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"AFRINIC, the regional internet registry for the African continent and Indian Ocean region, has been placed under receivership following an injunction obtained against it in the Supreme Court of Mauritius," writes Slashdot reader Kelerei. "This appears to be a result of poor governance at AFRINIC, and in part a consequence of an IP address assignment debacle in 2021." MyBroadband reports: Industry players on both sides of a conflict involving the registry have welcomed the Mauritian Supreme Court's latest ruling, as it potentially creates a path to reconstitute the ailing entity's board and appoint a CEO. Headquartered in Mauritius, AFRINIC found itself on the wrong side of the country's corporate governance laws after repeatedly ignoring warnings from its members and community about the danger. It also disregarded judgments on some occasions, with the courts warning AFRINIC that it was in danger of being held in contempt. The blow that finally left Afrinic without a quorate board and ultimately without a CEO was struck by Crystal Web, a defunct Internet Service Provider that used to offer consumer DSL and fiber broadband in South Africa. Although Crystal Web landed the paralyzing hit, it was hardly the primary litigant in the over 55 court cases brought against AFRINIC since June 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visual effects workers at Marvel Studios have unanimously voted to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, marking a historic milestone for the industry. Rolling Stone reports: Following the successful vote with the NLRB, Marvel's VFX union will now enter into collective bargaining negotiations with Marvel. A start date for those negotiations hasn't been announced yet. Underpinning the union drive were the poor working conditions visual effects professionals have endured on Marvel productions, including a lack of pay equity, grueling hours, understaffing, excessive requests for changes, and unfair turnaround times. VFX crews have been a crucial part of film and TV productions since the introduction of visual effects in the first Star Wars films of the 1970s. But while many other backstage/behind-the-scenes crews and professions (such as production designers, editors, lighting, make-up, and props) have long been unionized under the IATSE umbrella, VFX workers largely remained non-union.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills. The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country's hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills. Swedish Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology. "Sweden's students need more textbooks," Edholm said in March. "Physical books are important for student learning." The minister announced last month in a statement that the government wants to reverse the decision by the National Agency for Education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press. [...] "There's clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning," Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement last month on the country's national digitalization strategy in education. "We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy," said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research. To counter Sweden's decline in 4th grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth 685 million kronor (60 million euros or $64.7 million) in book purchases for the country's schools this year. Another 500 million kronor will be spent annually in 2024 and 2025 to speed up the return of textbooks to schools. "The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that's because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology," said Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Justice Department sought on Wednesday to show how Google did all it could to get people to use its search engine and build itself into a $1 trillion search and advertising giant on the second day of a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial. From a report: First out of the gate, the government questioned a former Google executive, Chris Barton, about billion-dollar deals with mobile carriers and others that helped make Google the default search engine. Barton, who was at Google from 2004 to 2011, said the number of Google executives working to win default status with mobile carriers grew dramatically when he was with the company, recognizing the potential growth of handheld devices and early versions of smartphones. Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google." Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's improved combat goggles have passed their first round of intensive testing by soldiers, and the tech giant has been awarded an order for another batch to be used for a make-or-break combat evaluation in 2025, according to a US Army spokesman. From a report: The first 20 prototype IVAS 1.2 goggles were delivered in late July and assessed by two squads of solders in late August to check for improvements in reliability, low-light performance and how well they fit without repeats of the nausea and dizziness that halted the deployment of earlier versions. The devices, based on Microsoft's HoloLens "mixed reality" goggles, "demonstrated improvements in reliability, low light sensor performance, and form factor" in tests last month at Fort Drum, New York, and "soldier feedback was positive," spokesman David Patterson said in an email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other technology heavyweights debated the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence Wednesday in a closed-door meeting with more than 60 U.S. Senators who are contemplating legislation to regulate the technology. WSJ: Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X (formerly Twitter), warned about what he views as AI's potential to threaten humanity, according to a participant. Microsoft founder Gates said the technology could help address world hunger, said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who convened the session. Other speakers included Facebook founder Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and IBM, along with union leaders. Schumer at one point asked the guests if they agreed that the government needed to play a role in regulating artificial intelligence. Everyone present raised their hands, Schumer said during a break in the day-long session. Despite that consensus -- and Schumer's vow to move toward passing legislation within months -- the meeting also laid bare some of the tension points ahead. One debate centered on the practice of making certain AI programs "open source," or available for the public to download and modify. Some in the room raised concerns about the practice, which has the potential to put powerful AI systems in the hands of bad actors, according to one participant. But Zuckerberg, whose company Meta Platforms has released powerful open source models, defended the practice. He told Senators in his opening statement that open source "democratizes access to these tools, and that helps level the playing field and foster innovation for people and businesses," according to excerpts released by the company. Another point of tension related to workers who see AI as a potential threat to their jobs. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) recounted a moment where the head of the Writers Guild of America West, Meredith Stiehm, described the views of members who are on strike seeking a new contract with Hollywood studios in part to address those fears.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House, weighing in for the first time on concerns about a Chinese backlash against Apple, said it is monitoring reports of a growing government ban of iPhones and believes the move is a reprisal against the US. From a report: "It seems to be of a piece of the kinds of aggressive and inappropriate retaliation to US companies that we've seen from the PRC in the past," said John Kirby, the council's spokesman, referring to the People's Republic of China. Bloomberg News reported this month that China plans to expand a ban on the use of iPhones to a plethora of state-backed companies and agencies, a sign of growing challenges for Apple in the country. Several Chinese agencies have begun instructing staff not to bring their iPhones to work. But the situation grew more muddled Wednesday, when Beijing pushed back on reports about iPhone restrictions while also raising concerns about security problems with the device. "China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brands' phones," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. It marked the government's first comments on the issue, but didn't seem to refer directly to workplace bans of the device.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is laying off hundreds of people across its global recruiting team as hiring at the tech giant continues to slow. Semafor: The company declined to cite what percentage of its recruiting workforce was impacted, but said that it plans to retain a significant majority. Workers who were laid off began learning their roles had been eliminated earlier today, according to posts on social media. "The volume of requests for our recruiters has gone down," Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said in a statement. "In order to continue our important work to ensure we operate efficiently, we've made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team. We're supporting everyone impacted with a transition period, outplacement services, and severance as they look for new opportunities here at Google and beyond."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A journalist and researcher on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), or UFOs as they're better known, presented the remains of purported "non-human" beings to lawmakers in Mexico on Tuesday during the country's first public congressional hearing on the topic. From a report: Jamie Maussan brought two boxes containing what he said were the small, stuffed bodies of extraterrestrials recovered in Peru in 2017. He said carbon-14 dating carried out by the National Autonomous University of Mexico had determined the remains were 700 and 1,800 years old. Each of the figures has only three fingers on each hand and elongated heads, resembling, at least superficially, the Hollywood-born character ET. "This is the first time it (extraterrestrial life) is presented in such a form and I think there is a clear demonstration that we are dealing with non-human specimens that are not related to any other species in our world," Maussan told the lawmakers, urging them to consider the topic, which he said should not be viewed as "a political topic -- it's a topic for humanity." He said DNA evidence could prove the specimens were not of this planet, but it wasn't clear if any such tests had been carried out. At least one previous claim by Maussan about purported "non-human" remains discovered in Peru has been debunked, though the specimens he presented Tuesday in Mexico City appeared different to the one he previously spoke about in 2015.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A who's who of tech tycoons will privately huddle with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for a marathon brainstorming session about how lawmakers can regulate artificial intelligence. From a report: The daylong, high-profile gathering, featuring Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and other tech figures, has its share of skeptics in both parties. Some senators lamented that the so-called AI Insight Forum is closed to the public and the media. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said it would allow tech billionaires to lobby senators behind closed doors about one of the most critical issues facing the country and economy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who organized the bipartisan gathering along with Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., Todd Young, R-Ind., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., dismissed the criticism, noting that three public hearings on AI have been held and that the forums will also include labor and civil rights leaders, national security experts and academics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Criminal gangs behind a rise in bombings and shootings in Sweden in recent years are using fake Spotify streams to launder money, a Swedish newspaper reported earlier this month. From a report: Criminal networks have for several years been using money from drug deals, robberies, fraud and contract killings to pay for false Spotify streams of songs published by artists with ties to the gangs, an investigative report in Svenska Dagbladet claimed. They then get paid by the platform for the high number of streams, thereby laundering the money. The newspaper said its information had been confirmed by four gang members from separate criminal networks in Stockholm, as well as an anonymous police investigator.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: France has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 12 for emitting too much electromagnetic radiation. On Tuesday, the French watchdog which governs radio frequencies also told the tech giant to fix existing phones. The ANFR has advised Apple that if it cannot resolve the issue via a software update, it must recall every iPhone 12 ever sold in the country. France's digital minister Jean-Noel Barrot told French newspaper Le Parisien the decision was due to radiation levels above the acceptable threshold, according to Reuters. He said the ANFR found the iPhone 12's Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) was above what is legally allowed. "Apple is expected to respond within two weeks," he said. "If they fail to do so, I am prepared to order a recall of all iPhones 12 in circulation. The rule is the same for everyone, including the digital giants."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony is rolling out a big new PS5 update today, just over a month after it first started testing the changes in a beta. From a report: The update adds Dolby Atmos, lets you mute that annoying bootup beep, and even supports pairing a second controller as an assist one to let you help friends or family complete a game. Sony is also expanding its PS Remote Play app to Google's Chromecast with Google TV (4K), allowing you to stream games from a PS5 or PS4 to Android TV OS 12 devices. The Dolby Atmos support comes in the form of Sony's 3D Audio implementation (Tempest 3D AudioTech). It's compatible with Dolby Atmos devices like sound bars, TVs, or home theater systems. Media apps like Netflix can also update their apps on PS5 soon to support Dolby Atmos audio. You can now mute the PS5 beep sound that chirps when you turn the console on or off, or even when it goes into rest mode after being idle. If you just want to adjust the volume of the beep there's now an option for that, too. One of the most useful additions is the ability to use a second DualSense controller for assistance. "You can now assign a second controller to one account as an assist controller, and use two controllers to operate your PS5 console as if you were using a single controller," explains Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experience at Sony Interactive Entertainment. "This feature introduces a new way for you to enjoy games collaboratively with others or help a friend or child navigate a particularly challenging section of a game."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla has released emergency security updates to fix a critical zero-day vulnerability exploited in the wild, impacting its Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. From a report: Tracked as CVE-2023-4863, the security flaw is caused by a heap buffer overflow in the WebP code library (libwebp), whose impact spans from crashes to arbitrary code execution. "Opening a malicious WebP image could lead to a heap buffer overflow in the content process. We are aware of this issue being exploited in other products in the wild," Mozilla said in an advisory published on Tuesday. Mozilla addressed the exploited zero-day in Firefox 117.0.1, Firefox ESR 115.2.1, Firefox ESR 102.15.1, Thunderbird 102.15.1, and Thunderbird 115.2.2. Even though specific details regarding the WebP flaw's exploitation in attacks remain undisclosed, this critical vulnerability is being abused in real-world scenarios.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ring/silent switch has been on the iPhone since the very first one was announced in 2007 by Steve Jobs, but now the writing is on the wall for the device's last significant moving part. From a report: With its replacement by a haptic "action button," it's just a matter of time before the rest of the lineup is as smooth as a pebble from the river. At today's iPhone event, the no doubt long-contemplated change was announced with little fanfare, selling the new button as a customizable shortcut to anything the user wants. Launch the camera, or an assistance feature, or a particular app, etc. Seems useful in some ways, especially for accessibility. But I mourn the loss of this switch the way I do every time they compromise the hardware design of Apple devices. Removing TouchID is one such choice I still hold out hope they will reverse. The haptic touchpads in MacBooks is not something I enjoy compared to the actual depression of the originals, though it's probably a net benefit repair-wise. The attempt to unify under a single port was unsuccessful in everything but driving dongle sales. They have tried and failed to kill the magnetic power connector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China flagged security problems with iPhones while saying it isn't barring purchases, the government's first comments on the topic after news reports that authorities are moving to restrict the use of Apple products in sensitive departments and state-owned companies. From a report: "We noticed that there have been many media reports about security incidents concerning Apple phones," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, without elaborating. China plans to expand a ban on the use of iPhones to a plethora of state-backed companies and agencies, Bloomberg News has reported, a sign of growing challenges for Apple in its biggest foreign market and global production base. Several agencies have begun instructing staff not to bring their iPhones to work. "China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brands' phones," Mao said, adding that the government attaches "great importance" to security and that all companies operating in China need to abide by its laws and regulations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unity, the tech company behind one of the most popular engines for creating video games, is scrambling to clarify how a price increase for its services will work, after its announcement Tuesday morning broadly infuriated the game development community. From a report: The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make. Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games' Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But by the evening, Unity exec Marc Whitten was updating Axios on the policies, potentially defusing some concerns raised by game creators. The new "Runtime Fee" announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player's installations of a game, an action that previously didn't cost developers anything. With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue. Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees. The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024. [...] After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An unnamed CIA whistleblower has made the dramatic allegation that half a dozen analysts there were bribed to reject the theory that COVID-19 resulted from a research-related leak of a new coronavirus, according to a press release today from the office of the Republican leading a congressional investigation into the pandemic. The allegation was strongly rejected in a CIA statement released hours later. Science.org: A majority of U.S. intelligence agencies has so far concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic mostly likely started when SARS-CoV-2 jumped from an infected animal host into people; a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, has received intense attention from researchers as the potential source. But the Department of Energy and FBI so far have favored the so-called lab-leak hypothesis, even though none of the agencies has expressed high confidence in their conclusions on COVID-19's origin. CIA, for example, had reportedly said it was "unable to determine" whether SARS-CoV-2 made a direct jump from animals to humans -- or came from a lab. Now, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), who chairs the House of Representatives's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, says his panel and the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have heard testimony from a whistleblower "who presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer." According to the press release, the whistleblower testified that only the most senior analyst of a seven-member CIA team investigating the origin of COVID-19 supported the zoonotic transmission theory. The whistleblower alleged the other six team members supporting the lab origin then received "a significant monetary incentive to change their position," wrote Wenstrup and Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), who chairs the intelligence panel. In response to emailed questions from Science, CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp challenged the whistleblower's account: "At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed," she wrote in the agency's statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership, research has found. Canada and Russia have the next biggest expansion plans, calculated based on how much carbon dioxide is likely to be produced from new developments, followed by Iran, China and Brazil. The United Arab Emirates, which is to host the annual UN climate summit this year, Cop28 in Dubai in November, is seventh on the list. The data, in a report from the campaign group Oil Change International, also showed that five "global north countries" -- the US, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK -- will be responsible for just over half of all the planned expansion from new oil and gas fields to 2050. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of the oil and gas expansion that is planned in the next three decades would be more than enough to drive global temperatures well beyond the limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels that countries agreed in 2021 at Cop26 in Glasgow, the report found.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's road transport minister on Tuesday warned local and foreign automakers to either cut production of polluting diesel vehicles or face higher taxes and levies, setting alarm bells ringing in the world's third-largest car market. From a report: Here are some facts about India's automotive market, the biggest after China and the United States, where players such as Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and foreign giants such as Mercedes and Volkswagen operate. In India, about four million passenger vehicles were sold in the fiscal year that ended in March, according to data from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers. Petrol vehicles have been the top sellers in recent years -- increasing their market share to around 68.4% in January-July 2023 from 42.5% in 2014, according to data from automotive market intelligence provider JATO Dynamics. Cost-conscious Indians are preferring to buy petrol cars as they are cheaper than diesel, even though diesel cars offer better fuel efficiency. In the luxury segment, though, which includes cars and SUVs made by Mercedes, BMW and Audi, petrol variants have accounted for 62% of sales so far this year, down from 68% in 2021, according to JATO Dynamics. Tuesday's warning from minister Nitin Gadkari targeted diesel carmakers, whose market share has seen a steady decline to nearly 18% of passenger vehicles in January-July this year from 47.9% in 2014. But when it comes to luxury cars, diesel variants remain in vogue, with their market share rising to 33% so far this year from 31% in 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The cofounder and main promoter of the $4 billion OneCoin pyramid scheme was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in one of the first and biggest criminal frauds involving cryptocurrency. Bloomberg: Karl Sebastian Greenwood, 46, was sentenced in New York Tuesday, after pleading guilty in December to creating and promoting a phony cryptocurrency. Greenwood was the wingman of Ruja Ignatova, the so-called "Cryptoqueen" and most wanted crypto fugitive in the world. US District Judge Edgardo Ramos called the fraud "massive in many respects," noting that OneCoin had no blockchain, no real cryptocoin and no trading market. Victims could not withdraw their investments and most face the likelihood they'll never get any of their money back. "At base, it involved nothing more than old-fashioned snake oil," the judge said. Greenwoood's sentencing closes one chapter of the OneCoin case, which authorities describe as one of the largest pyramid schemes in history. It impacted 3.5 million victims across the globe and foreshadowed a broader crackdown on crime in the cryptocurrency markets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple just announced its new high-end iPhones: the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. The Verge: They're made of titanium, they have Action Buttons, and Apple promises they're the most powerful smartphones Apple has ever made. The 15 Pro starts at $999 with 128GB of storage, and the Pro Max at $1,199 with 256GB of storage. Both will be available for preorder this Friday and on sale September 22nd. This year's Pro has a 6.1-inch screen, and the Pro Max has a 6.7-inch display -- same as the new iPhone 15 and 15 Plus. Both are powered by the A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has the fastest performance in any smartphone and can even challenge some high-end PCs. Along with a redesigned GPU, Apple seems to think these devices could be poised to level up the kinds of games you can play on your phone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies choose Alphabet's Google as the default search engine for their browsers and smartphones because it is the best one, and not because of a lack of competition, a Google lawyer said Tuesday at the start of a high-stakes antitrust trial in Washington. From a report: Consumers use Google "because it delivers value to them, not because they have to," John Schmidtlein, a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP who is representing the company, said during his opening statements on the first day of the trial. "Users today have more search options and ways to access information online than ever before." Schmidtlein pushed back on claims by US Justice Department antitrust enforcers that Google has used its market power -- and billions of dollars in exclusive deals with web browsers -- to illegally block rivals. Users have choices, and it's easy to switch, he said. For example, Microsoft pre-selects its own search engine, Bing, on Windows PCs, yet most PC users switch to Google because it's a better product, he said. Web browsers offered by Apple and Mozilla, which makes Firefox, have long chosen a default search engine in exchange for a revenue-share that helps pay for innovations, Schmidtlein said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inditex is racing to iron bugs out of a new anti-shoplifting system for its Zara stores, slightly delaying its rollout partly because the security tags were easy to identify and remove in initial tests, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Chief Executive Officer Oscar Garcia Maceiras unveiled the new technology in March and pledged to roll it out for tests in all Zara stores worldwide over the summer. The system relies on tiny chips known as RFID, doing away with the hard plastic tags on garments that require checkout clerks to remove them. The new technology has run into teething issues. Staff in several countries have raised concerns to management that the technology may actually make theft easier, according to the people, who asked not to be identified.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has just announced the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, and the big news is a USB-C port. From a report: We've been waiting for the day that the iPhone would switch to the widely used USB-C standard instead of Apple's proprietary Lightning connector. Apple confirmed last year that it would make the change to USB-C to comply with the European Union's upcoming regulations, and the iPhone 15 is now the first iPhone to make the switch. The iPhone 15 is priced starting at $799 for a 128GB model and the iPhone 15 Plus starts at $899 for a 128GB version. USB-C is good news, but if you were hoping for a totally new iPhone 15 design, well, that's not happening this year. This year's iPhone looks largely the same as the iPhone 14 before it, with the iPhone 15 continuing to use a 6.1-inch display. All models of the iPhone 15 will come with the Dynamic Island. That's the pill-shaped cutout that first debuted on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, providing a new way to see certain notifications and interact with apps. The iPhone 15 also has an OLED Super Retina display, which supports Dolby Vision content with 1,600 nits of brightness. The peak brightness of this display is 2,000 nits in sunlight, double that of the iPhone 14.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Bank poured billions of dollars into fossil fuels around the world last year despite repeated promises to refocus on shifting to a low-carbon economy, research has suggested. From a report: The money went through a special form of funding known as trade finance, which is used to facilitate global transactions. Urgewald, a campaign group that tracks global fossil fuel finance, found that the World Bank supplied about $3.7bn in trade finance in 2022 that was likely to have ended up funding oil and gas developments. Heike Mainhardt, the author of the research, called for reform of the World Bank and its private finance arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to make such transactions more transparent and to exclude funding for fossil fuels from its lending. "They can't say that they are aligned with the Paris agreement, because there isn't enough transparency to be able to tell," she said. Fossil fuel companies would take advantage of this, she added. "They can see that they can access public money this way, without drawing attention to themselves, and they're very clever, so they will do this," she told the Guardian. Trade finance is a form of funding more opaque than standard project finance. Whereas project finance usually flows to governments, organisations or consortiums for a particular well-defined purpose and is relatively easy to track, trade finance is more diffuse.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major corporations from oil and gas companies to retail giants would have to disclose their direct greenhouse gas emissions as well as those that come from activities like employee business travel under legislation passed Monday by California lawmakers, the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the nation. From a report: The legislation would require thousands of public and private businesses that operate in California and make more than $1 billion annually to report their direct and indirect emissions. The goal is to increase transparency and nudge companies to evaluate how they can cut their emissions. "We are out of time on addressing the climate crisis," Democratic Assemblymember Chris Ward said. "This will absolutely help us take a leap forward to be able to hold ourselves accountable." The legislation was one of the highest profile climate bills in California this year, racking support from major companies that include Patagonia and Apple, as well as Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations convention behind the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The bill would still need final approval by the state Senate before it can reach Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Lawmakers backing the bill say a large number of companies in the state already disclose some of their own emissions. But the bill is a controversial proposal that many other businesses and groups in the state oppose and say will be too burdensome.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google pays more than $10 billion a year to maintain its position as the default search engine on web browsers and mobile devices, stifling competition, the US Justice Department said Tuesday at the start of a high-stakes antitrust trial in Washington. From a report: "This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google's search engine will ever face meaningful competition," Kenneth Dintzer, a government lawyer, said in his opening statement. "The evidence will show they demanded default exclusivity to block rivals." Dintzer said Google became a monopoly by at least 2010 and today controls more than 89% of the online search market. "The company pays billions for defaults because they are uniquely powerful," he said. "For the last 12 years, Google has abused its monopoly in general search." The monopolization trial is the first pitting the federal government against a US technology company in more than two decades. The Justice Department and 52 attorneys general from states and US territories allege Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying billions to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers in exchange for being set as the preselected option or default on mobile phones and web browsers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has unveiled Thunderbolt 5, the latest iteration of its a standard aimed at enabling super-fast connectivity. From a report: With Thunderbolt 5, Intel promises a significant leap in connectivity speed and bandwidth, delivering enhanced performance for computer users. The unveiling of a prototype laptop and dock accompanied the announcement, providing a glimpse into the future of Thunderbolt technology. Thunderbolt 5 will offer an impressive 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, enabling lightning-fast data transfer and connectivity. Additionally, with the introduction of Bandwidth Boost, Thunderbolt 5 will reach up to 120 Gbps, ensuring an unparalleled display experience for users. These advancements represent two to three times more bandwidth than Thunderbolt 4. And it can deliver up to 240 watts of power.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HMD Global, the Finnish company best known for producing Nokia-branded smartphones, has revealed plans to launch its own line of mobile devices. From a report: On Monday, HMD Global CEO Jean-Francois Baril announced on Linkedin that the company will be expanding its portfolio with a new HMD brand that will co-exist alongside its Nokia phones and collaborations with "exciting new partners" that have yet to be disclosed. "It has been a great journey as 'HMD -- the home of Nokia phones' -- an exclusive position we have held for the past six years," said Baril. "Now we are ready for the next step on our journey -- to enter the market independently as a force to create a new world for telecommunications focused on consumer needs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe, IBM, Nvidia and five other firms have signed President Joe Biden's voluntary commitments governing artificial intelligence, which requires steps such as watermarking AI-generated content, the White House said. From a report: The original commitments, which were announced in July, were aimed at ensuring that AI's considerable power was not used for destructive purposes. Google, OpenAI and OpenAI partner Microsoft signed onto the commitments in July.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An artificial intelligence benchmark group called MLCommons unveiled the results on Monday of new tests that determine how quickly top-of-the-line hardware can run AI models. From a report: A Nvidia chip was the top performer in tests on a large language model, with a semiconductor produced by Intel a close second. The new MLPerf benchmark is based on a large language model with 6 billion parameters that summarizes CNN news articles. The benchmark simulates the "inference" portion of AI data crunching, which powers the software behind generative AI tools. Nvidia's top submission for the inference benchmark build around eight of its flagship H100 chips. Nvidia has dominated the market for training AI models, but hasn't captured the inference market yet. "What you see is that we're delivering leadership performance across the board, and again, delivering that leadership performance on all workloads," Nvidia's accelerated computing marketing director, Dave Salvator, said. Intel's success is based around its Gaudi2 chips produced by the Habana unit the company acquired in 2019. The Gaudi2 system was roughly 10% slower than Nvidia's system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Credit card disputes at Visa continued rising past their pandemic boom despite the proliferation of prevention software, as fraud grows alongside e-commerce and inflation. From a report: Disputes on Visa's network rose to more than 90 million in 2022, data provided by the payment company showed. More than 70 million disputes were filed in 2019, Visa said in a presentation, before rising 24% in 2020 during the pandemic and about 2% a year in 2021 and 2022. Despite being easy for consumers to file, making it one of the most-common credit card frauds, disputes are an opaque part of the payments industry. Both Mastercard Inc. and American Express declined to provide disputes data. Visa and Mastercard both bought dispute prevention companies in 2019, Verifi and Ethoca, respectively, and regularly promote their offerings at conferences. Disputes can be costly and onerous for both credit card companies and merchants to process, while chargebacks, when a dispute results in a refund, cost merchants dearly -- about $2.40 for every dollar disputed, according to Visa's Verifi, or as high as $3.36 for every dollar, according to Mastercard's Ethoca.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A WhatsApp for Android beta update (version 2.23.19.8) that came out today contains a new screen called Third-party chats, reports WABetaInfo. The Verge: For now, the screen is neither functional nor accessible by users, according to WABetaInfo. But its title is a strong clue that this is likely the first step to opening Meta's encrypted messages app to cross-platform compatibility. The beta comes just days after the European Commission confirmed that WhatsApp owner Meta meets the definition of a "gatekeeper" under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires communication software like WhatsApp to interoperate with third-party messaging apps by March 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lockheed Martin may see more than $800 million in payments withheld through next June until it wins approval for the software powering its most advanced version of the F-35, according to newly disclosed delivery figures. From a report: The No. 1 US defense contractor is on tap to finish production of about 52 of the upgraded TR-3 model fighter jets by Dec. 31 and approximately 12 per month after that, or 72 more by June 30, for as many as 124 jets, according to the data released Monday by Russ Goemaere, the Pentagon's spokesman on the F-35. The Pentagon is withholding $7 million per aircraft until the new software is validated because the aircraft are being placed in storage until then. At 124 jets, that's $868 million. Last month, the Defense Department withheld $7 million on each of the first four upgraded F-35s. The aircraft needs the delay-plagued software upgrade to function fully with new cockpit hardware before it can carry more precise weapons and gather more information on enemy aircraft and air defenses. The upgrade will increase processing power 37 times and memory 20 times over the F-35's current capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Grocery delivery app Instacart set a target valuation that was way below its prior funding round in 2021, a sign of companies treading carefully as they test investor appetite for new listings. From a report: The San-Francisco based firm said Monday it's pricing its shares between $26 and $28 per share. Instacart said it has 279 million shares outstanding as of Aug. 15. Including the stock options and the restricted stock units of 20.45 million and 31.47 million, respectively, the total stock for the purpose of valuing the company comes to 331 million shares. This makes for a valuation between $8.6 billion to $9.3 billion, far below its valuation of $39 billion set in a fundraising round in 2021. The company's internal valuation last year in March was $24 billion, and in July was reduced to $15 billion to reflect the selloff in technology stocks, a person familiar with the matter had told Barron's.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union has lowered its forecast for economic growth this year and next, saying inflation is taking a heavy toll on people's willingness to spend in shops -- while higher interest rates are sharply restricting the credit needed for investment and purchases. From a report: The revised forecast Monday from the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, comes as fears of recession grow and as the European Central Bank faces a key decision this week on whether to keep raising rates, which are aimed at getting inflation under control. The 20 countries that use the euro currency are expected to see growth of 0.8% this year instead of 1.1% projected in the spring forecast, the commission said. For next year, growth expectations were lowered to 1.3% from 1.6%. For the broader 27-country EU, the forecast also was lowered to 0.8% from 1% this year and to 1.4% from 1.7% next year. "Weakness in domestic demand, in particular consumption, shows that high and still increasing consumer prices for most goods and services are taking a heavier toll than expected," a commission statement said. EU Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said at a news conference that "further weakening in the coming months" was foreseen as the economy faces "multiple headwinds." One source of uncertainty is how far the ECB will go on interest rates -- more expensive credit restrains economic growth in some areas such as real estate, but if higher rates succeed in lowering inflation, that would boost consumer spending power.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows. From a report: The death rattle will be lengthy, as the timeline for the end of servicing stretches into 2027 -- although Microsoft noted that the dates will be subject to change. There is, after all, always that important customer with a strange old printer lacking Mopria support. Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then. Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: "This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Copyright Office has again rejected copyright protection for art created using artificial intelligence, denying a request by artist Jason M. Allen for a copyright covering an award-winning image he created with the generative AI system Midjourney. From a report: The office said on Tuesday that Allen's science-fiction themed image "Theatre D'opera Spatial" was not entitled to copyright protection because it was not the product of human authorship. The Copyright Office in February rescinded copyrights for images that artist Kris Kashtanova created using Midjourney for a graphic novel called "Zarya of the Dawn," dismissing the argument that the images showed Kashtanova's own creative expression. It has also rejected a copyright for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler said his AI system created autonomously. Allen said on Wednesday that the office's decision on his work was expected, but he was "certain we will win in the end." "If this stands, it is going to create more problems than it solves," Allen said. "This is going to create new and creative problems for the copyright office in ways we can't even speculate yet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is done supporting the original Surface Duo, three years after it first launched on September 10. From a report: The company has stated from the very start that the Surface Duo would receive just three years of OS updates, meaning today is the last day that Microsoft has to stay true to its word. Going forward, Microsoft will no longer ship new OS updates or security patches for the original Surface Duo, meaning Android 12L is the last version of the OS it will ever officially receive. Surface Duo only ever got two major OS updates, one shy of the average three that most high-end flagship Android devices get these days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slash_Account_Dot shares a report: The FBI had a problem. In 2019 the agency was secretly running an encrypted phone company called Anom. Serious organized criminals were using the phones and Anom was gaining popularity. But even though Anom contained a backdoor -- a chunk of code that silently copied every message sent -- the FBI was unable to actually read Anom's messages. The FBI had not obtained legal approval to rummage through that treasure trove of intelligence. [...] So the agency turned to what court records have described as a "third country," the first country being America and the second being Australia, which ran a beta test of the Anom surveillance operation. The third country allowed the FBI to overcome this legal hurdle. The country hosted the Anom interception server for the FBI, and then provided Anom's messages to American authorities every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That country "requested its participation be kept confidential," according to a document I previously obtained. The document said the third country was a European Union member but did not name the country itself. "The FBI is neither now nor in the future in a position to release the identity of the aforementioned third country," the document added. That country was Lithuania, 404 Media has learned from a source briefed on the operation but who did not work on it on the U.S. side.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sundar Pichai said Google's longstanding relationship with chipmaker Nvidia isn't going to change any time soon -- in fact, he expects it to continue over the next 10 years. From a report: In an interview Wired published Monday, the Google CEO said the company worked "deeply" with Nvidia on Android and other initiatives for over a decade, adding that Nvidia has a "strong track record" with AI innovation. "Look, the semiconductor industry is a very dynamic, cooperative industry," Pichai said. "It's an industry that needs deep, long-term R&D and investments. I feel comfortable about our relationship with Nvidia and that we are going to be working closely with them 10 years from now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is extending an agreement to get modem semiconductors from Qualcomm for three more years, a sign that its ambitious effort to design the chips in-house is taking longer than expected. From a report: The new pact will cover "smartphone launches in 2024, 2025 and 2026," Qualcomm said in a statement Monday. The companies' agreement had been set to end this year, and the latest iPhone -- due on Tuesday -- was expected to be one of the last to rely on the Qualcomm modem chip. Instead, Qualcomm will maintain its lucrative position within Apple's supply chain. The iPhone maker is Qualcomm's largest customer -- accounting for nearly a quarter of revenue, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. And their relationship helps validate Qualcomm's claim to having the best smartphone modem, a critical component that allows devices to connect to the internet and make calls. Starting with the iPhone 12 generation, the chip has supported speedier 5G networks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the New York Times:The collapse in cryptocurrency prices last year forced a procession of major firms into bankruptcy, triggering a government crackdown and erasing the savings of millions of inexperienced investors. But for a small group of corporate turnaround specialists, crypto's implosion has become a financial bonanza. Lawyers, accountants, consultants, cryptocurrency analysts and other professionals have racked up more than $700 million in fees since last year from the bankruptcies of five major crypto firms, including the digital currency exchange FTX, according to a New York Times analysis of court records. That sum is likely to grow significantly as the cases unfold over the coming months.Large fees are common in corporate bankruptcies, which require complex and time-intensive legal work to untangle. But in the crypto world, the mounting fees have sparked widespread outrage because many of the people owed money are amateur traders who lost their personal savings, rather than corporations with the ability to weather a financial crisis. Every dollar in fees is deducted from the pool of funds that will be returned to creditors at the end of the bankruptcies. The fees are "exorbitant and ridiculous," said Daniel Frishberg, a 19-year-old investor who lost about $3,000 when the crypto company Celsius Network filed for bankruptcy last year. "At every hearing, they have an army of people there, and most of them don't need to be there. You don't need 20 people taking notes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week IEEE Spectrum released its 10th annual rankings of the Top Programming Languages.It choose a top language for each of three categories: actively used among typical IEEE members and working software engineers, in demand by employers, or "in the zeitgeist". The results?This year, Python doesn't just remain No. 1 in our general "Spectrum" ranking - which is weighted to reflect the interests of the typical IEEE member - but it widens its lead. Python's increased dominance appears to be largely at the expense of smaller, more specialized, languages. It has become the jack-of-all-trades language - and the master of some, such as AI, where powerful and extensive libraries make it ubiquitous. And although Moore's Law is winding down for high-end computing, low-end microcontrollers are still benefiting from performance gains, which means there's now enough computing power available on a US $0.70 CPU to make Python a contender in embedded development, despite the overhead of an interpreter. Python also looks to be solidifying its position for the long term: Many children and teens now program their first game or blink their first LED using Python. They can then move seamlessly into more advanced domains, and even get a job, with the same language. But Python alone does not make a career. In our "Jobs" ranking, it is SQL that shines at No. 1. Ironically though, you're very unlikely to get a job as a pure SQL programmer. Instead, employers love, love, love, seeing SQL skills in tandem with some other language such as Java or C++. With today's distributed architectures, a lot of business-critical data live in SQL databases... But don't let Python and SQL's rankings fool you: Programming is still far from becoming a monoculture. Java and the various C-like languages outweigh Python in their combined popularity, especially for high-performance or resource-sensitive tasks where that interpreter overhead of Python's is still too costly (although there are a number of attempts to make Python more competitive on that front). And there are software ecologies that are resistant to being absorbed into Python for other reasons. The article cites the statistical analysis/visualization language R, as well as Fortran and Cobol, as languages that are hard to port code from or that have accumulated large already-validated codebases. But Python also remains at #1 in their third "Trending" category - with Java in second there and on the general "IEEE Spectrum" list. JavaScript appears below Python and Java on all three lists. Java is immediately below them on the Trending and "Jobs" list, but two positions further down on the general "Spectrum" list (below C++ and C). The metrics used for the calculation include the number of hits on Google, recent questions on Stack Overflow, tags on Discord, mentions in IEEE's library of journal articles and its CareerBuilder job site, and language use in starred GitHub repositories and number of new programming books.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, Singapore-based embedded security researcher yeokm1 built a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS. Now they're back with a new project:HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. Two years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. Graphics Gremline addresses this problem by using techniques like scan doubling (for CGA) and increasing the vertical refresh rate (for MDA) then outputing to a relatively newer but still old VGA port. I fabricated and assembled the design then installed it into my IBM5155... I decided to modify the Graphics Gremlin design so it can connect natively to an external HDMI monitor and service the internal Composite-based CRT at the same time. The post concludes triumphantly with a photo of their IBM 5155 running the CGA Compatibility Tester displaying the color palette.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:China-linked hackers breached the corporate account of a Microsoft engineer and are suspected of using that access to steal a valuable key that enabled the hack of senior U.S. officials' email accounts, the company said in a blog post. The hackers used the key to forge authentication tokens to access email accounts on Microsoft's cloud servers, including those belonging to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Representative Don Bacon and State Department officials earlier this year. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Microsoft disclosed the breach in June, but it was still unclear at the time exactly how hackers were able to steal the key that allowed them to access the email accounts. Microsoft said the key had been improperly stored within a "crash dump," which is data stored after a computer or application unexpectedly crashes... The incident has brought fresh scrutiny to Microsoft's cybersecurity practices. Microsoft's blog post says they corrected two conditions which allowed this to occur. First, "a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump," and second, "the key material's presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems."We found that this crash dump, believed at the time not to contain key material, was subsequently moved from the isolated production network into our debugging environment on the internet connected corporate network. This is consistent with our standard debugging processes. Our credential scanning methods did not detect its presence (this issue has been corrected). After April 2021, when the key was leaked to the corporate environment in the crash dump, the Storm-0558 actor was able to successfully compromise a Microsoft engineer's corporate account. This account had access to the debugging environment containing the crash dump which incorrectly contained the key. Due to log retention policies, we don't have logs with specific evidence of this exfiltration by this actor, but this was the most probable mechanism by which the actor acquired the key.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Insider reports on "a soaring number of Gen Zers who has decided to skip college altogether. "Four million fewer teenagers enrolled at a college in 2022 than in 2012." For many, the price tag has simply grown too exorbitant to justify the cost. From 2010 to 2022, college tuition rose an average of 12% a year, while overall inflation only increased an average of 2.6% each year. Today it costs at least $104,108 on average to attend four years of public university - and $223,360 for a private university. At the same time, the salaries students can expect to earn after graduation haven't kept up with the cost of college. A 2019 report from the Pew Research Center found that earnings for young college-educated workers had remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 - lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Factor in the average student debt of $33,500 that college graduates owe after they leave school, and many graduates will spend years catching up with their degree-less counterparts. This student-debt-driven financial hole is leaving more young graduates with a lower net worth than previous generations. The widening gap between the value and the cost of college has started to shift Gen Z's attitude toward higher education. A 2022 survey by Morning Consult found that 41% of Gen Zers said they "tend to trust US colleges and universities," the lowest percentage of any generation. It's a significant shift from when millennials were in their shoes a decade ago: A 2014 Pew Research survey found that 63% of millennials valued a college education or planned to get one. And of those who graduated, 41% of that cohort considered their schooling "very useful" in readying them to enter the workforce - that's compared to 45% of Gen Xers and 47% of boomers who felt the same... The focus now, especially in the midst of so much uncertainty in the economy, is on using college to prepare for a single, overriding goal: getting a good job. The article argues this is transforming which classes get emphasized by both students and colleges. For example, in 2014 computer programming was only the 7th most popular major at U.C. Berkeley - but now it's #1. And the data science degree Berkeley created five years ago is now already its third most popular. And meanwhile, "last year only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities - down from 20% a decade earlier and almost 30% in the 1970s." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader yusing for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: Roblox Corporation was to have its award ceremony for developers on Saturday when it cancelled the event at the last moment. According to reports, a game developer was reportedly arrested on gun charges outside the event. More from MarketWatch:Citing jail records, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday that a man identified as game developer Mikhail Olson, known by the nickname Simbuilder, was arrested by U.S. Park Police on suspicion of having a concealed firearm in his vehicle, along with armor-piercing ammunition and a large-capacity magazine. The awards ceremony was held at Fort Mason Center, which is on federal property. According to the Chronicle, the suspect was arrested Saturday afternoon after allegedly assaulting U.S. Park Police officers who had been called over a report of a disturbance outside the Roblox conference.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares this report from the Associated Press:The cost of building an artificial intelligence product like ChatGPT can be hard to measure. But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing. As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption. But they're often secretive about the specifics. Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI's most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it "was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines." Building a large language model requires analyzing patterns across a huge trove of human-written text. All of that computing takes a lot of electricity and generates a lot of heat. To keep it cool on hot days, data centers need to pump in water - often to a cooling tower outside its warehouse-sized buildings. In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research. "It's fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI," including "its heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI," said Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside who has been trying to calculate the environmental impact of generative AI products such as ChatGPT. In a paper due to be published later this year, Ren's team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what's in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions... Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period, which Ren also largely attributes to its AI work. OpenAI and Microsoft both said they were working on improving "efficiencies" of their AI model-training.Read more of this story at Slashdot.