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The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert will be the world's biggest optical telescope when completed in 2028. With a giant 39.3-meter main mirror and advanced adaptive optics, the ELT will collect far more light and achieve much sharper images than any existing ground-based telescope, revolutionizing the study of exoplanets, black holes, dark matter, and the early universe. Economist adds: But when it comes to detecting the dimmest and most distant objects, there is no substitute for sheer light-gathering size. On that front the ELT looks like being the final word for the foreseeable future. A planned successor, the "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope," would have sported a 100-metre mirror. But it was shelved in the 2000s on grounds of complexity and cost. The Giant Magellan Telescope is currently being built several hundred kilometres south of the elt on land owned by the Carnegie Institution for Science, an American non-profit, and is due to see its first light some time in the 2030s. It will combine seven big mirrors into one giant one with an effective diameter of 25.4 metres. Even so, it will have only around a third the light-gathering capacity of the ELT. A consortium of scientists from America, Canada, India and Japan, meanwhile, has been trying to build a mega-telescope on Hawaii. The Thirty Meter Telescope would, as its name suggests, be a giant -- though still smaller than the elt. But it is unclear when, or even if, it will be finished. Construction has been halted by arguments about Mauna Kea, the mountain on which it is to be built, which is seen as sacred by some. For the next several decades, it seems, anyone wanting access to the biggest telescope money can buy will have to make their way to northern Chile.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internet propagandists aligned with Russia have duped at least seven Western celebrities, including Elijah Wood and Priscilla Presley, into recording short videos to support its online information war against Ukraine, according to new security research by Microsoft. From a report: The celebrities look like they were asked to offer words of encouragement -- apparently via the Cameo app -- to someone named "Vladimir" who appears to be struggling with substance abuse, Microsoft said. Instead, these messages were edited, sometimes dressed up with emojis, links and the logos of media outlets and then shared online by the Russia-aligned trolls, the company said. The point was to give the appearance that the celebrities were confirming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was suffering from drug and alcohol problems, false claims that Russia has pushed in the past, according to Microsoft. Russia has denied engaging in disinformation campaigns. In one of the videos, a crudely edited message by Wood to someone named Vladimir references drugs and alcohol, saying: "I just want to make sure that you're getting help." Wood's video first surfaced in July, but since then Microsoft researchers have observed six other similar celebrity videos misused in the same way, including clips by "Breaking Bad" actor Dean Norris, John C. McGinley of "Scrubs," and Kate Flannery of "The Office," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech giants including Google and Facebook parent Meta have dramatically ramped up charitable giving to university campuses over the past several years -- giving them influence over academics studying such critical topics as artificial intelligence, social media and disinformation. From a report: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone has donated money to more than 100 university campuses, either through Meta or his personal philanthropy arm, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group studying the technology industry. Other firms are helping fund academic centers, doling out grants to professors and sitting on advisory boards reserved for donors, researchers told The Post. Silicon Valley's influence is most apparent among computer science professors at such top-tier schools as Berkeley, University of Toronto, Stanford and MIT. According to a 2021 paper by University of Toronto and Harvard researchers, most tenure-track professors in computer science at those schools whose funding sources could be determined had taken money from the technology industry, including nearly 6 of 10 scholars of AI. The proportion rose further in certain controversial subjects, the study found. Of 33 professors whose funding could be traced who wrote on AI ethics for the top journals Nature and Science, for example, all but one had taken grant money from the tech giants or had worked as their employees or contractors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US broadband industry is protesting a Federal Communications Commission plan to measure the affordability of Internet service. From a report: The FCC has been evaluating US-wide broadband deployment progress on a near-annual basis for almost three decades but hasn't factored affordability into these regular reviews. The broadband industry is afraid that a thorough examination of prices will lead to more regulation of ISPs. An FCC Notice of Inquiry issued on November 1 proposes to analyze the affordability of Internet service in the agency's next congressionally required review of broadband deployment. That could include examining not just monthly prices but also data overage charges and various other fees. [...] Cable industry lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association complained in a filing released Monday that the Notice of Inquiry's "undue focus on affordability -- or pricing -- is particularly inappropriate." The group, which represents cable providers such as Comcast and Charter, said that setting an affordability benchmark could lead to rate regulation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo has cancelled Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo and postponed other Japanese esports events after persistent threats were made to both staff and spectators. From a report: A Japanese press release, shared by reliable translator Genki on X/Twitter, revealed the "all ages celebration of Nintendo fun," which took place in the United States for the first time in 2023, has been cancelled and its main esports tournaments postponed. Nintendo said its employees have received relentless threats which have also recently targeted spectators, attendees, and staff at Nintendo Live 2024, forcing the cancellation in the interest of safety. It was due to take place from January 20 to 21.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK accused Russia's main intelligence agency of seeking to hack the emails of British politicians and officials in an attempt to interfere in its democratic processes. From a report: "They have been targeting high-profile individuals and entities with a clear intent: using information they obtained to meddle in British politics," Foreign Office minister Leo Docherty told the House of Commons on Thursday. The intrusions include targeting personal email accounts and impersonation attempts against universities and media organizations, according to Docherty. Civil servants and journalists have also been targeted by Russia's Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, he said. In November, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre warned that Russian and other state-sponsored hackers posed an "enduring and significant threat" to the country. The agency said that Russia was one of the most prolific state actors in cybercrime, and had dedicated substantial resources to conducting hacking operations internationally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new book argues that the invention of states and corporations has something to teach us about A.I. But perhaps it's the other way around. From a report: One of the things that make the machine of the capitalist state work is that some of its powers have been devolved upon other artificial agents -- corporations. Where [David] Runciman (a professor of politics at Cambridge) compares the state to a general A.I., one that exists to serve a variety of functions, corporations have been granted a limited range of autonomy in the form of what might be compared to a narrow A.I., one that exists to fulfill particular purposes that remain beyond the remit or the interests of the sovereign body. Corporations can thus be set up in free pursuit of a variety of idiosyncratic human enterprises, but they, too, are robotic insofar as they transcend the constraints and the priorities of their human members. The failure mode of governments is to become "exploitative and corrupt," Runciman notes. The failure mode of corporations, as extensions of an independent civil society, is that "their independence undoes social stability by allowing those making the money to make their own rules." There is only a "narrow corridor" -- a term Runciman borrows from the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson -- in which the artificial agents balance each other out, and citizens get to enjoy the sense of control that emerges from an atmosphere of freedom and security. The ideal scenario is, in other words, a kludgy equilibrium.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google this week took the wraps off of Gemini, its new flagship generative AI model meant to power a range of products and services including Bard. Google has touted Gemini's superior architecture and capabilities, claiming that the model meets or exceeds the performance of other leading gen AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4. But the anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. TechCrunch: The model fails to get basic facts right, like 2023 Oscar winners: Note that Gemini Pro claims incorrectly that Brendan Gleeson won Best Actor last year, not Brendan Fraser -- the actual winner. I tried asking the model the same question and, bizarrely, it gave a different wrong answer. "Navalny," not "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed," won Best Documentary Feature last year; "All Quiet on the Western Front" won Best International Film; "Women Talking" won Best Adapted Screenplay; and "Pinocchio" won Best Animated Feature Film. That's a lot of mistakes. Translation doesn't appear to be Gemini Pro's strong suit, either. What about summarizing news? Surely Gemini Pro, Google Search and Google News at its disposal, can give a recap of something topical? Not necessarily. It seems Gemini Pro is loathe to comment on potentially controversial news topics, instead telling users to... Google it themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Launched in the Nordics, BeneLux, Ireland, and the UK, the ads insist that HP printers are "made to be less hated." From a report: Which may come as news to HP's long-suffering users who still, for whatever reason, need to brand mushed-up trees with corporate nonsense despite this alleged digital age. The three ads run touch upon a spectrum of negative emotions that will be highly relatable to those who have ever tried to print something at home or work -- sorrow, anger, despair -- and all end with extreme and cathartic human-on-printer violence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the wake of laying off about 100 of its 1,200 employees, Bungie, the developer behind Destiny, is reportedly grappling with internal challenges and cost-saving measures, amid efforts to maintain some autonomy from Sony. Although Bungie operates as an independent Sony subsidiary, its leadership is seemingly striving to prevent a complete Sony takeover, IGN reports. The company's board, split between Bungie and Sony representatives, faces potential dissolution if Bungie fails to meet specific financial goals. This risk has been heightened by the delay of Destiny 2 expansion "The Final Shape" and investments in Marathon, challenging Bungie's financial performance. The report adds: Along with the recent layoffs, this has resulted in a massive decay in morale within the company, according to IGN's sources, one of whom told us that the mood within the studio has been "soul-crushing" over the last month. And it doesn't sound like management is making any significant efforts toward improving the atmosphere, either. According to those still with the company, employee frustration and sadness in the days and weeks following the layoffs was met with a surprising amount of indifference or even outright flippancy or hostility from management. Several people we spoke to told us that leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be more layoffs, with two specifically confirming previous reports that chief people officer Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a "lever" the company would pull again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's next for Windows? Microsoft plans next-gen Windows AI release in 2024, plus details on recent changes to the Windows roadmap. From a report: According to my sources, the new Windows bosses are now returning to an annual release cycle for major versions of the Windows platform, meaning Windows is going back to having just one big feature update a year instead of multiple smaller ones throughout. Microsoft may still use Moment updates sparingly, but they will no longer be the primary delivery vehicle for new features going forward. These changes are said to take effect after Hudson Valley launches in 2024, so I'm still expecting at least one more Moment update for the current version of Windows 11, which sources say will ship in the February or March time frame early next year. [...] According to my sources, Microsoft's blockbuster new feature will be the introduction of an AI-powered Windows Shell, enhanced with an "advanced Copilot," that's able to constantly work in the background to enhance search, jumpstart projects or workflows, understand context, and much more. Sources say these AI features will be "groundbreaking." The company is working on a new history/timeline feature that will let users scroll back in time through all the apps and websites that Copilot has remembered, which can be filtered based on a user's specific search criteria. For example, you could type "FY24 earnings" and every instance where that term was on-screen will reappear for you to see and open. AI will also enhance search in Windows, with the ability to use natural language to find things that you've previously opened or seen on your PC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After staving off collapse by cutting costs, many young tech companies are out of options, fueling a cash bonfire. From a report: WeWork raised more than $11 billion in funding as a private company. Olive AI, a health care start-up, gathered $852 million. Convoy, a freight start-up, raised $900 million. And Veev, a home construction start-up, amassed $647 million. In the last six weeks, they all filed for bankruptcy or shut down. They are the most recent failures in a tech start-up collapse that investors say is only beginning. After staving off mass failure by cutting costs over the past two years, many once-promising tech companies are now on the verge of running out of time and money. They face a harsh reality: Investors are no longer interested in promises. Rather, venture capital firms are deciding which young companies are worth saving and urging others to shut down or sell. It has fueled an astonishing cash bonfire. In August, Hopin, a start-up that raised more than $1.6 billion and was once valued at $7.6 billion, sold its main business for just $15 million. Last month, Zeus Living, a real estate start-up that raised $150 million, said it was shutting down. Plastiq, a financial technology start-up that raised $226 million, went bankrupt in May. In September, Bird, a scooter company that raised $776 million, was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because of its low stock price. Its $7 million market capitalization is less than the value of the $22 million Miami mansion that its founder, Travis VanderZanden, bought in 2021. "As an industry we should all be braced to hear about a lot more failures," said Jenny Lefcourt, an investor at Freestyle Capital. "The more money people got before the party ended, the longer the hangover." Getting a full picture of the losses is difficult since private tech companies are not required to disclose when they go out of business or sell. The industry's gloom has also been masked by a boom in companies focused on artificial intelligence, which has attracted hype and funding over the last year. But approximately 3,200 private venture-backed U.S. companies have gone out of business this year, according to data compiled for The New York Times by PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Those companies had raised $27.2 billion in venture funding. PitchBook said the data was not comprehensive and probably undercounts the total because many companies go out of business quietly. It also excluded many of the largest failures that went public, such as WeWork, or that found buyers, like Hopin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India wants to be the voice of the global south in the negotiations. But can the world's most populous nation cut its massive coal use? From a report: India is pitching itself as a leader of the global south at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), under way in Dubai. During his opening speech at the meeting, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a sharp rebuke to wealthy nations: "A small section of mankind has exploited nature indiscriminately. But the whole of humanity is paying its price, especially the residents of the global south." But India -- now the world's most populous nation -- relies heavily on coal to meet its energy needs, and faces a difficult path to cutting its emissions to net zero. The country's priority remains reducing poverty -- which India says requires more energy use -- but more action on climate change is essential, say researchers. "If we have to reach net-zero by 2050 collectively, then India's share in that collective goal should be a significant one," says Nandini Das, a climate researcher based in Perth, Australia, who works for the global research group Climate Action Tracker. But she adds that in terms of finance, "India requires substantial international support." India is the world's third biggest carbon producer, accounting for 7.3% of global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2022. But those emissions come from 1.43 billion people, accounting for 18% of the world's population. India's per capita emissions last year were equivalent to 2.76 tonnes of carbon dioxide, less than one-sixth of the per capita emissions of the United States and 24 times smaller than the figure for Qatar, the world's largest per capita emitter.India's average standard of living is far below those of the United States and Qatar, with 210 million people living in poverty according to United Nations metrics. India has maintained that coal -- a cheap fossil fuel readily available in the country -- is required to power its economic development. Coal supplied 73% of India's electricity in 2022; and in November this year, the country announced that it would install 80 gigawatts of new coal-fired power-generation capacity by 2032. "We have to give a fair share to all developing countries in the global carbon budget," Modi said at COP28.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A number of popular mobile password managers are inadvertently spilling user credentials due to a vulnerability in the autofill functionality of Android apps. The vulnerability, dubbed "AutoSpill," can expose users' saved credentials from mobile password managers by circumventing Android's secure autofill mechanism, according to university researchers at the IIIT Hyderabad, who discovered the vulnerability and presented their research at Black Hat Europe this week. The researchers, Ankit Gangwal, Shubham Singh and Abhijeet Srivastava, found that when an Android app loads a login page in WebView, password managers can get "disoriented" about where they should target the user's login information and instead expose their credentials to the underlying app's native fields, they said. This is because WebView, the preinstalled engine from Google, lets developers display web content in-app without launching a web browser, and an autofill request is generated. "Let's say you are trying to log into your favorite music app on your mobile device, and you use the option of 'login via Google or Facebook.' The music app will open a Google or Facebook login page inside itself via the WebView," Gangwal explained to TechCrunch prior to their Black Hat presentation on Wednesday. "When the password manager is invoked to autofill the credentials, ideally, it should autofill only into the Google or Facebook page that has been loaded. But we found that the autofill operation could accidentally expose the credentials to the base app." Gangwal notes that the ramifications of this vulnerability, particularly in a scenario where the base app is malicious, are significant. He added: "Even without phishing, any malicious app that asks you to log in via another site, like Google or Facebook, can automatically access sensitive information." The researchers tested the AutoSpill vulnerability using some of the most popular password managers, including 1Password, LastPass, Keeper and Enpass, on new and up-to-date Android devices. They found that most apps were vulnerable to credential leakage, even with JavaScript injection disabled. When JavaScript injection was enabled, all the password managers were susceptible to their AutoSpill vulnerability. Gangwal says he alerted Google and the affected password managers to the flaw. Gangwal tells TechCrunch that the researchers are now exploring the possibility of an attacker potentially extracting credentials from the app to WebView. The team is also investigating whether the vulnerability can be replicated on iOS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new preprint study, researchers were able to get AI chatbots to teach other chatbots how to bypass built-in restrictions. According to Scientific American, AIs were observed "breaking the rules to offer advice on how to synthesize methamphetamine, build a bomb and launder money." From the report: Modern chatbots have the power to adopt personas by feigning specific personalities or acting like fictional characters. The new study took advantage of that ability by asking a particular AI chatbot to act as a research assistant. Then the researchers instructed this assistant to help develop prompts that could "jailbreak" other chatbots -- destroy the guardrails encoded into such programs. The research assistant chatbot's automated attack techniques proved to be successful 42.5 percent of the time against GPT-4, one of the large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT. It was also successful 61 percent of the time against Claude 2, the model underpinning Anthropic's chatbot, and 35.9 percent of the time against Vicuna, an open-source chatbot. Ever since LLM-powered chatbots became available to the public, enterprising mischief-makers have been able to jailbreak the programs. By asking chatbots the right questions, people have previously convinced the machines to ignore preset rules and offer criminal advice, such as a recipe for napalm. As these techniques have been made public, AI model developers have raced to patch them -- a cat-and-mouse game requiring attackers to come up with new methods. That takes time. But asking AI to formulate strategies that convince other AIs to ignore their safety rails can speed the process up by a factor of 25, according to the researchers. And the success of the attacks across different chatbots suggested to the team that the issue reaches beyond individual companies' code. The vulnerability seems to be inherent in the design of AI-powered chatbots more widely. "In the current state of things, our attacks mainly show that we can get models to say things that LLM developers don't want them to say," says Rusheb Shah, another co-author of the study. "But as models get more powerful, maybe the potential for these attacks to become dangerous grows."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports on a new German-based project called WindCORES that operates data centers inside existing wind turbines, making them almost completely carbon neutral. "If you look at the sustainability pyramid, the highest form of sustainability is using things that already exist," said Fiete Dubberke, managing director of windCORES, which was founded in 2018. From the report: The concept uses existing wind turbines to power data centers on site, while fiber optic cables provide a constant internet connection. Planning for a project like this began 10 years ago, Dubberke said, when WestfalenWIND realized the electricity grid was too weak to handle the huge capacities of electricity being produced by its wind turbines during peak wind hours, resulting in their windfarms being switched off due to grid security issues. WindCORES estimates that the unused electricity generated during this period could power one-third of all German data centers. Its solution was to bypass the "middleman" (the grid) altogether, and instead, power IT servers from directly inside the large concrete wind turbine towers. Each tower is 13 meters wide and could potentially hold server racks up to 150 meters high. As the area is mostly empty space, Dubberke calls the concept a "no-brainer." According to Dubberke, an average of 85-92% of the power needed to sustain a windCORES data center comes directly from the host turbine. When there is no wind, electricity is obtained from other renewable sources, including solar farms and hydroelectric power plants, via the electricity grid. "The German data center average is 430 grams of CO2 released per kilowatt hour," he said. "For windCORES, it is calculated at just 10 grams per kilowatt hour." Since launching, windCORES has acquired around 150 clients through co-location and cloud solutions, from very small start-up companies to bigger, more established ones, such as Zattoo, a leading carbon-neutral Swiss TV streaming platform with several million monthly users. Zattoo joined windCORES in 2020, when it moved one of its six data centers into a wind turbine in Paderborn. Currently, 218 channels are encoded with windCORES, and by the end of next year, the company hopes to relocate more existing servers to the wind farm, making it Zattoo's main data center location. [...] WindCORES has recently opened a larger, second location called "windCORES II" at the Huser Klee windfarm in Lichtenau, Germany. Built for a new large automotive client from Munich (the name is yet to be revealed), it is over three levels and around 20 meters high.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sellafield, Europe's most hazardous nuclear site, has a worsening leak from a huge silo of radioactive waste that could pose a risk to the public, the Guardian can reveal. Concerns over safety at the crumbling building, as well as cracks in a reservoir of toxic sludge known as B30, have caused diplomatic tensions with countries including the US, Norway and Ireland, which fear Sellafield has failed to get a grip of the problems. The leak of radioactive liquid from one of the "highest nuclear hazards in the UK" -- a decaying building at the vast Cumbrian site known as the Magnox swarf storage Silo (MSSS) -- is likely to continue to 2050. That could have "potentially significant consequences" if it gathers pace, risking contaminating groundwater, according to an official document. Cracks have also developed in the concrete and asphalt skin covering the huge pond containing decades of nuclear sludge, part of a catalogue of safety problems at the site. These concerns have emerged in Nuclear Leaks, a year-long Guardian investigation into problems spanning cyber hacking, radioactive contamination and toxic workplace culture at the vast nuclear dump. "We are proud of our safety record at Sellafield and we are always striving to improve," said a Sellafield spokesperson in a statement. "The nature of our site means that until we complete our mission, our highest hazard facilities will always pose a risk. We continuously measure and report on nuclear, radiological, and conventional safety. Employees are empowered to raise issues and challenge when things aren't right."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan found that wasabi improves both short- and long-term memory. CBS News reports: Rui Nouchi, the study's lead researcher and an associate professor at the school's Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, told CBS News the results, while based on a limited sample of subjects without preexisting health conditions, exceeded their expectations. "We knew from earlier animal studies that wasabi conferred health benefits," he said in an interview from his office in northeast Japan. "But what really surprised us was the dramatic change. The improvement was really substantial." The main active component of Japanese wasabi is a biochemical called 6-MSITC, a known antioxidant and anti-inflammatory known to exist in only trace amounts elsewhere throughout the plant kingdom, Nouchi said. The double-blind, randomized study involved 72 healthy subjects, aged 60 to 80. Half of them took 100 milligrams of wasabi extract at bedtime, with the rest receiving a placebo. After three months, the treated group registered "significant" boosts in two aspects of cognition, working (short-term) memory, and the longer-lasting episodic memory, based on standardized assessments for language skills, concentration and ability to carry out simple tasks. No improvement was seen in other areas of cognition, such as inhibitory control (the ability to stay focused), executive function or processing speed. Subjects who received the wasabi treatment saw their episodic memory scores jump an average of 18%, Nouchi said, and scored on average 14% higher than the placebo group overall. The researchers theorized that 6-MSITC reduces inflammation and oxidant levels in the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for memory function, and boosts neural plasticity. Compared with the control group, the study said, subjects dosed with wasabi "showed improved verbal episodic memory performance as well as better performance in associating faces and names, which is often the major memory-related problem in older adults." But here's the rub: most of the "wasabi" you order at sushi restaurants is made of ordinary white horseradish, dyed green. "Genuine wasabi must be consumed fresh, with the stubbly rhizome, or stem of the plant, grated tableside just before eating," notes the report. "On the plus side, just a small dab offers the same benefits as the capsule supplements used in the Tohoku study, or 0.8 milligrams of 6-MSITC." The study has been published in the journal Nutrients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the suggestions in a recent report (PDF) from the European Parliament's Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection is to expand geo-blocking restrictions to the audiovisual sector, including streaming platforms. This has spooked some stakeholders who warn that a ban on geo-blocking would put the entire industry at risk. TorrentFreak reports: The report recommends the EU Commission to launch a comprehensive review of the current geo-blocking regulation and have that completed by 2025. It also carries several suggestions for improvement and expansion of the current rules. "The data presented in the report suggest that the effects of such an [geo-blocking] extension would vary by type of content, depending on the level of consumer demand and on the availability of content across the EU," the report's summary reads. "As regards an extension to audio-visual content, it highlights potential benefits for consumers, notably in the availability of a wider choice of content across borders. The report also identifies the potential impact that such an extension of the scope would have on the overall dynamics of the audio-visual sector, but concludes that it needs to be further assessed." The proposals don't include the abolishment of all territorial licenses in the EU, and they're mindful of the potential impact on the industry. Nevertheless, some industry insiders are spooked; the Creativity Works! coalition (CW), for example, which counts the MPA, ACT, and the Premier League among its members. According to CW, geo-blocking technology is crucial to the creative and cultural industries in Europe. "Geo-blocking is one of the foundations for Europe's creative and cultural sectors, providing Europeans with the means to create, produce, showcase, publish, distribute and finance diverse, high-quality and affordable content," they write. Banning geo-blocking altogether would be a disaster that puts millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of euros in revenue at risk, CW warns. At the same time, it may result in more expensive subscriptions for many consumers. "Ending geo-blocking's exclusive territorial licensing would threaten 10,000 European cinemas, access to over 8,500 European VOD films and up to half of European film budgets," CW writes. "What's more, over 100 million European fans could pay more to view the same sports coverage, while major digital streaming platforms might be forced to introduce sharp hikes for consumers in many European countries." Understandably, the movie industry is concerned about legislation that upsets the status quo. However, the IMCO report doesn't recommend a wholesale ban on territorial licenses but aims to ensure that content is available in regions where it currently isn't. At this stage, nothing is set in stone, so proposals could change. However, the present recommendations appear to seek a balance between the interests of the entertainment industry and the public at large.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event today that they will use AMD's newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X, as an alternative to Nvidia's expensive graphic processors. "If AMD's latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models and put competitive pressure on Nvidia's surging AI chip sales growth," reports CNBC. From the report: "All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud," AMD CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday. AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models. Su directly compared the MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia's main AI GPU, the H100. "What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience," Su said. "When you ask a model something, you'd like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated." The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. "It takes work to adopt AMD," Su said. AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia's industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons AI developers currently prefer Nvidia. Price will also be important. AMD didn't reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia's can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD's chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia's in order to persuade customers to buy it. On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia. Meta said it will use MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads such as processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, said the company would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle's cloud will also use the chips. OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products, called Triton, which isn't a big large language model like GPT but is used in AI research to access chip features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Another quantum computing record has been broken. A team has built a quantum computer with the largest ever number of so-called logical qubits (quantum bits). Unlike standard qubits, logical qubits are better able to carry out computations unmarred by errors, making the new device a potentially important step towards practical quantum computing. How complicated of a calculation a quantum computer can complete depends on the number of qubits it contains. Recently, IBM and California-based Atom Computing unveiled devices with more than 1000 qubits, nearly tripling the size of previously largest quantum computers. But the existence of these devices has not led to an immediate and dramatic increase in computing capability, because larger quantum computers often also make more errors. To make a quantum computer that can correct its errors, researchers from the quantum computing start-up QuEra in Boston and several academics focused instead on increasing its number of logical qubits, which are groups of qubits that are connected to each other through quantum entanglement. In conventional computers, error-correction relies on keeping multiple redundant copies of information, but quantum information is fundamentally different and cannot be copied -- so researchers use entanglement to spread it across several qubits, which achieves a similar redundancy, says Dolev Bluvstein at Harvard University in Massachusetts who was part of the team. To make their quantum computer, the researchers started with several thousand rubidium atoms in an airless container. They then used forces from lasers and magnets to cool the atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero where their quantum properties are most prominent. Under these conditions, they could control the atoms' quantum states very precisely by again hitting them with lasers. Accordingly, they first created 280 qubits from the atoms and then went a step further by using another laser pulse to entangle groups of those - for instance 7 qubits at a time -- to make a logical qubit. By doing this, the researchers were able to make as many as 48 logical qubits at one time. This is more than 10 times the number of logical qubits that have ever been created before. "It's a big deal to have that many logical qubits. A very remarkable result for any quantum computing platform" says Mark Saffman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says that the new quantum computer greatly benefits from being made of atoms that are controlled by light because this kind of control is very efficient. QuEra's computer makes its qubits interact and exchange information by moving them closer to each other inside the computer with optical "tweezers" made of laser beams. In contrast, chip-based quantum computers, like those made by IBM and Google, must use multiple wires to control each qubit. Bluvstein and his colleagues implemented several computer operations, codes and algorithms on the new computer to test the logical qubits' performance. He says that though these tests were more preliminary than the calculations that quantum computers will eventually perform, the team already found that using logical qubits led to fewer errors than seen in quantum computers using physical qubits. The research has been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers have identified a large number of bugs to do with the processing of images at boot time," writes longtime Slashdot reader jd. "This allows malicious code to be installed undetectably (since the image doesn't have to pass any validation checks) by appending it to the image. None of the current secure boot mechanisms are capable of blocking the attack." Ars Technica reports: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year's worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs. The researchers unveiled the attack on Wednesday at the Black Hat Security Conference in London. As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment. "Once arbitrary code execution is achieved during the DXE phase, it's game over for platform security," researchers from Binarly, the security firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, wrote in a whitepaper. "From this stage, we have full control over the memory and the disk of the target device, thus including the operating system that will be started." From there, LogoFAIL can deliver a second-stage payload that drops an executable onto the hard drive before the main OS has even started. The following video demonstrates a proof-of-concept exploit created by the researchers. The infected device -- a Gen 2 Lenovo ThinkCentre M70s running an 11th-Gen Intel Core with a UEFI released in June -- runs standard firmware defenses, including Secure Boot and Intel Boot Guard. LogoFAIL vulnerabilities are tracked under the following designations: CVE-2023-5058, CVE-2023-39538, CVE-2023-39539, and CVE-2023-40238. However, this list is currently incomplete. "A non-exhaustive list of companies releasing advisories includes AMI (PDF), Insyde, Phoenix, and Lenovo," reports Ars. "People who want to know if a specific device is vulnerable should check with the manufacturer." "The best way to prevent LogoFAIL attacks is to install the UEFI security updates that are being released as part of Wednesday's coordinated disclosure process. Those patches will be distributed by the manufacturer of the device or the motherboard running inside the device. It's also a good idea, when possible, to configure UEFIs to use multiple layers of defenses. Besides Secure Boot, this includes both Intel Boot Guard and, when available, Intel BIOS Guard. There are similar additional defenses available for devices running AMD or ARM CPUs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Liam Proven reports via The Register: One of the best FOSS text editors for Windows, Notepad++, is turning 20, while cross platform Geany just hit version 2.0 as it turns 18 years old. Notepad++'s version 8.6 is the twentieth anniversary release of one of the go-to FOSS text editors for Windows. [...] If you use an Arm-powered Windows machine, such as the ThinkPad X13S, there is now a native Arm64 version. It still supports x86-32 as well, and there are portable versions which work without being installed locally -- handy if you don't have admin rights. There is even a usefully recent version for Windows XP if you are still using that geriatric OS. This release adds multi-select, allowing you to manipulate multiple instances of the same text at once, which looks confusing but very powerful. It is a staple on all of the Reg FOSS desk's Windows partitions, thanks to its inclusion in the essential Windows post-install setup tool Ninite. Ninite will install -- and update -- a whole swath of FOSS and freeware tools for Windows, making setup of a new machine doable in just a couple of clicks. And if you keep the Ninite installer file around, you can re-run it later and it will update everything it installed first time around. Ninite does offer other programmers' editors, such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio Code -- but they are behemoths by comparison. VSCode is implemented as an Electron app, meaning that it's huge, embeds an entire copy of Chromium, and scoffs RAM like it's going out of fashion. Notepad++ is a native Win32 app, making it tiny and fast: the download is less than 5MB, one twentieth the size of VSCode. Sluggish, bloated editors are not just a problem on Windows. Gargantuan Electron apps are distressingly prevalent on Linux and macOS as well. This vulture is guilty of using some, and even recommending them -- because some of them can do things that nothing else can. That's not true in the case of plain text editors, though. You don't have to put up with apps that take a good fraction of a gigabyte for this. Geany is a good example. It straddles the line between a text editor and an IDE: it can manage multi-project files, automatically call out to compilers and suchlike, and parse their output to highlight errors. We last mentioned it nearly a decade ago but the project recently reached voting age -- at least for humans -- and after this milestone in maturity its developers called the latest release version 2.0. It has better support for dark mode, a new tree view in its sidebar, adds a bunch of new supported file types, and can detect if the user changes the type of a file and re-do its syntax highlighting to match.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A high-speed train from the greater Los Angeles area to Las Vegas took a big step closer to reality thanks to a $3 billion federal grant from the Department of Transportation and Joe Biden's signature infrastructure law. The proposed line will be built by Brightline West, a private company owned by Fortress Investment Group. It promises to use all-electric high-speed trains that can travel up to 180 mph, which will half the travel time from Los Angeles to Las Vegas without even taking into account the terrible traffic during peak travel times. The one catch is the LA station will be in Rancho Cucamonga, about 45 miles from Union Station (it is, however, connected via Metrolink trains). The Las Vegas station is more centrally located close to the airport. [...] Brightline West may be the flashiest rail project in the U.S. at the moment, but it's hardly alone. The U.S. is experiencing a modest but real resurgence in rail expansion thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In addition to Brightline West, a Raleigh-to-Richmond rail corridor received a $1 billion grant to be fit for reliable passenger service, a major boon to a region with good bones for passenger service and high demand that has become neglected and dominated by freight rail. North Carolina is experiencing record passenger rail ridership thanks to more service between Raleigh and Charlotte, two metro areas that have experienced massive population booms in recent decades and desperately need better rail service. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act is also providing tens of billions of dollars in funding to upgrade Northeast Corridor infrastructure between Washington D.C. and Boston, the nation's busiest rail route. The other California High Speed rail route, the one that a state authority has been trying to build for decades that will only go from Bakersfield to Merced, also received $3 billion in federal funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper:Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors are more plentiful and interconnected today than ever before. However, although there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in new ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find --contradicting recombinant growth theory. Here we shed light on this apparent puzzle. Analysing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications from across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally. We further show that across all fields, periods and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their on-site counterparts. Creating a dataset that allows us to explore the division of labour in knowledge production within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members, collaboration centres on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks -- such as conceiving new ideas and designing research -- when knowledge is tacit. We conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members to produce new, disruptive ideas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple, seeking to reverse a decline in Mac and iPad sales, is preparing several new models and upgrades for early next year, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: The effort includes updating the iPad Air, iPad Pro and MacBook Air, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven't been announced. The new iPad Air will come in two sizes for the first time, and the Pro model will get OLED screens -- short for organic light-emitting diode. The MacBook Air, meanwhile, will feature the speedier M3 processor. The Mac and iPad account for 15% of Apple's revenue combined, and they've been particularly hard hit by a decline in consumer tech spending. The iPad slump has been compounded by a lack of new models. In fact, 2023 will be the first calendar year in the product's history when no new versions were released. There have been Mac releases in the past year, but that market faces a broader pullback for computers following a boom in pandemic spending.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI coding assistants are here to stay -- but just how big a difference they make is still unclear. From a report: Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO: "You've got a lot of tabs open, you're planning a vacation, maybe you're reading the news. At last you copy the text you need and go back to your code, but it's 20 minutes later and you lost the flow." The key idea behind Copilot and other programs like it, sometimes called code assistants, is to put the information that programmers need right next to the code they are writing. The tool tracks the code and comments (descriptions or notes written in natural language) in the file that a programmer is working on, as well as other files that it links to or that have been edited in the same project, and sends all this text to the large language model behind Copilot as a prompt. (GitHub co-developed Copilot's model, called Codex, with OpenAI. It is a large language model fine-tuned on code.) Copilot then predicts what the programmer is trying to do and suggests code to do it. This round trip between code and Codex happens multiple times a second, the prompt updating as the programmer types. At any moment, the programmer can accept what Copilot suggests by hitting the tab key, or ignore it and carry on typing. The tab button seems to get hit a lot. A study of almost a million Copilot users published by GitHub and the consulting firm Keystone Strategy in June -- a year after the tool's general release -- found that programmers accepted on average around 30% of its suggestions, according to GitHub's user data. [...] Copilot has changed the basic skills of coding. As with ChatGPT or image makers like Stable Diffusion, the tool's output is often not exactly what's wanted -- but it can be close. "Maybe it's correct, maybe it's not -- but it's a good start," says Arghavan Moradi Dakhel, a researcher at Polytechnique Montreal in Canada who studies the use of machine-learning tools in software development. Programming becomes prompting: rather than coming up with code from scratch, the work involves tweaking half-formed code and nudging a large language model to produce something more on point.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A user of a legal manga app operated by one of Japan's largest publishers claims they were locked out of the service after being accused of fraudulent activity. TorrentFreak: While using Shueisha's YanJan! app, the user's smartphone began vibrating before displaying a message that their account had been suspended. It was later confirmed that taking screenshots, even inadvertently, can lead to being banned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch, the popular video streaming service, plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27 after finding that operating in one of the world's largest esports markets is "prohibitively expensive." From a report: Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the firm undertook a "significant effort" to reduce the network costs to operate in Korea, but ultimately the fees to operate in the East Asian nation was still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries. The ceasing of operations in Korea is a "unique situation," he wrote in a blog post. South Korea's expensive internet fees have led to legal fights -- streaming giant Netflix unsuccessfully sued a local broadband supplier last year to avoid paying usage charges, but Seoul's court ruled that Netflix must contribute to the network costs enabling its half-billion-dollar Korean business. Twitch attempted to lower its network costs by experimenting with a peer-to-peer model and then downgrading the streaming quality to 720p video resolution, Clancy said. While these efforts helped the firm lower its network costs, it wasn't enough.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned. From a report: Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures. Triggering these planetary shifts will not cause temperatures to spiral out of control in the coming centuries but will unleash dangerous and sweeping damage to people and nature that cannot be undone. "Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity," said Tim Lenton, from the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute. "They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability and financial collapse." The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one atmospheric current in the North Atlantic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon said it has "cultivated" a Southern California city mayor by donating PPE to the city and taking him and his team on tours in a confidential company document leaked on Tuesday. From a report: The document, which is undated but refers to 2024 plans, also describes the company's intent to combat legislation that would harm its interests by courting non-profit groups in California. The company said "Warehouse Moratorium Legislation" in the state -- like AB 1000, which would prohibit companies from building large warehouses in residential and public areas -- "would be detrimental to Amazon's interests." The document, titled "Community Engagement Plan 2024," was shared in screenshots on X by Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former California State Assembly member and AFL-CIO leader, who described it as an "interesting read about how [Amazon] plan[s] to use $$ to non-profits in communities of color to fight legislation that limits environmental affects of warehouses & labor organizing." The document states that Amazon is facing "significant reputational challenges in Southern California, where the company is perceived to build facilities in predominantly communities of color and poverty, negatively impacting their health." The document then names City of Perris Mayor Michael Vargas, who Amazon refers to as "Perris Mayor Marty Vargas" in an apparent typo, as an "influential elected leader that we have cultivated through PPE donations to support the region, touring him and his team, and ongoing engagement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aaron Klotz, reporting for Tom's Hardware: Intel recently published a new playbook titled "Core Truths" that put AMD under direct fire for utilizing its older Zen 2 CPU architecture in its latest Ryzen 7000 mobile series CPU product stack. Intel later removed the document, but we have the slides below. The playbook is designed to educate customers about AMD's product stack and even calls it "snake oil." Intel's playbook specifically talks about AMD's latest Ryzen 5 7520U, criticizing the fact it features AMD's Zen 2 architecture from 2019 even though it sports a Ryzen 7000 series model name. Further on in the playbook, the company accuses AMD of selling "half-truths" to unsuspecting customers, stressing that the future of younger kid's education needs the best CPU performance from the latest and greatest CPU technologies made today. To make its point clear, Intel used images in its playbook referencing "snake oil" and images of used car salesmen. The playbook also criticizes AMD's new naming scheme for its Ryzen 7000 series mobile products, quoting ArsTechnica: "As a consumer, you're still intended to see the number 7 and think, 'Oh, this is new.'" Intel also published CPU benchmark comparisons of the 7520U against its 13th Gen Core i5-1335U to back up its points. Unsurprisingly, the 1335U was substantially faster than the Zen 2 counterpart.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Increasing talk of AI developing with potentially dangerous speed is hardly slowing things down. A year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a new race to develop AI technology, Google today revealed an AI project intended to reestablish the search giant as the world leader in AI. From a report: Gemini, a new type of AI model that can work with text, images, and video, could be the most important algorithm in Google's history after PageRank, which vaulted the search engine into the public psyche and created a corporate giant. An initial version of Gemini starts to roll out today inside Google's chatbot Bard for the English language setting. It will be available in more than 170 countries and territories. Google says Gemini will be made available to developers through Google Cloud's API from December 13. A more compact version of the model will from today power suggested messaging replies from the keyboard of Pixel 8 smartphones. Gemini will be introduced into other Google products including generative search, ads, and Chrome in "coming months," the company says. The most powerful Gemini version of all will debut in 2024, pending "extensive trust and safety checks," Google says. "It's a big moment for us," Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, told WIRED ahead of today's announcement. "We're really excited by its performance, and we're also excited to see what people are going to do building on top of that." Gemini is described by Google as "natively multimodal," because it was trained on images, video, and audio rather than just text, as the large language models at the heart of the recent generative AI boom are. "It's our largest and most capable model; it's also our most general," Eli Collins, vice president of product for Google DeepMind, said at a press briefing announcing Gemini.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps' push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday. From a report: In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet's Google and Apple. Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones. Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. [...] That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps," Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to "repeal or modify any policies" that hindered public discussions of push notification spying. In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications. "In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Bill Ackman has called for the resignation of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania's presidents following their congressional hearing on antisemitism on Tuesday. The billionaire singled out the three college presidents in a post written on X, formerly Twitter, after their testimonies on Capitol Hill. "The presidents' answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership," Ackman wrote on X. "They must all resign in disgrace," he added. The three presidents were repeatedly asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik during the Tuesday congressional hearing if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' rules on bullying and harassment. "If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment," said University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Harvard and MIT presidents Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth replied similarly to Stefanik's question. "It can be, depending on the context," Gay replied when asked the same question. "I have heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people," Kornbluth said earlier when Stefanik asked if she'd heard chants of "Intifada" on campus. The term is a reference to previous Palestinian uprisings in Gaza. Ackman wrote in response to the clip: "If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context," Ackman continued. The hedge fund manager added in a later post that the three institutions would be far better off if they ditched their presidents -- quickly. "The world will be able to judge the relative quality of the governance at Harvard, Penn, and MIT by the comparative speed by which their boards fire their respective presidents," he wrote on X.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor. In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level: "Spying and surveillance are different but related things," Schneier writes. "If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did." Schneier says that current spying methods, like phone tapping or physical surveillance, are labor-intensive, but the advent of AI significantly reduces this constraint. Generative AI systems are increasingly adept at summarizing lengthy conversations and sifting through massive datasets to organize and extract relevant information. This capability, he argues, will not only make spying more accessible but also more comprehensive. "This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers," Schneier writes. "Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and 'Hey, Google' are already always listening; the conversations just aren't being saved yet." [...] In his editorial, Schneier raises concerns about the chilling effect that mass spying could have on society, cautioning that the knowledge of being under constant surveillance may lead individuals to alter their behavior, engage in self-censorship, and conform to perceived norms, ultimately stifling free expression and personal privacy. So what can people do about it? Anyone seeking protection from this type of mass spying will likely need to look toward government regulation to keep it in check since commercial pressures often trump technological safety and ethics. [...] Schneier isn't optimistic on that front, however, closing with the line, "We could prohibit mass spying. We could pass strong data-privacy rules. But we haven't done anything to limit mass surveillance. Why would spying be any different?" It's a thought-provoking piece, and you can read the entire thing on Slate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX's next test of its Starship rocket is expected to include "a propellant transfer demonstration." CNBC reports: SpaceX last month launched its second Starship flight, a test which saw the company make progress in development of the monster rocket yet fall short of completing the full mission. The propellant transfer demonstration would require that the rocket reach orbit as one of the demo's goals. A successful attempt would push Starship beyond its benchmarks reached thus far. "NASA and SpaceX are reviewing options for the demonstration to take place during an integrated flight test of Starship and the Super Heavy rocket. However, no final decisions on timing have been made," NASA spokesperson Jimi Russell said in a statement to CNBC. The "propellant transfer demonstration" falls under a NASA "Tipping Point" contract that the agency awarded SpaceX in 2020 for $53.2 million. As part of the contract, NASA wants SpaceX to develop and test "Cryogenic Fluid Management" (CFM) technology, which the agency notes is essential for future missions to the moon and Mars. [...] Under the NASA contract, SpaceX's first demo will involve transferring 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen between tanks within the Starship rocket. While Starship won't be rendezvousing with another tanker rocket for this demo, NASA considers the test progress in maturing the tech. "The goal is to advance cryogenic fluid transfer and fill level gauging technology through technology risk assessment, design and prototype testing, and in-orbit demonstration. The demonstration will decrease key risks for large-scale propellant transfer in the lead-up to future human spaceflight missions," NASA says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have proposed a framework that they say could unify quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of general relatively. "Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are mathematically incompatible with each other, so it's important to understand how this contradiction is resolved," said Prof Jonathan Oppenheim, a physicist at University College London, who is behind the theory. The Guardian reports: Until now, the prevailing assumption has been that Einstein's theory of gravity must be modified, or "quantized," in order to fit within quantum theory. This is the approach of string theory, which advances the view that spacetime comprises 10, 11 or possibly 26 dimensions. Another leading candidate, advanced by Rovelli and others, is loop quantum gravity, in which spacetime is composed of finite loops woven into an extremely fine fabric. Oppenheim's theory, published in the journal Physical Review X, challenges the consensus by suggesting that spacetime may be classical and not governed by quantum theory at all. This means spacetime, however closely you zoomed in on it, would be smooth and continuous rather than "quantized" into discrete units. However, Oppenheim introduces the idea that spacetime is also inherently wobbly, subject to random fluctuations that create an intrinsic breakdown in predictability. "The rate at which time flows is changing randomly and fluctuating in time," said Oppenheim, although he clarifies that time would never actually go into reverse. "It's quite mathematical," he added. "Picturing it in your head is quite difficult." This proposed "wobbliness" would result in a breakdown of predictability, which, Oppenheim says, "many physicists don't like." [...] Ultimately, whether the theory is correct is not an aesthetic preference, but a question of whether it is a faithful representation of reality. A second paper, published simultaneously in Nature Communications and led by Dr Zach Weller-Davies, formerly of UCL and now at Canada's Perimeter Institute, proposes an experiment designed to uncover "wobbles" in spacetime through tiny fluctuations in the weight of an object. For example, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France routinely weigh a 1kg mass, which used to be the 1kg standard. If the fluctuations in measurements of this 1kg mass are smaller than a certain threshold, the theory can be ruled out. "We have shown that if spacetime doesn't have a quantum nature, then there must be random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which have a particular signature that can be verified experimentally," said Weller-Davies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Increasingly intensive and frequent wildfires in the western U.S. are deteriorating air quality and causing more premature deaths, a new study found. Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health. From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires. Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found. The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span. Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period. Our air is supposed to be cleaner and cleaner due mostly to EPA regulations on emissions, but the fires have limited or erased these air-quality gains," said Jun Wang, the study's lead corresponding author and chair of the University of Iowa's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, in a statement. "[A]ll the efforts for the past 20 years by the EPA to make our air cleaner basically have been lost in fire-prone areas and downwind regions," Wang added. "We are losing ground." [Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA] said the findings were consistent with other studies that contribute to the same overall picture that after the air quality regulations' great success, "the extremes of those air pollution episodes are actually now increasing again" due to wildfires. "On average, the air quality is still better, but the problem is, it's during these episodes of just-near apocalyptic conditions where we're really losing a lot of ground and that really is because the size and the intensity of wildfires has increased greatly," he said. Given climate change is a wildfire driver, keeping global heating to the lowest level possible will help. "But we're still going to see more warming no matter what moving forward, and so there will be further increases in the wildfire hazard," Swain said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samuel Axon reports via Ars Technica: The trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV series dropped this weekend, and it's either craven fan service or wonderfully authentic, depending on your point of view. The trailer depicts a lead character leaving a vault after an apparent catastrophe, discovering the broken world outside, and encountering ridiculous monsters as well as factions like the Brotherhood of Steel. It also features some extreme gore, which you'd expect from Fallout. We've written a few times about the slowly unfolding saga of this show, which has Westworld's Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan as producers. To be clear, though, they won't actually be the showrunners; that honor goes to Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, The Office, Silicon Valley). The two showrunners each cover one-half of what Fallout has traditionally been: Robertson-Dworet brings the sci-fi action credentials, and Wagner brings the satirical comedy. As announced in October, the show will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Press2ToContinue shares a report from Politico: Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change. Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger. States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers -- let alone begin construction. [...] The goal is a reliable and standardized network in every corner of the nation, said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which leads the federal government's efforts on EV charging. "You have to go slow to go fast," Klein said in an interview. "These are things that take a little bit of time, but boy, when you're done, it's going to completely change the game." [...] Aatish Patel, president of charger manufacturer XCharge North America, is worried the delays in installing chargers are imperiling efforts to drive up EV adoption. "As an EV driver, a charger being installed in two years isn't really going to help me out now," Patel said. "We're in dire need of chargers here." The Biden administration is expecting a deluge of chargers funded by the law to break ground in early 2024. A senior administration official granted anonymity to speak on the specifics of the rollout said the pace is to be expected, given that the goal is to create a "convenient, affordable, reliable, made-in-America equitable network." "Anybody can throw a charger in the ground -- that's not that hard, it doesn't take that long," the official said. "Building a network is different." The administration insists it is doing all it can to speed up the process, including by streamlining federal permitting for EV chargers and providing technical assistance to states and companies through the Joint Office. It expects the U.S. to hit Biden's 500,000 charger target four years early, in 2026, the official said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2024, the Pixar films that debuted on Disney+ during the COVID-19 pandemic years when theaters were shut down will be returning to the big screen. Those include Soul, Luca and Turning Red. Engadget reports: Soul will get a theatrical release on January 12, Turning Red will hit cinemas on February 9 and Luca will emerge on a silver screen near you on March 22. Given that these movies have been around for as long as three years, it's unlikely that they'll set the box office charts alight. But the theatrical releases mean you'll have a chance to enjoy these films as originally intended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 10's end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That's the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead. But when Leznek does get to the announcement of the ESU program, the details are broadly similar to the program Microsoft offered for Windows 7 a few years ago: three additional years of monthly security updates and technical support, paid for one year at a time. The company told us that "pricing will be provided at a later date," but for the Windows 7 version of the ESU program, Microsoft upped the cost of the program each year to encourage people to upgrade to a newer Windows version before they absolutely had to; the cost was also per-seat, so what you paid was proportional to the number of PCs you needed updates for. One difference this time is that Microsoft told us it would be offering Windows 10 ESU updates to individuals, though the company didn't offer particulars. More details should be available on Windows 10's lifecycle support page soon. Leznek reiterated that Windows 10 22H2 would be the final version of Windows 10 and that the operating system would not receive any additional features during the ESU period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the page on "ChatGPT" was the most-viewed English article on Wikipedia in 2023, attracting nearly 50 million page views. The Hill reports: Wikimedia Foundation said English Wikipedia pages attracted more than 84 billion total page views in 2023, and ChatGPT topped its annual top 25 chart with a total of 49.5 million page views. The chatbot, created by Sam Altman's OpenAI, soared in popularity this year, as much of the public got its first chance to use artificial intelligence hands-on. The AI system debuted just more than a year ago, Nov. 30, 2022, and surpassed 100 million users, the nonprofit said. Following ChatGPT, "Deaths in 2023" was the second most-popular page with 42.7 million views; "2023 Cricket World Cup" came in third place with 38.2 million views; "Indian Premier League" placed fourth with 32 million views; and "Oppenheimer (film)" rounded out the top five with 28.3 million views. The rest of the list includes articles on sports, film/television, celebrities and some current events. The full list of the top 25 most popular English Wikipedia articles in 2023 is available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ivana Saric reports via Axios: U.S. students lag behind their peers in many industrialized countries when it comes to math, according to the results of a global exam released Tuesday. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in their 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math results when compared to the 2018 exam. The 2022 math score was not only lower than it was in 2012 but it was "among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics" for the U.S., per the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country note. The 2018 PISA assessment found that U.S. students straggled behind their peers in East Asia and Europe, per the Washington Post. PISA examines the proficiency of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science worldwide. The 2022 PISA edition is the first to take place since the pandemic and compares the test results of nearly 700,000 students across 81 OECD member states and partner economies. The exam, coordinated by the OECD, was first administered in 2000 and is conducted every three years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 test was delayed until 2022. What about the rest of the world? According to Axios, a total of 31 countries and economies "maintained or improved upon their 2018 math scores, including Switzerland and Japan." "10 countries and economies -- Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Macao and the U.K. -- saw their students score proficiently in all three domains and had 'high levels of socio-economic fairness,'" the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company. Even at the time, this was a feature for the paranoid users. By turning on the feature, all emails sent from Facebook -- mostly notifications of "likes" and private messages -- to the users who opted-in would be encrypted with the decades-old technology called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. Eight years later, Facebook is killing the feature due to low usage, according to the company. The feature was deprecated Tuesday. Facebook declined to specify exactly how many users were still using the encrypted email feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country's interest in space exploration. But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has told Britain's antitrust authority its rival Microsoft uses business practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market, the second major company to criticise the U.S. tech giant's operations. From a report: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the country's cloud computing industry in October, following a referral from media regulator Ofcom that highlighted Amazon and Microsoft's dominance of the market. In a letter published on the CMA's website on Tuesday, Amazon said changes to Microsoft's terms of services had made it difficult for customers to switch to alternative cloud providers, or run competitors' services alongside. "To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said. "This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Beeper has been offering a unified messaging platform for a few years, allowing users to open a single app to communicate with contacts via SMS, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and perhaps most significantly, iMessage. Up until this week though, Android users that wanted to use Beeper to send "blue bubble" messages to iMessage users had their messages routed through a Mac or iOS device. Now Beeper has launched a new app called Beeper Mini that handles everything on-device, no iPhone or Mac bridge required. Beeper Mini is available now from the Google Play Store, and offers a 7-day free trial. After that, it costs $2 per month to keep using. [...] previously the company had to rely on a Mac-in-the-cloud? The company explains the method it's using in a blog post, but in a nutshell, Beeper says a security researcher has reverse engineered "the iMessage protocol and encryption," so that "all messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple's servers" and "the encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone." That security researcher, by the way, is a high school student that goes by jjtech, who was hired by Beeper after showing the company his code. A proof-of-concept Python script is also available on Github if you'd like to run it to send messages to iMessage from a PC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many PlayStation Network users reported Monday that their accounts were unexpectedly permanently suspended. As of Tuesday morning, many of the people who had received the messages now say their accounts have been restored. From a report: Some of them contacted customer service while others did not, but nearly a day after the issues began, Sony hasn't commented publicly or responded to us about the wave of bans or the restorations that followed. A message to one user read: "This account is permanently suspended from PlayStation Network due to violations of the PlayStation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.