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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Former Amazon security engineer Shakeeb Ahmed pleaded guilty this week to hacking and stealing over $12.3 million from two cryptocurrency exchanges in July 2022. The two affected companies are Nirvana Finance, a decentralized crypto exchange, and an unnamed exchange on the Solana blockchain platform that Ahmed hacked using his blockchain audit and smart contract reverse engineering skills. He first targeted the undisclosed crypto exchange by manipulating a smart contract to introduce false pricing data, generating roughly $9 million worth of inflated fees. Ahmed later withdrew the funds and offered to return all but $1.5 million on the condition that the exchange refrained from involving law enforcement. Although not explicitly named by the Justice Department, the details of the attack match those of a July 2022 breach impacting the Crema Finance decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. Shortly after this first hack, Ahmed exploited a Nirvana Finance DeFi protocol smart contract loophole to take a flash loan of ANA cryptocurrency tokens at a low price and sell it back at a higher rate, yielding him approximately $3.6 million. Despite being offered a $300,000 bounty to return the stolen crypto assets, Ahmed kept everything he stole (representing all the funds owned by Nirvana Finance) after demanding $1.4 million and not reaching an agreement, forcing the exchange to shut down. Seeking to conceal his actions and obscure the digital trail of the stolen funds, Ahmed used several cryptocurrency mixers (including Samourai Whirlpool), the Solana and Ethereum blockchains, and foreign exchanges to convert the millions he stole into Monero, a cryptocurrency known for its enhanced privacy and anonymity. Wary of being apprehended, Ahmed actively sought ways to elude detection and extradition. His online searches revealed his interest in strategies to flee the United States, thwart asset seizures, and secure citizenship in different nations, clearly showcasing Ahmed's intention to sidestep legal repercussions for his actions. [...] Ahmed entered a guilty plea for a single computer fraud charge, an offense with a maximum imprisonment term of five years. Additionally, he committed to compensating his victims with a sum totaling $5,071,074.23.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a notice on Monday, Xfinity notified customers of a "data security incident" that resulted in the theft of customer information, including usernames, passwords, contact information, and more. The Verge reports: Xfinity traces the breach to a security vulnerability disclosed by cloud computing company Citrix, which began alerting customers of a flaw in software Xfinity and other companies use on October 10th. While Xfinity says it patched the security hole, it later uncovered suspicious activity on its internal systems "that was concluded to be a result of this vulnerability." The hack resulted in the theft of customer usernames and hashed passwords, according to Xfinity's notice. Meanwhile, "some customers" may have had their names, contact information, last four digits of their social security numbers, dates of birth, and / or secret questions and answers exposed. Xfinity has notified federal law enforcement about the incident and says "data analysis is continuing." We still don't know how many users were affected by the breach. Xfinity will automatically ask customers to change their passwords the next time they log in to their accounts, and it's also encouraging users to turn on two-factor authentication. You can find the full notice, including contact information for the company's incident response team, on Xfinity's website (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent "live" to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time. The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA's Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet's greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars. Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche's orbital path, Palomar's telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater's heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There's also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL's DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology -- everyone loves Taters."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet will pay $700 million and alter its Google Play policies to settle claims that the app store unlawfully dominates the Android mobile applications market, resolving antitrust complaints brought by attorneys general of about three dozen states and consumers. From a report: The deal disclosed in a court filing late Monday calls for tweaks to Google Play policies designed to reduce barriers to competition in the markets for app distribution and payment processing. The lawsuits that were grouped together in federal court in California had threatened billions of dollars in revenue generated by the sale and distribution of apps through Google Play. Google will also make a series of changes to its business practices as part of the settlement. In a blog post, the Android-maker said: Streamlining sideloading while prioritizing security: Unlike on iOS, Android users have the option to sideload apps, meaning they can download directly from a developer's website without going through an app store like Google Play. While we maintain it is critical to our safety efforts to inform users that sideloading on mobile could come with unique risks, as part of our settlement we will be further simplifying the sideloading process and updating the language that informs users about these potential risks of downloading apps directly from the web for the first time.Expanding user choice billing to more people: App and game developers will be able to implement an alternative billing option alongside Google Play's billing system for their U.S. users who can then choose which option to use when making in-app purchases. We have been piloting user choice billing in the U.S. for over a year and will now expand this option further.Expanding open communication on pricing: We have always given developers more ways to interact with their customers than iOS and other operating systems. For example, Google Play allows developers to communicate freely with their customers outside the app about subscription offers or lower-cost options available on a rival app store or the developer's website. This openness has spurred competition and benefited consumers and developers. As part of user choice billing, which we're expanding with today's settlement announcement, developers are also able to show different pricing options within the app when a user makes a digital purchase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: IBM said on Monday that it would buy Software AG's enterprise integration platforms for 2.13 billion euros ($2.33 billion) to bolster its artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud offerings. IBM will acquire Software AG's StreamSets and webMethods platforms with available cash on hand, it said. The two units formed Software AG's so-called "Super Ipaas" business, which was launched in October. The platforms provide application integration, application programming interface (API) management, and data integration among other uses. Software AG is majority owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, which currently owns 93.3% of shares in the German software company, following a takeover pursuit spanning several months. That deal valued the whole business at 2.6 billion euros ($2.84 billion). The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2024. "The opportunity to bring the StreamSets and webMethods teams together with IBM to innovate in building the future of hybrid cloud and next-generation AI solutions for the enterprise is uniquely compelling," Christian Lucas, chairman of the supervisory board of Software AG said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, posing a risk to the nearby Svartsengi Power Plant and the town of Grindavik. "We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure." The New York Times reports: Thousands of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. In November, with homes and roads being damaged, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a town of more than 3,000 people near the volcano. More recently, the Meteorological Office warned of a "significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days." Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland's tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains "entirely random." The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma. The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland's best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. "Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik," reported Reuters in mid November. "A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox 121 has arrived with Wayland support to be used by default on modern Linux desktops. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: Some Linux distributions and package builds have been using the native Wayland path for a while but now it's great to see the upstream builds make this default change as we get ready to embark on the 2024 Linux desktop. With my testing of Firefox 121 on Wayland, it's been working out well. X.Org/X11 support remains in place for those not using a Wayland-based desktop environment. Firefox 121 also adds Voice Control command support on macOS, adds an option to always force-underline links within websites, Firefox now includes a floating button to help in creation within PDFs, various CSS feature additions, and other developer enhancements. Firefox 121 also now supports tail call elimination in WebAssembly for enhancing support for functional languages. You can download Firefox 121 via archive.mozilla.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ron Amadeo reports via Ars Technica: Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google's cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn't enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Trevor Milton, the disgraced founder and former CEO of electric truck startup Nikola, was sentenced Monday to four years in prison for securities fraud. The sentence, by Judge Edgardo Ramos in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, caps a multi-year saga that at one point sent Nikola stock soaring 83% only to come crashing down months later over accusations of fraud and canceled contracts. The sentencing hearing comes after four separate delays, during which Milton has remained free under a $100 million bond. In his ruling, Ramos said he would impose a sentence of 48 months on each count, served concurrently, and a fine of $1 million. Milton is expected to appeal the sentence, which Ramos acknowledged. Milton sobbed as he pled with Judge Ramos for leniency in a long and often confusing statement ahead of the sentencing. At one point, Milton said he stepped down from the CEO post at Nikola not because of fraud allegations, but to support his wife. "I stepped down because my wife was suffering live threatening sickness," he said in his statement, which reporter Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press shared on social media post X. She suffered medical malpractice, someone else's plasma. So I stepped down for that -- not because I was a fraud. The truth matters. I chose my wife over money or power." During the sentencing hearing, defense attorneys said that Milton wasn't trying to defraud investors or intending to harm anyone. Instead, they argued he simply wanted to be loved and praised like Elon Musk. Prosecutors pushed back and said he lied repeatedly and targeted retail investors. Federal prosecutors recommended an 11-year sentence, but Milton faced a maximum term of 60 years in prison. The government also sought a $5 million fine, forfeiture of a ranch in Utah and an undetermined amount of restitution to investors. Restitution will be determined after Monday's sentencing hearing. Timeline of events: June, 2016: Nikola Motor Receives Over 7,000 Preorders Worth Over $2.3 Billion For Its Electric Truck December, 2016: Nikola Motor Company Reveals Hydrogen Fuel Cell Truck With Range of 1,200 Miles February, 2020: Nikola Motors Unveils Hybrid Fuel-Cell Concept Truck With 600-Mile Range June, 2020: Nikola Founder Exaggerated the Capability of His Debut Truck September, 2020: Nikola Motors Accused of Massive Fraud, Ocean of Lies September, 2020: Nikola Admits Prototype Was Rolling Downhill In Promo Video September, 2020: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Steps Down as Chairman in Battle With Short Seller October, 2020: Nikola Stock Falls 14 Percent After CEO Downplays Badger Truck Plans November, 2020: Nikola Stock Plunges As Company Cancels Badger Pickup Truck July, 2021: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Indicted on Three Counts of Fraud December, 2021: EV Startup Nikola Agrees To $125 Million Settlement September, 2022: Nikola Founder Lied To Investors About Tech, Prosecutor Says in Fraud TrialRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Flipboard, the social media magazine and news app, announced that it is starting to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, a technology developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that makes social networks interoperable, "connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system," reports The Verge. From the report: Right now, only 25 accounts have been federated with ActivityPub, but by March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to follow any fediverse account from within the Flipboard app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts. It'll be the biggest thing in the fediverse -- at least until Threads shows up for real. "Basically, we're in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub," says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. "I think Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer service that existed in a walled garden that switches over to ActivityPub."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple said on Monday that it would pause sales of its flagship smartwatches online starting Thursday and at retail locations on Christmas Eve. Two months ago, Apple lost a patent case over the technology its smartwatches use to detect people's pulse rate. The company was ordered to stop selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 after Christmas, which could set off a run on sales of the watches in the final week of holiday shopping.The move by Apple follows a ruling by the International Trade Commission in October that found several Apple Watches infringe on patents held by Masimo, a medical technology company in Irvine, Calif. In court, Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities -- whichmeasures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body -- that were patented by Masimo. To avoid a complete ban on sales, Apple had two months to cut a deal with Masimo to license its technology, or it could appeal to the Biden administration to reverse the ruling. But Joe Kiani, the chief executive of Masimo, said in an interview that Apple had not engaged in licensing negotiations. Instead, he said that Apple had appealed to President Biden to veto the I.T.C. ruling, which Mr. Kiani knows because the administration contacted Masimo about Apple's request. "They're trying to make the agency look like it's helping patent trolls," Mr. Kiani said of the I.T.C. Mr. Kiani said that he was willing to sell Apple a chip that Masimo had designed to provide pulse oximeter readings on the Apple Watch. The chip is currently in a Masimo medical watch, called the W1, that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The device uses algorithms to process red and near-infrared light to determine how oxygen-rich is the blood in arteries. "If they don't want to use our chip, I'll work with them to make their product good," Mr. Kiani said. "Once it's good enough, I'm happy to give them a license."Apple introduced its first watch with pulse oximetry in 2020. It has included the technology, which it calls "blood oxygen," in subsequent models. But unlike Masimo's W1 device, Apple hasn't had its watches cleared by the F.D.A. for use as a medical device for pulse oximetry. "The Apple Watch accounts for nearly $20 billion of the company's $383.29 billion in annual sales," notes the NYT. The company is the largest smartwatch seller in the world, accounting for about a third of all smartwatch sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Travel website Expedia wants to get people to start their travel search on its site with AI instead of using an external search engine. From a report: Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels. The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site. It's a long-term plan to shift the balance of power on the web -- albeit one that's still in its earliest stages for the company. Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia, says the goal is to get users started on their trips in one place. Expedia hopes to produce recommendations trained with its library of flight and hotel information and informed by users' travel preferences. "By being able to train large language models on our data, this rich 70 petabytes' worth of data we've gathered over the years, we can eventually recommend places to go and stay and do and continue to refine and personalize that," Naidu tells The Verge in an interview. According to Naidu, when people plan trips, they often start by going to a search engine to look for a destination. Only then do they visit services like Expedia to start booking travel and accommodation. There's nothing inherently wrong with going to Google and typing "best vacation that isn't cold and not that far from New York," but Naidu believes there's value in streamlining the travel planning process even more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers stole the sensitive personal information of more than 14.6 million Mr. Cooper customers, the mortgage and loan giant has confirmed. From a report: In a filing with Maine's attorney general's office, Mr. Cooper said the hackers stole customer names, addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers, as well as customer Social Security numbers and bank account numbers. Mr. Cooper previously said that customer banking information was stored by a third-party company and believed to be unaffected. Mr. Cooper said in a separate filing with federal regulators on Friday that hackers obtained personal data on "substantially all of our current and former customers." The number of affected victims is significantly higher than the four million existing customers that Mr. Cooper claims on its website, likely because of the historical data that the company stores on mortgage holders. Mr. Cooper said in its data breach notification letter to affected victims that the stolen data includes personal information on those whose mortgage was previously acquired or serviced by the company when it was known as Nationstar Mortgage, prior to its rebranding as Mr. Cooper. The company said affected customers may include those whose mortgages were serviced by a sister brand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, the AI company behind ChatGPT, laid out its plans for staying ahead of what it thinks could be serious dangers of the tech it develops, such as allowing bad actors to learn how to build chemical and biological weapons. From a report: OpenAI's "Preparedness" team, led by MIT AI professor Aleksander Madry, will hire AI researchers, computer scientists, national security experts and policy professionals to monitor its tech, continually test it and warn the company if it believes any of its AI capabilities are becoming dangerous. The team sits between OpenAI's "Safety Systems" team, which works on existing problems like infusing racist biases into AI, and the company's "Superalignment" team, which researches how to make sure AI doesn't harm humans in an imagined future where the tech has outstripped human intelligence completely. [...] Madry, a veteran AI researcher who directs MIT's Center for Deployable Machine Learning and co-leads the MIT AI Policy Forum, joined OpenAI earlier this year. He was one of a small group of OpenAI leaders who quit when Altman was fired by the company's board in November. Madry returned to the company when Altman was reinstated five days later. OpenAI, which is governed by a nonprofit board whose mission is to advance AI and make it helpful for all humans, is in the midst of selecting new board members after three of the four board members who fired Altman stepped down as part of his return. Despite the leadership "turbulence," Madry said he believes OpenAI's board takes seriously the risks of AI that he is researching. "I realized if I really want to shape how AI is impacting society, why not go to a company that is actually doing it?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI allowed Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. From a report: Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party used artificial intelligence to make a four-minute message from the 71-year-old, headlining a "virtual rally" hosted on social media overnight on Sunday into Monday despite internet disruptions that monitor NetBlocks said were consistent with previous attempts to censor Khan. PTI said Khan sent a shorthand script through lawyers that was fleshed out into his rhetorical style. The text was then dubbed into audio using a tool from the AI firm ElevenLabs, which boasts the ability to create a "voice clone" from existing speech samples. "My fellow Pakistanis, I would first like to praise the social media team for this historic attempt," the voice mimicking Khan said. "Maybe you all are wondering how I am doing in jail," the stilted voice adds. "Today, my determination for real freedom is very strong." The audio was broadcast at the end of a five-hour live-stream of speeches by PTI supporters on Facebook, X and YouTube, and was overlaid with historic footage of Khan and still images.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has written to U.S. President Joe Biden, warning European technology regulation are unfairly targeting U.S. companies and not including many Chinese or EU firms, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Monday. From the report: Under the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), five major U.S. tech companies -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft -- were designated "gatekeeper" service providers. From March 2024, these companies -- as well as TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance -- will be required to make their messaging apps work with rivals and let users choose which ones they want pre-installed on their devices. In a letter seen by Reuters, 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives warned the new rules could damage American economic and security interests and called on Biden to secure commitments from the EU the rules will be enforced fairly. "Securing our leadership in this sector is imperative for our economy and American workers," the letter said. "The designation of leading U.S. companies as 'gatekeepers' threatens to upend the U.S. economy, diminish our global leadership in the digital sphere, and jeopardize the security of consumers." The letter questioned why Chinese companies Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent had avoided designation and why European companies had avoided any scrutiny. "The EU inexplicably failed to designate any European retailers, content-sharing platforms, payment firms, and telcos," it said. Signatories of the letter -- including Representative Lou Correa, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, -- called on Biden to seek assurances from EU lawmakers the DMA will not be unfairly used to target U.S. companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following a tumultuous few weeks for Beeper, which has been trying to provide an iMessage-compatible Android app, a group of US lawmakers are pushing for the DOJ to investigate Apple for "potentially anticompetitive conduct" over its attempts to disable Beeper's services. From a report: Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) as well as Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Ken Buck (R-CO) said in a letter to the DOJ that Beeper's Android messaging app, Beeper Mini, was a threat to Apple's leverage by "creating [a] more competitive mobile applications market, which in turn [creates] a more competitive mobile device market." In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky and 16-year-old developer James Gill talked about the fight to keep Beeper Mini alive. Migicovsky told CBS News that Beeper is trying to provide a service people want and reiterated his belief that Apple has a monopoly over its iMessage service. The company created Beeper Mini after being contacted by Gill, who said he reverse-engineered the software by "poking at it" using a "real Mac and a real iPhone." [...] The lawmakers' letter also pointed to a Department of Commerce report calling Apple a "gatekeeper," mirroring language used in the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) that went into force earlier this year, regulating the "core" services of several tech platforms (though, notably, iMessage may not be included in this). They went on to cite Migicovsky's December 2021 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony that "the dominant messaging services would use their position to impose barriers to interoperability" and keep companies like Beeper from offering certain services. "Given Apple's recent actions, that concern appears prescient," they added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.