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The New York Times reports:Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it "disabled only a fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states. Instead, the social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations. "Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed," the complaint said, "and zealously protected from disclosure to the public...." It also accused Meta executives of publicly stating in congressional testimony that the company's age-checking process was effective and that the company removed underage accounts when it learned of them - even as the executives knew there were millions of underage users on Instagram... The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic - the next generation of users - that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth. More from the Wall Street Journal:An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens "predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior," the filings show... "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects," the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company's existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. "And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit...." "In December 2017, an Instagram employee indicated that Meta had a method to ascertain young users' ages but advised that 'you probably don't want to open this pandora's box' regarding age verification improvements," the states say in the suit. Some senior executives raised the possibility that cracking down on underage usage could hurt Meta's business... The states say Meta made little progress on automated detection systems or adequately staffing the team that reviewed user reports of underage activity. "Meta at times has a backlog of 2-2.5 million under-13 accounts awaiting action," according to the complaint... The unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms' usage above the well being of users... Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts earlier this month... The complaint cites numerous other executives making public claims that were allegedly contradicted by internal documents. While Meta's head of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Congress that the company didn't consider profitability when designing products for teens, a 2018 internal email stated that product teams should keep in mind that "The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270" when making product decisions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The abolition of third-party cookies will make it possible to protect privacy-related data such as what sites users visit and what pages they view from advertising companies," notes the Japan-based site Gigazine. And this month "Google has confirmed that it is on track to start disabling third-party cookies across its Chrome browser in a matter of weeks," writes TechRadar:An internal email published online sees Google software engineer Johann Hofmann share with colleagues the company's plan to switch off third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users from Q1 2024 - a plan that was shared months ago and that, surprisingly, remains on track, given the considerable pushbacks so far... Hofmann explains that Google is still awaiting a UK Competition and Markets Authority consultation in order to address any final concerns before "Privacy Sandbox" gets the go-ahead. The Register explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" idea: Since 2019 - after it became clear that European data protection rules would require rethinking how online ads work - Google has been building a set of ostensibly privacy-preserving ad tech APIs known as the Privacy Sandbox... One element of the sandbox is the Topics API: that allows websites to ask Chrome directly what the user is interested in, based on their browser history, so that targeted ads can be shown. Thus, no need for any tracking cookies set by marketers following you around, though it means Chrome squealing on you unless you tell it not to... Peter Snyder, VP of privacy engineering at Brave Software, which makes the Brave browser, told The Register in an email that the cookie cutoff and Privacy Sandbox remains problematic as far as Brave is concerned. "Replacing third-party cookies with Privacy Sandbox won't change the fact that Google Chrome has the worst privacy protections of any major browser, and we're very concerned about their upcoming plans," he said. "Google's turtle-paced removal of third-party cookies comes along with a large number of other changes, which when taken together, seriously harm the progress other browsers are making towards a user-first, privacy-protecting Web. "Recent Google Chrome changes restrict the ability for users to modify, make private, and harden their Web experience (Manifest v3), broadcasting users' interests to websites they visit (Topics), dissolving privacy boundaries on the Web (Related Sites), offloading the battery-draining costs of ad auctions on users (FLEDGE/Protected Audience API), and reducing user control and Web transparency (Signed Exchange/WebBundles)," Snyder explained. "And this is only a small list of examples from a much longer list of harmful changes being shipped in Chrome." Snyder said Google has characterized the removal of third-party cookies as getting serious about privacy, but he argued the truth is the opposite. "Other browsers have shown that a more private, more user-serving Web is possible," he said. "Google removing third-party cookies should be more accurately understood as the smallest possible change it can make without harming Google's true priority: its own advertising business." The Register notes that other browser makers such as Apple, Brave, and Mozilla have already begun blocking third-party cookies by default, while Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge "provide that option, just not out of the box." EFF senior staff technologist Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told The Register that "When Google Chrome finishes the project on some unspecified date in the future, it will be a great day for privacy on the web. According to the announcement, the actual phased rollout is slated to begin in Q3 2024, with no stated deadline to reach 100 percent. Let's hope Google's advertising wing does not excessively delay these critical privacy improvements." TechRadar points out that after the initial testing period in 2024, Google will begin its phased rollout of the cookie replacement program - starting in June. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Three out of four of the world's most popular websites are failing to meet minimum requirement standards" for password security, reports Georgia Tech's College of Computing. Which means three out of four of the world's most popular web sites are "allowing tens of millions of users to create weak passwords." Using a first-of-its-kind automated tool that can assess a website's password creation policies, researchers also discovered that 12% of websites completely lacked password length requirements. Assistant Professor Frank Li and Ph.D. student Suood Al Roomi in Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy created the automated assessment tool to explore all sites in the Google Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), a database of one million websites and pages. Li and Al Roomi's method of inferring password policies succeeded on over 20,000 sites in the database and showed that many sites: - Permit very short passwords- Do not block common passwords- Use outdated requirements like complex characters The researchers also discovered that only a few sites fully follow standard guidelines, while most stick to outdated guidelines from 2004... More than half of the websites in the study accepted passwords with six characters or less, with 75% failing to require the recommended eight-character minimum. Around 12% of had no length requirements, and 30% did not support spaces or special characters. Only 28% of the websites studied enforced a password block list, which means thousands of sites are vulnerable to cyber criminals who might try to use common passwords to break into a user's account, also known as a password spraying attack. Georgia Tech describes the new research as "the largest study of its kind." ("The project was 135 times larger than previous works that relied on manual methods and smaller sample sizes.") "As a security community, we've identified and developed various solutions and best practices for improving internet and web security," said assistant professor Li. "It's crucial that we investigate whether those solutions or guidelines are actually adopted in practice to understand whether security is improving in reality." The Slashdot community has already noticed the problem, judging by a recent post from eggegick. "Every site I visit has its own idea of the minimum and maximum number of characters, the number of digits, the number of upper/lowercase characters, the number of punctuation characters allowed and even what punctuation characters are allowed and which are not."The limit of password size really torques me, as that suggests they are storing the password (they need to limit storage size), rather than its hash value (fixed size), which is a real security blunder. Also, the stupid dots drive me bonkers, especially when there is no "unhide" button. For crying out loud, nobody is looking over my shoulder! Make the "unhide" default. "The 'dots' are bad security," agrees long-time Slashdot reader Spazmania. "If you're going to obscure the password you should also obscure the length of the password." But in their comment on the original submission, they also point out that there is a standard for passwords, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:Briefly: * Minimum 8 characters* Must allow at least 64 characters.* No constraints on what printing characters can be used (including high unicode)* No requirements on what characters must be used or in what order or proportion This is expected to be paired with a system which does some additional and critical things: * Maintain a database of known compromised passwords (e.g. from public password dictionaries) and reject any passwords found in the database.* Pair the password with a second authentication factor such as a security token or cell phone sms. Require both to log in.* Limit the number of passwords which can be attempted per time period. At one attempt per second, even the smallest password dictionaries would take hundreds of years to try... Someone attempting to brute force a password from outside on a rate-limited system is limited to the rate, regardless of how computing power advances. If the system enforces a rate limit of 1 try per second, the time to crack an 8-character password containing only lower case letters is still more than 6,000 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The Linux Foundation recently funded a new "security developer in residence" position for Python. (It's funded through the Linux Foundation's own "Open Software Security foundation", which has a stated mission of partnering with open source project maintainers "to systematically find new, as-yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities in open source code, and get them fixed to improve global software supply chain security.") The position went to the lead maintainer for the HTTP client library urllib3, the most downloaded package on the Python Package Index with over 10 billion downloads. But he hopes to create a ripple effect by demonstrating the impact of security investments in critical communities - ultimately instigating a wave of improvements to all software supply chains. (And he's also documenting everything for easy replication by other communities...) So far he's improved the security of Python's release processes with signature audits and security-hardening automation. But he also learned that CVE numbers were being assigned to newly-discovered vulnerabilities by the National Cyber Security Division of the America's Department of Homeland Security - often without talking to anyone at the Python project. So by August he'd gotten the Python Software Foundation authorized as a CVE Numbering Authority, which should lead to more detailed advisories (including remediation information), now reviewed and approved by Python's security response teams. "The Python Software wants to help other Open Source organizations, and will be sharing lessons learned," he writes in a blog post. And he now says he's already been communicating with the Curl program about his experiences to help them take the same step, and even authored a guide to the process for other open source projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher disagrees that Sam Altman's (temporary) firing stemmed from a conflict between the "go-faster" people pushing for commercialization and a rival contingent wanting more safety-assuring guardrails. "He's being talking about the problems," Swisher said on CNN. "Compared to a lot of tech people, he's talking about the problems. I think that's a false dichotomy." At the same time, NPR argues, the firing and re-hiring of Sam Altman "didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, the boardroom drama represented the boiling over of tensions that have long simmered under the surface of the company."The chaos at OpenAI can be traced back to the unusual way the company was structured. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, Elon Musk and others as a non-profit research lab. It was almost like an anti-Big Tech company; it would prioritize principles over profit. It wanted to, as OpenAI put it back then, develop AI tools that would "benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." But in 2018, two things happened: First, Musk quit the board of OpenAI after he said he invested $50 million, cutting the then-unknown company off from more of the entrepreneur's crucial financial backing. And secondly, OpenAI's leaders grew increasingly aware that developing and maintaining advanced artificial intelligence models required an immense amount of computing power, which was incredibly expensive. A year after Musk left, OpenAI created a for-profit arm. Technically, it is what's known as a "capped profit" entity, which means investors' possible profits are capped at a certain amount. Any remaining money is re-invested in the company. Yet the nonprofit's board and mission still governed the company, creating two competing tribes within OpenAI: adherents to the serve-humanity-and-not-shareholders credo and those who subscribed to the more traditional Silicon Valley modus operandi of using investor money to release consumer products into the world as rapidly as possible in hopes of cornering a market and becoming an industry pacesetter... The question was, did Altman abandon OpenAI's founding principles to try to scale up the company and sign up customers as fast as possible? And, if so, did that make him unsuited to helm a nonprofit created to develop AI products "free from financial obligations"? Microsoft's stock price hit an all-time high this week, reports the Wall Street Journal. (They also note that when OpenAI employees considered moving to Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella "assured their potential colleagues that they wouldn't even have to use Microsoft's workplace-communications app Teams.") "But the ideal outcome for Microsoft was Altman going back to OpenAI as CEO, according to a person familiar with Nadella's thinking. By opening Microsoft's doors to the OpenAI team, Nadella increased Altman's leverage to get his position back..."Even after investing $13 billion, Microsoft didn't have a board seat or visibility into OpenAI's governance, since it worried that having too much sway would alarm increasingly aggressive regulators. That left Microsoft exposed to the risks of OpenAI's curious structure... Microsoft has had to strike a tricky balance with OpenAI: safeguarding its investment while ensuring that its ownership stake remained below 50% to avoid regulatory pitfalls... AI is wildly expensive, and Microsoft's spending is expected to soar as the company builds out the necessary computing infrastructure. And it's unclear when or if it will be able to make back these upfront costs in added new revenue... Nadella is banking on OpenAI's independence leading to innovations that benefit Microsoft as much as humanity. But the uncertainty of the past week has shown the risks in one of the world's most valuable companies outsourcing the future to a startup beyond its control. When Chris Wallace asked Swisher if he should be more concerned about the dangers of AI now - and of its potential to take jobs - Swisher had a different answer. "One of the concerns you should have is the consolidation of this into bigger companies. Microsoft really want to win here..." But she didn't let the conversation end without wryly underscoring the potential for AI. "I'd be concerned that there's not enough innovation... It could be a good thing, Chris. Trust me, it could be a good thing. But it could also, you know, kill you." Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was November 23rd of the year 1963 that Doctor Who first premiered on the BBC. And the many years since then have wrought their changes, writes the BBC:Events on screen and off have shaped the character's personality, their face changing to reflect Britain itself, and every version building on what has gone before. To truly understand Who, you have to know your history... [T]he series was originally intended to teach children history as much as thrill them... [T]he Daleks were shouty miniaturised tanks, terrifying to a nation that had lived through World War 2... Scripts by the likes of Douglas Adams (who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) leaned into the show's inherent strangeness... Interestingly, the new specials and series involve Marvel-owner Disney, who will stream it outside the UK and Ireland, in turn helping boost the budget. The article handily summarizes the last 60 years. ("Perhaps the most shocking revelation of [2010 showrunner Steven Moffat's] tenure was a hitherto unseen, past version of the Doctor, played by John Hurt. Other writers would take this idea and run with it...") The article ends with the words, "Only time will tell." And elsewhere another BBC article notes that today "the TARDIS is set to return to BBC One and iPlayer."With David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate reprising her role as Donna Noble the popular duo will make their spectacular return to mark the show's 60th anniversary with three special episodes running each Saturday from the 25th November... Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker [is] set to cause all kinds of mayhem. It's going to be an unmissable cosmic adventure, all before Ncuti Gatwa gets the keys to the TARDIS over the festive season. Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,972) for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America celebrates "Small Business Saturday" today with special celebrations everywhere from Houston, Texas to Buffalo, New York NBC News reports:Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday - historically the biggest and busiest retail days of the year - there's another standout shopping event: Small Business Saturday. Started by American Express in 2010 and co-sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration since 2011, Small Business Saturday aims to create awareness about the impact shoppers have when they buy "small" year round, whether they physically visit stores or shop online. This year, 85% of consumers say they're likely to shop "small" during the holiday season, according to the American Express 2023 Shop Small Impact Study. That represents a multibillion dollar opportunity - consumers are expected to spend an estimated $125 billion at small businesses this holiday season, up 42% from $88 billion in 2022, as reported by Intuit QuickBooks. Like CBS News, NBC has compiled its list of small businesses that can ship their products to you - and suggests leaving positive reviews online for your favorite small businesses. ("Amazon, for example, now adds badges to product pages on its site if items are sold by small businesses.")They also recommend interacting with your favorite small businesses on social media - while "the American Express small-business map allows you to input your zip code so it can recommend local shops in your area and beyond. Google also has a 'small business' filter on desktop and mobile, and one for Google Maps on mobile." The UK's "Small Business Saturday" will happen next week, on the first Saturday in December.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last January the Register reported that the Budgie desktop environment was planning to switch from using GNOME to Enlightenment. But this week Budgie's project lead David Mohammed and packaging guru Sam Lane "passed on news of a rift - and indeed possible divorce - between Budgie and Enlightenment," the Register reported. "And it's caused by Wayland."The development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie's Wayland future... While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project's own words this is "still considered experimental and not for regular end users." Mohammed told us... "Progress though towards a full implementation currently doesn't fit into the deemed urgent nature to move to Wayland (Red Hat dropping further X11 development, and questions as to any organisation stepping up, etc.)" So, instead, Budgie is exploring different ways to build a Wayland-only environment. For now, as we mentioned when looking at Ubuntu's 23.10 release, there's a new windowing library, Magpie. Magpie 0.9 is what the project describes as "a soft-fork of GNOME's mutter at version 43" - the term soft fork meaning it's a temporary means to an end, rather than intended to form an on-going independent continuation. For the future, though, Mohammed told us... "[T]he Budgie team has been evaluating options to move forward. XFCE are doing some really great work in this area with libxfce4windowing - a compatibility layer bridging Wayland and X11, allowing the move in a logical direction without needing a big-bang approach. To date, most of the current codebase has already been reworked and is ready for a Wayland-only approach without impacting further development and enhancements." Mohammed later told the Register, "It makes sense for the more dynamic smaller projects to work together where there are shared aims."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The popular party game "Cards Against Humanity" continued their tradition of practical jokes on Black Friday. They created a new social network where users can perform only one action: posting the word "yowza." Then announced it on their official social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and X... Regardless of what words you type into the window, they're replaced with the word yowza. "For just $0.99, you'll get an exclusive black check by your name," reads an announcement on the site, "and the ability to post a new word: awooga." It's a magical land where "yowfluencers" keep "reyowzaing" the "yowzas" of other users. And there's also a tab for trending hashtags. (Although, yes, they all seem to be "yowza".) But they've already gotten a write up in the trade industry publication Advertising Age. "With every bad thing happening in the world, social media is always right there, making it worse," a spokesperson said.... "[W]e asked ourselves: Is there a way we could make a social network that doesn't suck? At first, the answer was 'no.' The content moderation problem is just too hard. And then we thought, why not solve the content moderation problem by having no content? That's Yowza...." When creating your profile on the network there's a dropdown menu for specifying your age and location - although all of the choices are yowza. More details from Advertising Age: The company said the word "yowza" was the first that came to mind when its creative teams were brainstorming-and it just stuck. "It's dumb, it's ridiculous, it means nothing. It's perfect," the rep said. And the service is still evolving, with fresh user upgrades. The official Yowza store will now also sell you the ability to also post the word Shazam - for $29.99. (Also on sale are 100,000 followers - for 99 cents.) But there's also an official FAQ which articulates the service's deep commitment to protecting their users' privacy. Do you promise you won't share my private information with the Chinese Communist Party, like TikTok? Yowza.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America passed a climate bill in August of 2022 with incentives to build wind and solar energy in regions that historically relied on fossil fuels. And sure enough, since then "a disproportionate amount of wind, solar, battery and manufacturing investment is going to areas that used to host fossil fuel plants," reports the Washington Post. They cite a new analysis of investment trends from independent research firm Rhodium Group and MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research:In Carbon County, Wyo. - a county named for its coal deposits - a power company is building hundreds of wind turbines. In Mingo County, W.Va., where many small towns were once coal towns, the Adams Fork Energy plant will sit on a former coal mining site and produce low-carbon ammonia... While communities that once hosted coal, oil or gas infrastructure make up only 18.6 percent of the population, they received 36.8 percent of the clean energy investment in the year after the Inflation Reduction Act's passage. "We're talking about in total $100 billion in investment in these categories," said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium Group. "So $37 billion investment in a year for energy communities - that's a lot of money...." Most significantly, 56.6 percent of investment in U.S. wind power in the past year has gone to energy communities, as well as 45.5 percent of the storage and battery investment... The analysis also found that significant amounts of clean energy investment were going to disadvantaged communities, defined as communities with environmental or climate burdens, and low-income communities. Many of the states benefiting are solidly Republican... Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way, is not sure whether the clean energy investments will make a difference for next year's election. But in the long term, he argues, rural Republican areas will become more dependent on clean energy - potentially shifting party alliances and shifting the position of the Republican Party itself. "It's going to change these fossil fuel communities," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Every car we were driving with was heading that direction..." Shelby Easler says in a TikTok video, "so we assumed this was going somewhere..." But SFGate reports that instead of a handy "alternate route," Google Maps was leading her and her two passengers "far off the major highway and into Nevada's fierce deserts on an off-roading trail."Easler's car were not the only bushwackers. In Shelby's viral TikTok, a trail of cars closely follows behind them. "The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere. He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around," Easler said. 1.5 million people have viewed Easler's earlier footage of their road to nowhere. The off-roading trail was apparently only wide enough for traffic in one direction, and attempting to return in that other direction, "We were driving over bushes and rocks and alot of the cars couldn't even make it," Easler says in the second video. "Which is kind of why our car broke down." They told SFGate that ultimately "We had to leave the car in Vegas, and it got towed to the service center of a dealership. They said the rear, right tire was coming off, and the alignment was messed up too. Low-key a pretty expensive fix." They eventually called the highway patrol to shut down the road that Google Maps was sending people to, because "With every car coming in, every single car was getting trapped."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Regulators in the European Union, China and France have asked for information on Nvidia's graphic cards, with more requests expected in the future, the U.S. chip giant said in a regulatory filing. From a report: Nvidia is the world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics. Demand for its chips jumped following the release of the generative AI application ChatGPT late last year. The California-based company has a market share of around 80% via its chips and other hardware and its powerful software that runs them. Its graphics cards are high-performance devices that enable powerful graphics rendering and processing for use in video editing, video gaming and other complex computing operations. The company said this has attracted regulatory interest around the world. "For example, the French Competition Authority collected information from us regarding our business and competition in the graphics card and cloud service provider market as part of an ongoing inquiry into competition in those markets," Nvidia said in a regulatory filing dated Nov. 21.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FFmpeg 6.1's codename is a tribute to the great 19th century mathematician Oliver Heaviside. This version includes support for multi-threaded hardware-accelerated video decoding of H.264, HEVC, and AV1 video using the cross-platform Vulkan API, the next-gen replacement for OpenGL, which was added to the codebase in May. The Register adds: The pace of development of FFmpeg has been speeding up slightly in recent years, given that it took 13 years to get to version 2.0. We can't help but wonder if that's connected with the departure of the former project lead in 2015. The developers are planning to release version 7.0 in about February next year. Even so, the "Heaviside" release, which has been refactored to support even more formats and introduce new methods for faster performance or reduced processor utilization, is smaller than previous releases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazil has signed onto an agreement to triple renewable energy globally by 2030 and shift away from using coal, the country's Foreign Ministry said on Friday, joining a prospective deal backed by the European Union, U.S. and United Arab Emirates. From a report: South America's largest country is now one of roughly 100 countries that have signed onto the deal, according to a European official familiar with the matter. Sources told Reuters earlier this month the aim is for the deal to be officially adopted by leaders attending the United Nation's COP28 climate negotiations that begins next week in Dubai. Brazil's embassy in Abu Dhabi said in a letter to the United Arab Emirates' Foreign Ministry that it would join the deal titled the "Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Targets Pledge." A spokesperson for Brazil's Foreign Ministry confirmed the country has decided to join the pact. Brazil is already a major player in renewable energy. More than 80% of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources, led by hydropower with solar and wind energy expanding rapidly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak: File-sharing and hosting giant Uloz has announced a radical change to its business model. The Czech site has been under fire for some time and was recently branded a 'notorious market' by the MPA. However, Uloz says that an imminent ban on file-sharing in favor of a private, cloud-based storage model, is due to the strict conditions imposed by the EU's Digital Services Act.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No one is a prophet in their own land, including European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, who admitted on Friday that her son lost "almost all" of his investments in crypto assets, despite copious warnings. From a report: Lagarde has long railed against cryptocurrencies, calling them speculative, worthless and a tool often used by criminals for illicit activity. "He ignored me royally, which is his privilege," Lagarde told a town hall with students in Frankfurt. "And he lost almost all the money that he had invested." "It wasn't a lot but he lost it all, he lost about 60% of it," Lagarde added. "So when I then had another talk with him about it, he reluctantly accepted that I was right." The ECB chief has two sons in their mid-30s but did not say which one she was referring to. The ECB has called for global regulation of crypto assets both to protect consumers who are unaware of the risk and to close a loophole that can be used to channel funding to terrorists or lets criminals launder cash.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of AI, and said that a much more ambitious Russian strategy for the development of AI would be approved shortly. From a report: China and the United States are leading the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders think will transform the world and revolutionise society in a way similar to the introduction of computers in the 20th century. Moscow has ambitions to be an AI power too, but its efforts have been set back due to the war in Ukraine which prompted many talented specialists to leave Russia and triggered Western sanctions that have hindered the country's high-tech imports. Speaking to an AI conference in Moscow beside Sberbank CEO German Gref, Putin said that trying to ban AI was impossible despite the sometimes troubling ethical and social consequences of new technologies. "You cannot ban something - if we ban it then it will develop somewhere else and we will fall behind," Putin said of AI, though he said ethical questions should be resolved with reference to "traditional" Russian culture. Putin cautioned that some Western online search systems and generative models ignored or even cancelled Russian language and culture. Such Western algorithms, he said, essentially thought Russia did not exist. "Of course, the monopoly and domination of such systems, such alien systems is unacceptable and dangerous," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) launched its new supercomputer based on the enhanced China-designed Sunway SW26010 Pro processors with 384 cores. Sunway's SW26010 Pro CPU not only packs more cores than its non-Pro SW26010 predecessor, but it more than quadrupled FP64 compute throughput due to microarchitectural and system architecture improvements, according to Chips and Cheese. However, while the manycore CPU is good on paper, it has several performance bottlenecks. The first details of the manycore Sunway SW26010 Pro CPU and supercomputers that use it emerged back in 2021. Now, the company has showcased actual processors and disclosed more details about their architecture and design, which represent a significant leap in performance, recently at SC23. The new CPU is expected to enable China to build high-performance supercomputers based entirely on domestically developed processors. Each Sunway SW26010 Pro has a maximum FP64 throughput of 13.8 TFLOPS, which is massive. For comparison, AMD's 96-core EPYC 9654 has a peak FP64 performance of around 5.4 TFLOPS. The SW26010 Pro is an evolution of the original SW26010, so it maintains the foundational architecture of its predecessor but introduces several key enhancements. The new SW26010 Pro processor is based on an all-new proprietary 64-bit RISC architecture and packs six core groups (CG) and a protocol processing unit (PPU). Each CG integrates 64 2-wide compute processing elements (CPEs) featuring a 512-bit vector engine as well as 256 KB of fast local store (scratchpad cache) for data and 16 KB for instructions; one management processing element (MPE), which is a superscalar out-of-order core with a vector engine, 32 KB/32 KB L1 instruction/data cache, 256 KB L2 cache; and a 128-bit DDR4-3200 memory interface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese health authorities have provided the requested data on an increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children, and have not detected any unusual or novel pathogens, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. From a report: The WHO had asked China for more information on Wednesday after groups including the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases reported clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children in north China. As per the rule, China responded to the WHO within 24 hours. The WHO had sought epidemiologic and clinical information as well as laboratory results through the International Health Regulations mechanism. Epidemiologists have warned that as, China heads into its first winter since the lifting of zero-Covid restrictions, natural levels of immunity to respiratory viruses may be lower than normal, leading to an increase in infections. Several countries, including the US and the UK, experienced large waves of respiratory viral infections in the first winter after Covid restrictions were lifted as people had lower natural levels of immunity. For young children, lockdowns delayed the age at which they were first exposed to common bugs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has swung from fourth to first place in an assessment of chip industry revenue published today. From a report: Taipei-based financial analyst Dan Nystedt noted that the green team took the revenue crown from contract chip-making titan TSMC as Q3 financials came into view. Those keeping an eye on the world of investing and finance will have seen our report about Nvidia's earnings explosion, evidenced by the firm's publishing of its Q3 FY23 results. Nvidia charted an amazing performance, with a headlining $18.12 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 206% year-over-year (YoY). The firm's profits were also through the roof, and Nystedt posted a graph showing Nvidia elbowed past its chip industry rivals by this metric in Q3 2023, too. Nvidia's advance is supported by multiple highly successful operating segments, which have provided a multiplicative effect on its revenue and income. Again, we saw clear evidence of a seismic shift in revenue, with the latest set of financials shared with investors earlier this week.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's biggest iceberg is on the move after more than 30 years being stuck to the ocean floor. From a report: The iceberg, called A23a, split from the Antarctic coastline in 1986. But it swiftly grounded in the Weddell Sea, becoming, essentially, an ice island. At almost 4,000 sq km (1,500 sq miles) in area, it's more than twice the size of Greater London. The past year has seen it drifting at speed, and the berg is now about to spill beyond Antarctic waters. A23a is a true colossus, and it's not just its width that impresses. This slab of ice is some 400m (1,312 ft) thick. For comparison, the London Shard, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, is a mere 310m tall. At the time, it was hosting a Soviet research station, which just illustrates how long ago its calving occurred. Moscow despatched an expedition to remove equipment from the Druzhnaya 1 base, fearing it would be lost. But the tabular berg didn't move far from the coast before its deep keel anchored it rigidly to the Weddell's bottom-muds. So, why, after almost 40 years, is A23a on the move now?"I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come," said Dr Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey. "It was grounded since 1986 but eventually it was going to decrease (in size) sufficiently to lose grip and start moving. I spotted first movement back in 2020." A23a has put on a spurt in recent months, driven by winds and currents, and is now passing the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI models can find patterns and make predictions, but their reasoning is often inscrutable. This "black box" issue makes AI less reliable and less scientifically useful. However, a team led by Dion Hafner (a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen) devised a clever neural network to predict rogue waves. By restricting inputs to meaningful wave measurements and tracing how they flowed through the network, the team extracted a simple five-part equation encapsulating the AI's logic. Economist adds: To generate a human-comprehensible equation, the researchers used a method inspired by natural selection in biology. They told a separate algorithm to come up with a slew of different equations using those five variables, with the aim of matching the neural network's output as closely as possible. The best equations were mixed and combined, and the process was repeated. The result, eventually, was an equation that was simple and almost as accurate as the neural network. Both predicted rogue waves better than existing models. The first part of the equation rediscovered a bit of existing theory: it is an approximation of a well-known equation in wave dynamics. Other parts included some terms that the researchers suspected might be involved in rogue-wave formation but are not in standard models. There were some puzzlers, too: the final bit of the equation includes a term that is inversely proportional to how spread out the energy of the waves is. Current human theories include a second variable that the machine did not replicate. One explanation is that the network was not trained on a wide enough selection of examples. Another is that the machine is right, and the second variable is not actually necessary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As 2023 slowly comes to an end I wondered what your picks are for the best movies and TV shows that came out this year. What films or series did you enjoy the most? Share your favorites and why you think they stand out above the rest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft is blaming an unspecified "technical error" for a fullscreen pop-up ad that appeared in Assassin's Creed Odyssey this week. From a report: Reddit users say they spotted the pop-up on Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, with an ad appearing just when you navigate to the map screen. "This is disgusting to experience while playing," remarked one Reddit user, summarizing the general feeling against such pop-ups in the middle of gameplay. "We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin's Creed titles yesterday," says Ubisoft spokesperson Fabien Darrigues, in a statement to The Verge. "This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a time when some are calling for a pause on the development of generative AI, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, has an argument for accelerating the work: AI advances are going to provide tools to better understand the technology and to make it safer, Huang said in a discussion with Goldman Sachs Asset Management. From a report: "We need to accelerate the development of AI as fast as possible, and the reason for that is because safety requires technology," Huang said in an interview at The Forum with Sung Cho, co-head of Tech Investing for Fundamental Equity in GSAM. Consider how much safer today's passenger cars are compared with those of earlier generations, Huang suggested, because the technology has advanced. He cited as an example how OpenAI's ChatGPT uses reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to create guardrails that make its responses more relevant, accurate, and appropriate. The RLHF is itself an AI model that sits around the core AI model. Huang lists examples of other AI technologies that hold promise for making the models safer and more effective. These range from retrieval augmented generation, in which the model gets information from a defined knowledge base or set of documents, to physics-informed reinforcement learning, which grounds the model in physical principles and constraints. "We need a bunch more technology like that," Huang said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dirty air killed more than half a million people in the EU in 2021, estimates show, and about half of the deaths could have been avoided by cutting pollution to the limits recommended by doctors. From a report: The researchers from the European Environment Agency attributed 253,000 early deaths to concentrations of fine particulates known as PM2.5 that breached the World Health Organization's maximum guideline limits of 5ug/m3. A further 52,000 deaths came from excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide and 22,000 deaths from short-term exposure to excessive levels of ozone. "The figures released today by the EEA remind us that air pollution is still the number one environmental health problem in the EU," said Virginijus Sinkevicius, the EU's environment commissioner. Doctors say air pollution is one of the biggest killers in the world but death tolls will drop quickly if countries clean up their economies. Between 2005 and 2021, the number of deaths from PM2.5 in the EU fell 41%, and the EU aims to reach 55% by the end of the decade. The WHO, which tightened its air quality guidelines in 2021, warns that no level of air pollution can be considered safe but has set upper limits for certain pollutants. The European parliament voted in September to align the EU's air quality rules with the WHO's but decided to delay doing so until 2035.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, is far more harmful to human health than previously thought, according to a new report, which found that coal emissions are associated with double the mortality risk compared with fine airborne particles from other sources. From a report: The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, linked coal pollution to 460,000 deaths among Medicare recipients aged 65 and older between 1999 and 2020. Yet the study also found that during that period the shuttering of coal plants in the United State, coupled with the installation of scrubbers in the smokestacks to "clean" coal exhaust, has had salubrious effects. Deaths attributable to coal plant emissions among Medicare recipients dropped from about 50,000 a year in 1999 to 1,600 in 2020, a decrease of more than 95 percent, the researchers found. "Things were bad, it was terrible," Lucas Henneman, the study's lead author, and an assistant professor in environmental engineering at George Mason University, said in an interview. "We made progress, and that's really good." Researchers from six universities collected emissions data from 480 coal power plants between 1999 and 2020. They used atmospheric modeling to track how sulfur dioxide converted into particulate matter and where it was carried by wind, and then examined millions of Medicare patient deaths by ZIP code. Though the researchers could not identify exact causes of death, the statistical model showed that areas with more airborne coal particulates had higher death rates. Some 138 coal plants each contributed to at least 1,000 excess deaths, and 10 plants were linked to more than 5,000 deaths apiece, the researchers found. While fine particulate matter, known as P.M. 2.5, is frequently examined for its health risks, the researchers found that inhaling those fine particles from coal exhaust was especially deadly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new AI chip it designed to comply with U.S. export rules until the first quarter of next year, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The delayed chip is the H20, the most powerful of three China-focused chips Nvidia has developed to comply with fresh U.S. export restrictions, the sources said, and could complicate its efforts to preserve market share in China against local rivals like Huawei. The California-based AI chip giant had been expected to launch the new products as early as Nov. 16, chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis reported this month. However, the H20 launch has now been pushed back until the first quarter of next year, the sources said, with one saying they were advised it could take place in February or March. The sources said they were told that the H20 was being delayed due to issues server manufacturers were having in integrating the chip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some Pixel 8 Pro owners have noticed circular bumps in several places on the screen that look to be the result of something pressing up against the underside, which is soft and fragile, of the 6.7-inch OLED panel. From a report: A statement from the company today acknowledges how "some users may see impressions from components in the device that look like small bumps" in specific conditions. Google says there is "no functional impact to Pixel 8 performance or durability," which does line up with all current reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British Library has confirmed that personal data stolen in a cyber-attack has appeared online, apparently for sale to the highest bidder. From a report: The attack was carried out in October by a group known for such criminal activity, said the UK's national library, which holds about 14m books and millions of other items. This week, Rhysida, a known ransomware group, claimed it was responsible for the attack. It posted low-resolution images of personal information online, offering stolen data for sale with a starting bid of 20 bitcoins (about $750,000). Rhysida said the data was "exclusive, unique and impressive" and that it would be sold to a single buyer. It set a deadline for bids of 27 November. The images appear to show employment contracts and passport information. The library said it was "aware that some data has been leaked, which appears to be from files relating to our internal HR information." It did not confirm that Rhysida was responsible for the attack, nor that the data offered for sale was information on personnel. Academics and researchers who use the library have been told that disruption to the institution's services after the serious ransomware attack was likely to continue for months. This week, the library advised its users to change any logins also used on other sites as a precaution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The office sector's credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it's now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. From a report: Only one out of every three securitized office mortgages that expired during the first nine months of 2023 was paid off by the end of September, according to Moody's Analytics. That is the smallest share for the first nine months of any year since at least 2008 and well below the nadir reached in 2009, when 47% of these loans got paid off. That share is also well below the rate before the pandemic, when more than eight out of every 10 maturing securitized office mortgages were paid back in some years. While the numbers cover only office mortgages packaged into bonds -- so-called commercial mortgage-backed securities -- they reflect a broader freeze in the lending market for office buildings. Many office owners can't pay back their old loans because they can't get new mortgages. Remote work and rising vacancies have hit building profits, making it harder to pay interest. Higher interest rates have pushed debt costs up and building values down. That combination is fueling a rise in defaults. The share of office CMBS loans that are delinquent has tripled over the past year to 5.75%, according to Trepp. It doesn't help that many banks no longer issue new office loans and that many insurance companies and debt funds have become more cautious.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. From a report: Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's IT Minister, said the ministry held meetings with all large social media companies, industry body Nasscom and academics earlier in the day and has reached a consensus that a regulation is needed to better combat spread of deepfake videos as well as apps that facilitate their creations. "The companies share our concerns and they understood that it's [deepfakes] are not free speech. They understood that it's something that's very harmful to the society," he said. "They understood the need for much heavier regulation on this, so we agree that we will start drafting the regulation today itself." The ministry will be ready with "clear actionable items" on how to combat deepfakes in 10 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have detected the most powerful cosmic ray seen in more than three decades. But the exact origin of this turbocharged particle from outer space remains a mystery, with some suggesting that it could have been generated by unknown physics. From a report: The puzzling cosmic ray had an estimated energy of 240 exa-electron volts (EeV; 10^18 volts), making it comparable to the most powerful cosmic ray ever detected, aptly named the Oh-My-God particle, which measured at around 320 EeV when it was discovered in 1991. The findings were published today in Science. "It's amazing because you have to think of what could produce such high energy," says Clancy James, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. A cosmic ray, despite its name, is actually a high-energy subatomic particle -- often a proton -- that zips through space at close to the speed of light. In their ultra-high energy form, cosmic rays have energy levels that exceed one EeV, which is around one million times greater than those reached by the most powerful human-made particle accelerators. Cosmic rays with energies of more than 100 EeV are rarely spotted -- fewer than one of these particles arrive on each square kilometre of Earth each century.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At 26, nurse Benzor Vidal moved from the Philippines to America for work, but quit his unsafe, understaffed nursing home job after 14 weeks. His employment contract stipulated he could owe $20,000+ in damages if he resigned early. The New York Times Magazine digs deeper: This type of contract provision is known as a "stay or pay" clause, and it used to be common only for certain high-paying roles or in certain specialized industries. For airline pilots and software engineers, for example, it has been a longstanding practice at some companies to require employees to stay at their jobs for a defined period of time in order to recoup costs related to hiring and training. But the line between recouping costs and penalizing workers for leaving can be blurry, and companies have increasingly taken advantage of that ambiguity. Workers' rights advocates say that, in many cases, stay-or-pay clauses no longer accurately reflect the company's costs but instead appear to be inflated financial penalties designed to discourage quitting. The use of stay-or-pay clauses has grown rapidly over the past decade, and it has seemingly exploded since the start of the pandemic, as companies try to retain workers in a tight labor market. The clauses have spread far beyond the handful of roles and industries where they originated and are now used by thousands of mid- and low-wage employers -- something that came to light when workers began filing lawsuits challenging the practice. These contract terms have been applied to bank workers, salespeople, dog groomers, police officers, aestheticians, firefighters, mechanics, nurses, federal employees, electricians, roofers, social workers, paramedics, truckers, mortgage brokers, teachers and metal polishers. Legal experts believe stay-or-pay clauses might now be in industries that employ a third of all American workers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Kiddo 9000 writes: Dbrand, a company known best for making cases for phones, game consoles, and laptops, has filed a lawsuit against case manufacturer CASETiFY over their "Inside Out" case lineup. Dbrand alleges that CASETiFY copied the designs from their Teardown skins and put them on their own products without permission. In a video published by JerryRigEverything, several easter eggs placed in the Teardown skins were found in the CASETiFY designs, alongside numerous tweaks and layout changes, and even Dbrand's logo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have used the technology behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT to create a fake clinical-trial data set to support an unverified scientific claim. From a report: In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November, the authors used GPT-4 -- the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs -- paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated -- wrongly -- that one treatment is better than the other. "Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available," says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy. The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity. "It was one thing that generative AI could be used to generate texts that would not be detectable using plagiarism software, but the capacity to create fake but realistic data sets is a next level of worry," says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent research-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The founder of Chipotle is opening a new endeavor called Kernel, a vegetarian fast-casual restaurant that will be operated mostly by robots. Steve Ells is opening at least 15 locations of Kernel, the first by early 2024; the remainder are on track for NYC in the next two years, a spokesperson confirms. From a report: Kernel will serve vegetarian sandwiches, salads, and sides, made in a space that's around 1,000 square-feet or smaller. Each location would employ three workers, the Wall Street Journal reported, "rather than the dozen that many fast-casual eateries have working." The menu pricing will be on par with Chipotle's, and, Ells says, the company will pay more and offer better benefits for actual humans working than other chains. As you'd expect from the former CEO of Chipotle -- which had at least five foodborne illness outbreaks between 2015 and 2018, costing the company $25 million per the Justice Department -- "the new system's design helps better ensure food safety," Ells told the Journal. It has taken $10 million in his personal funds to start Kernel, along with $36 million from investors. The company suggests customers may not want much interaction with other people -- and neither do CEOs. "We've taken a lot of human interaction out of the process and left just enough," he told the Journal. Yet in a 2022 study on the future of dining out conducted by commerce site, PYMNTS, of 2,500 people surveyed, 63 percent of diners believe restaurants are becoming increasingly understaffed, and 39 percent said that they are becoming less personal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Levandowski, a tech entrepreneur and self-driving car pioneer, said he's rebooting his AI church in a renewed attempt at creating a religious movement focused on the worship and understanding of artificial intelligence. From a report: Levandowski's so-called Way of the Future was founded in 2015 but shut its doors a few years later. The congregation at the new church, which shares the original's name, has "a couple thousand people" coming together to build a spiritual connection between humans and AI, its founder said. Levandowski made the remarks during an interview for the latest episode of the Bloomberg Originals series AI IRL, available to stream now. "How does a person in rural America relate to this? What does this mean for their job?" he said. "Way of the Future is a mechanism for them to understand and participate and shape the public discourse as to how we think technology should be built to improve you." The existence of the original church became public in 2017, years before the viral success of ChatGPT brought AI into mainstream consciousness. Levandowski's idea raised eyebrows, both because of the church's focus on "the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence developed through computer hardware and software," and because of Levandowski himself. At the time, he was at the center of a high-profile legal battle related to the theft of trade secrets, sentenced to 18 months in prison, then pardoned by former President Donald Trump.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Hickson, a software engineer at Google who left the company after 18 years, reflects on his time at the firm in a blog post and why he thinks the firm lost its way. He joined in 2005 when its culture genuinely prioritized doing good, but over time he saw that culture erode into one focused on profits over users, he writes. The recent layoffs have damaged trust and morale across the company, he writes. An excerpt from the post: Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing. There are still great people at Google. [...] In recent years I started offering career advice to anyone at Google and through that met many great folks from around the company. It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO's office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google's extensive resources to deliver value to users. I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful). Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements. I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google's culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare is a content-neutral Internet infrastructure service. The company aims not to interfere with the traffic of its clients and users but, in some cases, it has to take action. This means responding to DMCA subpoenas and takedown requests for hosted content, for example. In addition, Cloudflare now reports it has blocked access to 'abusive' content on its Ethereum gateway. [...] In its most recent transparency report, Cloudflare further notes that it has implemented access restrictions on its public Ethereum gateway. The company doesn't store any content on the Ethereum network, nor can it remove any. However, it can block access through its service. If Cloudflare receives valid abuse reports or copyright infringement complaints, it will take appropriate action. The same applies to the gateway for the decentralized IPFS network. In its previous transparency report, Cloudflare already mentioned more than 1,000 IPFS actions a figure that increased slightly in the second half of last year. At the same time, Cloudflare also restricted access to 99 'items' on the Ethereum network. Since these are 'gateway' related restrictions there's no impact on the content hosted on IPFS or Ethereum. Instead, it will only make it impossible to access content through Cloudflare's service. It's not clear how many of these restrictions are abuse or copyright-related, as not much context is provided. The Ethereum actions are, at least in part, a response to the U.S. Department of Treasury's sanctions against the cryptocurrency tumbler Tornado Cash. "Those sanctions raise significant legal questions about the extent to which particular computer software, rather than individuals or entities that use that software, can be subject to sanctions," Cloudflare writes. "Nonetheless, to comply with legal requirements, Cloudflare has taken steps to disable access through the Cloudflare-operated Ethereum Gateway to the digital currency addresses identified in the designation." The report notes that the volume of valid DMCA notices Cloudflare received has increased, "up from 18 to 972 in the span of a year." Meanwhile, the number of civil subpoenas it's received, including those issued under the DMCA, has decreased. "In the second half of last year, the company received 20 civil subpoenas which targeted 57 domain names," reports TorrentFreak. "That's the lowest number since Cloudflare first disclosed this statistic five years ago, signaling a downward trend." Cloudflare's latest Transparency Report is available here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA selected Blue Origin in February to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of smallsats that will study the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere of Mars. The space agency now expects the mission will be on the first launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle next year. SpaceNews reports: Neither Blue Origin nor NASA disclosed exactly where in the manifest of New Glenn launches ESCAPADE would take place. "It will be an early New Glenn mission and we're going to be ready," one Blue Origin executive, Ariane Cornell, said at the Satellite 2023 conference in March. At a Nov. 20 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee, Bradley Smith, director of NASA's Launch Services Office, said he was "incredibly excited" about the ESCAPADE launch, which he said was scheduled for about one year. His charts, though, and past presentations, listed an August 2024 launch for ESCAPADE. "It's an incredibly ambitious first launch for New Glenn and we really appreciate the partnership," he said. Later in the committee meeting, he confirmed that NASA expected ESCAPADE to be on the inaugural New Glenn launch. "We will very likely be the very first launch of New Glenn," he said. That is acceptable, Smith said, since ESCAPADE is what NASA characterizes as a "class D" mission with a higher tolerance for risk. "We're willing to take a little bit of risk with a price tag and a mission assurance model that reflects that risk." Besides the inherent technical risks in the first launch of a new rocket, there are also schedule risks. New Glenn development is years behind the original schedule Blue Origin put forward. The company has not provided recent updates about progress towards a first launch of the rocket, although Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said at World Satellite Business Week in September that the first flight vehicle would arrive at a Florida integration facility by the end of the year, with the company planning "multiple" launches of New Glenn in 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameMaker announced that it will be free to use for noncommercial, non-console projects, breaking away from Unity and its massive pricing controversy that saw game developers boycotting the engine. The company is also "eliminating its indie / creator tier monthly subscription fee in favor of a one-time paid licensing fee of $99," reports The Verge. "Additionally, if you're currently enrolled at the indie / creator tier and wish to pay the licensing fee, the subscription fees you've paid will be discounted from the price." The Verge: Russell Kay, head of GameMaker, said that the changes were a way for the company to express its thanks to users, explaining that, since 2021, GameMaker has seen its user base triple in size. Kay also had some subtle but effective shade for GameMaker's competitors. "We have seen other platforms making awkward moves with their pricing and terms, so we thought, what if we did the opposite, something that could actually be good for developers?" Kay wrote in the announcement. Though customers currently enrolled in an enterprise-level subscription will see no changes to their plans, it seems like GameMaker is counting on the pricing update to draw more people to the software. "Our success is measured by the number of people making games!" Kay wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm was a key development ahead of the board's ouster of Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. Before his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft in solidarity with their fired leader. The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman's firing. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. According to one of the sources, long-time executive Mira Murati mentioned the project, called Q*, to employees on Wednesday and said that a letter was sent to the board prior to this weekend's events. After the story was published, an OpenAI spokesperson said Murati told employees what media were about to report, but she did not comment on the accuracy of the reporting. The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans. Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*'s future success, the source said. Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math -- where there is only one right answer -- implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. This could be applied to novel scientific research, for instance, AI researchers believe. Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn and comprehend. In their letter to the board, researchers flagged AI's prowess and potential danger, the sources said without specifying the exact safety concerns noted in the letter. There has long been discussion among computer scientists about the danger posed by superintelligent machines, for instance if they might decide that the destruction of humanity was in their interest. Last night, OpenAI announced it reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO. Under an "agreement in principle," Altman will serve under the supervision of a new board of directors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Silvestro reports via Motor1.com: New Jersey announced a new rule set on Wednesday laying out plans to transition sales of light-duty vehicles in the state to 100-percent zero-emission by 2035. According to a statement released by the office of governor Phil Murphy, the law, titled the Advanced Clean Cars II rule, will come into effect starting in 2027, where manufacturers must ensure that zero-emissions vehicles represent 42 percent of sales in the state. That percentage will climb with each year until 2035, when it reaches 100 percent. Currently, EVs represent roughly 12 percent of all new vehicle sales, according to the governor's office. The new law will also put more stringent standards in place for traditional ICE-powered vehicles, with the goal of improving air quality in New Jersey communities and high-traffic corridors. While the announcement does not directly mention investment into charging infrastructure, the governor's office points out its continued dedication to providing adequate charging locations across the state, claiming it has helped fund the installment of 2,980 charging stations with 5,271 ports at 680 locations. New Jersey is the ninth state to enact a ban on future ICE car sales, joining California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lenovo has filed a lawsuit against Asus, claiming that the company's laptops infringe on four of their patents. "Lenovo is seeking damages and for Asus to stop selling Zenbook laptops and other allegedly infringing products in the U.S.," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The lawsuit [PDF] centers on four patents. The first, entitled "Methods and apparatus for transmitting in resource blocks" was issued in 2021 and relates to minimizing the delay experienced during an uplink package transmission by reducing the number of steps for a wireless device to upload data. Lenovo's lawsuit, which uses Asus' Zenbook Pro 14 OLED (UX6404) as an example of an allegedly infringing product, also claims Asus is selling laptops that violate the wireless wake-on-LAN power management patent issued to Lenovo in 2010. Another patent Lenovo is suing over was issued in 2010 and entitled "Touchpad diagonal scrolling." It allows users to "initiate a diagonal scroll at any location on a touchpad by using two fingers," the lawsuit says. Finally, Lenovo is upset about Asus' purported infringing of its "Dual shaft hinge with angle timing shaft mechanism" patent rewarded in 2014. Lenovo describes it as a hinge block enabling 2-in-1 laptops to go from clamshell mode to tablet mode. For this accused patent infringement, Lenovo's lawsuit points to Asus' Zenbook Flip 14 UX461, which Asus advertises as having a 360-degree "ErgoLift" hinge that "lifts and tilts the keyboard into the perfect typing position when the display is rotated into laptop mode." As noted by The Register today, in a letter to the ITC dated November 15 [PDF], Lenovo said it wants Asus to "cease and desist from marketing, advertising, distributing, offering for sale, selling, or otherwise transferring, including the movement or shipment of inventory" products that infringe upon the four patents in question. In a further dig, Lenovo added that a limited exclusion order wouldn't harm US consumers or competition, due to Asus' smaller market share. According to the IDC, Asus represented about 7.1 percent of the PC market (which includes laptops and desktops) in Q3 2023. Lenovo led at 23.5 percent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Nvidia is facing legal action in the U.S. for theft of trade secrets from a German automotive company, which alleges its ex-employee made an epic blunder of showing something he shouldn't have when minimizing a Powerpoint slide at a joint Microsoft Teams meeting both companies were attending. The automotive firm, Valeo Schalter und Sensoren, claims the flashing of its source code for the assisted parking app on the call is evidence to support its accusations that the ex-staffer stole the IP before leaving to join Nvidia. The two tech companies were both on the call as they were each suppliers on contract for a parking and driving assistance project with a major automotive OEM that was not named in the suit. Under the terms of the contract with the OEM, the suit states, engineers from both Valeo and Nvidia had to schedule collaboration meetings so that "Nvidia employees could ask Valeo employees questions about Valeo's ultrasonic hardware and data associated with the hardware." The complaint [PDF], filed by Valeo in the US District Court for Northern California, goes on to allege misappropriation of trade secrets by Nvidia, through which the company claims the GPU-maker attempted to take a shortcut into the automotive marketplace by using its stolen software. Nvidia is a relative newcomer to the automotive market, introducing its Nvidia Drive platform at the CES trade show in 2015. Valeo says that it only discovered the theft during a conference call on March 8, 2022 between its engineers and those of Nvidia to collaborate on work for an automotive OEM, a customer of both companies. Valeo develops automotive hardware such as cameras and sensors, in addition to software to processes the data from the hardware. The court filing states that Valeo previously provided the OEM in question with both hardware and software for its autonomous vehicle technology, but in this instance, it asked Valeo to provide ultrasonic hardware only. For the software side, the OEM instead chose Nvidia. One of the Nvidia engineers on the call, named as Mohammad Moniruzzaman, was a former employee of Valeo, and during the call, made using Microsoft's Teams software, he shared his screen in order to give a presentation containing questions for the Valeo participants. Yet also visible on his screen after the presentation finished - or so the complaint alleges - was a window of source code, which the Valeo participants recognized as belonging to their company. According to the filing, one of the Valeo engineers succeeded in capturing a screenshot as evidence. According to Valeo, the source code file names that were allegedly visible in the screenshot were identical to those used in its source code, and it also claims the source code appeared to be identical to proprietary code maintained in Valeo's repositories. The company says in the suit that it then conducted a comprehensive internal forensic IT audit, and alleges it discovered that Moniruzzaman had copied four repositories containing the code for Valeo's parking and driving assistance software, prior to leaving the company in May 2021. [...] The claim is that Valeo's source code and documentation has been used in the development of Nvidia's software, and this provided the GPU giant and its engineers with a shortcut in the development of its parking assistance code, saving Nvidia perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs. According to the court filing, Nvidia said it removed Moniruzzaman's additions to its code. However, those additions underwent "a peer review process of 10-30 iterations of feedback loops" before the code was fully merged into Nvidia's database. Valeo contends that this process of extensive edits by others means it is not realistic that Nvidia could have fully remove Moniruzzaman's contributions. Valeo claims it has suffered competitive harm as a result of Nvidia's action and as a result is seeking damages, to be determined at trial, as well as an injunction prohibiting Nvidia or its employees from using or disclosing Valeo's trade secrets. A date for jury trial has yet to be announced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Sam Altman may have been asked to leave OpenAI, but his involvement in crypto project Tools for Humanity, which is building Worldcoin, remains uninterrupted, a source close to the project told TechCrunch. Altman has "consistent and valuable" engagement with Tools for Humanity and "that is not expected to change," the source said. The source added that Altman is still chairman and co-founder of the project, confirming that the information on the project's website is up to date. News of Altman's ouster sent the Worldcoin token, WLD, plummeting to a low of $1.84 on Saturday, but the token recovered over the weekend and is currently trading on par with previous levels at $2.40, per CoinMarketCap data. Worldcoin raised $115 million in May in a Series C round led by Blockchain Capital. As of March, Altman was on the project's board, but was not involved in day-to-day operations. "Proof of personhood is becoming increasingly important in the rapidly advancing age of AI," The Worldcoin Foundation told TechCrunch late on Monday. The team supporting Worldcoin is still focused on the project's mission, "building a more human internet and a more accessible global economy through World ID, a privacy-enhancing way to verify humanness and uniqueness online," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's "ChatGPT with voice" feature announced in September is now rolling out to all free users on mobile. Engadget reports: When the company first introduced voice chats, it admitted that the capability to create "realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech" presents new risks. It could, for instance, allow bad actors to impersonate public figures or anybody they want. As a result, it decided that ChatGPT's voice feature will focus on conversations. It's powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate "human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech." OpenAI worked with voice actors to create the capability and offers five different voices to choose from.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's predictions, with revenue growing 206% year over year. However, Nvidia shares are down after the company called for a negative impact in the next quarter due to export restrictions affecting sales in China and other countries. CNBC reports: Nvidia's revenue grew 206% year over year during the quarter ending Oct. 29, according to a statement. Net income, at $9.24 billion, or $3.71 per share, was up from $680 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company's data center revenue totaled $14.51 billion, up 279% and more than the StreetAccount consensus of $12.97 billion. Half of the data center revenue came from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, and the other from consumer internet entities and large companies, Nvidia said. Healthy uptake came from clouds that specialize in renting out GPUs to clients, Kress said on the call. The gaming segment contributed $2.86 billion, up 81% and higher than the $2.68 billion StreetAccount consensus. With respect to guidance, Nvidia called for $20 billion in revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter. That implies nearly 231% revenue growth. [...] Nvidia faces obstacles, including competition from AMD and lower revenue because of export restrictions that can limit sales of its GPUs in China. But ahead of Tuesday report, some analysts were nevertheless optimistic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Miscreants are actively exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities to wrangle routers and video recorders into a hostile botnet used in distributed denial-of-service attacks, researchers from networking firm Akamai said Thursday. Both of the vulnerabilities, which were previously unknown to their manufacturers and to the security research community at large, allow for the remote execution of malicious code when the affected devices use default administrative credentials, according to an Akamai post. Unknown attackers have been exploiting the zero-days to compromise the devices so they can be infected with Mirai, a potent piece of open source software that makes routers, cameras, and other types of Internet of Things devices part of a botnet that's capable of waging DDoSes of previously unimaginable sizes. Akamai researchers said one of the zero-days under attack resides in one or more models of network video recorders. The other zero-day resides in an "outlet-based wireless LAN router built for hotels and residential applications." The router is sold by a Japan-based manufacturer, which "produces multiple switches and routers." The router feature being exploited is "a very common one," and the researchers can't rule out the possibility it's being exploited in multiple router models sold by the manufacturer. Akamai said it has reported the vulnerabilities to both manufacturers, and that one of them has provided assurances security patches will be released next month. Akamai said it wasn't identifying the specific devices or the manufacturers until fixes are in place to prevent the zero-days from being more widely exploited. The Akamai post provides a host of file hashes and IP and domain addresses being used in the attacks. Owners of network video cameras and routers can use this information to see if devices on their networks have been targeted. [...] In an email, Akamai researcher Larry Cashdollar wrote: "The devices don't typically allow code execution through the management interface. This is why getting RCE through command injection is needed. Because the attacker needs to authenticate first they have to know some login credentials that will work. If the devices are using easy guessable logins like admin:password or admin:password1 those could be at risk too if someone expands the list of credentials to try." He said that both manufacturers have been notified, but only one of them has so far committed to releasing a patch, which is expected next month. The status of a fix from the second manufacturer is currently unknown. Cashdollar said an incomplete Internet scan showed there are at least 7,000 vulnerable devices. The actual number of affected devices may be higher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.