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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.

Nearly 1 in 5 teenagers in the U.S. say they use YouTube and TikTok "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey. CNBC reports: The survey showed that YouTube was the most "widely used platform" for U.S.-based teenagers, with 93% of survey respondents saying they regularly use Google's video-streaming service. Of that 93% figure, about 16% of the teenage respondents said they "almost constantly visit or use" YouTube, underscoring the video app's immense popularity with the youth market. TikTok was the second-most popular app, with 63% of teens saying they use the ByteDance-owned short-video service, followed by Snapchat and Meta's Instagram, which had 60% and 59%, respectively. About 17% of the 63% of respondents who said they use TikTok indicated they access the short-video service "almost constantly," the report noted. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, are not as popular with U.S.-based teenagers as they were a decade ago, the Pew Research study detailed. Regarding Facebook in particular, the Pew Research authors wrote that the share of teens who use the Meta-owned social media app "has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today." During the same period, Meta-owned Instagram's usage has not made up the difference in share, increasing from 52% in 2014-15 to a peak of 62% last year, then dropping to 59% in 2023, according to the firm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study from the University of Warwick found that artificial intelligence can analyze X-rays and diagnose medical issues better than doctors. The BBC reports: Software was trained using chest X-rays from more than 1.5m patients, and scanned for 37 possible conditions. It was just as accurate or more accurate than doctors' analysis at the time the image was taken for 35 out of 37 conditions, the University of Warwick said. The AI could reduce doctors' workload and delays in diagnosis, and offer radiologists the "ultimate second opinion," researchers added. The software understood that some abnormalities for which it scanned were more serious than others, and could flag the most urgent to medics, the university said. To check the results were accurate, more than 1,400 X-rays analysed by the software were cross-examined by senior radiologists. They then compared the diagnoses made by the AI with those made by radiologists at the time. The software, called X-Raydar, removed human error and bias, said lead author, Dr Giovanni Montana, Professor of Data Science at Warwick University. "If a patient is referred for an X-ray with a heart problem, doctors will inevitably focus on the heart over the lungs," he said. "This is totally understandable but runs the risk of undetected problems in other areas".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it. Berglund was inspired by Fink's discovery, but not for botanical reasons. The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, specializes in polymer composites and was interested in creating a more robust alternative to transparent plastic. And he wasn't the only one interested in wood's virtues. Across the ocean, researchers at the University of Maryland were busy on a related goal: harnessing the strength of wood for nontraditional purposes. Now, after years of experiments, the research of these groups is starting to bear fruit. Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures; and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows. "I truly believe this material has a promising future," says Qiliang Fu, a wood nanotechnologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China who worked in Berglund's lab as a graduate student. Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin's color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains. This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does -- a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent. The material the scientists worked with is thin -- typically less than a millimeter to around a centimeter thick. But the cells create a sturdy honeycomb structure, and the tiny wood fibers are stronger than the best carbon fibers, says materials scientist Liangbing Hu, who leads the research group working on transparent wood at the University of Maryland in College Park. And with the resin added, transparent wood outperforms plastic and glass: In tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure, transparent wood came out around three times stronger than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10 times tougher than glass. "The results are amazing, that a piece of wood can be as strong as glass," says Hu, who highlighted the features of transparent wood in the 2023 Annual Review of Materials Research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Zotac's ZBox PI430AJ mini PC is the first computer to use Frore System's fanless AirJet cooler, and as tested by HKEPC, it's not a gimmick. Two AirJet coolers were able to keep Intel's N300 CPU below 70 degrees Celsius under load, allowing for an incredibly thin mini PC with impressive performance. AirJet is the only active cooling solution for PCs that doesn't use fans; even so-called liquid coolers still use fans. Instead of using fans to push and pull air, AirJet uses ultrasonic waves, which have a variety of benefits: lower power consumption, near-silent operation, and a much thinner and smaller size. AirJet coolers can also do double duty as both intake and exhaust vents, whereas a fan can only do intake or exhaust, not both. Equipped with two of the smaller AirJet Mini models, which are rated to cool 5.25 watts of heat each, the ZBox PI430AJ is just 23.7mm thick, or 0.93 inches. The mini PC's processor is Intel's low-end N300 Atom CPU with a TDP of 7 watts, and after HKEPC put the ZBox through a half-hour-long stress test, the N300 only peaked at 67 C. That's all thanks to AirJet being so thin and being able to both intake and exhaust air. For comparison, Beelink's Mini S12 Pro mini PC with the lower-power N100, which has a TDP of 6 watts, is 1.54 inches thick (66% thicker than the ZBox PI430AJ). Traditional fan-equipped coolers just can't match AirJet coolers in size, which is perhaps AirJet's biggest advantage. Last month, engineers from Frore Systems integrated the AirJet into an M2-based Apple MacBook Air. "With proper cooling, the relatively inexpensive laptop matched the performance of a more expensive MacBook Pro based on the same processor," reports Tom's Hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During a Wells Fargo summit last month, Microsoft Gaming CFO Tim Stuart suggested Xbox is seeking to bring Xbox Game Pass to competing platforms, such as PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. One of the scenarios for Xbox Game Pass expansion may include offering access in exchange for viewing advertisements. Windows Central reports: "For models like Africa, or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that aren't console-first, you can say, 'hey, do you want to watch 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?'," Stuart continued. "Africa is, you know, 50% of the population is 23 years old or younger with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones and mobile devices, not a lot of high-end disposable income, generally-speaking. So we can go in with our own business models and say -- there's millions of gamers we would never have been able to address, and now we can go in with our business models." Microsoft has previously surveyed Xbox users on the Xbox Insider Program and via other avenues about the possibility of offering Xbox Game Pass time in exchange for viewing advertisements. And recently, security researcher Title_OS shared some code snippets from the Xbox OS that described systems that would provide access to Xbox Game Pass via on an "Earned Time" basis, complete in 15-minute blocks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meghan Bartels reports via Scientific American: Some sky watchers this month will witness Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and best-known stars in the sky, nearly disappear. Mere seconds later -- despite astronomers' hopes that the star will meet its explosive end someday soon -- it will return, shining just as brightly as ever. Betelgeuse's brief blip of obscurity will mark a cosmic coincidence: an asteroid will block the star from view over a thin strip of Earth's surface. Scientists are hailing this celestial alignment as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion that, they hope, will permit them to glimpse Betelgeuse's ever changing surface of hot and cold patches in the best resolution to date. The opportunity comes courtesy of a sizable asteroid called Leona, which astronomers first spotted in 1891. On its own, Leona is just another space rock cluttering up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But at 8:17 P.M. ET on December 11 Leona will slip directly between Earth and Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star that, unlike the asteroid, has been recognized by countless generations of humans around the world. [...] To understand how special the event is, consider the total solar eclipse that will occur in April 2024. During the climax of the eclipse, viewers across a narrow strip of Earth's surface will see the moon pass directly in front of the sun. Because the two bodies appear as the same size in our sky, the moon will entirely block the visible disk of the sun and expose the faint, wispy halo called the corona, a layer of our home star's atmosphere that scientists otherwise cannot see from Earth. Similarly, the roughly 40-mile-wide Leona appears in the sky as about the same size as the enormous but very distant Betelgeuse. This will allow the asteroid to block all or most of the star's light when the two bodies perfectly align. But whereas Earth experiences a total solar eclipse every 18 months or so, occultations of bright stars such as Betelgeuse are extremely rare, occurring less than once a century [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Providing a resource for U.S. policymakers, a committee of MIT leaders and scholars has released a set of policy briefs that outlines a framework for the governance of artificial intelligence. The approach includes extending current regulatory and liability approaches in pursuit of a practical way to oversee AI. The aim of the papers is to help enhance U.S. leadership in the area of artificial intelligence broadly, while limiting harm that could result from the new technologies and encouraging exploration of how AI deployment could be beneficial to society. The main policy paper, "A Framework for U.S. AI Governance: Creating a Safe and Thriving AI Sector," suggests AI tools can often be regulated by existing U.S. government entities that already oversee the relevant domains. The recommendations also underscore the importance of identifying the purpose of AI tools, which would enable regulations to fit those applications. "As a country we're already regulating a lot of relatively high-risk things and providing governance there," says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, who helped steer the project, which stemmed from the work of an ad hoc MIT committee. "We're not saying that's sufficient, but let's start with things where human activity is already being regulated, and which society, over time, has decided are high risk. Looking at AI that way is the practical approach." [...] "The framework we put together gives a concrete way of thinking about these things," says Asu Ozdaglar, the deputy dean of academics in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who also helped oversee the effort. The project includes multiple additional policy papers and comes amid heightened interest in AI over last year as well as considerable new industry investment in the field. The European Union is currently trying to finalize AI regulations using its own approach, one that assigns broad levels of risk to certain types of applications. In that process, general-purpose AI technologies such as language models have become a new sticking point. Any governance effort faces the challenges of regulating both general and specific AI tools, as well as an array of potential problems including misinformation, deepfakes, surveillance, and more. These are the key policies and approaches mentioned in the white papers: Extension of Current Regulatory and Liability Approaches: The framework proposes extending current regulatory and liability approaches to cover AI. It suggests leveraging existing U.S. government entities that oversee relevant domains for regulating AI tools. This is seen as a practical approach, starting with areas where human activity is already being regulated and deemed high risk. Identification of Purpose and Intent of AI Tools: The framework emphasizes the importance of AI providers defining the purpose and intent of AI applications in advance. This identification process would enable the application of relevant regulations based on the specific purpose of AI tools. Responsibility and Accountability: The policy brief underscores the responsibility of AI providers to clearly define the purpose and intent of their tools. It also suggests establishing guardrails to prevent misuse and determining the extent of accountability for specific problems. The framework aims to identify situations where end users could reasonably be held responsible for the consequences of misusing AI tools. Advances in Auditing of AI Tools: The policy brief calls for advances in auditing new AI tools, whether initiated by the government, user-driven, or arising from legal liability proceedings. Public standards for auditing are recommended, potentially established by a nonprofit entity or a federal entity similar to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Consideration of a Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO): The framework suggests considering the creation of a new, government-approved "self-regulatory organization" (SRO) agency for AI. This SRO, similar to FINRA for the financial industry, could accumulate domain-specific knowledge, ensuring responsiveness and flexibility in engaging with a rapidly changing AI industry. Encouragement of Research for Societal Benefit: The policy papers highlight the importance of encouraging research on how to make AI beneficial to society. For instance, there is a focus on exploring the possibility of AI augmenting and aiding workers rather than replacing them, leading to long-term economic growth distributed throughout society. Addressing Legal Issues Specific to AI: The framework acknowledges the need to address specific legal matters related to AI, including copyright and intellectual property issues. Special consideration is also mentioned for "human plus" legal issues, where AI capabilities go beyond human capacities, such as mass surveillance tools. Broadening Perspectives in Policymaking: The ad hoc committee emphasizes the need for a broad range of disciplinary perspectives in policymaking, advocating for academic institutions to play a role in addressing the interplay between technology and society. The goal is to govern AI effectively by considering both technical and social systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A jury in San Francisco unanimously found (PDF) that Google violated California and federal antitrust laws through deals that stifled competition for its mobile app store. "The verdict delivers the first significant US courtroom loss for big tech in the years-long campaign by rivals, regulators, and prosecutors to tame the power of internet gatekeepers," reports Wired. From the report: The lawsuit next moves to a remedies phase, meaning a judge as soon as the coming weeks will hear arguments about and decide whether to order changes to Google's business practices. Users of devices powered by Google's Android operating system could find more app options to choose from, at lower prices, if Google is forced to allow downloads of rival app stores from Play or share a greater portion of sales with developers selling digital items inside their apps. The ruling came in a case first filed in 2020 by Epic Games, known for its blockbuster game Fortnite and tools for developers, and argued before a jury since early November. The jury of nine -- a 10th juror dropped out early in the trial -- deliberated for three hours before reaching its verdict. They faced 11 questions such as defining product and geographic markets and whether Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in those areas. Epic had accused Google of restricting smartphone makers, wireless carriers, and app developers from providing any competition to the Play store, which accounts for over 95 percent of all downloads onto Android phones in the US. Google had denied any wrongdoing, saying that its sole aim was to provide a safe and attractive experience to users, especially as it faced competition from Apple, its iPhone, and its App Store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg, Wendy's is expanding its test of an AI-powered chatbot that takes orders at the drive-thru. From the report: Franchisees will get the chance to test the product in 2024, the Dublin, Ohio-based chain said Monday. The tool, powered by Google Cloud's AI software, is currently active in four company-operated restaurants near Columbus. More locations are slated to start using it soon. Wendy's announced the pilot in May, joining the AI race as fast-food joints contended with elevated labor costs and the enduring popularity of drive-thrus. In writing for the chain, Matt Spessard, senior vice president and global chief technology officer, said Monday the software could on average take 86% of orders without intervention from restaurant staff, just exceeding the 85% target outlined earlier this year. The system, called Wendy's FreshAI, uses generative AI to create responses and adapt to customers in real time, Wendy's said. In one location, service times were 22 seconds faster than the average for Columbus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With iOS 17.2 rolling out today, Apple is giving users the ability to record spatial videos on their iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. "The new feature lets users film in three dimensions and experience their favorite memories and special moments on Apple Vision Pro, the upcoming mixed-reality headset," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In order to create a three-dimensional video, Apple explains that the iPhone uses both the main and ultrawide cameras when recording. This is then saved as a single file within a new album in the Photos app titled "Spatial." The videos will also sync across devices with iCloud. Spatial videos are captured in 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second. Spatial video recording can be enabled in Settings by toggling on "Spatial Video for Apple Vision Pro" in the Camera section under Formats. Apple suggests holding the iPhone in landscape orientation for optimal results. Spatial videos can be viewed on all iPhones and other devices; however, they'll appear as regular, 2D videos. The new feature allows users to record videos that Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, describes as "magical" and "setting a new bar for what's possible." While that's marketing speak, it's a differentiator for Apple's high-end iPhone, and will deepen users' connections with Apple's latest product, the AR/VR headset, launching next year. As part of today's release, Apple also launched its Journal app, which is designed to allow iOS users to record key moments in their lives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Huawei will start building its mobile phone network equipment factory in France next year, a source familiar with the matter said, pressing ahead with its first plant in Europe even as some European governments curb the use of the firm's 5G gear. The company outlined plans for the factory with an initial investment of 200 million euros ($215.28 million) in 2020, but the roll-out was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the source said on Monday. The source did not give a timeline for when the factory in Brumath, near Strasbourg, will be up and running. A French government source said the site was expected to open in 2025. Further reading: 'How Washington Chased Huawei Out of Europe'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Play Movies & TV will be replaced with Google TV on January 17, 2024. 9to5Google reports: Since the 2020 launch of the Google TV platform, that branding has replaced Play Movies & TV in areas such as mobile apps, but that's also led to the choice to do away with Play Movies & TV branding basically everywhere else. In October, that decision also made its way to Android TV, and the app has not been working ever since. Despite some confusion over the past few days, the app currently just redirects to Android TV's "Shop" tab, which has been widely available for months. In a new post, Google explains that it will do away with the last parts of Google Play Movies & TV in January 2024: "With these changes, Google Play Movies & TV will no longer be available on Android TV devices or the Google Play website.* However, you'll still be able to access all of your previously purchased titles (including active rentals) on Android TV devices, Google TV devices, the Google TV mobile app (Android and iOS), and YouTube." On January 17, Play Movies & TV will officially cease for good on Android TV. For anyone who does still have the app working -- again, most users cannot use the app already -- the "Shop" tab will become the only option. Similarly, Google says that Play Movies & TV will cease on other remaining platforms that same date. Any cable boxes with the app integrated will also lose it, and in turn pushed to the YouTube app for continued access to purchased content. Web access via play.google.com/movies will also go away, with youtube.com/movies becoming the alternative.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Browser Company's Chromium-based Arc browser, which aims to rethink the whole browser UI with a sidebar for tabs and lots of personalization options, is finally coming to Windows. In a post on X, the Browser Company says it's sent out the first Windows beta invites. It's currently only available for iOS and Mac users. Slashdot reader dokjest shares the email they received: Hey there, Hursh here, CTO at the Browser Co, with some exciting news! A little while ago, you signed up for a brand new browser, Arc -- one that The Verge called "The Chrome replacement I've been waiting for" and Shopify's CEO named as "the best browser." Well, starting today, we're onboarding our very first beta testers to Arc on Windows. And you're next! Over the coming weeks, our team will be onboarding hundreds of beta testers to Arc. And come January, we'll be welcoming 1,000s of you from the waitlist every week. If you don't mind a few bugs and some rough edges, sign up as a beta tester and we'll prioritize your invite to Arc! For us, this period leading up to our Windows release is about crafting the very best version of Arc that we can. And that means learning from you -- what you love, what's missing, what doesn't feel quite right. It still feels surreal to say, but it really does all begin today. Follow along for some fun on isarconwindowsyet.com -- And we'll see you very soon! - Hursh and The Browser Co Crew P.S. If you have a friend on Windows with one too many tabs, who could use a better browser -- forward this on to them, too! If you want to get on the beta waitlist, you can sign up here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Kentucky-based nonprofit healthcare system Norton Healthcare has confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of millions of patients and employees during an earlier ransomware attack. Norton operates more than 40 clinics and hospitals in and around Louisville, Kentucky, and is the city's third-largest private employer. The organization has more than 20,000 employees, and more than 3,000 total providers on its medical staff, according to its website. In a filing with Maine's attorney general on Friday, Norton said that the sensitive data of approximately 2.5 million patients, as well as employees and their dependents, was accessed during its May ransomware attack. In a letter sent to those affected, the nonprofit said that hackers had access to "certain network storage devices between May 7 and May 9," but did not access Norton Healthcare's medical record system or Norton MyChart, its electronic medical record system. But Norton admitted that following a "time-consuming" internal investigation, which the organization completed in November, Norton found that hackers accessed a "wide range of sensitive information," including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health and insurance information and medical identification numbers. Norton Healthcare says that, for some individuals, the exposed data may have also included financial account numbers, driver licenses or other government ID numbers, as well as digital signatures. It's not known if any of the accessed data was encrypted. Norton says it notified law enforcement about the attack and confirmed it did not pay any ransom payment. The organization did not name the hackers responsible for the cyberattack, but the incident was claimed by the notorious ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang in May, according to data breach news site DataBreaches.net, which reported that the group claimed it exfiltrated almost five terabytes of data. TechCrunch could not confirm this, as the ALPHV website was inaccessible at the time of writing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.