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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission has approved (PDF) a new set of rules aiming to prevent "digital discrimination." It means the agency can hold telecom companies accountable for digitally discriminating against customers -- or giving certain communities poorer service (or none at all) based on income level, race, or religion. The new rules come as part of the Biden Administration's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which requires the FCC to develop and adopt anti-digital discrimination rules. "Many of the communities that lack adequate access to broadband today are the same areas that suffer from longstanding patterns of residential segregation and economic disadvantage," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said following today's vote. "It shows that minority status and income correlate with broadband access." Under the new rules, the FCC can fine telecom companies for not providing equal connectivity to different communities "without adequate justification," such as financial or technical challenges of building out service in a particular area. The rules are specifically designed to address correlations between household income, race, and internet speed. Last year, a joint report from The Markup and the Associated Press found that AT&T, Verizon, and other internet service providers offer different speeds depending on the neighborhood in cities throughout the US. The report revealed neighborhoods with lower incomes and fewer white people get stuck with slower internet while still having to pay the same price as those with faster speeds. At the time, USTelecom, an organization that represents major telecom providers, blamed the higher price on having to maintain older equipment in certain communities. The FCC was nearly divided on the new set of rules, as it passed with a 3-2 vote. Critics of the new policy argue the rules are an overextension of the FCC's power. Jonathan Spalter, the CEO of USTelecom, says the FCC is "taking overly intrusive, unworkably vague, and ultimately harmful steps in the wrong direction." Spalter adds the framework "is counter" to Congress' goal of giving customers equal access to the internet. Still, supporters of the new rules believe they can go a long way toward improving fractured broadband coverage throughout the US. The FCC will also establish an "improved" customer portal, where the agency will field and review complaints about digital discrimination. It will take things like broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance across communities into account when evaluating providers for potential rule violations, giving it the authority to hopefully finally address the disparities in internet access throughout the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese companies are buying up U.S. chipmaking equipment to make advanced semiconductors, despite a raft of new export curbs aimed at thwarting advances in the country's semiconductor industry, a report said on Tuesday. The 741 page annual report, released by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, takes aim at the Biden administration's Oct. 2022 export curbs, which seek to bar Chinese chipmakers from getting U.S. chipmaking tools if they would be used to manufacture advanced chips at the 14 nanometer node or below. With the Commerce Department using the 14 nanometer restriction limit, 'importers are often able to purchase the equipment if they claim it is being used on an older production line, and with limited capacity for end-use inspections, it is difficult to verify the equipment is not being used to produce more advanced chips,' the report stated. According to the document, between January and August 2023, China imported $3.2 billion (RMB 23.5 billion) worth of semiconductor manufacturing machines from the Netherlands, a 96.1% increase over the $1.7 billion (RMB 12 billion) recorded over the same period in 2022. China's imports of semiconductor equipment from all countries totaled $13.8 billion (RMB 100 billion) over the first eight months of 2023, it added. The report does not outline a specific recommendation to address the gaps in the U.S. rules, but urges Congress to request an annual evaluation, to be completed within 6 months by the General Accountability Office and later made public, of the effectiveness of export controls on chipmaking equipment to China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch its second spaceflight attempt of its Starship rocket. CNBC reports: SpaceX posted on the social media platform X shortly after the greenlight that it was "targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship's second flight test." A two-hour launch window will begin at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX plans to livestream the Starship launch, with a webcast beginning about 30 minutes before lift off. Starship first launched in April, achieving flight for a few minutes before exploding mid-air, severely damaging the ground infrastructure and raising environmental concerns. The FAA in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a safety review prior to issuing a new flight license for the second attempt. FWS determined that the rocket launch and subsequent damage to the pad infrastructure had no long-term negative effects on the surrounding ecology, according to an agency report released Wednesday. Still, SpaceX will help mitigate damage to the area by reducing sound waves and vibrations, assisting in fire suppression, and providing launch pad protection, the agency said. As a result, "the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency said in a statement Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A prolonged decline in male fertility in the form of sperm concentrations appears to be connected to the use of pesticides, according to a study published Wednesday. Researchers compiled, rated and reviewed the results of 25 studies of certain pesticides and male fertility and found that men who had been exposed to certain classes of pesticides had significantly lower sperm concentrations. The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives, included data from more than 1,700 men and spanned several decades. "No matter how we looked at the analysis and results, we saw a persistent association between increasing levels of insecticide and decreases in sperm concentration," said study author Melissa Perry, who is an environmental epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University. "I would hope this study would get the attention of regulators seeking to make decisions to keep the public safe from inadvertent, unplanned impacts of insecticides." [...] Scientists have long suspected changes to the environment could be contributing, and they've been probing the role of pesticides for decades in studies of animals and in human epidemiology research. The new analysis focuses on two groups of chemicals -- organophosphates and some carbamates -- that are commonly used in insecticides. The researchers looked at data collected from groups of people with exposures to pesticides and others who were not. Most, but not all, of the research centered on exposures in the workplace. The researchers controlled for outside factors that could contribute to lower sperm counts like smoking and age. Perry said researchers aren't sure how pesticides are affecting sperm concentrations and more research will be needed. It's likely that pesticides are one of many environmental factors that could be contributing to a decline in sperm concentrations. The trend of sperm concentration declines has been widely observed in studies around the world, but it's a complicated topic and some scientists still have reservations. Sperm are notoriously difficult to count and the technology to do so has changed over the years. There are many confounding factors that can affect male fertility, including age, obesity and opioid use, to name a few. Sperm concentrations are one important data point to consider, but other factors -- like how sperm are shaped and how they swim -- are also critical to male fertility. Perry said she hopes agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency begin to factor the impact of chemicals and pesticides on reproductive health in their assessments. "Given the body of evidence and these consistent findings, it's time to proactively reduce these insecticide exposures for men wanting to have families," Perry said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Simon Jack reports via the BBC: The price paid to generate electricity by offshore wind farms is set to rise by more than 50% as the government tries to entice energy firms to invest. Its comes after an auction for offshore wind projects failed to attract any bids, with firms arguing the price set for electricity generated was too low. The BBC understands the government now will raise the price it pays from 44 pounds per MWh to as much as 70 pounds. It is hoped more offshore wind capacity will lead to cheaper energy bills. Energy companies have told the BBC that electricity produced out at sea would remain cheaper and less prone to shock increases compared to power derived from gas-fired power stations. The UK is a world leader in offshore wind and is home to the world's four largest farms, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, which provided 13.8% of the UK's electricity generation last year, according to government statistics. But when the government revealed in September that no companies bid for project contracts, plans to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 13 gigawatts GW to 50 by 2030 -- enough to power every home in the UK -- were dealt a heavy blow. The technology has been described as the "jewel in the UK's renewable energy crown," but firms have been hit by higher costs for building offshore farms, with materials such as steel and labour being more expensive. According to energy companies, the government's failure to recognize the impact of higher costs led some firms to abandon existing projects, and all operators to boycott the most recent auction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lauren Irwin reports via The Hill: Google agreed to pay $8 billion over four years to Samsung to make its apps default on Samsung phones, according to information presented by Epic Games in court. James Kolotouros, vice president for partnerships at Google, testified Monday in a San Francisco trial, saying that the company and Samsung were to share app store revenue to ensure Android mobile devices came with Google Play preinstalled. Epic, the company that makes the popular video game "Fortnite," sued Google in 2020, alleging the company's app marketplace violates antitrust laws. Epic is trying to show that Google executives have discouraged third-party app stores on Samsung devices so it wouldn't cut into the profit of Google Play, Bloomberg reported. According to Kolotouros's testimony, half or more of Google Play revenue comes from Samsung devices. The trial targets the app store that distributes apps for the company's Android software, which powers virtually all the world's smartphones that aren't made by Apple. Epic alleges Google has created an illegal monopoly on Android apps so it can boost its profits through commissions, ranging from 15 to 30 percent on purchases made within an app. Google argues it was doing so to compete with Apple and its app store, an argument attacked by Epic attorney Lauren Moskowitz. Earlier in the trial, Google's attorney said the company can't be a monopoly because it faces competition from companies such as Apple. Further reading: Apple Gets 36% of Google Revenue in Search Deal, Witness SaysRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbnb has acquired a secretive new AI startup, GamePlanner.AI, for around $200 million. TechCrunch reports: GamePlanner was co-founded by Adam Cheyer and Siamak Hodjat. Cheyer famously helped co-launch the startup Siri, which Apple acquired and whose technology became the basis for Apple's AI-powered Siri assistant. Hodjat previously worked with Cheyer at Viv Labs, a firm that Samsung bought and leveraged to launch its own AI assistant, Bixby, in 2017. It's not immediately clear what GamePlanner does. A LinkedIn search only turns up two associates: Gabe Greenbaum, a general partner at B Capital who sits on GamePlanner's board of directors, and Joseph Huang, head of design at GamePlanner. GamePlanner hasn't had a web presence for some time; the Internet Archive's earliest cache of the website (from December 2021) yields a blank page. But in a canned statement, Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky hinted that the 12-person startup combines expertise in AI and design toward crafting AI-driven experiences, sort of like an AI-focused consultancy. "AI will rapidly alter our world more than any other technology in our lifetime, but we need to ensure that it augments humanity in a positive way," Chesky said, adding that the GamePlanner team will focus on "accelerating" select AI projects and integrating their tooling into Airbnb's platform. "Airbnb is one of the more humanistic companies in technology, and I believe that, together with Adam and his team, we can develop some of the best interfaces and practical applications for AI."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: A group of lawmakers from a House of Representatives committee wants Apple, like many Jon Stewart enthusiasts, to explain why its streaming arm abruptly canceled the talk show The Problem With Jon Stewart. The current affairs TV series hosted by Jon Stewart briefly made its debut on Apple TV+ in 2021 but its time on air ended when the show received the ax for a third season, reportedly due to "disagreements" over show topics. According to Reuters, Lawmakers want to know if the show's coverage and criticism of China has anything to do with the show's cancellation. The government officials have asked Apple to speak on the issue by Dec 15, 2023. In a letter to the tech giant, the House members wrote that while Apple has the right to determine what content it deems appropriate for its platform, "the coercive tactics of a foreign power should not be directly or indirectly influencing these determinations." This effort is bipartisan, with members from both Republican and Democratic parties affiliated with the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default! Mozilla Bug 1752398 to "ship the Wayland backend to release" has been closed this evening! After the ticket was open for the past two years, it's now deemed ready to hopefully ship enabled for Firefox 121! This patch drops the "early beta or earlier" check to let Wayland support be enabled by default when running on recent GTK versions (GTK 3.24.30 threshold). Firefox 121 is due for release around 19 December and if all continues to hold, it will finally ship with the Wayland back-end enabled by default as another big step forward.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In what may be a potentially confusing rebranding move, Microsoft today has rebranded Bing Chat to Copilot, sharing the same brand name as multiple other Microsoft AI products. Search Engine Land reports: Bing is no longer "your AI-powered copilot for the web." However, Microsoft Bing will still provide a combined Search and chat experience. It will just be called CoPilot heading forward. For people who may not want that combined experience, CoPilot will have its own standalone ChatGPT-style experience at https://copilot.microsoft.com/. Microsoft said the rebrand is to unify the Copilot experience: "Our efforts to simplify the user experience and make Copilot more accessible to everyone starts with Bing, our leading experience for the web. Beginning today, Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are becoming Copilot, with commercial data protection enforced when any eligible user is signed in with Microsoft Entra ID." While it's definitely a more unified experience, it also seems a bit confusing because Microsoft's chatbot "companion" is used across multiple apps, including Microsoft 365, Edge, Windows and more -- some free, some not. In addition to Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is also rebranded as Copilot Pro. It offers the same chat functionality with greater commercial data protection for Microsoft 365 subscribers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you've only ever used standard Qi chargers with devices that don't have their own schemes, the Wireless Power Consortium's announcement today of the first Qi 2.0 devices being ready to launch before the holidays, with more than 100 in the queue behind them, is great. Qi2 sports a "Magnetic Power Profile" (MPP), created with help by Apple's MagSafe team, to help align devices and chargers' coils for faster, more efficient charging. Qi2-certified devices set onto Qi2 chargers can achieve 15 W charging, up from 7.5 W in the standard Qi scheme. That brings Qi2 devices up to the same speed as iPhones on MagSafe chargers, and it clears up some consumer confusion about how fast a device might charge on Qi, MagSafe, or proprietary chargers. Should a phone and charger be Qi2 certified, you can now expect about 15 W out of it, regardless of whatever Google, Apple, or third party is behind them. Android and iPhone users alike are no longer beholden to their primary hardware vendor if they want 15 W of wireless juice. This announcement does not, however, bring the Qi2 standard close to the far-out speeds that proprietary setups now offer. [...] A number of accessory makers, including stalwarts Anker and Belkin, had already lined up their Qi2-compatible offerings, waiting for the certification to drop. It will be interesting to see if Qi2 brings a wave of magnet mania to Android phones, akin to the MagSafe-induced blitz a few years back. Magnetic charging packs, wallets, wireless charging for a non-wireless-charging phone -- there's a lot to work with, especially at now somewhat more respectable charging speeds. Regarding speed, the WPC told Android Authority back in January that the Qi2 standards group intends to standardize charging speeds above 15 W by mid-2024. If you need a fast charge, plugging in the right cable to a well-powered source is still the most certain route. But with magnetic alignment and a good deal more universal compatibility, Qi2 drags the broader wireless charging market forward.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nasa's James Webb space telescope has revealed a planet where specks of sand fall as rain, in groundbreaking observations. From a report: The planet, Wasp-107b, lies 200 light years away in the Virgo constellation and had already caught the attention of astronomers because it is very large but very light, earning it the nickname the "candy floss" planet. The latest observations give an unprecedented glimpse of a strange and exotic world beyond our solar system that features silicate sand clouds and rain, scorching temperatures, raging winds and the distinct burnt-matches scent of sulphur dioxide. "Our knowledge of other planets is based on what we know from Earth," said Prof Leen Decin, of the Catholic Institute (KU) Leuven and first author of the research. "That's a very restricted knowledge." The planet was discovered in 2017 after astronomers spotted a telltale periodic flickering of light from its host star each time the planet passed in front of it. "It's like a fly in front of a street lamp," said Decin. "You see a slight dimming of the light." James Webb takes these observations to the next level by measuring starlight that is filtered through the planet's atmosphere. Because different elements absorb different wavelengths of light, the spectrum of starlight indicates which gases are present. Wasp-107b is similar in mass to Neptune but almost the size of Jupiter, and its vast, diffuse nature allows the James Webb telescope to peer deep into its atmosphere.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon said on Wednesday that it was removing seven eyedrops products from its website after the Food and Drug Administration warned the company that the eyedrops had not been recognized as safe and effective. From a report: The F.D.A. said in a letter to Andrew Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, on Monday that Amazon had violated federal regulations by selling the eyedrops, which claimed to help with problems including pink eye, dry eyes, eyestrain and floaters. "These products are especially concerning from a public health perspective," the F.D.A. letter said. "Ophthalmic drug products, which are intended for administration into the eyes, in general pose a greater risk of harm to users because the route of administration for these products bypasses some of the body's natural defenses." The eyedrops named in the letter are: Similasan Pink Eye Relief, The Goodbye Company Pink Eye, Can-C Eye Drops, Optique 1 Eye Drops, OcluMed Eye Drops, TRP Natural Eyes Floaters Relief, and Manzanilla Sophia Chamomile Herbal Eye Drops. None of the eyedrops appeared to be available for purchase on Amazon on Wednesday morning. The company said in an emailed statement on Wednesday that "safety is a top priority."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft and Nvidia want to help developers run and configure AI models on their Windows PCs. During the Microsoft Ignite event on Wednesday, Microsoft announced Windows AI Studio: a new hub where developers can access AI models and tweak them to suit their needs. From a report: Windows AI Studio allows developers to access development tools and models from the existing Azure AI Studio and other services like Hugging Face. It also offers an end-to-end "guided workspace setup" with model configuration UI and walkthroughs to fine-tune various small language models (SLMs), such as Microsoft's Phi, Meta's Llama 2, and Mistral. Windows AI Studio lets developers test the performance of their models using Prompt Flow and Gradio templates as well. Microsoft says it's going to roll out Windows AI Studio as a Visual Studio Code extension in the "coming weeks." Nvidia, similarly, revealed updates to TensorRT-LLM, which the company initially launched for Windows as a way to run large language models (LLMs) more efficiently on H100 GPUs. However, this latest update brings TensorRT-LLM to PCs powered by GeForce RTX 30 and 40 Series GPUs with 8GB of RAM or more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: A newspaper run by the Communist Party of Vietnam is reporting the "disappearance" of a number of popular channels from pay TV packages. Citing National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild as examples, the paper notes they're owned by Disney. Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications is said to be "concerned" that the withdrawal will allow piracy to run rampant in Vietnam. Multiple high-level trade reports in the U.S. note that piracy has been rampant for years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tencent dismissed concerns that US export controls will constrain its AI development capabilities, at least for the foreseeable future. From a report: The Shenzhen-based company has stockpiled Nvidia's H800 artificial intelligence accelerators, enough to develop its proprietary Hunyuan AI model for at least another couple of generations, President Martin Lau said on an analyst call after earnings on Wednesday. "Right now we actually have one of the largest inventories of AI chips in China among all the players," Lau said. "We were the first to put in orders for H800 and that allows us to have a pretty good inventory of H800 chips. So we have enough chips to continue our development." The Biden administration in October escalated export controls on AI semiconductors heading to China, depriving the Asian nation from access to a broad range of the world's best AI-training hardware. The purpose of the measures is to prevent China's military from obtaining the advanced technology, Washington argues, but they're also making business harder for the country's private sector. Elsewhere in China, AI industry veteran Kai-Fu Lee's unicorn startup 01.AI has been buying up the Nvidia chips it needs to develop its own foundation models, with Lee saying the company has enough semiconductors for the next 18 months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is officially launching its Notion-like productivity and collaboration app called Loop. From a report: Loop lets you use flexible, collaborative workspaces and pages to make it easier to cooperate on work. If you're familiar with Notion's interface at all, Loop looks and feels remarkably similar -- right down to the ability to easily access a bunch of tools and formatting options by typing the forward slash key (which pulls up what Microsoft calls the "insert menu"). But because Loop is built by Microsoft, that means it has some useful integrations with other Microsoft software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU has struck a deal that will force the fossil fuel industry to rein in dangerous methane pollution. From a report: Under the proposed law, which is the first of its kind, coal, oil and gas companies would be required to report their methane emissions and take steps to avoid them. The measures include finding and fixing leaks, and limiting wasteful practices such as venting and flaring gas by 2027. Jutta Paulus, a German MEP with the Green grouping who worked on the proposal, said: "Finally, the EU tackles the second most important greenhouse gas with ambitious measures. Less methane emissions mean more climate protection and more energy sovereignty." Methane has more than 80 times the global heating power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year timespan but does not last as long in the atmosphere. Cutting methane emissions is seen as a cheap and easy way to stop extreme weather growing more violent in the short-term. The new EU rules, which were agreed on Wednesday by the European parliament and European Council, mean fossil fuel companies must try to repair leaks no more than five days after finding them, and fully fix them within a month. By the end of next year, operators will have to survey their existing sites and submit action plans to find and fix methane leaks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft unveiled its first homegrown AI chip and cloud-computing processor in an attempt to take more control of its technology and ramp up its offerings in the increasingly competitive market for AI computing. The company also announced new software that lets clients design their own AI assistants. From a report: The Maia 100 chip, announced at the company's annual Ignite conference in Seattle on Wednesday, will provide Microsoft Azure cloud customers with a new way run AI programs that generate content. Microsoft is already testing the chip with its Bing and Office AI products, said Rani Borkar, a vice president who oversees Azure's chip unit. Microsoft's main AI partner, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is also testing the processor. Both Maia and the server chip, Cobalt, will debut in some Microsoft data centers early next year. Microsoft's multi-year investment shows how critical chips have become to gaining an edge in both AI and the cloud. Making them in-house lets companies wring performance and price benefits from the hardware. The initiative also could insulate Microsoft from becoming overly dependent on any one supplier, a vulnerability currently underscored by the industrywide scramble for Nvidia's AI chips. Microsoft's push into processors follows similar moves by cloud rivals. Amazon.com Inc. acquired a chip maker in 2015 and sells services built on several kinds of cloud and AI chips. Google began letting customers use its AI accelerator processors in 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever wanted to add your own annotations to search results you find on Google? With Google's new "Notes" experiment, launching Wednesday as an opt-in feature through Search Labs, you'll be able to. From a report: If you've opted in to Notes, buttons to add and see notes will appear under search results and under articles on Discover in the Google app. When you create a note, you can add colorful fonts and images. During a briefing, Google showed me a note for an article about different kinds of frosting that had green text, an image of a cake, and a heart sticker. (At the bottom of the note, there was a link to the article the note was about.) If you post a note, it should show up "within minutes," unless it's flagged for human review, Google VP Cathy Edwards said in an interview with The Verge. When you look at all of the notes for a link, what's shown will be ranked dynamically based on things like the user's query and a note's relevance to the content on the page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Huawei and China Mobile have built a 3,000 kilometer (1,860-mile) internet network linking Beijing to the south, which the country is touting as its latest technological breakthrough. From a report: The two firms teamed up with Tsinghua University and research provider Cernet.com to build what they claim is the world's first internet network to achieve a "stable and reliable" bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second, several times faster than typical speeds around the world. Trials began July 31 and it's since passed various tests verifying that milestone, the university said in a statement. Tsinghua, Chinese President Xi Jinping's alma mater, is plugging the project as an industry-first built entirely on homegrown technology, and credits Huawei prominently in its statement. The Chinese firm in August made waves when it released a 5G smartphone with a sophisticated made-in-China processor, inspiring celebration in Chinese state and social media. That event also spurred debate in Washington about whether the Biden administration has gone far enough in attempts to contain Chinese technological achievement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Programmer and writer James Somers, writing for New Yorker: Yes, our jobs as programmers involve many things besides literally writing code, such as coaching junior hires and designing systems at a high level. But coding has always been the root of it. Throughout my career, I have been interviewed and selected precisely for my ability to solve fiddly little programming puzzles. Suddenly, this ability was less important. I had gathered as much from Ben (friend of the author), who kept telling me about the spectacular successes he'd been having with GPT-4. It turned out that it was not only good at the fiddly stuff but also had the qualities of a senior engineer: from a deep well of knowledge, it could suggest ways of approaching a problem. For one project, Ben had wired a small speaker and a red L.E.D. light bulb into the frame of a portrait of King Charles, the light standing in for the gem in his crown; the idea was that when you entered a message on an accompanying Web site the speaker would play a tune and the light would flash out the message in Morse code. (This was a gift for an eccentric British expat.) Programming the device to fetch new messages eluded Ben; it seemed to require specialized knowledge not just of the microcontroller he was using but of Firebase, the back-end server technology that stored the messages. Ben asked me for advice, and I mumbled a few possibilities; in truth, I wasn't sure that what he wanted would be possible. Then he asked GPT-4. It told Ben that Firebase had a capability that would make the project much simpler. Here it was -- and here was some code to use that would be compatible with the microcontroller. Afraid to use GPT-4 myself -- and feeling somewhat unclean about the prospect of paying OpenAI twenty dollars a month for it -- I nonetheless started probing its capabilities, via Ben. We'd sit down to work on our crossword project, and I'd say, "Why don't you try prompting it this way?" He'd offer me the keyboard. "No, you drive," I'd say. Together, we developed a sense of what the A.I. could do. Ben, who had more experience with it than I did, seemed able to get more out of it in a stroke. As he later put it, his own neural network had begun to align with GPT-4's. I would have said that he had achieved mechanical sympathy. Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself. In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player's only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asus recently launched a special edition Rog Maximus Z790 Hero EVA-02 motherboard, but the company misspelt "Evangenlion" on it -- adding an extra "n" on the I/O heatsink. From a report: Despite being just a single letter, ASUS acknowledges that this error on a $700 motherboard is significant enough to warrant replacement, likely at no additional cost to the users. ASUS has officially stated that users who find the typo on their motherboards unacceptable can reach out to ASUS support for guidance on the replacement process. Notably, there is no indication of a dedicated service to handle these replacements on behalf of users. So users will be asked to disassemble their motherboards themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Cruise's robotaxis are front and center of the industry's trust issue after losing their California permit following an incident where a pedestrian ended up stuck underneath one of its cars. It already halted service nationwide and said it's installing new updates. Now Cruise has announced it's taking its cars off of public roads while it undergoes a full safety review. Meanwhile, Cruise board member and GM legal executive VP Craig Glidden is "expanding" his role to lead Cruise's Legal, Communications, and Finance teams: "In the coming days, we are also pausing our supervised and manual AV operations in the U.S., affecting roughly 70 vehicles. This orderly pause is a further step to rebuild public trust while we undergo a full safety review. We will continue to operate our vehicles in closed course training environments and maintain an active simulation program in order to stay focused on advancing AV technology."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbus has launched an innovative "detumbler" device designed to mitigate the risks posed by tumbling satellites in space. Space Daily reports: The Detumbler, a brainchild of Airbus and supported by the French Space Agency CNES under their Tech4SpaceCare initiative, was unveiled on Saturday, November 11. This magnetic damping device, weighing approximately 100 grams, is engineered to be attached to satellites nearing the end of their operational lives. Its purpose is to prevent these satellites from tumbling, a common issue in orbital flight dynamics, especially in LEO. The device features a central rotor wheel and magnets that interact with the Earth's magnetic field, effectively damping unwanted motion. Airbus' development of the Detumbler commenced in 2021. Its operational principle is simple yet innovative. When a satellite functions normally, the rotor behaves akin to a compass, aligning with the Earth's magnetic field. However, if the satellite begins to tumble, the movement of the rotor induces eddy currents, creating a friction torque that dampens this motion. The design of the Detumbler involves a stator housing, complete with a bottom plate and top cover, along with the rotor comprising the central axle, rotor wheel, and magnets. Tumbling satellites, particularly those in LEO, pose a significant challenge for future active debris removal missions. Dead satellites naturally tend to tumble due to orbital flight dynamics. The introduction of the Airbus Detumbler could revolutionize this scenario, making satellites easier to capture during debris-clearing missions and enhancing the overall safety and sustainability of space operations. Airbus is expected to perform an in-orbit demonstration of the Detumbler in early 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A tool bag that astronauts accidentally let float away during a routine spacewalk at the International Space Station is now orbiting Earth and can be seen with a pair of binoculars. NBC News reports: The bag drifted away from the space station this month when NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara were performing maintenance on the exterior of the orbiting outpost. "During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost," NASA officials wrote Nov. 1 in a blog post detailing the outcome of the spacewalk. "Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk." The bag is now circling the planet in low-Earth orbit, but NASA said there's little danger of the tools hitting the International Space Station. "Mission Control analyzed the bag's trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required," the agency said in the blog post. For now then, the lost tool bag has become a new artificial "star" in the night sky. The tool bag is orbiting about a minute ahead of the space station and may be bright enough to see with a pair of binoculars. "Skywatchers who want to try to spot the tool bag in orbit should head out on a clear night and first determine when the International Space Station is passing overhead," reports NBC News. "The tool bag will likely remain visible in the night sky for a few months, before its orbit slowly degrades and it eventually falls toward Earth." You can track the ISS via NASA's Spot the Station website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Oct. 9, 2022, telescopes in space picked up a jet of high energy photons careening through the cosmos toward Earth, evidence of a supernova exploding 1.9 billion light-years away. Such events are known as gamma ray bursts, and astronomers who have continued studying this one said it was the "brightest of all time." Now, a team of scientists have discovered that this burst caused a measurable change in the number of ionized particles found in Earth's upper atmosphere, including ozone molecules, which readily absorb harmful solar radiation. "The ozone was partially depleted -- was destroyed temporarily," said Pietro Ubertini, an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome who was involved in discovering the atmospheric event. The effect was detectable for just a few minutes before the ozone repaired itself, so it was "nothing serious," Dr. Ubertini said. But had the supernova occurred closer to us, he said, "it would be a catastrophe." The discovery, reported Tuesday in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates how even explosions that occur far from our solar system can influence the atmosphere, which can be used as a giant detector for extreme cosmic phenomena. To study the effects of last year's gamma ray burst on Earth, Dr. Ubertini and his colleagues looked for signals at the top of the ionosphere using data from the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite, an orbiter designed to study changes in the atmosphere during earthquakes. They identified a sharp jump in the electric field at the top of the ionosphere, which they correlated to the gamma ray burst signal measured by the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, a mission that launched in 2002 to observe radiation from faraway celestial objects. The researchers found that the electric field rose by a factor of 60 as gamma rays ionized (essentially knocking away electrons from) ozone and nitrogen molecules high in the atmosphere. Once ionized, the molecule is unable to absorb any ultraviolet radiation, temporarily exposing Earth to more of the sun's damaging rays.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nicola Davis reports via The Guardian: A new study has found people are more likely to think pictures of white faces generated by AI are human than photographs of real individuals. "Remarkably, white AI faces can convincingly pass as more real than human faces -- and people do not realize they are being fooled," the researchers report. The team, which includes researchers from Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, said their findings had important implications in the real world, including in identity theft, with the possibility that people could end up being duped by digital impostors. However, the team said the results did not hold for images of people of color, possibly because the algorithm used to generate AI faces was largely trained on images of white people. Dr Zak Witkower, a co-author of the research from the University of Amsterdam, said that could have ramifications for areas ranging from online therapy to robots. "It's going to produce more realistic situations for white faces than other race faces," he said. The team caution such a situation could also mean perceptions of race end up being confounded with perceptions of being "human," adding it could also perpetuate social biases, including in finding missing children, given this can depend on AI-generated faces. The findings have been published in the journal Psychological Science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap must proceed with a lawsuit alleging their social platforms have adverse mental health effects on children, a federal court ruled on Tuesday. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected the social media giants' motion to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits accusing the companies of running platforms "addictive" to kids. School districts across the US have filed suit against Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap, alleging the companies cause physical and emotional harm to children. Meanwhile, 42 states sued Meta last month over claims Facebook and Instagram "profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans." This order addresses the individual suits and "over 140 actions" taken against the companies. Tuesday's ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn't be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don't shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don't "constitute free speech or expression," as they have to do with alleged "defects" on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no "robust" age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process. "Addressing these defects would not require that defendants change how or what speech they disseminate," Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes. "For example, parental notifications could plausibly empower parents to limit their children's access to the platform or discuss platform use with them." However, Judge Gonzalez Rogers still threw out some of the other "defects" identified by the plaintiffs because they're protected under Section 230, such as offering a beginning and end to a feed, recommending children's accounts to adults, the use of "addictive" algorithms, and not putting limits on the amount of time spent on the platforms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fitbit is active in only 23 countries after leaving Mexico, South Africa, and all Latin American countries. "We communicated that we will stop selling Fitbit products in select countries in order to align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel's regional availability," a Google spokesperson confirmed to Cord Cutters News via email. From the report: The move marks a phasing out of Fitbit products after the Big Tech company acquired wearable company in 2021. Last month, Fitbit said it would remove itself from Asian markets Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, along with European markets Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia. It's possible Google is removing Fitbit and Nest from the European markets because they don't have a Google Store support. If that changes, Fitbit products and Nest Aware subscriptions could return. New products like the Pixel Watch could also arrive for the first time. "We remain committed to our customers and have not made any changes that impact the existing Fitbit devices they already own. Existing Fitbit customers will continue to have access to the same customer support, warranties will still be honored, and products will continue to receive software and security updates," the Google spokesperson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel on Tuesday pushed microcode updates to fix a high-severity CPU bug that has the potential to be maliciously exploited against cloud-based hosts. The flaw, affecting virtually all modern Intel CPUs, causes them to "enter a glitch state where the normal rules don't apply," Tavis Ormandy, one of several security researchers inside Google who discovered the bug, reported. Once triggered, the glitch state results in unexpected and potentially serious behavior, most notably system crashes that occur even when untrusted code is executed within a guest account of a virtual machine, which, under most cloud security models, is assumed to be safe from such faults. Escalation of privileges is also a possibility. The bug, tracked under the common name Reptar and the designation CVE-2023-23583, is related to how affected CPUs manage prefixes, which change the behavior of instructions sent by running software. Intel x64 decoding generally allows redundant prefixes -- meaning those that don't make sense in a given context -- to be ignored without consequence. During testing in August, Ormandy noticed that the REX prefix was generating "unexpected results" when running on Intel CPUs that support a newer feature known as fast short repeat move, which was introduced in the Ice Lake architecture to fix microcoding bottlenecks. The unexpected behavior occurred when adding the redundant rex.r prefixes to the FSRM-optimized rep mov operation. [...] Intel's official bulletin lists two classes of affected products: those that were already fixed and those that are fixed using microcode updates released Tuesday. An exhaustive list of affected CPUs is available here. As usual, the microcode updates will be available from device or motherboard manufacturers. While individuals aren't likely to face any immediate threat from this vulnerability, they should check with the manufacturer for a fix. People with expertise in x86 instruction and decoding should read Ormandy's post in its entirety. For everyone else, the most important takeaway is this: "However, we simply don't know if we can control the corruption precisely enough to achieve privilege escalation." That means it's not possible for people outside of Intel to know the true extent of the vulnerability severity. That said, anytime code running inside a virtual machine can crash the hypervisor the VM runs on, cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are going to immediately take notice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bloc of 48 nations have developed the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), aimed at standardizing reporting requirements for crypto assets to address concerns related to money laundering and tax evasion. It's set to be implemented by 2027. The Register reports: Developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the CARF was developed under the 168-member Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, with the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development looking on approvingly and lending a hand. As the name implies, that Forum is all about sharing data so that each nation's tax authorities have the information they need to understand money movements and make sure they can see what they're allowed to tax. The Forum and the legislative instruments it has fostered include reporting requirements that ensure relevant information is collected by those who facilitate transactions and will be shared. CARF brings similar reporting requirements to crypto assets. Note the term "crypto assets." That's important, because cryptocurrency is not the only blockchain-based instrument that worries authorities. Some, like non-fungible tokens, rely on the same "greater fool" theory that pumped up cryptocurrency prices, and can attract - ahem - interesting investors. But others are far less contentious or speculative, and instead aim to speed transaction processing. Stablecoins, for example, are often suggested as a means for faster and cheaper cross-border transactions than is possible with dominant transaction processing services. Tokenized assets can also be more easily integrated into applications to ease automated money movements. That speed and flexibility is increasingly appreciated. But unless transactions made with those instruments can be observed, the potential for their use to evade tax authorities is high. CARF's use of the term "crypto assets" therefore signals an effort to cover the weird world of cryptocurrencies and the emerging classes of classier tokenized assets. The Framework was signed off in March 2023, and in the time since OECD members and other interested nations have been dotting the Is and crossing the Ts to prepare for its implementation. The Framework can be found here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: YouTube today announced how it will approach handling AI-created content on its platform with a range of new policies surrounding responsible disclosure as well as new tools for requesting the removal of deepfakes, among other things. The company says that, although it already has policies that prohibit manipulated media, AI necessitated the creation of new policies because of its potential to mislead viewers if they don't know the video has been "altered or synthetically created." One of the changes that will roll out involves the creation of new disclosure requirements for YouTube creators. Now, they'll have to disclose when they've created altered or synthetic content that appears realistic, including videos made with AI tools. For instance, this disclosure would be used if a creator uploads a video that appears to depict a real-world event that never happened, or shows someone saying something they never said or doing something they never did. It's worth pointing out that this disclosure is limited to content that "appears realistic," and is not a blanket disclosure requirement on all synthetic video made via AI. "We want viewers to have context when they're viewing realistic content, including when AI tools or other synthetic alterations have been used to generate it," YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon told TechCrunch. "This is especially important when content discusses sensitive topics, like elections or ongoing conflicts," he noted. [...] The company also warns that creators who don't properly disclose their use of AI consistently will be subject to "content removal, suspension from the YouTube Partner Program, or other penalties." YouTube says it will work with creators to make sure they understand the requirements before they go live. But it notes that some AI content, even if labeled, may be removed if it's used to show "realistic violence" if the goal is to shock or disgust viewers. [...] Other changes include the ability for any YouTube user to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic or altered content that simulates an identifiable individual -- aka a deepfake -- including their face or voice. But, the company clarifies that not all flagged content will be removed, making room for parody or satire. It also says that it will consider whether or not the person requesting the removal can be uniquely identified or whether the video features a public official or other well-known individual, in which case "there may be a higher bar," YouTube says. Alongside the deepfake request removal tool, the company is introducing a new ability that will allow music partners to request the removal of AI-generated music that mimics an artist's singing or rapping voice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: On Monday, Rivian released an incremental software update 2023.42, which bricked the infotainment system in R1Ses and R1Ts. The company is frantically working on a fix, but it might not be an OTA. [...] The vehicles are drivable, but software and displays go black. It appears that the 2023.42 software update hangs at 90% on the vehicle screen or 50% on the app screen, and then the vehicle screens black out. All systems appear to still work except for the displays. At the moment, it appears that Amazon vans are not impacted. Update: The company has acknowledged the issue with affected customers but has yet to issue a fix or plan to fix. Rivian's vice president of software engineering, Wassim Bensaid, took to Reddit to update users on the situation, writing: "Hi All, We made an error with the 2023.42 OTA update -- a fat finger where the wrong build with the wrong security certificates was sent out. We cancelled the campaign and we will restart it with the proper software that went through the different campaigns of beta testing. Service will be contacting impacted customers and will go through the resolution options. That may require physical repair in some cases. This is on us -- we messed up. Thanks for your support and your patience as we go through this. *Update 1 (11/13, 10:45 PM PT): The issue impacts the infotainment system. In most cases, the rest of the vehicle systems are still operational. A vehicle reset or sleep cycle will not solve the issue. We are validating the best options to address the issue for the impacted vehicles. Our customer support team is prioritizing support for our customers related to this issue. Thank you."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's capital, New Delhi, is preparing a new weapon in the fight against deadly air pollution: cloud seeding. From a report: The experiment, which could take place as early as next week, would introduce chemicals like silver iodide into a cloudy sky to create rain and, it's hoped, wash away the fine particulate matter hovering over one of the world's largest cities. The need is desperate. Delhi has already tried traffic restriction measures, multimillion-dollar air filtration towers, and the use of fleets of water-spraying trucks to dissolve the particulate matter in the air -- but to no avail. The use of cloud seeding, if it goes ahead, would be controversial. "It's not at all a good use of resources because it's not a solution, it's like a temporary relief," says Avikal Somvanshi, a researcher at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. Environmentalists and scientists worry that most of the government's response is focused on mitigating the pollution rather than trying to cut off its source. "There is just no political intent to solve this, that is one of the biggest problems," says Bhavreen Kandhari, an activist and cofounder of Warrior Moms, a network of mothers demanding clean air. [...] Now, Delhi officials are seeking permission from federal agencies in India to try cloud seeding. The technique involves flying an aircraft to spray clouds with salts like silver or potassium iodide or solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, to induce precipitation. The chemical molecules attach to moisture already in the clouds to form bigger droplets that then fall as rain. China has used artificial rain to tackle air pollution in the past -- but for cloud seeding to work properly, you need significant cloud cover with reasonable moisture content, which Delhi generally lacks during the winter. If weather conditions are favorable, scientists leading the project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur plan to carry out cloud seeding around November 20.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some of the United States' largest civil liberties groups are urging Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to pursue a short-term extension of the Section 702 surveillance program slated to sunset on December 31. From a report: The more than 20 groups -- Demand Progress, the Brennan Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice among them -- oppose plans that would allow the program to continue temporarily by amending "must-pass" legislation, such as the bill needed now to avert a government shutdown by Friday, or the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation set to dictate $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and US Department of Energy in 2024. "In its current form, [Section 702] is dangerous to our liberties and our democracy, and it should not be renewed for any length of time without robust debate, an opportunity for amendment, and -- ultimately -- far-reaching reforms," a letter from the groups to Schumer says. It adds that any attempt to prolong the program by rushed amendment "would demonstrate blatant disregard for the civil liberties and civil rights of the American people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Top500 organization released its semi-annual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer retaining its spot at the top of the list with 1.194 Exaflop/s (EFlop/s) of performance, fending off a half-scale 585.34 Petaflop/s (PFlop/s) submission from the Argonne National Laboratory's Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer. From a report: Argonne's submission, which only employs half of the Aurora system, lands at the second spot on the Top500, unseating Japan's Fugaku as the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. Intel also made inroads with 20 new supercomputers based on its Sapphire Rapids CPUs entering the list, but AMD's EPYC continues to take over the Top500 as it now powers 140 systems on the list -- a 39% year-over-year increase. Intel and Argonne are currently still working to bring Arora fully online for users in 2024. As such, the Aurora submission represented 10,624 Intel CPUs and 31,874 Intel GPUs working in concert to deliver 585.34 PFlop/s at a total of 24.69 megawatts (MW) of energy. In contrast, AMD's Frontier holds the performance title at 1.194 EFlop/s, which is more than twice the performance of Aurora, while consuming a comparably miserly 22.70 MW of energy (yes, that's less power for the full Frontier supercomputer than half of the Aurora system). Aurora did not land on the Green500, a list of the most power-efficient supercomputers, with this submission, but Frontier continues to hold eighth place on that list. However, Aurora is expected to eventually reach up to 2 EFlop/s of performance when it comes fully online. When complete, Auroroa will have 21,248 Xeon Max CPUs and 63,744 Max Series 'Ponte Vecchio' GPUs spread across 166 racks and 10,624 compute blades, making it the largest known single deployment of GPUs in the world. The system leverages HPE Cray EX a" Intel Exascale Compute Blades and uses HPE's Slingshot-11 networking interconnect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a tech entrepreneur and investor lost his password for retrieving $100,000 in bitcoin and hired experts to break open the wallet where he kept it, they failed to help him. But in the process, they discovered a way to crack enough other software wallets to steal $1 billion or more. From a report: On Tuesday, the team is releasing information about how they did it. They hope it's enough data that the owners of millions of wallets will realize they are at risk and move their money, but not so much data that criminals can figure out how to pull off what would be one of the largest heists of all time. Their start-up, Unciphered, has worked for months to alert more than a million people that their wallets are at risk. Millions more haven't been told, often because their wallets were created at cryptocurrency websites that have gone out of business. The story of those wallets' vulnerabilities underscores the enormous risk in experimental currencies, beyond their wild fluctuations in value and fast-changing regulations. Many wallets were created with code containing profound flaws, and the companies that used that code can disappear. Beyond that, it is a sobering reminder that underneath software infrastructure of all kinds, even ones explicitly dedicated to securing funds, are open-source programs that few or no people oversee. "Open-source ages like milk. It will eventually go bad," said Chris Wysopal, a co-founder of security company Veracode who advised Unciphered as it sorted through the problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In research published in Science today, Google DeepMind's model, GraphCast, was able to predict weather conditions up to 10 days in advance, more accurately and much faster than the current gold standard. From a report: GraphCast outperformed the model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in more than 90% of over 1,300 test areas. And on predictions for Earth's troposphere -- the lowest part of the atmosphere, where most weather happens -- GraphCast outperformed the ECMWF's model on more than 99% of weather variables, such as rain and air temperature. Crucially, GraphCast can also offer meteorologists accurate warnings, much earlier than standard models, of conditions such as extreme temperatures and the paths of cyclones. In September, GraphCast accurately predicted that Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia nine days in advance, says Remi Lam, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind. Traditional weather forecasting models pinpointed the hurricane to Nova Scotia only six days in advance. [...] Traditionally, meteorologists use massive computer simulations to make weather predictions. They are very energy intensive and time consuming to run, because the simulations take into account many physics-based equations and different weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and cloudiness, one by one. GraphCast uses machine learning to do these calculations in under a minute. Instead of using the physics-based equations, it bases its predictions on four decades of historical weather data. GraphCast uses graph neural networks, which map Earth's surface into more than a million grid points. At each grid point, the model predicts the temperature, wind speed and direction, and mean sea-level pressure, as well as other conditions like humidity. The neural network is then able to find patterns and draw conclusions about what will happen next for each of these data points.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nothing Phone 2 owners get blue bubbles now. The company shared it has added iMessage to its newest phone through a new "Nothing Chats" app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. From a report: The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries starting this Friday, November 17th. Nothing writes on its page that it's doing this because "messaging services are dividing phone users," and it wants "to break those barriers down." But doing so here requires you to trust Sunbird. Nothing's FAQ says Sunbird's "architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey," and that messages aren't stored on its servers. Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, "...it's literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen." Nothing's US head of PR, Jane Nho, told The Verge in an email that Sunbird stores user iCloud credentials as a token "in an encrypted database" and associated with one of its Mac Minis in the US or Europe, depending on the user's location, that then act as a relay for iMessages sent via the app. She added that, after two weeks of inactivity, Sunbird deletes the account information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Videos collected by 404 Media over months give a peek into the world of spoofing numbers, automated call scripts, and a specific seller of the phones. From the report: "Alright lads," a man sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car says in a heavy British accent. In his left hand he holds a special phone he is showing off to his clients, while with the other he films his demonstration which was later uploaded to Telegram. "I'm only going to say it once, yeah. You swipe, and it's gone," he continues, demonstrating one app installed that can instantly destroy data stored on the device. The phone in question is one from "Russiancoms," an underground outfit that sells the devices for just under $2,000 each. For that price, customers get a laundry list of features: the ability to spoof phone numbers, play hold music, and have a computerized voice read pre-determined scripts. While Russiancoms does not acknowledge in its Telegram channel what the phones might really be for, those are features well suited to committing fraud. The Russiancoms Telegram channel periodically deletes its videos and other messages, but 404 Media has been archiving many of them for months. They provide insight into a little known industry of fraud phones, ones that make it easy for anyone to enter the world of robocalling or other scams. While much of the underground phone industry has been focused on providing secure communications to criminals -- companies like Phantom Secure, Encrochat, and Sky for example -- Russiancoms and similar companies appear to cater to a different use case: enabling people to make calls that fraudulently appear to come from someone else. A common tool in the underground is also so-called Russian SIMs, which can spoof numbers in some cases. Russiancoms' phones, however, are more fully featured.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has struggled to stop a hyper-aggressive cybercrime gang that's been tormenting corporate America over the last two years, according to nine cybersecurity responders, digital crime experts and victims. Reuters: For more than six months, the FBI has known the identities of at least a dozen members tied to the hacking group responsible for the devastating September break-ins at casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment, according to four people familiar with the investigation. Industry executives have told Reuters they were baffled by an apparent lack of arrests despite many of the hackers being based in America. "I would love for somebody to explain it to me," said Michael Sentonas, president of CrowdStrike, one of the firms leading the response effort to the hacks. "For such a small group, they are absolutely causing havoc," Sentonas told Reuters in an interview last month. Sentonas said the hackers were "known" but didn't provide specifics. He did say, "I think there is a failure here." Asked who was responsible for the failure, Sentonas said, "law enforcement." [...] Dubbed by some security professionals as "Scattered Spider," the hacking group has been active since 2021 but it grabbed headlines following a series of intrusions at several high profile American companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI could be used to predict if a person is at risk of having a heart attack up to 10 years in the future, a study has found. From a report: The technology could save thousands of lives while improving treatment for almost half of patients, researchers at the University of Oxford said. The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), looked at how AI might improve the accuracy of cardiac CT scans, which are used to detect blockages or narrowing in the arteries. Prof Charalambos Antoniades, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the BHF and director of the acute multidisciplinary imaging and interventional centre at Oxford, said: "Our study found that some patients presenting in hospital with chest pain -- who are often reassured and sent back home -- are at high risk of having a heart attack in the next decade, even in the absence of any sign of disease in their heart arteries. Here we demonstrated that providing an accurate picture of risk to clinicians can alter, and potentially improve, the course of treatment for many heart patients." About 350,000 people in the UK have a CT scan each year but, according to the BHF, many patients later die of heart attacks due to their failure in picking up small, undetectable narrowings. Researchers analysed the data of more than 40,000 patients undergoing routine cardiac CT scans at eight UK hospitals, with a median follow-up time of 2.7 years. The AI tool was tested on a further 3,393 patients over almost eight years and was able to accurately predict the risk of a heart attack. AI-generated risk scores were then presented to medics for 744 patients, with 45% having their treatment plans altered by medics as a result.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Two men who allegedly used 65 Google accounts to bombard Google with fraudulent DMCA takedown notices targeting up to 620,000 URLs, have been named in a Google lawsuit filed in California on Monday. Google says the men weaponized copyright law's notice-and-takedown system to sabotage competitors' trade, while damaging the search engine's business and those of its customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A person linked to a scam that tricked an elderly victim into transferring more than $100,000 formally requested the FBI give back his seized cryptocurrency, claiming in a petition to the agency that he is a part-time crypto investor and not doing anything illegal, according to a recently filed court record. From a report: 404 Media also reached the person by email and they largely repeated the same story. The request is an unusual sight, and, to be frank, probably not going to work. In the court record, authorities allege that the frozen funds are linked to a scam of a victim in the U.S. The document says authorities seized just under 18,500 Tether, valued at around $18,500, in July with a federal search warrant. "Hello Sir/Ma'am, My name is Vishal Gautam," the request starts. "The funds which you have on hold that is a very big amount of money for me and my family, I request you to please release it from your custody. Thank You & Regards." The message says that Gautam lives in India and as well as investing in cryptocurrency, he is a "full-time Health Insurance" worker. "In the month of July 2023 suddenly my crypto from Binance got disappeared, I don't know how it happened but then I got to know that the FBI has put hold on my assets," the message continues. "I am not into something illegal and never will be, I will not do any such thing that can harm your country or your people in any manner." U.S. authorities, meanwhile, allege that the seized cash is connected to a fraud scheme that targeted a senior citizen in Knoxville, Iowa. In February, this victim opened an email on her iPad that claimed it had been compromised, and that she needed to contact the sender for assistance, according to the court record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US inflation fell to 3.2 per cent in October, lower than economists had expected and the first decline for four months. From a report: Consumer prices rose 3.2 per cent year on year in October, down from an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in September. The annual rise was slightly less than economists had forecast, and prices were flat month on month. The central bank held its benchmark interest rate steady at a 22-year high earlier this month, and investors have become increasingly confident that rates have peaked. Futures markets on Monday afternoon were pricing in a 13 per cent chance of a further rate rise at the Fed's next rate-setting meeting in mid-December. Core inflation -- which strips out volatile food and energy prices -- was also slightly weaker than economists had predicted, dipping from 4.1 per cent to 4.0 per cent on a year on year basis. Core inflation rose by 0.2 per cent month on month. Fed chair Jay Powell stressed last week that policymakers would not be "misled by a few good months of data," and that the central bank could tighten monetary policy further if necessary, although officials have shown little intention of immediately raising rates beyond the current range of 5.25-5.5 per cent. Stronger-than-expected gross domestic product growth has fanned fears that the slowdown in inflation could stall, but Powell said last week that he and his colleagues expected the pace of economic expansion to slow. Instead of another rate rise, the Fed is increasingly expected to push back the timing of rate cuts deeper into 2024 if consumer prices remain stubbornly high.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Joby Aviation and Volocopter gave the public a vivid glimpse of what the future of aviation might look like this weekend, with both companies performing brief demonstration flights of their electric aircraft in New York City. The demonstration flights were conducted during a press conference on Sunday, during which New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would electrify two of the three heliports located in Manhattan -- Downtown Manhattan Heliport and East 34th Street. (The third heliport is privately owned.) Beta Technologies, which is also developing an electric aircraft, showed off its interoperable aircraft charging technology at the event. You can watch a demo of the Joby Aviation flight here. Additional assets are available via Joby's press release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Press2ToContinue writes: "An undergraduate student used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 and AI to decipher a word in one of the Herculaneum scrolls to win a $40,000 prize (via Nvidia)," reports Tom's Hardware. "Herculaneum was covered in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls are one of the site's most famous artifacts." The scrolls have been notoriously hard to decipher because they cannot be unwrapped because they're basically like a stick of charcoal. Instead they must be virtually unwrapped, using a 3D scan dataset of it in its wrapped state. So, the task is to find the tiny bits of ink, assemble them into letters, and try to decipher what they say. Machine learning is now becoming the key that picks the lock. A student deciphered one of the words using a GTX 1070, which doesn't even have any tensor cores. Imagine what he could do with a RTX 4090!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan plans to establish a new 1 trillion yen ($6.6 billion) fund to develop the country's outer space industry. "We believe it is a necessary fund to speed up our country's space development so we don't lag behind the increasingly intensifying international competition," Sanae Takaichi, minister in charge of space development, said in a news conference last week. The Japan Times reports: The fund will be allocated over a 10-year period for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), an Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry spokesperson said. Some 300 billion yen has been set aside for the fund in the latest supplementary budget approved by the Cabinet on Friday. The funding, which will support JAXA and the development of Japan's space industry, was a response to increased public and private sector focus on space activities. Back in June, Tokyo unveiled a Space Basic Plan, detailing budgetary support for innovation in the private sector as an area of business growth. At the same time, it also unveiled a Space Security Initiative, which labeled space "a major arena for geopolitical competition for national power over diplomacy, defense, economic, and intelligence, as well as the science and technology and innovation that support these national powers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: For decades, scientists have tried to figure out ways to reverse climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it underground. They've tried using trees, giant machines that suck CO2 out of the sky, complicated ocean methods that involve growing and burying huge quantities of kelp. Companies, researchers and the U.S. government have spent billions of dollars on the research and development of these approaches and yet they remain too expensive to make a substantial dent in carbon emissions. Now, a start-up says it has discovered a deceptively simple way to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it for thousands of years. It involves making bricks out of smushed pieces of plants. And it could be a game changer for the growing industry working to pull carbon from the air. Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates's investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter -- which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks -- can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years. The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air. [...] Graphyte's approach uses the power of plants and trees to photosynthesize and pull carbon dioxide from the air. While trees and plants are excellent at carbon capture, they don't store that carbon for very long -- when a plant burns or decays, its stored carbon comes spilling back out into the air and soil. Graphyte plans to avoid that decomposition by taking plant waste from timber harvesters and farmers and drying it thoroughly, removing all the microbes that could cause it to decompose and release greenhouse gases. Then, in a process that they call "carbon casting," it will compress the waste and wrap it into Lego-like bricks, for easier storage about 10 feet underground. The company says that with the right monitoring systems, the blocks can stay there for a thousand years. [...] Graphyte is planning to build its first project in Pine Bluff, Ark., and the company hopes to sequester its first carbon for a customer in 2024. It remains to be seen whether Graphyte will be able to scale up its operation to removing millions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The company will need to secure many sources of plant waste and build many small processing centers around the country to be successful. "The simplicity of the Graphyte approach is so exciting," said Daniel Sanchez, who runs the Carbon Removal Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, and serves as a science adviser for Graphyte. "You don't need very expensive equipment or processes. And it locks up a lot of the carbon in the wood -- nearly all of it." "People that are academics probably thought about this before and were like, 'That's way too simple,'" Sanchez said, laughing. "'No one's ever going to do that.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.