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metrix007 writes: OpenBSD, the OS that earned an exaggerated reputation for security simply by disabling services by default, has released version 7.3. Plenty of new improvements and bug fixes including to the editor, although still no real security features to help lock down a system, no virtual machine support for non-OpenBSD guests and no modern file system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI recently warned consumers against using free public charging stations, saying crooks have managed to hijack public chargers that can infect devices with malware, or software that can give hackers access to your phone, tablet or computer. From a report: "Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels or shopping centers," a tweet from the FBI's Denver field office said. "Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead." The FBI offers similar guidance on its website to avoid public chargers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For all the high-profile examples of ChatGPT getting facts and even basic math wrong, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan says the latest version of the generative AI engine makes a pretty good tutor. From a report: "This technology is very powerful," Khan told Axios in a recent interview. "It's getting better."Khan Academy was among the early users of GPT-4 that OpenAI touted when it released the updated engine. This week, two more school districts (Newark, N.J. and Hobart, Indiana) are joining the pilot of Khanmigo, the AI-assisted tutor. With the two new districts, a total of 425 teachers and students are testing Khanmigo. The chatbot works much like a real-life or online tutor, looking at students' work and helping them when they get stuck. In a math problem, for example, Khanmigo can detect not just whether a student got an answer right or wrong, but also where they may have gone astray in their reasoning. ChatGPT and its brethren have been highly controversial -- especially in education, where some schools are banning the use of the technology. Concerns range from the engines' propensity to be confidently wrong (or "hallucinate") to worries about students using the systems to write their papers. Khan said he understands these fears, but also notes that many of those criticizing the technology are also using it themselves and even letting their kids make use of it. And, for all its flaws, he says today's AI offers the opportunity for more kids -- in both rich and developing countries -- to get personalized learning. "The time you need tutoring is right when you are doing the work, often when you are in class," Khan said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US bank lending contracted by the most on record in the last two weeks of March, indicating a tightening of credit conditions in the wake of several high-profile bank collapses that risks damaging the economy. From a report: Commercial bank lending dropped nearly $105 billion in the two weeks ended March 29, the most in Federal Reserve data back to 1973. The more than $45 billion decrease in the latest week was primarily due to a a drop in loans by small banks. The pullback in total lending in the last half of March was broad and included fewer real estate loans, as well as commercial and industrial loans. Friday's report also showed commercial bank deposits dropped $64.7 billion in the latest week, marking the 10th-straight decrease that mainly reflected a decline at large firms. The slide in lending follows the collapse of several firms including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Economists are closely monitoring the Fed's so-called H.8 report, which provides an estimated weekly aggregate balance sheet for all commercial banks in the US, to gauge credit conditions. The recent bank failures have complicated the central bank's efforts to reduce inflation without sending the economy into a recession.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's payment and clearing industry association warned on Monday against using Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence tools due to "risks such as cross-border data leaks." From a report: "Payment industry staff must comply with laws and rules when using tools such as ChatGPT, and should not upload confidential information related to the country and the finance industry," the Payment & Clearing Association of China said in a statement on Monday. The association is governed by the China's central bank. OpenAI has kept its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot off-limits to users in China, but the app is attracting huge interest in there, with firms rushing to integrate the technology into their products and launch rival solutions. While residents in China are unable to create OpenAI accounts, virtual private networks and foreign phone numbers are helping some bypass those restrictions to access the chatbox.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a nice spike during the first two years of the pandemic, global PC shipments continued to drop for a fourth consecutive quarter. Analyst firm IDC's latest figure has Q1 down 29% from the same time last year. Canalys paints an even more troubling picture for the industry, with a full 33% drop. From a report: A disappointing 2022 holiday set the stage for the beginning of the year, as vendor inventory has continued to pile up -- a trend that is expected to carry at least into Q3. The plunge has been so consistent that last quarter's figures dipped below those of Q1 2019, putting worldwide shipments below their pre-pandemic level. [...] The culprits? For starters, a lot of people purchased news systems in 2020 and 2021 as their work settings adapted to a global pandemic. Laptops tend to have a life span of around three to five years. Desktops are even longer, at three to eight. People are likely to be content with their systems for a few years at least. As vendors go, both IDC and Canalys have Apple suffering the largest drop at 40.5 and 45.5%, respectively. That's a staggering figure, likely owing -- at least in part â" to the company coming back down to earth, as the M1 chip managed to buck larger category trends in 2021/2022. That chip marked Apple's biggest PC computing update since the company shifted to Intel decades prior. In spite of what ad copy might suggest, you don't get a generational shift every year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SFGate reports:A herculean effort is required to produce an event centered around the intellectual property of "Star Wars" (protected within the Disney galactic empire), but a film commissioner in Northern California was determined and got creative to solicit a response from the film franchise owners. "I offered to send my adult daughter, who's a chef, to Lucasfilm to make them meals if they let us do this," said Cassandra Hesseltine, commissioner for the Humboldt-Del Norte Film Commission. The plea caught the attention of the San Francisco-based company, and a "Star Wars" festival in the redwoods was born. After a decade of planning, following an extensive back-and-forth to comply with IP rights, the film commission has announced the Forest Moon Festival. The two-day event commemorates the 40th anniversary of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi" June 2 and 3 in Northern California. It includes four film screenings [outdoors and indoors] between the two counties and holiday-like fanfare, with costumes and parties in downtown Eureka and on Cal Poly Humboldt's campus in Arcata. The festival's vision is to gather community members and outsider fans of the series for a summer jubilee akin to the Fourth of July, where folks are encouraged to dress up to the theme and congregate under the redwood trees. The article also notes that in June the monthly street fair in the town of Eureka "is expected to feature a 20-person squadron of Stormtroopers marching down main street."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering global tech news from 100 countries, the site announced this week. "But at Rest of World, the story of tech is as big as the world that's using it" — so they just finished their first international photography contest.We asked our readers to send us images of technology's impact in their communities — as seen from their lenses. We received 548 entries from around the world, including from Afghanistan, Mexico, Nigeria, Iraq, and Pakistan. Photographers captured a wide range of issues, from facial recognition software used at gated communities in Brazil to students studying on their phones during a power outage in India. They recognized 10 photos in all — three winners, and seven "honorable mentions" — including one showing a surgeon implanting a venomous snake with a radio telemetry device in India "to try and mitigate human-snake conflict in the region," as well as a stunning aerial view of a vast solar park in Dubai. There's solar-powered cooking device in India, and the face of an old man in Nepal using headphones for the first time in his life. And the #1 photo shows children in rural Palestine watching TV "with electricity generated from solar panels at their home inside a cave," vividly illustrating the point that they'd turned to a decentralized, self-generated power technology. ("For decades, rural Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta have lobbied for connection to the electric grid, but the Israeli state does not recognize such villages as legitimate and refuses to issue any kind of master plan for their development.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"There's an invisible monster on the loose," NASA wrote on Thursday, "barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. "This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy... Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut... The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to... Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole... Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy. This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Francisco autonomous vehicle company Cruise recalled and updated the software of its fleet of 300 cars, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, " after a Cruise taxi rear-ended a local bus "when the car's software got confused by the articulated vehicle, according to a federal safety report and the company." The voluntary report notes that Cruise updated its software on March 25th.Since last month's low-speed crash, which resulted in no injuries, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company chose to conduct a voluntary recall, and the software update assured such a rare incident "would not recur...." As for the March bus collision, Vogt said the software fix was uploaded to Cruise's entire fleet of 300 cars within two days. He said the company's probe found the crash scenario "exceptionally rare" with no other similar collisions. "Although we determined that the issue was rare, we felt the performance of this version of software in this situation was not good enough," Vogt wrote in a blog post. "We took the proactive step of notifying NHTSA that we would be filing a voluntary recall of previous versions of our software that were impacted by the issue." The CEO said such voluntary recalls will probably become "commonplace." "We believe this is one of the great benefits of autonomous vehicles compared to human drivers; our entire fleet of AVs is able to rapidly improve, and we are able to carefully monitor that progress over time," he said. The Cruise car was traveling about 10 miles per hour, and the collision caused only minor damage to its front fender, Vogt's blog post explained. San Francisco's buses have front and back coaches connected by articulated rubber, and when the Cruise taxi lost sight of the front half, it made the assumption that it was still moving (rather than recognizing that the back coach had stopped). Or, as Cruise told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, their vehicle ""inaccurately predicted the movement" of the bus.It was not the first San Francisco incident involving Cruise since June, when it became the first company in a major city to win the right to taxi passengers in driverless vehicles — in this case Chevrolet Bolts. The city's Municipal Transportation Agency and County Transportation Authority recorded at least 92 incidents from May to December 2022 in which autonomous ride-hailing vehicles caused problems on city streets, disrupting traffic, Muni transit and emergency responders, according to letters sent to the California Public Utilities Commission.... Just two days before the Cruise crash in March, the company had more problems with Muni during one of San Francisco's intense spring storms. A falling tree brought down a Muni line near Clay and Jones streets on March 21, and a witness reported on social media that two Cruise cars drove through caution tape into the downed wire. A company representative said neither car had passengers and teams were immediately dispatched to remove the vehicles. On Jan. 22, a driverless Cruise car entered an active firefighting scene and nearly ran over hoses. Fire crews broke a car window to try to stop it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Duke University announces their engineers "have produced the world's first fully recyclable printed electronics that replace the use of chemicals with water in the fabrication process" — bypassing the need for hazardous chemicals. Electrical/computer engineering professor Aaron Franklin led the study, according to Duke's announcement:In previous work, Franklin and his group demonstrated the first fully recyclable printed electronics. The devices used three carbon-based inks: semiconducting carbon nanotubes, conductive graphene and insulating nanocellulose. In trying to adapt the original process to only use water, the carbon nanotubes presented the largest challenge.... In the paper, Franklin and his group develop a cyclical process in which the device is rinsed with water, dried in relatively low heat and printed on again. When the amount of surfactant used in the ink is also tuned down, the researchers show that their inks and processes can create fully functional, fully recyclable, fully water-based transistors.... Franklin explains that, by demonstrating a transistor first, he hopes to signal to the rest of the field that there is a viable path toward making some electronics manufacturing processes much more environmentally friendly. Franklin has already proven that nearly 100% of the carbon nanotubes and graphene used in printing can be recovered and reused in the same process, losing very little of the substances or their performance viability. Because nanocellulose is made from wood, it can simply be recycled or biodegraded like paper. And while the process does use a lot of water, it's not nearly as much as what is required to deal with the toxic chemicals used in traditional fabrication methods. According to a United Nations estimate, less than a quarter of the millions of pounds of electronics thrown away each year is recycled. And the problem is only going to get worse as the world eventually upgrades to 6G devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand. So any dent that could be made in this growing mountain of electronic trash is important to pursue. While more work needs to be done, Franklin says the approach could be used in the manufacturing of other electronic components like the screens and displays that are now ubiquitous to society. Every electronic display has a backplane of thin-film transistors similar to what is demonstrated in the paper. The current fabrication technology is high-energy and relies on hazardous chemicals as well as toxic gasses. The entire industry has been flagged for immediate attention by the US Environmental Protection Agency. "The performance of our thin-film transistors doesn't match the best currently being manufactured, but they're competitive enough to show the research community that we should all be doing more work to make these processes more environmentally friendly," Franklin said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Rust" and "Cargo" are registered trademarks held by the Rust Foundation — the independent non-profit supporting Rust's maintainers. In August 1,000 people responded to the foundation's Trademark Policy Review Survey, after which the foundation invited any interested individuals to join their Trademark Policy Working Group (which also included Rust Project leaders). They've now created a draft of an updated policy for feedback... Crate, RS, "Rustacean," and the logo of Ferris the crab are all available for use by anyone consistent with their definition, with no special permission required. Here's how the document's quick reference describes other common use-cases:Selling Goods — Unless explicitly approved, use of the Rust name or Logo is not allowed for the purposes of selling products/promotional goods for gain/profit, or for registering domain names. For example, it is not permitted to sell stickers of the Rust logo in an online shop for your personal profit.Showing Support of Rust — When showing your support of the Rust Project on a personal site or blog, you may use the Rust name or Logo, as long as you abide by all the requirements listed in the Policy. You may use the Rust name or Logo in social media handles, avatars, and emojis to demonstrate Rust Project support in a manner that is decorative, so long as you don't suggest commercial Rust affiliation.Inclusion of the Marks in Educational Materials — You may use the Rust name in book and article titles and the Logo in graphic components, so long as you make it clear that the Rust Project or Foundation has not reviewed/approved/endorsed your content.There's also a FAQ, answering questions like "Can I use the Rust logo as my Twitter Avatar?" The updated policy draft says "We consider social media avatars on personal accounts to be fair use. On the other hand, using Rust trademarks in corporate social media bios/profile pictures is prohibited.... In general, we prohibit the modification of the Rust logo for any purpose, except to scale it. This includes distortion, transparency, color-changes affiliated with for-profit brands or political ideologies. On the other hand, if you would like to change the colors of the Rust logo to communicate allegiance with a community movement, we simply ask that you run the proposed logo change by us..." And for swag at events using the Rust logo, "Merch developed for freebies/giveaways is normally fine, however you need approval to use the Rust Word and/or Logo to run a for-profit event. You are free to use Ferris the crab without permission... If your event is for-profit, you will need approval to use the Rust name or Logo. If you are simply covering costs and the event is non-profit, you may use the Rust name or Logo as long as it is clear that the event is not endorsed by the Rust Foundation. You are free to use Ferris the crab without permission."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie "has now earned the largest global animated opening weekend in box office history," reports the Wrap, with a worldwide five-day launch of $377 million, passing the $358 million record set by Disney's Frozen II on Thanksgiving weekend in 2019."Domestically, "Mario" was projected when it opened in theaters on Wednesday to earn a five-day opening of at least $125 million from 4,343 theaters, and it has shattered that figure with $204.6 million grossed. Both that and its three-day total of $143 million are a studio record for Illumination, with the three-day total being the third highest seen on Easter weekend and second only to the $182 million earned by Pixar's "Incredibles 2" among all animated films. It is also the new animation record holder for Imax with $21.6 million grossed worldwide. And of course, the film has blasted past every box office opening record for video game adaptations, nearly doubling the three-day domestic record of $72.1 million set by "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" last year and shattering the $210 million global record set by "Warcraft" in 2016. "This weekend's record-breaking debut proves audiences of all ages and demographics will pour into theaters for a hysterically funny and authentic universe expansion of an already iconic franchise," said Universal's domestic distribution president Jim Orr. "Nintendo and Illumination's creative synergy along with Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri's extraordinary leadership created an entertaining juggernaut that will be sure to power up the box office for weeks to come...." Thanks in large part to "Super Mario Bros.," overall weekend estimates have risen to $194 million, 76% above the same weekend in 2019.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader unixbhaskar writes:A company in the U.K. calling itself Minifree has started to ship old Thinkpad (specifically the X series and T series models) with Libreboot firmware. Which is based on coreboot firmware. More specifically, Libreboot is the free-as-in-speech replacement for proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware, the site notes, "offering faster boots speeds, better security and many advanced features compared to most proprietary boot firmware." Those advanced features include the GNU project's multiple-OS-booting "grand unified bootloader" GNU GRUB directly in the boot flash, along with several other customization options. "The aim is simple: make it easy to have a computer that was made to run entirely on Free Software at every level, meaning no proprietary software of any kind. That includes the boot firmware, operating system, drivers and applications." The Libreboot project's founder is also the founder of Minifree, and the profits from Minifree's sales directly fund the Libreboot project. (The whole Minifree web site runs on Libreboot-powered servers, on a network behind a Libreboot-powered router...) Their site points out that Minifree Ltd has also privately funded several new board ports to coreboot, including 90,000 USD to Raptor Engineering for ASUS KGPE-D16 and KCMA-D8 libreboot support, and 4000 AUD to Damien Zammit for Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L and Intel D510MO libreboot support. The installed OS on the laptops is either encrypted Debian (KDE Plasma desktop environment), with full driver support, or "other Linux distro/BSD (e.g. OpenBSD, FreeBSD) at your request... Advanced features like encrypted /boot (GNU+Linux only), signed kernels and more are available." And the laptops are also shipped — worldwide — with "your choice of 480/960GB SSD or 2x480GB/2x960GB RAID1 SSDs, with good batteries and 16GB RAM. Free technical support via email/IRC plus 5-year warranty." But judging by their FAQ, the support is even more extensive. "If you brick your Minifree laptop when updating Libreboot, Minifree will unbrick it for free if you send it back to us. Even if your warranty has expired! However, such bricking is rare."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shares a new report from the Economist:Thanks to innovations such as fractal colouration patterns, which mimic nature by repeating shapes at different scales, the distance from which naked eyes can quickly spot soldiers wearing the best camouflage has shrunk, by one reckoning, by a fifth over the past two decades. That is impressive. On today's battlefields, however, it is no longer enough to merely hide from human eyes. People and kit are given away as well by signals beyond the visual spectrum, and devices that detect these wavelengths are getting better, lighter and cheaper. Thermal sensors are a case in point. Today, one that costs about $1,000 and weighs as little as five sachets of sugar can, in good weather, detect a warm vehicle as far off as 10km. As Hans Kariis, deputy head of signatures research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, notes, that is well beyond the range at which a small drone would be spotted. Two decades ago, he adds, a less sensitive thermal sensor weighing a kilogram cost ten times as much. And then there's automatic target-detection software, the article points out, like the Kestrel software deployed in more than 3,500 aircraft around the world, which "scans feeds of visual, infrared and radar data, and places red boxes around people and other potential targets, even as their positions in the frame move." And the threat has only increased with the arrival of satellite-based synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) imagery. But then the article lists examples of new camouflage that now tricks electronic sensors:Military vehicles affix hexagon-shaped sheets that can be cooled with electricity to blend into the temperature of their surroundings.Camouflage netting that absorbs (some) incoming radar beams with semi-conducting polymers while reducing heat signatures with insulation — and reflecting back the cooler temperature of the ground.Netherlands-based TNO makes "battery-powered sniper suits" embedded with 500 LEDs that match the luminosity and color of the surroundings using real-time data from a helmet camera.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz believes the industry most affected by generative AI will be videogames. But they're not the only ones, reports the Economist:Games' interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in "Red Dead Redemption 2", a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting ai assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets.... Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries, in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chipmaker to found an AI-gaming startup. Don't count the big studios out, though. If they can release half a dozen high-quality titles a year instead of a couple, it might chip away at the hit-driven nature of their business, says Josh Chapman of Konvoy, a gaming-focused VC firm. A world of more choice also favours those with big marketing budgets. And the giants may have better answers to the mounting copyright questions around AI. If generative models have to be trained on data to which the developer has the rights, those with big back-catalogues will be better placed than startups .Trent Kaniuga, an artist who has worked on games like "Fortnite", said last month that several clients had updated their contracts to ban AI-generated art.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new stunning image of ice giant Uranus, with almost all its faint dusty rings on display," reports CNN:The image is representative of the telescope's significant sensitivity, NASA said, as the fainter rings have only been captured previously by the Voyager 2 spacecraft and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii. Uranus has 13 known rings, with 11 of them visible in the new Webb image. Nine rings are classified as the main rings, while the other two are harder to capture due to their dusty makeup and were not discovered until the Voyager 2 mission's flyby in 1986. Two other, faint outer rings not shown in this latest image were discovered in 2007 from images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and scientists hope Webb will capture them in the future.... "The JWST gives us the ability to look at both Uranus and Neptune in a completely new way because we have never had a telescope of this size that looks in the infrared," said Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, a postdoctoral research scientist and solar system ambassador for the Webb space telescope at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The infrared can show us new depths and features that are difficult to see from the ground with the atmosphere in the way and invisible to telescopes that look in visible light like Hubble." "When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths," NASA explains. "With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is."On the right side of the planet there's an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus — it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb's NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory.... This was only a short, 12-minute exposure image of Uranus with just two filters. It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Tom's Hardware:When we think about Raspberry Pi, we normally picture single-board computers, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation was started to help kids learn about computers and it wants to help whether or not you own its hardware. The non-profit arm of Raspberry Pi this week released its new, browser-based code editor that's designed for young people (or any people) who are learning. The Raspberry Pi Code Editor, which is considered to be in beta, is available to everyone for free right now at editor.raspberrypi.org. The editor is currently designed to work with Python only, but the organization says that support for other languages such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS is coming.... The Raspberry Pi Foundation already had a nice set of Python tutorials on its site, but it has adapted some of them to open sample code directly in the online editor....The Pi Foundation says that it plans to add a number of features to the Code Editor, including sharing and collaboration. The organization also plans to release the editor as an open-source project so anyone can modify it. There's a pane showing your code's output when you click the "Run" button (plus a smaller pane for adding additional files to a project). Tom's Hardware notes that "Since the entire programming experience takes place online, there's no way (at least right now) to use Python to control local hardware on your PC or your Raspberry Pi." But on the plus side, "If you create a free account on raspberrypi.org, which I did, the system will save all of your projects in the cloud and you can reload them any time you want. You can also download all the files in a project as a .zip file."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company behind ChatGPT will propose measures to resolve data privacy concerns that sparked a temporary Italian ban on the artificial intelligence chatbot, regulators said Thursday. The Associated Press reports: In a video call late Wednesday between the watchdog's commissioners and OpenAI executives including CEO Sam Altman, the company promised to set out measures to address the concerns. Those remedies have not been detailed. The Italian watchdog said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but stressed to OpenAI the importance of complying with the 27-nation EU's stringent privacy rules. The regulators imposed the ban after some users' messages and payment information were exposed to others. They also questioned whether there's a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to train ChatGPT's algorithms and raised concerns the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals. Other regulators in Europe and elsewhere have started paying more attention after Italy's action. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it's "following up with the Italian regulator to understand the basis for their action and we will coordinate with all EU Data Protection Authorities in relation to this matter." France's data privacy regulator, CNIL, said it's investigating after receiving two complaints about ChatGPT. Canada's privacy commissioner also has opened an investigation into OpenAI after receiving a complaint about the suspected "collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent." In a blog post this week, the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office warned that "organizations developing or using generative AI should be considering their data protection obligations from the outset" and design systems with data protection as a default. "This isn't optional -- if you're processing personal data, it's the law," the office said. In an apparent response to the concerns, OpenAI published a blog post Wednesday outlining its approach to AI safety. The company said it works to remove personal information from training data where feasible, fine-tune its models to reject requests for personal information of private individuals, and acts on requests to delete personal information from its systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With no discussion, the Arkansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would require social media users in The Natural State to verify they're 18 years old or older to use the platforms. Arkansas Times reports: The proposal, backed by Gov. Sarah Sanders, is aimed at shielding minors from the harmful effects of social media. Young folks could use the platforms, but only if parents provide consent. Senate Bill 396, sponsored by Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Springdale) and Rep. Jon Eubanks (R-Paris), would require social media companies including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to contract with third-party companies to perform age verification. Users would have to provide the third-party company with a digital driver's license. Dees also sponsored a bill, now law, that requires anyone who wants to watch online pornography to verify they're an adult. The social media bill squeaked through the Senate with 18 yes votes, the bare minimum, but passed the House 82-10 with four voting present (same as no). No one asked any questions of Eubanks -- who assured his colleagues that Facebook had "the AI and algorithms" to keep track of what users had parental consent without holding on to sensitive data -- but because it was amended (to among other things exempt LinkedIn, the most boring social media platform), the bill has to go back to the Senate, where perhaps it will meet some resistance. Utah's governor signed two bills into law last month requiring companies like Meta, Snap and TikTok to get parents permission before teens could create accounts on their platforms. "The laws also require curfew, parental controls and age verification features," adds Engadget.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: An Apple Store at the Alderwood Mall was burgled last weekend, with thieves infiltrating the location through a nearby coffee shop. According to Seattle's King 5 News, thieves broke into Seattle Coffee Gear, went into the bathroom, and cut a hole in the wall to get to the Apple Store backroom. The burglars were able to bypass the Apple Store's security system by using the adjacent coffee shop, stealing a total of 436 iPhones that were worth around $500,000. According to Seattle Coffee Gear manager Eric Marks, the coffee shop is not noticeably adjacent to the Apple Store because of the way that the store is laid out. "I would have never suspected we were adjacent to the Apple Store, how it wraps around I mean," Marks told King 5 News. "So, someone really had to think it out and have access to the mall layout." Police were able to obtain surveillance footage of the theft, but as it is part of an active investigation, it has not yet been released. Nothing was stolen from the coffee shop, but it will cost $1,500 to replace locks and repair the bathroom wall.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A NASA instrument to provide unprecedented resolution of monitoring major air pollutants -- down to four square miles -- lifted off on its way to geostationary orbit at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space. From a report: "The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution -- it's about improving life on Earth for all. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and protect our planet," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. [...] From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles -- far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the effects of fertilizer application. TEMPO's observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution -- including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde -- not only over the continental United States, but also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola. "Our TEMPO slogan is 'It's about time,' which hints at TEMPO's ability to provide hourly air pollution data," said Xiong Liu, deputy principal investigator for TEMPO at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "After working on the TEMPO for more than 10 years, it is about time to launch TEMPO to produce real TEMPO data and start the new era of air quality monitoring over North America."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world needs a "business mindset" to tackle the climate crisis, the president of the next UN climate summit has said. From a report: Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of the Cop28 summit to be hosted in the United Arab Emirates later this year, said he aimed to use the UN talks to set out how the private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions and give businesses and governments a clear set of tasks and targets. "We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone," Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28 role. "The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action," he said. "Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies] and an ambitious action-oriented agenda." Al Jaber, as well as being the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology, is better known as a businessman, chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc, one of the world's biggest oil and gas producers, and the founding chief executive of its renewable energy company Masdar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2020, we reported that emulator developers were using a hole in the Xbox Store's app distribution system to get around Microsoft's longstanding ban on emulators running on Xbox consoles. This week, though, many of the emulators that were distributed through that workaround have stopped working, the apparent victims of a new crackdown by Microsoft. Xbox emulator makers and users can't say they weren't warned. In the "Gaming and Xbox" section of Microsoft's official Store Policies, section 10.13.10 clearly states that "products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family." Microsoft's enforcement of this clause has historically focused on removing emulators published as "private" UWP apps to the Xbox Store. Those apps could be distributed to whitelisted users via direct links accessed on the system's Edge browser, getting around the usual approval process for a public store listing. Previously, users who downloaded one of these "hidden" emulator listings before Microsoft's inevitable takedown could run that emulator on an unmodified retail system indefinitely. That is no longer the case; trying to launch downloaded versions of emulators like Xenia or Retrospection on an Xbox console now generates an error saying, "Unable to launch this game or app. The game or app you're trying to launch violates Microsoft Store policy and is not supported."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. From a report: They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven't been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely. Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not 'til September 29th. Existing Dropcam cameras will keep working until April 8th, 2024, after which you won't be able to access them from the Nest app. To soften the blow, Google's offering a free indoor wired Nest Cam to Dropcam owners who subscribe to Nest Aware. Nonsubscribers will get a 50 percent-off coupon. The promotion runs until May 7, 2024, so you can keep using your Dropcam until it stops working.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung Electronics will cut back on chip production, as it faces a sharp decline in global demand for semiconductors that has sent prices plunging. From a report: The world's biggest memory chip maker said it would make a "meaningful" cut to chip output after sales dropped sharply and it flagged a 96% drop in first-quarter profits, worse than expected. The fellow South Korean firm SK Hynix and Micron Technology of the US have also reduced production. "Samsung talking about production cuts is evidence of how bad the current slump really is," said Greg Roh, the head of research at Hyundai Motor Securities. Smartphone and personal computer makers ramped up purchases of chips during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for consumer electronics soared as people were stuck at home during lockdowns. This led to a global chip shortage. However, demand has waned as consumers cut back on bigger purchases amid the cost of living crisis, with food and energy bills soaring. Samsung said demand had dropped because of a weaker world economy and companies buying fewer chips as they run down their inventories. "We are lowering the production of memory chips by a meaningful level, especially that of products with supply secured," the company said, referring to customers with sufficient inventories.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Startups and other companies trying to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom sparked by OpenAI are running into a problem: They can't find enough specialized computers to make their own AI software. The Information: A spike in demand for server chips that can train and run machine-learning software has caused a shortage, prompting major cloud-server providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle to limit their availability for customers, according to interviews with the cloud companies and their customers. Some customers have reported monthslong wait times to rent the hardware. "All the startups who are trying to get into this space...maybe they can get one [server] but there's no way they're going to get five," said Johnny Dallas, founder and CEO of Zeet, which sells software that makes it easier for engineers to run apps across multiple clouds. The server chip shortage is a frustrating hangup for software developers trying to build AI tools hinging on recent advancements in machine-learning models. These programmers, at small and big companies alike, are developing large-language models to make personalized writing coaches or search engines that respond to questions with written answers rather than links, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Many others are licensing and augmenting software from OpenAI and its rivals to create specialized customer service chatbots and research tools for corporate employees. For instance, OpenAI software is helping Morgan Stanley bankers find the best locations to auction a work of art, based on the bank's myriad internal reports on art markets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a good reason to use Google Pay: Google might send you a bunch of free money. From a report: Many users report that Google accidentally deposited cash in their accounts -- anywhere from $10 to $1,000. Android researcher Mishaal Rahman got hit with the bug and shared most of the relevant details on Twitter. The cash arrived via Google Pay's "reward" program. Just like a credit card, you're supposed to get a few bucks back occasionally for various promotions, but nothing like this. Numerous screenshots show users receiving loads of "Reward" money for what the message called "dogfooding the Google Pay Remittance experience." "Dogfooding" is tech speak for "internally beta testing pre-release software," so if a message like this was ever supposed to go out, it should have only gone out to Google employees and/or some testing partners. Many regular users received multiple copies of this message with multiple payouts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Multi-brand consumer megacorp Unilever says it has become a "cloud-only enterprise" with the help of Accenture and Microsoft. From a report: One of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the retail goods industry, according to the company, will give Unilever "resilient, secure and optimised operations" as well as "a platform to drive innovation and growth." The Anglo-Dutch biz owns more than 400 brands, which include everything from ice cream to shampoo to toilet cleaner, and is set to use Microsoft's Azure as its "primary cloud platform." According to the corporate blurb, the move will see Unilever employ "industrial metaverse technologies" that use real-time data from factory digital twins. It musn't have got the memo from Microsoft, which recently put a bullet in its own industrial metaverse masterplan. The cloud contract is also expected to help "achieve perpetual breakthroughs in research and development," says Unilver. Lastly, through Microsoft's partnership with the controversial GPT maker, it will use "Azure OpenAI Service across Unilever's business to drive increased automation, enabling better customer and employee experiences."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MSI has confirmed it suffered a data breach after a ransomware gang claimed it stole files from the PC maker. The company published a Taiwanese stock exchange filing about experiencing a âoecyber attack,â although the company is thin on details. From a report: "After detecting some information systems being attacked by hackers, MSI's IT department has initiated information security defense mechanism and recovery procedures," the PC maker said. The company also reported the incident to authorities. MSI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, making it unclear whether customer data is affected. But in the stock exchange filing, the PC maker says it anticipates the breach having "no significant impact" on its financials or operations. A new ransomware group called Money Message claims it breached the PC maker to steal the company's source code, including the framework for the BIOS used in MSI products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Putting a temporary pause on artificial intelligence development would only hand an advantage to competitors in China, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, after more than 1,000 researchers signed a letter warning of the consequences of moving too quickly on AI research. From a report: Speaking to the Australian Financial Review in an interview published Friday, Schmidt said there were legitimate concerns about the speed of research into AI but they should be mitigated by tech companies working together to set standards. In the past week, more than 1,000 researchers and executives, including Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, signed an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, which called for an AI research pause of "at least six months," warning of "potentially catastrophic effects" on society if appropriate governance wasn't put in place. But Schmidt said he wasn't in favor of the six-month pause as it would "simply benefit China. What I am in favor of is getting everyone together ASAP to discuss what are the appropriate guardrails."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has banned the sale of the Flipper Zero portable multi-tool for pen-testers as it no longer allows its sale on the platform after tagging it as a card-skimming device. From a report: The Flipper Zero is a compact, portable, and programmable pen-testing tool that can help experiment with and debug various digital and hardware devices via various protocols, including RFID, radio, NFC, infrared, Bluetooth, and others. Since its launch, users have showcased Flipper Zero's capabilities demonstrating its capacity to activate doorbells, conduct replay attacks to unlock cars and open garage doors, and clone a wide range of digital keys. According to notices sent to sellers on Thursday evening, Amazon has now banned Flipper Zero on its platform, tagging it as a "restricted product." Card-skimming devices are listed on Amazon's Seller Central portal under the Lock Picking & Theft Devices restricted product category, next to key duplicating devices and shoplifting devices, such as sensormatic detachers. Currently, some links to previously available Amazon pages selling Flipper Zero tools are dead and displaying "Sorry, we couldn't find that page. Try searching or go to Amazon's home page." errors, while others list it as "Unavailable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. From the report: A pitch deck for Anthropic's Series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers. In the deck, Anthropic says that it plans to build a "frontier model" -- tentatively called "Claude-Next" -- 10 times more capable than today's most powerful AI, but that this will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months. Anthropic describes the frontier model as a "next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching," making reference to an AI training technique it developed called "constitutional AI." At a high level, constitutional AI seeks to provide a way to align AI with human intentions -- letting systems respond to questions and perform tasks using a simple set of guiding principles. Anthropic estimates its frontier model will require on the order of 10^25 FLOPs, or floating point operations -- several orders of magnitude larger than even the biggest models today. Of course, how this translates to computation time depends on the speed and scale of the system doing the computation; Anthropic implies (in the deck) it relies on clusters with "tens of thousands of GPUs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) services that aren't compliant with anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules pose "the most significant current illicit finance risk" in that corner of the crypto sector, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury's first analysis of hazards from the technology. From a report: In an expected risk assessment, published Thursday, the Treasury Department said thieves, scammers, ransomware cyber criminals and actors for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are using DeFi to launder proceeds from crime. On the basis of its findings, the department recommends an assessment of "possible enhancements" to U.S. anti-money laundering (AML) requirements and the rules for countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) as they should be applied to DeFi services. It also calls for input from the private sector to inform the next steps."Clearly, we can't do this alone," said Brian Nelson, Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, in a Thursday webcast hosted by ACAMS, a global organization focused on preventing financial crime. "We call on the private sector to use the findings of the risk assessment to inform your own risk-mitigation strategies." The 40-page report warns that "DeFi services at present often do not implement AML/CFT controls or other processes to identify customers, allowing layering of proceeds to take place instantaneously and pseudonymously."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Full-size, self-driving bus services will begin in Scotland next month in what is believed to be a world first. The BBC reports: Stagecoach said the route over the Forth Road Bridge would launch on May 15. The 14-mile route will run between Ferrytoll park and ride in Fife and Edinburgh Park train and tram interchange. Five single-decker autonomous buses will have the capacity for about 10,000 passenger journeys per week. The vehicles have sensors enabling them to travel on pre-selected roads at up to 50mph. They will have two members of staff on board. A safety driver will sit in the driver's seat to monitor the technology, and a so-called bus captain will help passengers with boarding, buying tickets and queries. The UK government said Project CAVForth would be the world's first full-size, self-driving public bus service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has invited Venezuela to join its lunar research station project as the country works to gain partners for the endeavor. SpaceNews reports: Venezuela would be the first country to join China and Russia in the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which is planned to be constructed in the early 2030s using super heavy-lift launch vehicles. The launches will follow smaller, precursor missions later this decade. Marglad Bencomo, executive director of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), visited China's new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) March 30 to discuss cooperation and exchanges. She was met by Wu Yanhua, former deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and now executive vice chairman of DSEL. The two sides exchanged in-depth views on international cooperation in the field of deep space exploration, according to a DSEL statement. Bencomo said that Venezuela was willing to sign a China-Venezuela Memorandum of Understanding as soon as possible to jointly promote the construction of international lunar research stations, according to the DSEL statement. ABAE has been invited to attend an international forum hosted by DSEL during China's national "space day," held annually on April 24 since 2016, potentially providing a platform for signing an MOU. China and Russia presented a roadmap for the joint ILRS in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2021 and opened the project to interested parties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Record temperatures, devastating floods and superstorms are causing death and destruction across the planet but humans are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fueling the climate emergency, new US data shows. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide -- the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to global heating -- continued to increase rapidly during 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). Carbon dioxide levels rose by more than two parts per million (ppm) for the 11th consecutive year: the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases since monitoring began 65 years ago. Before 2013, scientists had never recorded three consecutive years of such high CO2 growth. Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. The 2022 methane rise was the fourth-largest since records began in 1983, following record growth in 2021 and 2022, and now stands at an average of 1,912 parts per billion (ppb). Methane is a potent greenhouse gas less abundant than CO2 but which warms the Earth's atmosphere much faster, and today is responsible for about 25% of the heat trapped by all greenhouse gases. "Methane levels in the atmosphere are now more than two and a half times their pre-industrial level," adds the Guardian. "The oil and gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane, which can also cause medical complications, fires and even engine failure leading helicopters to fall out of the sky." "Levels of nitrous oxide, the third-most significant anthropogenic greenhouse gas, are now 24% higher than preâ"industrial levels, following a 1.25ppb rise last year." While fossil fuel-powered vehicles are a major source of nitrous oxide, the primary culprits behind the rising levels have been synthetic fertilizers and livestock manure from industrialized agriculture, says the report. The NOAA report can be found here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Academics in the US have developed an attack dubbed NUIT, for Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan, that exploits vulnerabilities in smart device microphones and voice assistants to silently and remotely access smart phones and home devices. The Register reports: The research team -- Guenevere Chen, an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, her doctoral student Qi Xia, and Shouhuai Xu, a professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs -- found Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa are all vulnerable to NUIT attacks, albeit to different degrees. In an interview with The Register this month, Chen and Xia demonstrated two separate NUIT attacks: NUIT-1, which emits sounds to exploit a victim's smart speaker to attack the same victim's microphone and voice assistant on the same device, and NUIT-2, which exploits a victim's speaker to attack the same victim's microphone and voice assistant on a different device. Ideally, for the attacker, these sounds should be inaudible to humans. The attacks work by modulating voice commands into near-ultrasound inaudible signals so that humans can't hear them but the voice assistant will still respond to them. These signals are then embedded into a carrier, such as an app or YouTube video. When a vulnerable device picks up the carrier, it ends up obeying the hidden embedded commands. Attackers can use social engineering to trick the victim into playing the sound clip, Xia explained. "And once the victim plays this clip, voluntarily or involuntarily, the attacker can manipulate your Siri to do something, for example, open your door." For NUIT-1 attacks, using Siri, the answer is yes. The boffins found they could control an iPhone's volume so that a silent instruction to Siri generates an inaudible response. The other three voice assistants -- Google's, Cortana, and Alexa -- are still susceptible to the attacks, but for NUIT-1, the technique can't silence devices' response so the victim may notice shenanigans are afoot. It's also worth noting that the length of malicious commands must be below 77 milliseconds -- that's the average reaction time for the four voice assistants across multiple devices. In a NUIT-2 attack, the attacker exploits the speaker on one device to attack the microphone and associated voice assistant of a second device. These attacks aren't limited by the 77-millisecond window and thus give the attacker a broader range of possible action commands. An attacker could use this scenario during Zooms meeting, for example: if an attendee unmutes themself, and their phone is placed next to their computer, an attacker could use an embedded attack signal to attack that attendees phone. The researchers will publish their research and demonstrate the NUIT attacks at the USENIX Security Symposium in August.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an exclusive interview with Variety, legendary video game designer, Nintendo fellow and self-proclaimed "Mario's mom", Shigeru Miyamoto, said: "Mobile apps will not be the primary path of future Mario games." From the report: After two moderately successful but dwindling iOS games, plus another that shuttered after two years, Nintendo is pulling Mario away from the mobile market. Released in 2016, Super Mario Run grossed $60 million in its first year, while 2019's Mario Kart Tour has generated $300 million (compared to Mario Kart 8's $3 billion and counting). Without explanation, Nintendo removed 2019's Dr. Mario World from app markets two years after its release. "First and foremost, Nintendo's core strategy is a hardware and software integrated gaming experience," said Miyamoto, who played a pivotal role in designing the Wii, among other Nintendo consoles. "The intuitiveness of the control is a part of the gaming experience. When we explored the opportunity of making Mario games for the mobile phone -- which is a more common, generic device -- it was challenging to determine what that game should be. That is why I played the role of director for Super Mario Run, to be able to translate that Nintendo hardware experience into the smart devices." Elaborating on the merits of Run and Tour, Miyamoto continued, "Having Mario games as mobile apps expands the doorway for far more audience to experience the game, and also expands the Mario gaming experience, where you only need your thumb on one hand." Referencing the innovation of the Super Mario Maker series and Super Mario Odyssey, which Miyamoto called "the ultimate evolution of a Mario adventure game on a typical 3D platformer," the Nintendo exec laid out how the company begins to develop a Mario game: "We try to define what is the gameplay, what is the method, and then define what devices we go on." When asked when fans can expect the next mainline Mario game, Miyamoto chuckled and said: "All I can say is please stay tuned for future Nintendo Directs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For $30, you can ship Best Buy a prepaid box filled with up to 15 pounds of unwanted electronics. CNET reports: Starting this month, two sizes of prepaid boxes are available on the Best Buy website: a 9-by-5-by-3-inch container that can carry up to 6 pounds for $23, and a larger, 18-by-14-by-4-inch box that can carry up to 15 pounds for $30. Once you've filled it up with approved electronics, you can take the box to a UPS location or arrange for a pickup. The recycling-by-mail program is the latest salvo in Best Buy's campaign to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. In April 2022, the company began offering a haul-away service that picks TVs, appliances and other products for recycling from customers' homes. You can also drop off unwanted electronics at Best Buy locations and trade in select merchandise for gift cards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last month, UK regulators said they no longer believed a proposed Microsoft-owned Activision would bar Call of Duty games from PlayStation platforms, a reversal of earlier preliminary findings. Even if you grant that premise, though, Sony says that it's still worried Microsoft could give PlayStation owners a "degraded" version of new Call of Duty games in an effort to make the Xbox versions look better. In a newly published response (PDF) to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, Sony says the regulators' recent turnaround is "surprising, unprecedented, and irrational." The company takes specific issue with the regulators' "lifetime value" modeling, which Sony says heavily undervalues what an Xbox-exclusive Call of Duty would be worth to Microsoft. Beyond those technical concerns, though, Sony says it worries that Microsoft might subtly undermine PlayStation "simply by not making it as good as it could be." That could include small changes to the game's "performance [or] quality of play," but also secondary moves to "raise [Call of Duty's] price [on PlayStation], release the game at a later date, or make it available only on Game Pass." Microsoft would also "have no incentive to make use of the advanced features in PlayStation not found in Xbox," Sony says, an apparent reference to the PS5 controller's advanced haptics and built-in audio capabilities. In its own newly filed response (PDF), Microsoft reiterated that it has "no intention to withhold or degrade access to Call of Duty or any other Activision content on PlayStation." That follows on a March filing where Microsoft promised Sony parity on Call of Duty's "release date, content, features, upgrades, quality, and playability." But Sony's response reflects a continued lack of trust in such promises. The company cites detailed analyses from the likes of Digital Foundry in saying that "the technical quality of Modern Warfare II was similar across platforms" in today's market. After a merger, though, Sony argues that "Microsoft would have different incentives because degrading the experience on PlayStation would benefit Xbox, PlayStation's 'closest rival.'" "This kind of 'partial foreclosure' strategy might 'trigger fewer gamer complaints' than full Xbox exclusivity for Call of Duty, Sony says, while also allowing Microsoft to 'still secure revenues from sales of Call of Duty on PlayStation for a transitional period,'" reports Ars. "But Sony says the long-term results of this kind of 'degraded' PlayStation version would be the same as a full PlayStation ban: Call of Duty players abandoning Sony and moving to Microsoft's platforms." "Such a move would 'seriously damage our reputation,' Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan told the CMA in a recent hearing. 'Our gamers would desert our platform in droves and network effects would exacerbate the problem. Our business would never recover.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has been teasing plans for an India retail store since 2016. Seven years later, it's finally here. Quartz reports: The company finally released a picture of the barricade of its first ever Indian retail store in Mumbai, the country's financial hub, on Apr. 5. The store will be located in Jio World Drive -- the mall owned by India's richest man Mukesh Ambani -- in the upscale commercial hub called Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). So far, Apple has only sold goods and offered services in India via authorized third-party retailers, or through online portals such as Amazon, Flipkart, and Paytm Mall. Apple has chosen a prime location for its first retail outlet in India. Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), which is morphing into the city's main business district, houses offices for multinational companies and banks. BKC recently made headlines for hosting what is being touted as India's answer to the Met Gala: the opening of the multi-disciplinary Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Arts Centre (NMACC). The launch of the first-of-its-kind cultural arts space was flanked by both Bollywood and Hollywood celebrities -- from Shahrukh Khan to Zendaya. "Hello Mumbai," says Apple on their website. "We are getting ready to welcome you aboard our first store in India. And raring to see where your creativity takes you at Apple BKC." The Apple Mumbai store promises to offer one-on-one support with a Specialist, expert service and support at the Genius Bar, and product exchanges for credit towards a future purchase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia's financial regulator has cancelled the local financial services licence of the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. The Guardian reports: Earlier this year, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) found Binance had incorrectly classified hundreds of retail customers as wholesale investors. The Asic chair, Joe Longo, said the distinction was important because retail customers have access to more consumer protections under Australian law, including the right to dispute resolution. Binance's Australia's financial services (AFS) licence only allows it to provide derivatives products to sophisticated investors, rather than retail customers. "It is critically important that AFS licensees classify retail and wholesale clients in accordance with the law," Longo said. "Retail clients trading in crypto derivatives are afforded important rights and consumer protections under financial services laws in Australia, including access to external dispute resolution through the Australian financial complaints authority. Our targeted review of these matters is ongoing, including focus on the extent of consumer harms." From April 14, Binance clients will not be able to increase derivatives positions or open new positions. The exchange must close any remaining open positions by April 21. Binance can remain a member of the Australian financial complaints authority until April 8, 2024. "As we have said before, Asic supports a regulatory framework for crypto with a focus on consumer protection and market integrity. The final decision as to the regulatory settings is one for government," Longo said. Binance has been operating in Australia for many years but its now cancelled AFSL was with Oztures Trading, a company it acquired last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Embryos made from stem cells -- instead of a sperm and egg -- have been created from monkey cells for the first time. When researchers put these "synthetic embryos" into the uteruses of adult monkeys, some showed the initial signs of pregnancy. It's the furthest scientists have ever been able to take lab-grown embryos in primates -- and the work hints that it may one day be possible to generate fetuses this way. The team behind the research, Zhen Liu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and his colleagues, started with embryonic stem cells originally taken from macaque monkey embryos. These cells have been grown in labs for multiple generations and, given the right conditions, have the potential to develop into pretty much any type of body cell, including those that make up organs, blood, and nervous system. The team used a set of lab conditions, which they tweaked and improved, to encourage embryonic stem cells to develop further. Over several days, the cells began developing in a very similar way to embryos. The resulting blobs of cells are called blastoids, because they look like early embryos, which are called blastocysts. After the blastoids had been growing in a dish for seven days, the researchers put them through a series of tests to figure out how similar they were to typical embryos. In one test, the team separated the individual cells in the blastoids and checked to see which genes were expressed in each one. The team analyzed over 6,000 individual cells this way. These tests revealed close similarities between the stem-cell-derived embryos and conventional monkey embryos. Some of the blastoids were grown for longer -- up to 17 days. These structures looked very much like typical embryos, the researchers say, although other scientists not involved in the study say more evidence is needed to prove just how similar they are. The only way to find out how embryo-like these blastoids really are is to test whether they can develop in a monkey's uterus. So the team put between eight and 10 seven-day-old blastoids into the uteruses of each of eight adult monkeys. The researchers then monitored the transferred blastoids for three weeks. The researchers believe that in three of these monkeys, the blastoids successfully implanted in the uterus and appeared to generate a yolk sac -- one of the very first signs of pregnancy. These monkeys also had elevated levels of pregnancy hormones. In other words, they would have had a positive pregnancy test. But within 20 days of transfer, the monkey blastoids stopped developing and seemed to come apart, say Liu and colleagues, who published their results in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The results suggest that blastoids still aren't perfect replicas of normal embryos. "That might be because a typical embryo is generated from an egg, which is then fertilized by sperm," reports MIT Technology Review. "A blastoid made from stem cells might express genes in the same way as a normal embryo, but it may be missing something crucial that normally comes from an egg." "There's also a chance that the team might have seen more progress if the experiment had been done in more monkeys. After all, of the 484 blastoids that were developing at day seven, only five survived to day 17."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's slowing growth and cash-rich balance sheet are again fueling speculation that the world's most valuable company should make a big acquisition. From a report: Entertainment giant Disney recently joined a long list of potential acquisition targets that over the years has grown to include Netflix, Tesla, Peloton and Sonos. They all have one thing in common: Anyone betting that Apple would buy them has so far been sorely disappointed. "You're probably missing the value of the business if you think the key catalyst for investment is a major acquisition," said Kevin Walkush, portfolio manager at Jensen Investment Management. "It's a low-probability bet." Apple is famous for eschewing splashy acquisitions in contrast with peers like Microsoft and Amazon, which have continued to make deals despite increasing scrutiny by regulators. Instead, Apple favors buying small startups to augment its home-grown pushes into new markets even if those efforts take many years to bear fruit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. From a report: The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2. Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month. The main addition with this pull request is adding the Apple M2 Device Tree series.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Android users who want to tap into some AI as they type on their phones can now do so with help from Microsoft. Released this week, the latest flavor of the Microsoft SwiftKey Beta keyboard integrates the Bing AI bot to bring some smarts to your typing. From a report: Confirming the beta release in a tweet posted on Wednesday, Pedram Rezaei, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer for the Mobile and Commerce Division, asked: "Did we just add major AI functionality to @SwiftKey?" and then followed up by saying: "Slowly rolling out. Get yourself onto the Beta channel to taste the future." By selecting the new SwiftKey beta as the keyboard on your Android device, you can search for information via Bing, ask the AI to rewrite certain text, and chat with it to generate specific content. If you already have the current regular release of SwiftKey, you can keep that one, install the beta, and just switch back and forth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is making its DALL-E-powered AI image generator "available on desktop for Edge users around the world." From a report: The company announced it'd be coming last month when it integrated the image generation tech into its Bing chatbot, but this move could make it available to a much wider audience. When it rolls out, the "Image Creator" will live in Edge's sidebar. Using it should be pretty simple; you type in what you want to see, and Bing will generate several images that match the prompt. Then, you can download the ones you like and use them however you need. In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft pitches the feature as a way to create "very specific" visuals when they're working on social media posts or slideshows and documents. While this has been possible in a variety of ways before -- you could use OpenAI's DALL-E, Microsoft's Bing image creator site, the built-in image generator in Bing Chat, or one of the many other image generators -- putting it right in Edge's sidebar makes it much easier to ask an AI to make you some pictures while you're doing something else on the web.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is considering banning the export of technologies used to produce high-performance rare earth magnets deployed in electric vehicles, wind turbine motors and other products, citing "national security" as a reason, it has been learned. From a report: With the global trend toward decarbonization driving a shift toward the use of electric motors, China is believed to be seeking to seize control of the magnet supply chain and establish dominance in the burgeoning environment sector. Beijing is currently in the process of revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export -- a list of manufacturing and other industrial technologies subject to export controls -- and released a draft of the revised catalog for public comment in December. In the draft, manufacturing technologies for high-performance magnets using such rare earth elements as neodymium and samarium cobalt were added to the export ban. The solicitation of comments ceased late January and the revisions are expected to be adopted as early as this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has announced an AI model called the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that can identify individual objects in images and videos, even those not encountered during training. From a report: According to a blog post from Meta, SAM is an image segmentation model that can respond to text prompts or user clicks to isolate specific objects within an image. Image segmentation is a process in computer vision that involves dividing an image into multiple segments or regions, each representing a specific object or area of interest. The purpose of image segmentation is to make an image easier to analyze or process. Meta also sees the technology as being useful for understanding webpage content, augmented reality applications, image editing, and aiding scientific study by automatically localizing animals or objects to track on video. Typically, Meta says, creating an accurate segmentation model "requires highly specialized work by technical experts with access to AI training infrastructure and large volumes of carefully annotated in-domain data." By creating SAM, Meta hopes to "democratize" this process by reducing the need for specialized training and expertise, which it hopes will foster further research into computer vision. In addition to SAM, Meta has assembled a dataset it calls "SA-1B" that includes 11 million images licensed from "a large photo company" and 1.1 billion segmentation masks produced by its segmentation model. Meta will make SAM and its dataset available for research purposes under an Apache 2.0 license. Currently, the code (without the weights) is available on GitHub, and Meta has created a free interactive demo of its segmentation technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.