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OpenAI's ChatGPT has enraptured the business world since its November release and OpenAI is signing up customers eager to pay to use its artificial intelligence models in their own products. But the Microsoft-backed startup faces a surprising rival: Microsoft itself. From a report: As part of its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has the rights to sell the startup's software through its Azure cloud business, even as OpenAI licenses its own software directly to customers. Microsoft also gets a share of OpenAI's profits. The offerings cost the same, a fraction of a cent per query. Meanwhile, all of OpenAI's technology runs on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure rent free. The dual offerings mean the companies are at times pitching the same customers on nearly identical products, putting salespeople at Microsoft in the uneasy position of trying to lure customers away from OpenAI while touting its technology. While the profit-sharing agreement means sales of either offering theoretically benefit both companies, OpenAI pursues direct relationships with big customers, such as Microsoft rival Salesforce, which has licensed ChatGPT for a new suite of customer service software. It's not clear whether the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft dictates the price each company sets for the models. Microsoft gets 75% of OpenAI's profits until its investment is paid back and 49% of subsequent profits up to a certain cap, The Information previously reported. It's also not clear how much profit Microsoft returns to OpenAI for the models it sells through Azure OpenAI Service. [...] An internal Microsoft document, viewed by The Information, instructs Azure salespeople to tell potential customers that OpenAI's own licenses are "great [for] experimentation" but have "limited enterprise-grade capabilities" and fewer "security/privacy features."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft today announced that its new AI-enabled Bing will now allow users to generate images with Bing Chat. From a report: This new feature is powered by DALL-E, OpenAI's generative image generator. The company didn't say which version of DALL-E it is using here, except for saying that it is using the "very latest DALL-E models." Dubbed the "Bing Image Creator," this new capability is now (slowly) rolling out to users in the Bing preview and will only be available through Bing's Creative Mode. It'll come to Bing's Balanced and Precise modes in the future. The new image generator will also be available in the Edge sidebar. The right prompts will generate the now-familiar square of four high-res DALL-E images. There's one major difference, though: there will be a small Bing logo in the bottom left corner. The early Bing AI release was missing a few guardrails, but Microsoft quickly fixed those. The company is clearly hoping to avoid these issues with this release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Strains in the banking sector are roiling a roughly $8 trillion bond market considered almost as safe as U.S. government bonds. From a report: So-called agency mortgage bonds are widely held by banks, insurers and bond funds because they are backed by the mortgage loans from government-owned lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bonds are far less likely to default than most debt and are easy to buy and sell quickly, a crucial reason they were Silicon Valley Bank's biggest investment before it foundered.ÂBut agency mortgage-backed securities, like all long-term bonds, are vulnerable to rising interest rates, which pushed their prices down last year and saddled banks such as SVB with unrealized losses. Now that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has taken over SVB, investors expect the bonds to be sold off in coming months, adding supply to the weakened market and pushing prices lower. Last week, the risk premium on a widely followed Bloomberg index of agency MBS hit its highest level since October, when climbing interest rates turned global markets topsy-turvy. The move reflected fears that other regional banks might have to sell their holdings, bond-fund managers said. [...] When benchmark interest rates rise, bonds that were sold at times of lower rates lose value. Prices of such "low coupon" agency MBS started dropping about a year ago, when the Federal Reserve raised rates to fight inflation and indicated it might start selling MBS it owned.ÂSome of the bonds lost 15% or more in a matter of months, trading as low as 80 cents on the dollar, according to data from FactSet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google says it's ready to let the public use its generative AI chatbot,Bard. The company will grant tens of thousands of users access to the bot in a gradual rollout that starting Tuesday. From a report: Google says people will use the chatbot, which will be available online and as a mobile app, for things like generating ideas ("Bard, how do I keep my plants alive?"), researching ideas (in combination with Search), and drafting first drafts of letters, invites, or proposals. Google originally announced Bard February 6, alongside some generative AI search functions and developer tools. On March 14, it announced that it will integrate generative AI features across the apps in its Workspace productivity suite. But today marks the first time that Google has released a generative AI chatbot powered by a large language model to the public. Google says the bot is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India will not tolerate use of abusive language and display of obscene content in movies and TV shows on on-demand video streaming services, a key minister has warned in a move that illustrates how the nation's IT rules have "handed over direct ministerial power for censorship." From the report: Anurag Thakur, Union Minister of Information Broadcasting and Sports and Youth Affairs, said at a press conference that use of abusive language in the name of creativity will not be tolerated and that the government is receiving a growing list of complaints about increasing abusive and obscene content. Thakur warned that New Delhi will not shy away from "making any changes" in the rules to address this situation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Crypto ads in Belgium must be accurate and warn investors of the risks under new laws announced by the country's financial regulator Monday. Powers published in Belgium's Official Gazette on Friday mean any mass-media campaign to promote a digital currency would have to be submitted to the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) 10 days in advance, allowing the regulator to intervene if needed. "Virtual currencies are all the rage at the moment, but they involve considerable risk," the FSMA said in a statement. "They are often subject to wild price fluctuations and are vulnerable to fraud and IT-related risks." The new rules, which will take effect on May 17, require ads to state that "the only guarantee in crypto is risk." Belgium joins European countries such as Spain and the U.K. in imposing restrictions on publicity campaigns, which often mirror those already in place for traditional finance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears. From a report: The BBC seems to be the first UK media organisation to issue the guidance - and only the second in the world after Denmark's public service broadcaster. The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. [...] The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing. In an email to staff on Sunday, it said: "The decision is based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security. If the device is a BBC corporate device, and you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted from the BBC corporate mobile device." Staff with the app on a personal phone that they also use for work have been asked to contact the corporation's Information Security team for further discussions, while it reviews concerns around TikTok. Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of journalism industry trade publication the Press Gazette, said it would be interesting to see what other media organizations decide to do. He told the BBC: "I suspect everyone's chief technical officer will be looking at this very closely. Until now, news organizations have been very keen to use TikTok, because it's been one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for news publishers over the last year, and it's been a good source of audience and traffic. So most of the talk in the news media has been around encouraging TikTok rather than banning it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader drwho writes: A new type of propulsion system which uses no propellant, but rather only electricity, will be tested in a satellite to be launched from June 10's Falcon 9 launch. The IVO Quantum Drive utilizes an alternative theory of inertia known as "Quantum Inertia' by its originator Prof. Mike McCullough of U. Plymouth, which seeks to reconcile General Relativity (GR) with Quantum Field Theory (QFT). If successful, this would herald in a new era not only in satellite technology but in space travel as a whole. See this article for more details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) has led a data recovery firm to conclude that "in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives." The statement comes from a Los Angeles-headquartered HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery firm aptly named Secure Data Recovery that has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved more than 100,000 cases. It studied the HDDs it received in 2022. "Most" of those drives were 40GB to 10TB, according to a blog post by Secure Data Recovery spotted by Blocks & Files on Thursday. Secure Data Recovery's March 8 post broke down the HDDs it received by engineer-verified "power-on hours," or the total amount of time the drive was functional, starting from when its owner began using it and ending when the device arrived at Secure Data Recovery. The firm also determined the drives' current pending sector count, depicting "the number of damaged or unusable sectors the hard drive developed during routine read-and-write operations." The company's data doesn't include HDDs that endured non-predictable failures or damage by unexpected events, such as electrical surges, malware, natural disasters, and "accidental mishandling," the company said. Among the sample, 936 drives are from Western Digital, 559 come from Seagate, 211 are Hitachi brand, 151 are Toshiba's, 123 are Samsung's, and there are 27 Maxtor drives. Notably, 74.5 percent of the HDDs came from either Western Digital or Seagate, which Secure Data Recovery noted accounted for 80 percent of hard drive shipments in 2021, citing Digital Storage Technology Newsletter data shared by Forbes. The average time before failure among the sample size was 2 years and 10 months, and the 2,007 defective HDDs had an average of 1,548 bad sectors. "While 1,548 bad sectors out of hundreds of millions or even billions of disk subdivisions might seem minuscule, the rate of development often increases, and the risk of data corruption multiplies," the blog said. "We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made before 2015," says Secure Data Recovery. "On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015." One of the reasons for this may have to do with HDD manufacturers "pushing the performance envelope," adds Ars. "This includes size limits that cut 'allowance between moving parts, appearing to affect mechanical damage and wear resistance.'" Secure Data Recovery also believes that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) impacts HDD reliability, as the disks place components under "more stress." "What this study shows is not the average working life of a hard disk drive," notes Blacks & Files. "Instead it provides the average working life if a failed disk drive. Cloud storage provider Backblaze issues statistics about the working life of its disk drive fleet and its numbers are quite different." A recent report of theirs found that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer component maker Acer built a lightweight electric bike called the Acer ebii. Electrek reports: This lightweight 35 lb. (16 kg) e-bike features a number of gadgets and gizmos we have yet to spot in the industry, such as built-in AI designed to predictively control the transmission and make use of collision detection sensors for a safer ride. There's also proximity unlocking feature that the company says "automatically locks your bike when you leave and unlocks it again when you're nearby." My Gogoro electric scooter has a similar function, though that's a highway-capable vehicle. Tracking capabilities are built into the ebii to help keep tabs on it 24/7. If the bike is ever stolen, it can be locked remotely and tracked using its built-in GPS locator. But don't think that you won't find typical bike parts here either, as the Acer ebii still features high-end components like a belt drive instead of a chain drive, 160mm hydraulic disc brakes, and 360-degree LED lighting. Airless tires are designed to remove the chance of flats, and a lefty-style fork does double duty as a conversation piece and a fancy weight saver. There's also a 460 Wh electric bicycle battery that is said to offer a range of up to 68 miles (110 km) per charge. A top speed of 15 mph (25 km/h) and a 250W rear hub motor look to keep the bike within European and Asian power and speed limits. There's no hand throttle, which means riders will have to rely on pedal assist that is activated when the rider spins the pedals. It appears that there's some confusion about the 2.5-hour charger included with the bike, as some in the industry seem to think it can be used to charge phones and batteries as well. In fact, it's actually the e-bike's removable battery itself that can function as a portable power station to charge up your mobile devices. Pricing and availability are not yet available. But there is a launch video to build up excitement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a years-long wait, Apple Pay today launched in South Korea, allowing those living in the country to use Apple's payment system to make contactless payments using the iPhone or Apple Watch. MacRumors reports: Apple has been working to bring Apple Pay to South Korea since 2017, but Apple was unable to be registered as an electronic financial business operator because regulators were investigating whether Apple Pay violated local regulations and laws. Apple was finally approved by financial regulators back in February. NFC terminal adoption was also low in retail stores in South Korea around when Apple Pay first launched, which continues to be an issue. There are more NFC terminals than there were six years ago, but The Korea Times suggests Apple Pay will face "significant challenges" in Korea due to the limited number of NFC terminals. At the current time, Apple Pay is limited to Hyundai Card users, which could see South Koreans interested in using the service picking up a Hyundai Card. No other card companies are participating in Apple Pay as of yet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a blog post shared last week, Ingka, the legal entity responsible for most of Ikea's stores, says it now has a total of 100 autonomous drones counting stock in its warehouses during nonoperational hours. The Verge reports: Ikea first partnered with the drone-making company Verity in 2020 to deploy the drones in Switzerland, but now, the company says they're zipping around 16 locations across Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Swedish furniture giant says the drones help improve the accuracy of product availability and also support "a more ergonomic workplace," as it saves employees from counting stock manually. Verity, which specializes in creating self-flying drones for warehouses and even concerts, was founded by Raffaello D'Andrea, one of the creators of Kiva Systems, or what's now called Amazon Robotics. As noted by D'Andrea in 2020, the drones work by taking off from a charging station and then going to each pallet in the warehouse to capture images, videos, and 3D depth scans of the items. Once the job is done, the drones return to their charging stations to download the collected data. The drones not only count inventory but also help employees determine if something's missing or in the wrong spot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the enduring legacies of the '90s browser wars has been an outsize attention to how Microsoft handles default app settings in Windows, especially browser settings. The company plans to make it more straightforward to change your app defaults in future versions of Windows 11, according to a new blog post that outlines a "principled approach to app pinning and app defaults in Windows." The company's principled approach is a combination of broad, vague platitudes ("we will ensure people who use Windows are in control of changes to their pins and their defaults") and new developer features. A future version of Windows 11 will offer a consistent "deep link URI" for apps so they can send users to the right place in the Settings app for changing app defaults. Microsoft will also add a pop-up notification that should be used when newly installed apps want to pin themselves to your Taskbar, rather than either pinning themselves by default or getting lost somewhere in your Start menu. These new features will be added to Windows "in the coming months," starting in the Dev channel Windows Insider Preview builds. Though Microsoft frames these changes as a way to make changing default apps easier and more consistent, they also serve as a gentle rebuke to developers who handle things differently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indian authorities severed mobile internet access and text messaging for a second day Sunday across Punjab, a state of about 27 million people, as officials sought to capture a Sikh separatist and braced for potential unrest. The Washington Post reports: The statewide ban -- which crippled most smartphone services except for voice calls and some SMS text messages -- marked one of the broadest shutdowns in recent years in India, a country that has increasingly deployed the law enforcement tactic, which digital rights activists call draconian and ineffective. The Punjab government, led by the opposition Aam Admi Party, initially announced a 24-hour ban starting midday Saturday as its security forces launched a sprawling operation to arrest the fugitive Amritpal Singh, then extended the ban Sunday for another 24 hours. Singh, a 30-year-old preacher, has been a popular figure within a separatist movement that seeks to establish a sovereign state in Punjab called Khalistan for followers of the Sikh religion. He rocketed to nationwide notoriety in February after his supporters stormed a police station to free one of his jailed supporters. The Khalistan movement is outlawed in India and considered a top national security threat by officials, but the movement has sympathizers across Punjab state, which is majority Sikh, and among members of the large Sikh diaspora who have settled in countries such as Canada and Britain. In a bid to forestall unrest and curtail what it called "fake news," Punjab authorities blocked mobile internet service beginning at noon Saturday, shortly after they failed to apprehend Singh as he drove through central Punjab with a cavalcade of supporters. Officials were probably also motivated by a desire to deprive Singh's supporters of social media, which they briefly used Saturday to seek help and organize their ranks. Singh was still on the run as of late Sunday, and the 4G blackout remained in effect. Three Punjab residents who spoke to The Washington Post said life had been disrupted since midday Saturday. Only essential text messages, such as confirmation codes for bank transfers, were trickling through. Wired internet services were not affected. "My entire business is dependent on internet," said Mohammad Ibrahim, who accepts QR code-based payments at his two clothing shops in a village outside of Ludhiana and also sells garments online. "Since yesterday, I've felt crippled."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch announced plans to lay off 400 employees at the company. It comes just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch's business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon's plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units. "Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2018, Pixel phones gained a built-in screenshot editor called "Markup" with the release of Android 9.0 Pie. The tool pops up whenever you take a screenshot, and tapping the app's pen icon gives you access to tools like crop and a few colored drawing pens. That's very handy assuming Google's Markup tool actually does what it says, but a new vulnerability points out the edits made by this tool weren't actually destructive! It's possible to uncrop or unredact Pixel screenshots taken during the past four years. The bug was discovered by Simon Aarons and is dubbed "Acropalypse," or more formally CVE-2023-21036. There's a proof-of-concept app that can unredact Pixel screenshots at acropalypse.app, and it works! There's also a good technical write-up here by Aarons' collaborator, David Buchanan. The basic gist of the problem is that Google's screenshot editor overwrites the original screenshot file with your new edited screenshot, but it does not truncate or recompress that file in any way. If your edited screenshot has a smaller file size than the original -- that's very easy to do with the crop tool -- you end up with a PNG with a bunch of hidden junk data at the end of it. That junk data is made up of the end bits of your original screenshot, and it's actually possible to recover that data. While the bug was fixed in the March 2023 security update for Pixel devices, it doesn't solve the problem, notes Ars. "There's still the matter of the last four years of Pixel screenshots that are out there and possibly full of hidden data that people didn't realize they were sharing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta's security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case. From the report: The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece. It demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation. The simultaneous tapping of the target's phone by the national intelligence service and the way she was hacked indicate that the spy service and whoever implanted the spyware, known as Predator, were working hand in hand. The latest case comes as elections approach in Greece, which has been rocked by a mounting wiretapping and illegal spyware scandal since last year, raising accusations that the government has abused the powers of its spy agency for illicit purposes. The Predator spyware that infected the device is marketed by an Athens-based company and has been exported from Greece with the government's blessing, in possible breach of European Union laws that consider such products potential weapons, The New York Times found in December. The Greek government has denied using Predator and has legislated against the use of spyware, which it has called "illegal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has announced that it has 40 games slated for launch this year and has 70 in development with its partners. The company also has 16 games currently being developed by its in-house game studios. Netflix launched games in November 2021 and has released 55 titles since then. From a report: The streaming service says it's committed to building out its games portfolio and will be bringing Ustwo's Monument Valley franchise to its platform, starting with Monument Valley 1 and Monument Valley 2, with more to come. In a briefing with reporters, Ustwo CEO Maria Sayans confirmed that the Netflix versions of the games won't be different than the current available versions, and that they will include all paid in-app purchases. The streaming service also announced that Mighty Quest: Rogue Palace, a rogue-lite game set in the universe some may remember from The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, will be launching in April 18. The game, which is from Ubisoft, features an improved formula, deepened narrative and upgraded frantic action gameplay. The launch is part of Netflix's partnership with Ubisoft, and is the second of three exclusive games from the developer to be released on Netflix. The first exclusive game, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, launched in January.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration is planning to take action soon on at least three of its half-dozen investigations of Amazon -- moves that could lead to a blitz of litigation to rein in the iconic tech-industry giant. From a report: The FTC has been investigating the internet titan on multiple fronts dating at least back to 2019, looking into its abuse of power within its online marketplace, as well as potential consumer-privacy violations connected to its Ring cameras and Alexa digital assistant. The agency is also reviewing Amazon's purchase of robot vacuum maker iRobot. Any suit against Amazon would be a high-profile move by the agency under chair Lina Khan, a Big Tech skeptic who rose to prominence with a 2017 academic paper specifically identifying Amazon as a modern monopolist needing to be reined in. Although Amazon has already been hit by local antitrust suits in Washington, D.C. and California, the coming federal cases would be the most significant challenges to the global company yet. The exact timing of any cases or settlements is unknown. POLITICO spoke to more than 10 people with direct knowledge of the investigations by the FTC's competition and consumer protection teams to put together a comprehensive picture of how the agency is now pursuing Amazon, why it didn't take action on the company's most recent major acquisition of One Medical and what is likely to happen in the coming months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI has made remarkable progress with still images. For months, services like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion have been creating beautiful, arresting and sometimes unsettling pictures. Now, a startup called Runway AI is taking the next step: AI-generated video. From a report: On Monday, New York-based Runway announced the availability of its Gen 2 system, which generates short snippets of video from a few words of user prompts. Users can type in a description of what they want to see, for example: "a cat walking in the rain," and it will generate a roughly 3-second video clip showing just that, or something close. Alternately, users can upload an image as a reference point for the system as well as a prompt. The product isn't available to everyone. Runway, which makes AI-based film and editing tools, announced the availability of its Gen 2 AI system via a waitlist; people can sign up for access to it on a private Discord channel that the company plans to add more users to each week. The limited launch represents the most high-profile instance of such text-to-video generation outside of a lab. Both Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms showed off their own text-to-video efforts last year -- with short video clips featuring subjects like a teddy bear washing dishes and a sailboat on a lake -- but neither has announced plans to move the work beyond the research stage. Runway has been working on AI tools since 2018, and raised $50 million late last year. The startup helped create the original version of Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image AI model that has since been popularized and further developed by the company Stability AI. In an exclusive live demo last week with Runway co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Cris Valenzuela, this reporter put Gen 2 to the test, suggesting the prompt "drone footage of a desert landscape." Within minutes, Gen 2 generated a video just a few seconds long and a little distorted, but it undeniably appeared to be drone footage shot over a desert landscape.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, United Nations members have agreed on a unified treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas -- representing a turning point for vast stretches of the planet where conservation has previously been hampered by a confusing patchwork of laws. From a report: The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, before marine biodiversity was a well-established concept. The treaty agreement concluded two weeks of talks in New York. An updated framework to protect marine life in the regions outside national boundary waters, known as the high seas, had been in discussions for more than 20 years, but previous efforts to reach an agreement had repeatedly stalled. The unified agreement treaty, which applies to nearly half the planet's surface, was reached late Saturday. "We only really have two major global commons -- the atmosphere and the oceans," said Georgetown marine biologist Rebecca Helm. While the oceans may draw less attention, "protecting this half of earth's surface is absolutely critical to the health of our planet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After almost 17 years online, file-hosting veteran Zippyshare will shut down at the end of the month. TorrentFreak: Founded in 2006, Zippyshare was known for its free, no-nonsense, no-frills approach to storing files online. Having changed very little over the years, Zippyshare's operators say the platform is now a dinosaur that costs too much to run in a world where ad-blocking is widespread. Zippyshare said, "Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam. I guess all the competing file storage service companies on the market look better, offer better performance and more features. No one needs a dinosaur like us anymore."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A federal judge on Monday will weigh pleas by four major book publishers to stop an online lending library from freely offering digital copies of books, in a case that raises novel questions about digital-library rights and the reach of copyright law that protects the work of writers and publishers. From a report: Nonprofit organization Internet Archive created the digital books, building its collection by scanning physical book copies in its possession. It lends the digital versions to readers worldwide, with more than three million digitized books on offer. Titles range from Stephen King's scary bestseller "It" to Kristin Hannah's historical novel "The Nightingale." The archive expanded its digital lending during the Covid-19 pandemic, temporarily lifting limits on how many people could check out a book at one time. The move helped prompt the publishers' copyright infringement lawsuit in 2020, which is pending before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan. The plaintiffs are Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, John Wiley and Sons, Bertelsmann SE's Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins Publishers, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp. They argue the Internet Archive book platform "constitutes willful digital piracy on an industrial scale" and hurts writers and publishers who rely on consumers buying their products. William Adams, general counsel for HarperCollins Publishers, said the archive's approach has no basis in law. "What they're doing is supplanting what authors and publishers do with libraries and have been doing for a long time," he said. The Internet Archive says its lending practices are a fair and legal use of the books, in the same way that traditional bricks-and-mortar libraries have a right to share their collections with the public.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Credit Suisse, the Swiss banking giant that liked to live dangerously, has run out of road. From a report: The bank struck a deal this weekend to be bought by rival UBS Group after an uncontrolled slide in its stock and bonds. The agreement marks the end of 167 years as an independent institution, a humbling comedown for a bank that once went toe-to-toe with U.S. giants on Wall Street and boasted a market value greater than that of Goldman Sachs Group. The bank's downfall has roots in the way it exited the last financial crisis flush with confidence. When the financial system seized up in 2008, Credit Suisse emerged in better shape than many rivals. It was then slow to adjust to how the crisis changed banking. The lender relied on a freewheeling investment bank, dawdled in its pivot to more stable lines of business and above all failed to shake its predilection for risk. "They felt, 'We are the winner from the financial crisis, and everyone else is hurt,''' said Andreas Venditti, a banking analyst at Vontobel. "So they doubled down on these kinds of businesses and on investment-banking exposure in general." The result was 15 years of scandal, litigation and strategic zigzags while other major banks became more focused, more regulated and more free of drama. A spying imbroglio, a $5.5 billion loss on a single client, executive turnover, fines in connection with tax and sanctions evasion and a fraud settlement over Mozambican loan sales weakened the bank financially while eroding the confidence of investors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The planet is on track for catastrophic warming, but world leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to a major new climate change report from the United Nations. NPR: The report was drafted by top climate scientists and reviewed by delegates from nearly 200 countries. The authors hope it will provide crucial guidance to politicians around the world ahead of negotiations later this year aimed at reining in climate change. The planet faces an increasingly dire situation, according to the report. Climate change is already disrupting daily life around the world. Extreme weather, including heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes, is killing and displacing people worldwide, and causing massive economic damage. And the amount of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere is still rising. "Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health," the report states. "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all." But there are many choices readily available to policymakers who want to address climate change, the report makes clear. Those choices include straightforward, immediate solutions such as quickly adopting renewable sources of electricity and clamping down on new oil and gas extraction. They are also more aspirational ones, such as investing in research that could one day allow technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. The authors of the report are not prescriptive. No solution is held up as the "right" one. [...] The report lays out sobering facts about the state of the Earth's climate. The planet is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the late 1800s, and is on track to exceed 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century, it warns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a new app store for games on iPhones and Android smartphones as soon as next year if its $75bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard is cleared by regulators, according to the head of its Xbox business. From a report: New rules requiring Apple and Google to open up their mobile platforms to app stores owned and operated by other companies are expected to come into force from March 2024 under the EU's Digital Markets Act. "We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play," said Phil Spencer, chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, in an interview ahead of this week's annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "Today, we can't do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up." Microsoft is fighting with regulators in the US, Europe and UK, which have all raised concerns about the potential impact on competition from the owner of the Xbox console buying the developer of Call of Duty, one of the world's most popular games franchises. PlayStation maker Sony has been a vocal opponent of the deal. However, Spencer argues the deal can boost competition in what he called the "largest platform people play on" -- smartphones -- where Apple and Google currently operate what some antitrust authorities have called a "duopoly" over distribution of games and other apps. [...] While acknowledging it was hard to predict exactly when Microsoft will be able to launch its own store, Spencer said it would be "pretty trivial" for Microsoft to adapt its Xbox and Game Pass apps to sell games and subscriptions on mobile devices. Microsoft's current lack of mobile games was an "obvious hole in our capability" that it needed Activision Blizzard to fill, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is cutting another 9,000 jobs, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote to employees in a memo on Monday. The move, which impacts roles in AWS, PXT, Advertising and Twitch, comes weeks after the e-commerce group said it would eliminate 18,000 jobs. Jassy: As part of our annual planning process, leaders across the company work with their teams to decide what investments they want to make for the future, prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses. For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study from the Department of Defense revealed that military pilots and ground crews experienced higher rates of certain cancers compared to the general population. Axios: Earlier military studies had not indicated that aviators were at higher risk, though the data has long been sought by those who raised alarm about the rates of cancer they observed among air and ground crew members, according to AP, which first reported the study. The study examined cancer rates among nearly 900,000 air and ground crew from 1992 to 2017. Overall -- compared to the general population after adjusting for age, sex and race -- aircrews saw a 24% higher rate of cancer of all types while ground crews saw a 3% higher rate of cancer of all types. However, both air and ground crews saw "lower or similar" cancer mortality rates for all cancer types compared to the general population.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Phoronix:For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Tinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V. The ASUS Tinker V is their first RISC-V single board computer and intended for the industrial IoT (Internet of Things) developer community. The ASUS Tinker V is set to officially run Debian Linux and Yocto while surely with time more Linux distributions will be supported.... Being IoT focused, there isn't any display support. Those interested in learning more about the ASUS Tinker V can do so via tinker-board.asus.com. The Register notes that Asus "is offering at least five years of support for Tinker V... Dedicated on-site technical support is also available to shorten customer development cycles and accelerate application deployment."The move shows that the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture continues to garner support. The last RISC-V Summit in San Jose saw the launch of a family of datacenter-class processors based on the architecture from Ventana Micro Systems, while XMOS unveiled new high-performance microcontrollers using RISC-V. According to Asus, Tinker V samples will be available in Q2 of this year, but it did not disclose a date for full availability or pricing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023," notes a new blog post at Stack Overflow. But then it asks the question: "What's different about these layoffs?"[T]he current economy has less in common than you might think with the wreckage of the dot-com bubble or the Great Recession. Overall, it's still a good time to work in tech, and the hiring market remains robust: One survey found that almost 80% of people laid off in tech found new roles within three months of launching their job search. There are more open tech positions than people to fill them (about 375,000, according to one estimate), and job listings between January and October 2022 were up 25% over the same period in 2021. If the job market isn't as dire as we think, why does this round of layoffs feel so widespread, affecting companies often perceived as more recession-proof than their peers? Part of the answer may be what organizational behavior experts have termed "copycat layoffs." "Laying off employees turns out to be infectious," writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. "When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so...." In many cases, workers laid off by household-name tech companies have found new jobs outside the traditional parameters of the tech industry, where their skill sets are in high demand. As Matt McLarty, global field chief technology officer for MuleSoft, told CNBC, businesses that have long needed tech professionals to upgrade their stack or guide a long-delayed cloud migration can now scoop up freshly laid-off tech workers (and those for whom Silicon Valley has lost its luster). Companies in energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more are hiring tech pros at a steady clip, even if FAANG companies are less bullish. It's been said before that every company is a tech company, but in 2023, that's truer than ever. In fact, the biggest difference for tech workers this year, reports The New Stack, is that "the greatest opportunities may not lie exclusively in the FAANG companies anymore, but in more traditional industries that are upgrading their legacy stacks and embracing cloud native." Some of those opportunities also lie with startups, including ones helmed by Big Tech veterans ready to turn their layoffs into lemonade.... So whether you've been affected by the recent spate of layoffs or not, it's worth expanding your list of potential employers to include companies — even industries — you've never considered. You might find that they're thrilled to have you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When we learned that a BlackBerry movie was in the works last year," writes Engadget, "we had no idea it would be something close to a comedy. But judging from the trailer, it's aiming to be a far lighter story than other recent films about tech." Variety notes that the movie has already screened at both Berlin Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival. "The film has received favorable reviews so far, with Variety's Peter Debruge calling it "frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy." That review also calls the film "surprisingly charitable to the parties involved, acknowledging that these visionaries, while making it up as they go along, still managed to change the way the world communicates.... The film, at least, feels fresh, making geek history more entertaining than it has any right to be." But there's also a message in there somewhere. Mashable calls it "a cautionary tale jolted with humor and heart," while Vulture describes it as "a very funny geek tragedy."The stories of tech founders continue to entertain and frustrate us in equal measure, and continue to give us more content to watch on the platforms and devices they created. Clearly, something about power-tripping nerds really speaks to something in our collective psyche. Actor Jay Baruchel plays BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis — and even tells Vulture he'd kept using his own BlackBerry "until about three or four years ago..." "I think there's something inherently tragic about these guys that are really significantly responsible, in a really significant way, for the way we all relate to each other. There's a direct line from how we all communicate now, back to what these nerds did in Waterloo in 1996." The movie will be released on May 12.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Liliputing.com has an update about the System76 Meerkat, which they describe as "a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor. It's basically a rebranded Intel NUC." (Escept that System76 offers a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.) "Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips."That means there are a total of 9 different processor options available. Prices start at $499 for an entry-level model with a Core i3-10110U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The prices rises by $50 if you want to go with a Core i3-1135G4 model, while prices start at $599 for a Meerkat mini PC with a 12th-gen Intel Core processor.... But the biggest difference is that Intel's 12th-gen processors introduce a hybrid architecture that pairs Performance and Efficiency cores, leading to much higher core counts for better multi-core performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And starting in 2021 — long before the run on Silicon Valley Bank — the Federal Reserve had "repeatedly warned the bank that it had problems," reports the New York Times:In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as "matters requiring attention" and "matters requiring immediate attention," flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble. But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions. Last autumn, staff members from the San Francisco Fed met with senior leaders at the firm to talk about their ability to gain access to enough cash in a crisis and possible exposure to losses as interest rates rose. It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality. y early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a "horizontal review," an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies — but at that point, the bank's days were numbered. In early March, it faced a run and failed within a matter of days.... The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed — but ignored the concerns. The Federal Reserve Bank system has 12 distircts, and the one overseeing California had a board of directors which included SVB's CEO Greg Becker, the article points out. "While board members do not play a role in bank supervision, the optics of the situation are bad."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night," reports the Associated Press. The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues:Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he's 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris. McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added.... He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour. The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle. Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward. First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics.... These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With all the space junk cluttering our orbits, Popular Science writes, "Lowering costs while also shortening satellite lifespans is important if space exploration and utilization is to remain safe and viable. "As luck would have it, a group of students and researchers at Brown University just made promising headway for both issues."Last year, the team successfully launched their breadloaf-sized cube satellite (or cubesat) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the comparatively low production cost of $10,000, with a dramatically shortened lifespan estimated at just five years. What's more, much of the microsat was constructed using accessible, off-the-shelf components, such as a popular $20 microprocessor powered by 48 AA batteries. In total, SBUDNIC — a play on Sputnik as well as an acronym of the students' names — is likely the first of its kind to be made almost entirely from materials not specifically designed for space travel. Additionally, the group attached a 3D-printed drag sail made from Kapton film that unfurled once the cubesat reached orbit roughly 520 kilometers above Earth. Since tracking began in late May 2022, the students' satellite has already lowered down to 470 kilometers — well below its fellow rocketmates aboard the Falcon 9, which remain around 500 kilometers high.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Prahjister knows what a system on a chip is. But that's part of the problem:I recently started hearing the term SoC at work when referring to digital signage hardware. This has really triggered me.... It is like when I heard people refer to a PC as a CPU. I tried to speak to my colleagues and dissuade them from using this term in this manner with no luck. Am I wrong trying to dissuade them for this? Maybe another question would be: Are there technical malapropisms that drive you crazy? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. And when should you call hardware a 'SoC'?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader turp182 shares two stories about the new state-of-the-art in very-high-speed imaging. "The techniques don't image captured photons, but instead 'touch' the target to perform imaging/read structures using either lasers or neutrons." First, Science Daily reports that physicists from the University of Gothenburg (with colleagues from the U.S. and Germany) have developed an ultrafast laser camera that can create videos at 12.5 billion images per second, "which is at least a thousand times faster than today's best laser equipment."[R]esearchers use a laser camera that photographs the material in [an ultrathin, one-atom-thick] two-dimensional layer.... By observing the sample from the side, it is possible to see what reactions and emissions occur over time and space. Researchers have used single-shot laser sheet compressed ultrafast photography to study the combustion of various hydrocarbons.... This has enabled researchers to illustrate combustion with a time resolution that has never been achieved before. "The more pictures taken, the more precisely we can follow the course of events...." says Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, who was one of the researchers at the University of Gothenburg and who is now presenting the results in a scientific article in the journal Light: Science & Applications.... The new laser camera takes a unique picture with a single laser pulse. Meanwhile, ScienceAlert reports on a camera with a trillionth-of-a-second shutter speed — that is, 250 million times faster than digital cameras — that's actually able to photograph atomic activity, including "dynamic disorder."Simply put, dynamic disorder is when clusters of atoms move and dance around in a material in specific ways over a certain period — triggered by a vibration or a temperature change, for example. It's not a phenomenon that we fully understand yet, but it's crucial to the properties and reactions of materials. The new super-speedy shutter speed system gives us much more insight into what's happening.... The researchers are referring to their invention as variable shutter atomic pair distribution function, or vsPDF for short.... To achieve its astonishingly quick snap, vsPDF uses neutrons to measure the position of atoms, rather than conventional photography techniques. The way that neutrons hit and pass through a material can be tracked to measure the surrounding atoms, with changes in energy levels the equivalent of shutter speed adjustments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid quotes an intriguing new article from the Economist:Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a hobbit hole than Moonbase Alpha. There could be another solution, however, that would offer future colonists safer and far more expansive living space than any cramped base built on the surface. Writing in Acta Astronautica, Raymond Martin, an engineer at Blue Origin, a rocket company, and Haym Benaroya, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, explore the benefits of setting up a Moon base inside giant geological tunnels that lie just below the lunar surface. First discovered during the Apollo programme, these lunar lava tubes are a legacy of when Earth's nearest celestial neighbour was geologically hyperactive, with streams of boiling basaltic magma bursting from the interior to flow across the Moon's surface as lava. Found on Earth (see picture), and identified on Mars, lava tubes form when the sluggish top layer of a lava stream slows and cools, forming a thick and rocky lid that is left behind when the rest of the lava underneath eventually drains away. Lava tubes on Earth are usually up to 15 metres wide and can run for several kilometres. But the reduced gravity on the Moon makes them hundreds of times bigger, creating colossal cave systems that are up to a kilometre across and hundreds of kilometres long.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:Like many, parents Sai Gaddam and his wife Priyanka Rai were concerned about how well schooling and education might serve their own children. Unlike many, PhD-educated computational neuroscientist Gaddam and MBA-trained marketer Rai took matters into their own hands and are now running a micro-school in Mumbai that's inspired by the Finnish model of early education. In One AI Tutor Per Child, Gaddam explains with examples why he's so excited about the possibilities for the use of AI and Large Language Models to practically facilitate the Holy Grail of personalized learning. "With generative AI," Gaddam explains, "we have the ability — today — to massively boost this human-human loop by inserting into it an AI tutor/assistant who also doubles as a pedagogy translator. What Seymour Papert — inventor of LOGO, pioneering educator, and the original inspiration for the One Laptop Per Child initiative — said about computers back in the early nineties ('The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes.') is even more true of AI now. We are now within touching distance of giving every child their own personal Aristotle."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gizmodo reports that Amazon "is thinking about releasing a web browser, a boring-sounding project that could have massive implications."The company has sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, including which features would "convince you to download and try" a "new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon...." The survey asked a variety of questions. Most telling was the last question: "Imagine that there is a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon available to do. Select which of the following you would most like to know more about." The survey went on to list topics such as privacy, syncing passwords across devices, and shopping features.... Users were asked to rate the importance of features including text to speech, extensions, the availability to sync data across desktop and mobile devices, and — notably — blocking third party cookies. Amazon seems to be seriously considering a web browser of its own, and it comes at a time when it would have an unusual impact on the advertising business. The ad industry is bracing for cataclysmic change as Google moves closer to killing third-party cookies in Chrome, the world's most popular web browser, which would kneecap one of the primary ways businesses track consumers for ads.... Part of what makes Amazon so attractive to marketers is the fact that the company sits on a treasure trove of data about what consumers are buying and what their shopping habits are like. If Amazon could match that information with the data collection that comes from a web browser, it could tip the scales of internet advertising in favor of the retail giant. One thing Amazon asked users is whethered they'd be convinced to download and try a browser if it offered "AI-enabled tab, history, and bookmarks management to automatically sort these into categories for quick search and retrieval."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader BonThomme shared this article from Axios:In a story in the Financial Times out Thursday, current and former Silicon Valley Bank employees cited the bank's commitment to remote work as one reason for its failure.... The banking industry has led the return to office charge for a while, and SVB was an outlier in its commitment to something different. The company's career site touted its flexible culture. "If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it's that we can trust our employees to be productive from wherever they work," the site says. The executive team at SVB was spread out around the country, with CEO Greg Becker at times working from Hawaii, according to the FT. Yet, SVB included remote work as a risk to its business in its 2022 annual report — in part because of the IT issues posed when employees are dispersed around the country, but also for productivity reasons. The FDIC, which now runs the bank, told staff they could continue working remotely — except essential workers and branch employees, per Reuters. Axios ultimately blames SVB's run 11 days ago on its panic-inciting public communications about needing to raise capital, combined with its oddly high concentration of tech clients and a portfolio of long-term U.S. treasuries as interest rates rose. "It's certainly possible that if more executives were working in closer proximity those missteps would've been avoided. But it's hard to really know." Yet they warn workplace policies could change simply because the Financial Times ran a piece blaming remote work. "Companies looking for a reason to bring workers back to the office may find it in this piece."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language). Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away.And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Codon is a new "high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code without any runtime overhead," according to its README file on GitHub.Typical speedups over Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still. Its development team includes researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab, according to this announcement from MIT shared by long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R):The compiler lets developers create new domain-specific languages (DSLs) within Python — which is typically orders of magnitude slower than languages like C or C++ — while still getting the performance benefits of those other languages. "We realized that people don't necessarily want to learn a new language, or a new tool, especially those who are nontechnical. So we thought, let's take Python syntax, semantics, and libraries and incorporate them into a new system built from the ground up," says Ariya Shajii SM '18, PhD '21, lead author on a new paper about the team's new system, Codon. "The user simply writes Python like they're used to, without having to worry about data types or performance, which we handle automatically — and the result is that their code runs 10 to 100 times faster than regular Python. Codon is already being used commercially in fields like quantitative finance, bioinformatics, and deep learning." The team put Codon through some rigorous testing, and it punched above its weight. Specifically, they took roughly 10 commonly used genomics applications written in Python and compiled them using Codon, and achieved five to 10 times speedups over the original hand-optimized implementations.... The Codon platform also has a parallel backend that lets users write Python code that can be explicitly compiled for GPUs or multiple cores, tasks which have traditionally required low-level programming expertise.... Part of the innovation with Codon is that the tool does type checking before running the program. That lets the compiler convert the code to native machine code, which avoids all of the overhead that Python has in dealing with data types at runtime. "Python is the language of choice for domain experts that are not programming experts. If they write a program that gets popular, and many people start using it and run larger and larger datasets, then the lack of performance of Python becomes a critical barrier to success," says Saman Amarasinghe, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator. "Instead of needing to rewrite the program using a C-implemented library like NumPy or totally rewrite in a language like C, Codon can use the same Python implementation and give the same performance you'll get by rewriting in C. Thus, I believe Codon is the easiest path forward for successful Python applications that have hit a limit due to lack of performance." The other piece of the puzzle is the optimizations in the compiler. Working with the genomics plugin, for example, will perform its own set of optimizations that are specific to that computing domain, which involves working with genomic sequences and other biological data, for example. The result is an executable file that runs at the speed of C or C++, or even faster once domain-specific optimizations are applied.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

InfoWorld interviews Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research (who is also a pioneer in design patterns, agile methods, and one of the creators of UML). Here's some of the highlights:Q: Let me begin by asking something "of the moment." There has been an almost cultural war between object-oriented programming and functional programming. What is your take on this? Booch: I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus — one of the pioneers of functional programming — in 2006 on behalf of the Computer History Museum. I asked John why functional programming didn't enter the mainstream, and his answer was perfect: "Functional programming makes it easy to do hard things" he said, "but functional programming makes it very difficult to do easy things...." Q: Would you talk a bit about cryptography and Web3? Booch: Web3 is a flaming pile of feces orbiting a giant dripping hairball. Cryptocurrencies — ones not backed by the full faith and credit of stable nation states — have only a few meaningful use cases, particularly if you are a corrupt dictator of a nation with a broken economic system, or a fraud and scammer who wants to grow their wealth at the expense of greater fools. I was one of the original signatories of a letter to Congress in 2022 for a very good reason: these technologies are inherently dangerous, they are architecturally flawed, and they introduce an attack surface that threatens economies.... Q: What do you make of transhumanism? Booch: It's a nice word that has little utility for me other than as something people use to sell books and to write clickbait articles.... Q: Do you think we'll ever see conscious machines? Or, perhaps, something that compels us to accept them as such? Booch: My experience tells me that the mind is computable. Hence, yes, I have reason to believe that we will see synthetic minds. But not in my lifetime; or yours; or your children; or your children's children. Remember, also, that this will likely happen incrementally, not with a bang, and as such, we will co-evolve with these new species.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic, Retool's Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment, presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill Gates' genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the"Father of Visual Basic," with the Windows Pioneer Award. For Gates, VB was love at first sight. "It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it," recalls Cooper of Gates's reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. "At one point he turned to his retinue and asked 'Why can't we do stuff like this?'" Gates even came up with the idea of taking Cooper's visual programming frontend and replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC. After seeing what Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front row at the launch event. But it's hard to argue with success, and Cooper eventually came to appreciate VB's impact. "Had Ruby [Cooper's creation] gone to the market as a shell construction set," Cooper said, "it would have made millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty right." At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Minnesota regulators said Thursday they're monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energy's Monticello nuclear power plant," reports the Associated Press, "and the company said there's no danger to the public.""Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment," the Minneapolis-based utility said in a statement. While Xcel reported the leak of water containing tritium to state and federal authorities in late November, the spill had not been made public before Thursday. State officials said they waited to get more information before going public with it.... "Now that we have all the information about where the leak occurred, how much was released into groundwater, and that contaminated groundwater had moved beyond the original location, we are sharing this information," said Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Michael Rafferty, adding the water remains contained on Xcel's property and poses no immediate public health risk. The company said it notified the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state on Nov. 22, the day after it confirmed the leak, which came from a pipe between two buildings. Since then, it has been pumping groundwater, storing and processing the contaminated water, which contains tritium levels below federal thresholds. "Ongoing monitoring from over two dozen on-site monitoring wells confirms that the leaked water is fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility or in any local drinking water," the Xcel Energy statement said. When asked why Xcel Energy didn't notify the public earlier, the company said: "We understand the importance of quickly informing the communities we serve if a situation poses an immediate threat to health and safety. In this case, there was no such threat."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:A recent paper on ArXiv reports new spectroscopic analyses of the surfaces of 42 asteroids. The main result for space enthusiasts is that there is not one "M" class asteroid (metal-rich) surface in the collection. The imagery that (many) people grow up with from Hollywood and TV "science" "documentaries" is that the Solar system is full of asteroids which are made of metal ready for mining to produce solid ingots of precious metals. That's Hollywood, not reality. This result is about what you'd expect from the proportion of metallic asteroids — otherwise estimated at about 0.5% of the population. The asteroid mining fraternity dream of taking apart an M-type asteroid like Psyche, which is fair enough as a dream. Even as a dream for "asteroid mining" metal market speculators. But they are relatively rare asteroids. A realistic "ISRU" (In-Situ Resource Utilisation) plan is going to have to expect to digest around 200 silicate mineral (and clay ("phyllosilicate"), and ice) asteroids for every metallic one they digest. Here's the home page for the project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: It's happening now — and you can watch it live online. Saturday is the beginning of the fifteenth edition of the Free Software Foundation's conference on ethical technology and user freedom. And they're livestreaming the talks — with three different livestreams available online from the conference's Jupiter Room, Saturn Room, and Neptune Room. This year's theme is "Charting the Course" — here's a complete schedule of the talks. Topics will include freedom hardware, free software for non-developers, free licensing of trademarks, Emacs for P2P deliberation, free software boot, DIY browsers, free/libre payment systems, "the future of the right to repair and free software", and a talk on Sunday titled "It's time to jailbreak the farm."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rest of World reports on viral teenage pranks at conveyor-belt sushi chain restaurants across Japan, which snowballed into a societal phenomenon that social media users and the Japanese press have named "sushi terrorism." It began January 9th when a video showed a customer adding a pile of wasabi onto sushi on a conveyor belt. Another video shows a giggling teenager touching sushi on a conveyor belt at the sushi chain Sushiro after first licking that finger. The stock of the parent company that owns that sushi chain drops nearly 5%.It's not over. At a Nagoya branch of Kura Sushi, a 21-year-old customer grabs sushi from the conveyor belt, cramming it into his mouth and chasing it down with a swig from the communal soy sauce bottle. The incident is filmed by his two younger friends, one of whom posts the clip online. The same day, Sushiro's operating company announces it will limit conveyor belts and move to ordering by touch screen. Concerns continued at other sushi chains. ("Kura Sushi says it's installing surveillance cameras equipped with AI to monitor customers' behavior and catch sushi terrorists. A day later, Choushimaru announces it will switch entirely to an iPad-based ordering system by April 26.") Sushiro also moves to ordering by touch screen and promises to limit conveyor belts. The story's dramatic conclusion?Nagoya police arrest the 19-year-old man who allegedly posted the soy-sauce-swigging video from Kura Sushi, along with his two "co-conspirators." Nagoya police declare they are holding all three sushi terrorists on suspicion of "forcible obstruction of business." The crime would carry a maximum penalty of three years in prison, if they're convicted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.