause older iPhone models to have trouble running CarPlay consistently. He points to J.D. Power data that shows issues with CarPlay and Android Auto are common owner complaints, and that customers tend to blame the automaker rather than the phone manufacturer or phone software. In that way, eliminating CarPlay and Android Auto potentially relieves GM of a key customer complaint dragging down their perceived quality scores. After MotorTrend's story was published, GM issued the following statement: "We wanted to reach out to clarify that comments about GM's position on phone projection were misrepresented and to reinforce our valued partnerships with Apple and Google and each company's commitment to driver safety. GM's embedded infotainment strategy is driven by the benefits of having a system that allows for greater integration with the larger GM ecosystem and vehicles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has struck a deal with Politico parent company Axel Springer, allowing ChatGPT to summarize news stories from Politico and Business Insider. CNBC reports: Once the OpenAI-Axel Springer deal goes into effect, when a user asks ChatGPT a question, it will respond with summaries of news articles from media outlets such as Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt. The chatbot will also include articles that would otherwise be limited to subscribers of those outlets, according to a release, and the answers will include "attribution and links to the full articles for transparency." The partnership follows a deal that OpenAI struck with the Associated Press in July, allowing it to license the AP's news archive for training data. As part of the agreement, Axel Springer will provide content from its media brands as training data for OpenAI's large language models, such as GPT-4, the AI model that helps power ChatGPT. The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 publishers, released research in October suggesting that data sets used to train popular AI models rely "significantly" more on publisher content, outweighing it by a factor ranging from over five to almost 100, compared to generic web content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For those looking for a more rigorous way of comparing various models, the folks over at the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSys) have set up Chatbot Arena, a platform for generating Elo-style rankings for LLMs based on a crowdsourced blind-testing website. Chatbot Arena users can enter any prompt they can think of into the site's form to see side-by-side responses from two randomly selected models. The identity of each model is initially hidden, and results are voided if the model reveals its identity in the response itself. The user then gets to pick which model provided what they judge to be the "better" result, with additional options for a "tie" or "both are bad." Only after providing a pairwise ranking does the user get to see which models they were judging, though a separate "side-by-side" section of the site lets users pick two specific models to compare (without the ability to contribute a vote on the result). Since its public launch back in May, LMSys says it has gathered over 130,000 blind pairwise ratings across 45 different models (as of early December). Those numbers seem poised to increase quickly after a recent positive review from OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy that has already led to what LMSys describes as "a super stress test" for its servers. Chatbot Arena's thousands of pairwise ratings are crunched through a Bradley-Terry model, which uses random sampling to generate an Elo-style rating estimating which model is most likely to win in direct competition against any other. Interested parties can also dig into the raw data of tens of thousands of human prompt/response ratings for themselves or examine more detailed statistics, such as direct pairwise win rates between models and confidence interval ranges for those Elo estimates. Chatbot Arena's latest public leaderboard update shows a few proprietary models easily beating out a wide range of open-source alternatives. OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 Turbo leads the pack by a wide margin, with only an older GPT-4 model ("0314," which was discontinued in June) coming anywhere close on the ratings scale. But even months-old, defunct versions of GPT-3.5 Turbo outrank the highest-rated open-source models available in Chatbot Arena's testbed. Anthropic's proprietary Claude models also feature highly in Chatbot Arena's top rankings. Oddly enough, though, the site's blind human testing tends to rank the older Claude-1 slightly higher than the subsequent releases of Claude-2.0 and Claude-2.1. Among the tested non-proprietary models, the Llama-based Tulu 2 and 01.ai's Yi get rankings that are comparable to some older GPT-3.5 implementations. Past that, there's a slow but steady decline until you get to models like Dolly and StableLM at the bottom of the pack (amid older versions of many models that have more recent, higher-ranking updates on Chatbot Arena's charts).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers unbricked a train in Poland that had been deliberately disabled by its manufacturer. Now the manufacturer is threatening legal action against the hackers despite evidence it sabotaged the trains. From a report: The manufacturer is also now demanding that the repaired trains immediately be removed from service because they have been "hacked," and thus might now be unsafe, a claim they also cannot substantiate. The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train's control systems that prevented them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent a certain number of days in an independent repair company's maintenance center, and also prevented it from running if certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number. This anti-repair mechanism is called "parts pairing," and is a common frustration for farmers who want to repair their John Deere tractors without authorization from the company. It's also used by Apple to prevent independent repair of iPhones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Overclocking AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series blows a fuse, indicating modification. However, AMD has told Tom's Hardware that this does not automatically invalidate the warranty of these top-tier workstation CPUs. From the report: "Threadripper 7000 Series processors do contain a fuse that is blown when overclocking is enabled. To be clear, blowing this fuse does not void your warranty. Statements that enabling an overclocking/overvolting feature will 'void' the processor warranty are not correct. Per AMD's standard Terms of Sale, the warranty excludes any damage that results from overclocking/overvolting the processor. However, other unrelated issues could still qualify for warranty repair/replacement," an AMD representative told Tom's Hardware. In summation, overclocking your Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 or non-Pro processor will not void the warranty -- only damages directly resulting from overclocking will. As always, AMD isn't against overclocking. If it was, the chipmaker wouldn't advertise overclocking support as one of the features of the WRX90 and TRX50 platforms. Only OEM systems lack overclocking support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has said it now requires a judge's order to hand over information about its customers' push notification to law enforcement, putting the iPhone maker's policy in line with rival Google and raising the hurdle officials must clear to get app data about users. From a report: The new policy was not formally announced but appeared sometime over the past few days on Apple's publicly available law enforcement guidelines. It follows the revelation from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that officials were requesting such data from Apple as well as from Google, the unit of Alphabet that makes the operating system for Android phones. Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible "dings" or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers. In a letter first disclosed by Reuters last week, Wyden said the practice gave the two companies unique insight into traffic flowing from those apps to users, putting them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you bought a new smart TV during any of the holiday sales, there's likely to be an uninvited guest watching along with you. The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you're watching and serve you highly targeted ads. The software is largely hidden from view, and it's complicated to opt out. Many consumers aren't aware of ACR, let alone that it's active on their shiny new TVs. If that's you, and you'd like to turn it off, we're going to show you how. First, a quick primer on the tech: ACR identifies what's displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots and comparing them to a massive database of media and advertisements. Think of it as a Shazam-like service constantly running in the background while your TV is on. These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second. The data is then used for content recommendations and ad targeting, which is a huge business; advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads in 2022, according to market research firm eMarketer. For anyone who'd rather not have ACR looking over their shoulder while they watch, we've put together a guide to turning it off on three of the most popular smart TV software platforms in use last year. Depending on the platform, turning off ACR took us between 10 and 37 clicks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is set to be hit by a ban on its App Store rules that govern music-streaming rivals and a potential hefty fine in the European Union's latest attempt to limit the power of Big Tech. From a report: EU regulators are putting the finishing touches to a decision that would prohibit Apple's practice of blocking music services from pushing their users away from the App Store to alternative subscription options, according to people familiar with the investigation. The decision is slated for early next year, they added. As part of the upcoming decision, Apple runs the risk of a potential fine of as much as 10% of its annual sales -- although EU penalties seldom reach that level and orders for companies to change their business models can be more hard-hitting.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's making the second generation of Imagen, its AI model that can create and edit images given a text prompt, more widely available -- at least to Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI who've been approved for access. From a report: But the company isn't disclosing which data it used to train the new model -- nor introducing a way for creators who might've inadvertently contributed to the data set to opt out or apply for compensation. Called Imagen 2, Google's enhanced model -- which was quietly launched in preview at the tech giant's I/O conference in May -- was developed using technology from Google DeepMind, Google's flagship AI lab. Compared to the first-gen Imagen, it's "significantly" improved in terms of image quality, Google claims (the company bizarrely refused to share image samples prior to this morning), and introduces new capabilities including the ability to render text and logos. "If you want to create images with a text overlay -- for example, advertising -- you can do that," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said during a press briefing on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This year has been marked by many terrifying things, but perhaps the most surprising of the 2023 horrors was ... eye drops. The seemingly innocuous teeny squeeze bottle made for alarming headlines numerous times during our current revolution around the sun, with lengthy lists of recalls, startling factory inspections, and ghastly reports of people developing near-untreatable bacterial infections, losing their eyes and vision, and dying. Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled "What You Should Know about Eye Drops" in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market. The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 190 governments at the United Nations climate conference approved an agreement Wednesday calling for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, an accord that bridged differences between big energy-producing nations and countries that want to completely phase out coal, oil and natural gas. From a report: The deal, the result of all-night talks, calls for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner." It says the shift to clean energy for the global economy should accelerate this decade with the aim of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Scientists say that is crucial to fulfilling the Paris accord, the landmark climate agreement that calls for governments to attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. The deal marks the first time a U.N. climate agreement has called for governments to cut back on all fossil fuels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Regulators in the UK are weighing a cap on some of the fees that Visa and Mastercard charge local merchants for each card transaction, seeking to rein in charges that have risen fivefold since Brexit. From a report: After a monthslong review, the UK's Payment Systems Regulator said it's concerned that the payment giants have no effective competition, especially when it comes to the interchange fees they charge UK merchants when a consumer carrying a card issued by a bank in the European Economic Area makes an online purchase. For now, the PSR is proposing to restore those fees to the pre-Brexit levels of 0.3% of a purchase price for credit cards and 0.2% for debit cards. For credit cards, those fees have risen in recent years to as high as 1.5% and the PSR estimated that the increases cost UK businesses as much as $250 million last year. The two companies have been under fire from a bevy of regulators and lawmakers around the world for the fees they charge. While it usually amounts to just pennies per purchase, the fees do add up: US merchants spent a record $160.7 billion on swipe fees last year, up 16.7% from 2021, according to the Nilson Report, an industry publication.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Two years after the Log4Shell vulnerability in the open source Java-based Log4j logging utility was disclosed, circa one in four applications are dependent on outdated libraries, leaving them open to exploitation. Research from security shop Veracode revealed that the vast majority of vulnerable apps may never have updated the Log4j library after it was implemented by developers as 32 percent were running pre-2015 EOL versions. Prior investigations from Veracode also showed that 79 percent of all developers never update third-party libraries after first introducing them into projects, and given that Log4j2 -- the specific version of Log4j affected by the vulnerability -- dates back to 2014, this could explain the large proportion of unpatched apps. A far smaller minority are running versions that were vulnerable at the time of the Log4j vulnerability's disclosure in December 2021. Only 2.8 percent are still using versions 2.0-beta9 through 2.15.0 -- post-EOL versions that remain exposed to Log4Shell, the industry-coined moniker of the vulnerability's exploit. Some 3.8 percent are still running version 2.17, a post-patch version of the Java logger that's not exposed to Log4Shell attacks, but is vulnerable to a separate remote code execution (RCE) bug (CVE-2021-44832). The researchers believe this illustrates a minority of developers that acted quickly when the vulnerability was first disclosed, as was the advice at the time, had returned to older habits of leaving libraries untouched. Altogether, just shy of 35 percent remain vulnerable to Log4Shell, and nearly 40 percent are vulnerable to RCE flaws. The EOL versions of Log4j are also vulnerable to three additional critical bugs announced by Apache, bringing the total to seven high and critical-rated issues. "At a surface level, the numbers above show that the massive effort to remediate the Log4Shell vulnerability was effective in mitigating risk of exploitation of the zero-day vulnerability. That should not be surprising," said Chris Eng, chief research officer at Veracode. "The bigger story at the two-year anniversary, however, is that there is still room for improvement when it comes to open source software security. If Log4Shell was another example in a long series of wake-up calls to adopt more stringent open source security practices, the fact that more than one in three applications currently run vulnerable versions of Log4j shows there is more work to do. "The major takeaway here is that organizations may not be aware of how much open source security risk they are exposed to and how to mitigate it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite being valued at $86 billion by private investors, OpenAI reported $44,485 in revenue in 2022, almost entirely from investment income. CNBC reports: That's from the nonprofit parent's 990 filing with the Internal Revenue Service, a form that has to be filled out by organizations wishing to maintain their tax-exempt status. Federal standards don't require audited financial statements from nonprofits. In its home state of California, OpenAI was able to avoid submitting audited financials for 2022 because the foundation's stated revenue was below the $2 million reporting threshold. The last time OpenAI filed with the state was 2017, when revenue was $33.2 million, or more than 700 times what the foundation reported for 2022. For all its talk of openness, OpenAI's financials remain a black box. Created as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI launched a so-called capped-profit entity in 2019, enabling it to raise billions of dollars in outside funding and attain attributes of a tech startup, such as the ability to hand out equity to employees. The for-profit side of the house went on to develop ChatGPT, the chatbot that took the world by storm late last year and kicked off the generative AI boom. [...] Thad Calabrese, a professor of public and nonprofit financial management at New York University, said OpenAI's current status is confusing, and is unlike anything he has seen in the nonprofit world. He said OpenAI could give up its nonprofit status, and he cited the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which in 1994 allowed associated nonprofit medical insurance plans to switch into for-profit entities. "There's no real need to have the nonprofit," Calabrese said. "If you want to be a startup, be a startup." Regarding OpenAI's reporting with the IRS, he said "fundamentally you can't really get a holistic sense of these organizations when you don't have consolidated financial statements."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, scientists have discovered nuclear fission occurring amongst the stars, supporting the idea that neutron stars create "superheavy" elements when they collide, which then break down via nuclear fission to birth rare elements. Space.com reports: Nuclear fission is basically the opposite of nuclear fusion. While nuclear fusion refers to the smashing of lighter elements to create heavier elements, nuclear fission is a process that sees energy released when heavy elements split apart to create lighter elements. Nuclear fission is pretty well known, too. It's actually the basis of energy-generating nuclear power plants here on Earth -- however, it had not been seen occurring amongst the stars before now. The team of researchers led by North Carolina State University scientist Ian Roederer searched data concerning a wide range of elements in stars to discover the first evidence that nuclear fission could therefore be acting when neutron stars merge. These findings could help solve the mystery of where the universe's heavy elements come from. Scientists know that nuclear fusion is not just the primary source of energy for stars, but also the force that forges a variety of elements, the "heaviest" being iron. The evidence of nuclear fission discovered by [Matthew Mumpower, research co-author and a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory] and the team comes in the form of a correlation between "light precision metals," like silver, and "rare earth nuclei," like europium, showing in some stars. When one of these groups of elements goes up, the corresponding elements in the other group also increases, the scientists saw. The team's research also indicates that elements with atomic masses -- counts of protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus -- greater than 260 may exist around neutron star smashes, even if this existence is brief. This is much heavier than many of the elements at the "heavy end" of the periodic table. "The only plausible way this can arise among different stars is if there is a consistent process operating during the formation of the heavy elements," Mumpower said. "This is incredibly profound and is the first evidence of fission operating in the cosmos, confirming a theory we proposed several years ago." "As we've acquired more observations, the cosmos is saying, 'hey, there's a signature here, and it can only come from fission.'" The research was published in the journal Science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from REVE News: The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects, for the first year on record, combined electricity generation from wind and solar to surpass generation from coal in 2024. EIA expects solar generation in 2024 to increase 39% (228 kilowatthours) from 2023, driven by continued increases in solar capacity. "Renewables, particularly solar photovoltaics, are growing rapidly and making large contributions to electricity generation," DeCarolis said. EIA expects natural gas prices to be $2.77 per million British thermal units this winter, about 23% lower than previously forecast. The winter season is off to a warmer-than-expected start, so U.S. households are consuming less natural gas for heat than expected. The lower natural gas consumption is also contributing to rising U.S. natural gas inventories, which typically results in lower prices. "We're seeing record domestic natural gas production paired with lower-than-expected natural gas demand, and we expect that is going to push prices lower this winter season," DeCarolis said. EIA will publish its next STEO on January 9, 2024, including the agency's first forecasts for the energy sector through 2025. The full report is available on the EIA website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An artificial intelligence campaign volunteer named Ashley is being used to call thousands of Pennsylvania voters on behalf of Democrat Shamaine Daniels, "ushering in a new era of political campaigning in which candidates use technology to engage with voters in ways increasingly difficult to track," reports Reuters. From the report: Like a seasoned campaign volunteer, Ashley analyzes voters' profiles to tailor conversations around their key issues. Unlike a human, Ashley always shows up for the job, has perfect recall of all of Daniels' positions, and does not feel dejected when she's hung up on. "This is going to scale fast," said 30-year-old Ilya Mouzykantskii, the London-based CEO of Civox, the company behind Ashley. "We intend to be making tens of thousands of calls a day by the end of the year and into the six digits pretty soon. This is coming for the 2024 election and it's coming in a very big way. ... The future is now." For Daniels, the tool levels the playing field: as the underdog, she is now armed with another way to understand voters better, reach out in different languages (Ashley is fluent in over 20), and conduct many more "high bandwidth" conversations. Mouzykantskii said he is fully aware of the potential downsides, and does not intend to take any venture capital funding which might entice him to prioritize profits over ethics. Mouzykantskii and his co-founder Adam Reis, former computer science students at Stanford and Columbia Universities respectively, declined to disclose the exact generative AI models they are using. They will only say they use over 20 different AI models, some proprietary and some open-source. Thanks to the latest generative AI technologies, Reis was able to build the product almost entirely on his own, whereas several years ago it would have taken a team of 50 engineers several years to do so, he said. The report notes that there are "few legal guardrails" regulating this particular use of AI. "No rules directly apply to what Civox is doing. Federal Trade Commission regulations ban telemarketers from making robocalls to people on the Do Not Call Registry, but the list does not apply to political calls -- and Civox's activity, with its 'personalized' messages, does not qualify as robocalling."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, Netflix has released a comprehensive report of what people watched on the platform over a six month period. It includes hours viewed for every title, the premiere date for any Netflix show and movie, and whether a title was available globally. From the Hollywood Reporter: The list includes worldwide viewing for more than 18,000 movies and seasons of TV (18,214, to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles all had at least 50,000 hours of viewing over those six months, encompassing about 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, vp strategy and analysis Lauren Smith told reporters during a presentation of the data on Tuesday. It is the deepest dive into viewing that Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever made public. Among the highlights: The Night Agent was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, racking up 812.1 million hours of viewing. Season two of Ginny & Georgia was second at 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama The Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday ranked fourth at 507.7 million hours of viewing, despite being released in November 2022. The company is using total hours viewed in this report as a way to measure engagement by its users rather than the "view" formula (total viewing hours divided by running time) it employs to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists. Original series and movies dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles was more even: About 55 percent of viewing was for originals and 45 percent was for licensed shows and films. Suits, which dominated the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for much of the summer and fall, had a combined 599 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show's first season ranked highest, coming in 67th place with 129.1 million hours. At the other end, a little more than 20 percent of the titles on Netflix's list (3,813 in all) had very little viewing. The company rounded them to 100,000 hours but they would fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours -- barely a drop in the streamer's more than 100 billion total hours of viewing for the six months. The full "What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report" can be downloaded here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, Futurism noticed Sports Illustrated was publishing AI-generated articles under fake author biographies. Although the magazine removed the articles in question and released a statement blaming the issue on a contractor, it wasn't enough to quell the widespread backlash. Today, Sports Illustrated's publisher, Arena Group, fired the sports media outlet's CEO. The Hill reports: The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated, said Monday that its board of directors had moved to fire CEO Ross Levinsohn. The board took the action to "improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company," the company said. Manoj Bhargava will serve as Arena Group's interim chief executive officer effective this week. Levinsohn was the CEO of Arena Group since 2019 and previously was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is including new Stolen Device Protection in iOS 17.3 that requires authentication through Face ID or Touch ID to perform certain actions. The Verge reports: The new feature appears to come in response to the concerns raised in previous reports by The Wall Street Journal describing how thieves watch their victims type in their iPhone passcodes and then steal their devices. This gives thieves access to a trove of personal and financial information stored on the device, allowing them to lock victims out of their iCloud accounts and spend thousands of dollars using saved payment information. If you opt in to the feature, you would have to verify your identity with face or fingerprint biometrics when doing things like viewing your saved passwords in iCloud Keychain, applying for a new Apple Card, factory resetting your device, using saved payment methods in Safari, and turning off Lost Mode. This way, thieves wouldn't be able to steal your information even if they have your phone and the passcode. For even more sensitive actions, like changing your Apple ID password, changing your iPhone passcode, or turning off Find My, the new Stolen Device Protection feature adds an additional hurdle if the device is somewhere other than locations you often frequent, like at home or in the office. It requires you to not only verify your identity with Face ID or Touch ID but also wait one hour and then repeat the authentication process again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft wants to use nuclear energy to power its artificial intelligence operations. And in order to help cut the red tape required to make that happen, Microsoft plans to use AI. From a report: A Microsoft team has spent months building an AI trained on nuclear regulations and licensing requirements to help the tech giant fill out all the applications it needs to build its own power plants. This typically takes years and millions, but Microsoft is urgently looking for more power to bring next-generation AI to life. That's because the larger the model and the more capable it becomes, the more power it requires. Microsoft today reflects the sensibilities of its founder, Bill Gates, in that the company believes in carbon-neutral energy sources -- and, like Gates who himself invests in nuclear power innovation, the company seems to see more potential in nuclear than other renewable sources of energy. "If we're going to do that carbon-free, we're going to need all the tools in the tool kit," Michelle Patron, Microsoft's senior director of sustainability policy, told the Journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Politico reports that the climate bill passed in America in 2022 "has ignited a new zeal among leaders around the world for the kind of winner-picking, subsidy-flush governing that has been out of fashion in many countries for the past 40 years." The bill's "mix of lavish support for clean energy technologies and efforts to box out foreign competitors is also promoting a kind of green patriotism - and even some politicians on the right, at least outside the U.S., say that's a climate message they can sell."[The bill] is having a real-world impact as investors shift their money to the U.S. from abroad, hungry to take advantage of the tax breaks. In July, for example, Swiss solar manufacturer Meyer Burger canned plans to build a factory in Germany, choosing Arizona instead. That has left political leaders across the world with a choice: Grinch and grumble about the United States' sudden clean industry favoritism, or follow suit... Even the United States' favorite pals on the global stage have felt rattled by the sudden diversion from decades of free trading. But in the U.K., European Union and Australia, many leaders are now working on their own versions. Some examples of upcoming climate actions: - Australia's Labor party "has budgeted $1.3 billion in spending this year on green hydrogen projects and around $660 million on moving the economy toward electricity rather than fossil fuels." - The EU will "start operating a border tariff on high-carbon products in 2026, which seeks to keep hold of its heavy industries even as they pay an increasingly punitive price for polluting to the EU Emissions Trading System." - The UK Labour party plans messaging "that casts the green energy transition as a national mission which can create jobs in former industrial communities." - In the U.S. the White House says its bill will spur closer to $700 billion - or even $1 trillion - in green incentives over 10 years. "As the White House sees it, the jump means the tax credits for priorities such as homegrown clean power and electric vehicles have proven more popular than initially anticipated." Taken together, all the bills "reflect the urgency of the problem," Politico argues, "by aiming to transform the economy at a pace the market can't deliver on its own." "We are in the middle of a climate crisis because firms couldn't do the job of decarbonizing," said Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the progressive think tank Roosevelt Institute. "The climate crisis is the world's biggest market failure ever and it's going to take really strong public investment."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScreenRant reports that on December 4, "Godzilla Minus One" was the #1 movie in the crucial U.S./Canada "domestic" market (which also includes Guam and Puerto Rico). But the next week was even more impressive, reports Forbes, retaining most of its box office figure with "an incredibly strong 90% hold across the three-day Friday-Saturday-Sunday frame, for what appears to be the best second weekend hold for a wide release in 2023."Through the week, Godzilla Minus One topped the North American charts four out of five weekdays on overwhelmingly positive word of mouth. Good buzz grew through the week as more viewers and critics saw and recommend the film... Godzilla Minus One is already the highest grossing Japanese live-action release of all time in the U.S. The film is a final contender for the Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects, and is widely expected to be one of the final official nominees. CinemaBlend believes the movie should be nominated for this year's Best Picture award at the Oscars.With a total of 105 critical reviews (at the time of this writing), Godzilla Minus One has a Tomatometer score of 97%... Godzilla has literally been a metaphor for the atomic bomb since the very beginning. However, Godzilla Minus One isn't as concerned with that idea. Instead, the story is all about sacrifice as well as the hope we have for future generations. It's a story of coming together and living for today, so that our children can be inspired to want to live for tomorrow. The Takashi Yamazaki-helmed feature doesn't present a story about destruction, but rather one about wanting peace and finding conducive ways to deal with trauma. I know you might not believe me if you haven't seen it yet, but the film is just as deep and "important" as Oppenheimer and, for that, it should be nominated. They argue the movie manages to be both "a layered film" and "a popcorn flick... "it's more than JUST a film featuring a giant reptile This one actually has something to say."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Shepardson reports via Reuters: U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she expects to make around a dozen semiconductor chips funding awards within the next year, including multi-billion dollar announcements that could drastically reshape U.S. chip production. She announced the first award on Monday -- $35 million to a BAE Systems facility in Hampshire to produce chips for fighter planes from the "Chips for America" semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program approved by Congress in August 2022. "Next year we'll get into some of the bigger ones with leading-edge fabs," Raimondo told reporters. "A year from now I think we will have made 10 or 12 similar announcements, some of them multi-billion dollar announcements." In an interview with Reuters, Raimondo said that the number of awards could go higher than 12. She said she wants the percentage of semiconductors produced in the United States to rise from about 12% to closer to 20% -- though that is still down from 40% in 1990 -- and to have at least two "leading-edge" U.S. manufacturing clusters. In addition, she wants the U.S. to have cutting-edge memory and packaging production and to "meet the military's needs for current and mature" chips. Raimondo noted that the U.S. currently does not have any cutting-edge manufacturing production and wants to get that to about 10%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Miklos Daniel Brody, a cloud engineer, was sentenced to two years in prison and a restitution of $529,000 for wiping the code repositories of his former employer in retaliation for being fired by the company. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announcement, Brody was fired on March 11, 2020, from First Republic Bank (FRB) in San Francisco, where he worked as a cloud engineer. The court documents state that Brody's employment was terminated after he violated company policies by connecting a USB drive containing pornography to company computers. Following his dismissal, Brody allegedly refused to return his work laptop and instead used his still-valid account to access the bank's computer network and cause damages estimated to be above $220,000. "Among other things, Brody deleted the bank's code repositories, ran a malicious script to delete logs, left taunts within the bank's code for former colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names," describes the U.S. DOJ announcement. "He also emailed himself proprietary bank code that he had worked on as an employee, which was valued at over $5,000." After the incident, Brody falsely reported to the San Francisco Police Department that the FRB-issued laptop had been stolen from his car. He continued to uphold this story when interviewed by United States Secret Service agents following his arrest in March 2021. Eventually, in April 2023, Brody pleaded guilty to lying about the laptop and to two charges concerning violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In addition to the two-year prison term and the payment of the restitution, Brody will serve three years of supervised release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: [H]ow do we feed ourselves without further damaging the planet or worsening rising levels of hunger? This year's United Nations climate summit has confronted this question like never before. For the first time there is a broad acknowledgment that the food agenda is aligned with the climate fight across the board," said Ed Davey of the World Resources Institute, who worked with organizers of the summit, known as COP28, on its food agenda. [...] More than two-thirds of the world's countries endorsed an agreement to retool the global food system, though it's vague, lacks concrete targets, and is nonbinding. The United Nations food agency issued a landmark report laying out what it would take to align the global food system with the goal to limit average global temperature rise to manageable levels. The United States and the United Arab Emirates together committed about $17 billion toward agricultural innovations to address climate change. [...] The F.A.O. road map means doing different things in different countries. In North America, food experts said, it means nudging citizens to eat less meat and dairy, which produce high emissions. In countries of sub-Saharan Africa, it means increasing agricultural productivity. Every country must cut food loss and waste. "We are at this reckoning point where we have to move away from pure awareness raising and actually start changing habits," Yvette Cabrera, a food waste expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. Road maps, of course, are only that until someone starts following the directions. In this case, that's up to national governments. That's where the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action comes in. It commits countries to including agricultural emissions in their next round of climate targets, in 2025. It contains no other targets or timelines, nor prescribes any specific policies. So far, 154 countries have signed on. India, which has long been sensitive to any global accords that impact food security, was a holdout. One measure of the coming food fight is that it's unclear whether there's any appetite to include agricultural emissions targets in the main agreement, which is the subject of bitter negotiations at the moment. The latest draft does not include them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five years after founding Atari in 1972, Nolan Bushnell started work on a chain of pizza restaurants with singing animatronic robots and videogames - called Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre. While 600 of the restaurants still operate today, "the company is in the process of remodeling its more than 400 U.S. locations," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and the last 30 or so remaining animatronic bands are being shown the door in favor of interactive dance floors and large screens that feature Chuck E. and pals in animated form."That is, they're being evicted everywhere but Northridge, Los Angeles... The goal - or hope - for the company is to have at least one location that can serve both new generations as well as nostalgia hunters, especially fans of animatronic figures. Animatronics have long been the stars of themed entertainment, at least as long as Disneyland has been putting mechanical creatures in its rides and shows. In the '80s and '90s, theme parks began switching to screen-based entertainment to mirror blockbuster movies, but today animatronics have been making a comeback. The recent makeover, for instance, of Disneyland's Adventureland Treehouse came with the addition of multiple animatronic figures, and Universal Studios' Super Nintendo World is full of mechanical kinetic energy from an assortment of characters. Additionally, this year's video game-inspired movie "Five Nights at Freddy's" is centered on a haunted pizzeria where the animatronics become sentient. The film is indicative of the cult fandom that has long existed around Chuck E. Cheese and its former competitor Showbizz Pizza Place, as evidenced by the documentary "The Rock-afire Explosion," which charts the pizza and animatronic band wars of the '80s... Restaurant franchise's CEO David McKillips says the company is acknowledging not just changing technological tastes but the realities of maintaining animatronic groups, which are programmed in Texas but maintained locally. "These are decades old, and we have a dedicated technician at every single location who spends a fair amount of time making sure the animatronics are working properly," McKillips says, adding that "it's a fairly complex issue" to keep the bands up and running. The animatronic band's final restaurant hopes to become a tourist destination offering "retro glory," according to the article. (The robots are still powered by floppy disks.) And there are fans who still fondly remember the singing robots, judging by an episode of the Simpsons where Homer hunts down the last animatronic robots that sang in a 1970s chain of pizza parlors - titled "Do Pizza Bots Dream of Electric Guitars" Unfortunately, in the episode Homer has to compete with a reboot-minded J. J. Abrams...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Reuters, Ukraine's biggest mobile network was hit by "what appeared to be the largest cyber attack of the war with Russia so far," severing mobile and internet services for millions of people and knocking out the air raid alert system in parts of Kyiv. From the report: Kyivstar has 24.3 million mobile subscribers - more than half of Ukraine's population - as well as over 1.1 million home internet subscribers. Its CEO Oleksandr Komarov said the attack was "a result of" the war with Russia, although he did not say which Russian body he believed to be responsible, and that the company's IT infrastructure had been "partially destroyed." "(The attack) significantly damaged (our) infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy's access," Komarov said. A source close to Ukraine's cyber defense also said that Russia was suspected to be the source of the attack, but no specific group had been identified. "It's definitely a state actor," said the source, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue, adding that data cable interception showed "a lot of Russian controlled traffic directed at these networks." "There's no ransom. It's all destruction. So it's not a financially motivated attack," said the source. Ukrainian officials said that air raid alert systems in more than 75 settlements in the central Kyiv region were affected by the cyber attack. Komarov said two databases containing customer data had been damaged and were currently locked. "The most important thing is that the personal data of users has not been compromised," Kyivstar said in its statement, promising to compensate customers for loss of access to services. Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense intelligence director (GUR) said it infected thousands of servers belonging to Russia's state tax service with malware, and destroyed databases and backups. "According to GUR's statement published Tuesday, the attack led to the 'complete destruction' of the agency's infrastructure," reports The Record. "GUR claimed they destroyed configuration files 'which for years ensured the functioning of Russia's tax system.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: While the video game industry had already largely given up on E3 -- once the largest video game trade show in the industry and the biggest video game showcase event of the year -- there was always the chance it would return after multiple years of cancellations. However, in a statement to The Washington Post today, E3's organizer confirmed that the show is permanently canceled. "We know it's difficult to say goodbye to such a beloved event, but it's the right thing to do given the new opportunities our industry has to reach fans and partners," Stanley Pierre-Louis, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the nonprofit trade organization that ran E3, told the Post. Pierre-Louis alluded to the biggest reason for E3's precipitous collapse and ultimate demise: game developers and publishers had increasingly moved away from the event in order to put on their own less costly showcases targeted directly to fans, rather than the industry insiders and journalists that E3 typically catered to. The last E3 was held in 2019. The 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic, only to return as a digital showcase in 2021. A virtual-only event was scheduled to take place the following year but was canceled, with promises that it would return in 2023. Then, that was canceled, with a possible 2024 return date. Now, it's been confirmed that E3 is never coming back.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Targett reports via The Stack: Broadcom is killing off VMware's on-premises perpetual licenses -- and getting set to strong-arm VMware customers onto subscriptions, by also ending the sale of Support and Subscription renewals for such customers. VMware described this to customers as part of its plan to "complete the transition of all VMware by Broadcom solutions to subscription licenses." "We are [also] ending the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings beginning today" SVP Krish Prasad said in a FAQ. VMware perpetual licenses were described by its own Office of the CTO earlier this year in a short blog as its "most renowned licenses." The on-premises licenses for the virtualization software come with a license key, with SnS separately licensing users for support and software updates. Perpetual license keys never expire but the SnS lapses and now will not, seemingly, be renewed -- meaning that customers reluctant to shift to an alternative licensing model will be left without support or updates. VMware customers "may continue using perpetual licenses with active support contracts. We will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments. We encourage customers to review their inventory of perpetual licenses, including Support Services renewal and expiration dates," Broadcom said rather menacingly, on December 10. The company is also announcing a new "bring-your-own-subscription license option, providing license portability to VMware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud Foundation," it added, without initially sharing details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: DLang is among the newer breed of memory-safe languages being endorsed by Western security agencies over the past few years, the same type of language that cyber criminals are switching to. At least three new DLang-based malware strains have been used in attacks on worldwide organizations spanning the manufacturing, agriculture, and physical security industries, Cisco Talos revealed today. The attacks form part of what's being called "Operation Blacksmith" and are attributed to a group tracked as Andariel, believed to be a sub-division of the Lazarus Group -- North Korea's state-sponsored offensive cyber unit. [...] The researchers noted that DLang is an uncommon choice for writing malware, but a shift towards newer languages and frameworks is one that's been accelerating over the last few years -- in malware coding as in the larger programming world. Rust, however, has often shown itself to be the preferred choice out of what is a fairly broad selection of languages deemed to be memory-safe. AlphV/BlackCat was the first ransomware group to make such a shift last year, re-writing its payload in Rust to offer its affiliates a more reliable tool. A month later, the now-shuttered Hive group did the same thing, and many others followed after that. Other groups to snub Rust include China-based Sandman which was recently observed using Lua-based malware, believed to be part of a wider shift toward Lua development from Chinese attackers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A document detailing technical requirements of Italy's Piracy Shield anti-piracy system confirms that ISPs are not alone in being required to block pirate IPTV services. All VPN and open DNS services must also comply with blocking orders, including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform. [...] Italy's Piracy Shield anti-piracy system reportedly launched last week, albeit in limited fashion. Whether the platform had any impact on pirate IPTV providers offering the big game last Friday is unclear but plans supporting a full-on assault are pressing ahead. When lawmakers gave Italy's new blocking regime the green light during the summer, the text made it clear that blocking instructions would not be limited to regular ISPs. The document issued by AGCOM [...] specifically highlights that VPN and DNS providers are no exception. "[A]ll parties in any capacity involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content -- and therefore also, by way of example and not limitation -- VPN and open DNS service providers, will have to execute the blocks requested by the Authority [AGCOM] including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform or otherwise implementing measures that prevent the user from reaching that content," the notice reads. [...] The relevant section of the new law is in some ways even more broad when it comes to search engines such as Google. Whether they are directly involved in accessibility or not, they're still required to take action. AGCOM suggests that Google understands its obligations and is also prepared to take things further. The company says it will deindex offending platforms from search and also remove their ability to advertise. "Since this is a dynamic blocking, the search engine therefore undertakes to perform de-indexing of all websites/telematic addresses that are the subject of subsequent reports that can also be communicated by rights holders accredited to the platform," AGCOM writes. "Google has shared a procedural mode for the communication of the blocking list, and the Company has also committed to the timely removal of all advertisements that do not comply with the company's policies, having particular regard to those that invest the promotion of pirate sites referring to protected sporting events."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FTC is considering an investigation into Microsoft's investment in OpenAI to determine if the company broke any antitrust laws. The Register reports: Despite the money poured into it over the years, OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015, and Microsoft's investment does not amount to control of the company. Microsoft chief communications officer Frank X Shaw underlined attempts to dampen down industry talk of a probe: "While details of our agreement remain confidential, it is important to note that Microsoft does not own any portion of OpenAI and is simply entitled to share of profit distributions." At the end of last week, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched a consultation to ask interested parties to comment on Microsoft's relationship with ChatGPT developer, and if it could be construed as a merger that potentially skews competition. If so, the CMA will itself launch an official inspection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.