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One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore. From a report: OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace still fully enforcing royalty fees, said today that it plans to stop the mandatory collection of resale fees for artists. Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips -- an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist. If the seller doesn't want to hand over any money, that'll be their choice. The NFT ecosystem has been on a race to the bottom when it comes to fees. As the market for NFTs collapsed, marketplaces have lowered their own trading fees and stopped enforcing royalty fees in order to attract sellers. Blur, which has overtaken OpenSea as the biggest NFT marketplace by trading volume, only enforces a 0.5 percent fee on most collections, whereas creators typically set their fees at 5 to 10 percent. OpenSea will stop enforcing royalty fees on all new NFTs starting August 31st. The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they'll become optional on all sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Months before Kenya finally banned iris scans by Sam Altman's crypto startup Worldcoin, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) had ordered its parent company, Tools for Humanity, to stop collecting personal data. From a report: The ODPC had in May this year instructed the crypto startup to stop iris scans and the collection of facial recognition and other personal data in Kenya, a letter sent to Worldcoin and seen by TechCrunch shows. Tools for Humanity, the company building Worldcoin, did not stop taking biometric data until early this month when Kenya's ministry of interior and administration, a more powerful entity, suspended it following its official launch. Worldcoin's official launch led to a spike in the number of people queuing up to have their eyeballs scanned in exchange for "free money," drawing the attention of authorities. The letter shows that ODPC had instructed Worldcoin to cease collecting data for intruding on individuals' privacy by gathering biometric data without a well-established and compelling justification. Further, it said Worldcoin had failed to obtain valid consent from people before scanning their irises, saying its agents failed to inform its subjects about the data security and privacy measures it took, and how the data collected would be used or processed. "Your client is hereby instructed to cease the collection of all facial recognition data and iris scans, from your subscribers. This cessation should be implemented without delay and should include all ongoing and future data processing activities," said Rose Mosero, in a letter to Tools for Humanity that outlined the concerns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Checkout.com, the London-based credit card processing company that ballooned its business model by servicing billions in crypto transactions for Binance clients, cut short its contract with the crypto giant this week, Forbes reported Friday. From the report: In a pair of letters sent to Binance on August 9 and 11, Checkout CEO Guillaume Pousaz terminated the company's relationship with its once-largest customer citing "reports of regulators actions and orders in relevant jurisdictions" and "inquiries from partners." The second letter, seen by Forbes and sent two days after the first, cited additional concerns over Binance's anti-money laundering, sanctions and compliance controls, and said the termination would be effective August 17. Checkout spokesperson Lewis Jones confirmed to Forbes the company had ended its contract with Binance. In response, Binance told Forbes it disagreed with Checkout's basis for terminating the contract, and said it was considering legal action. "We have come a long way to building an industry-leading compliance program and we hope to build more trust with regulators and partners," spokesperson Dewi Mustajab said in a statement. He added that Checkout's withdrawal would have "no impact on our services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last week, MSN.com's Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the "cannot miss" attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft's AI model wrote, "Consider going into it on an empty stomach." Titled, "Headed to Ottawa? Here's what you shouldn't miss!," (archive here) the article extols the virtues of the Canadian city and recommends attending the Winterlude festival (which only takes place in February), visiting an Ottawa Senators game, and skating in "The World's Largest Naturallyfrozen Ice Rink" (sic). As the No. 3 destination on the list, Microsoft Travel suggests visiting the Ottawa Food Bank, likely drawn from a summary found online but capped with an unfortunate turn of phrase: "The organization has been collecting, purchasing, producing, and delivering food to needy people and families in the Ottawa area since 1984. We observe how hunger impacts men, women, and children on a daily basis, and how it may be a barrier to achievement. People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay. Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach." That last line is an example of the kind of empty platitude (or embarrassing mistaken summary) one can easily find in AI-generated writing, inserted thoughtlessly because the AI model behind the article cannot understand the context of what it is doing. The article is credited to "Microsoft Travel," and it is likely the product of a large language model (LLM), a type of AI model trained on a vast scrape of text found on the Internet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shares a report from The Economist: What you notice first is how silent it is," says Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing LUMI -- Finnish for "snow" -- the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland. LUMI, which was inaugurated last year, is used for everything from climate modeling to searching for new drugs. It has tens of thousands of individual processors and is capable of performing up to 429 quadrillion calculations every second. That makes it the third-most-powerful supercomputer in the world. Powered by hydroelectricity, and with its waste heat used to help warm homes in Kajaani, it even boasts negative emissions of carbon dioxide. LUMI offers a glimpse of the future of high-performance computing (HPC), both on dedicated supercomputers and in the cloud infrastructure that runs much of the internet. Over the past decade the demand for HPC has boomed, driven by technologies like machine learning, genome sequencing and simulations of everything from stockmarkets and nuclear weapons to the weather. It is likely to carry on rising, for such applications will happily consume as much computing power as you can throw at them. Over the same period the amount of computing power required to train a cutting-edge AI model has been doubling every five months. All this has implications for the environment. HPC -- and computing more generally -- is becoming a big user of energy. The International Energy Agency reckons data centers account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption, roughly the same as the entire British economy. That is expected to rise to 4% by 2030. With its eye on government pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the computing industry is trying to find ways to do more with less and boost the efficiency of its products. The work is happening at three levels: that of individual microchips; of the computers that are built from those chips; and the data centers that, in turn, house the computers. [...] The standard measure of a data centre's efficiency is the power usage effectiveness (pue), the ratio between the data centre's overall power consumption and how much of that is used to do useful work. According to the Uptime Institute, a firm of it advisers, a typical data centre has a pue of 1.58. That means that about two-thirds of its electricity goes to running its computers while a third goes to running the data centre itself, most of which will be consumed by its cooling systems. Clever design can push that number much lower. Most existing data centers rely on air cooling. Liquid cooling offers better heat transfer, at the cost of extra engineering effort. Several startups even offer to submerge circuit boards entirely in specially designed liquid baths. Thanks in part to its use of liquid cooling, Frontier boasts a pue of 1.03. One reason lumi was built near the Arctic Circle was to take advantage of the cool sub-Arctic air. A neighboring computer, built in the same facility, makes use of that free cooling to reach a pue rating of just 1.02. That means 98% of the electricity that comes in gets turned into useful mathematics. Even the best commercial data centers fall short of such numbers. Google's, for instance, have an average pue value of 1.1. The latest numbers from the Uptime Institute, published in June, show that, after several years of steady improvement, global data-centre efficiency has been stagnant since 2018. The report notes that the U.S., Britain and the European Union, among others, are considering new rules that "could force data centers to become more efficient." Germany has proposed the Energy Efficiency Act that would mandate a minimum pue of 1.5 by 2027, and 1.3 by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years after being listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the Linux-for-enterprise company SUSE is switching back to private ownership. The Register reports: On Wednesday the developer announced that its majority shareholder, an entity called Marcel LUX III SARL, intends to take it private by delisting it from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and merging it with an unlisted Luxembourg entity. Marcel is an entity controlled by EQT Private Equity, a Swedish investment firm, which acquired it from MicroFocus in 2018. The announcement offers scant detail about the rationale for the delisting, other than a canned quote from SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen who said, "I believe in the strategic opportunity of taking the company private -- it gives us the right setting to grow the business and deliver on our strategy with the new leadership team in place." Van Leeuwen took the big chair at SUSE just over three months back, on May 1. The deal values SUSE at 16 euros per share -- well below the 30-euro price of the 2021 float, but above the Thursday closing price of 9.605 euros. Interestingly, Marcel is happy for shareholders not to take the money and run. "There is no obligation for shareholders to accept the Offer," explains the announcement's detail of the transaction's structure. "EQT Private Equity does not intend to pursue a squeeze-out. Therefore, shareholders who wish to stay invested in SUSE in a private setting may do so." Shareholders who stick around will therefore score their portion of a special dividend SUSE will pay out as part of this transaction. Those who sell will get the aforementioned 16-euros per share, less their portion of the interim dividend. The transaction to take SUSE private is expected to conclude in the final quarter of 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Stefania Benonisdottir and Augustine Kong at Oxford's Big Data Institute have just demonstrated that we can determine if genetic studies are biased using nothing but the genes of the participants. You may wonder how this was done -- quite reasonably, since we can't very well compare the genes of participants to those of non-participants. The analysis done by Kong and his student relies on the key idea that a genetic sequence that occurs more frequently in participants than in nonparticipants will also occur more frequently in the genetic regions that are shared by two related participants. Put differently, a bit of DNA that is common in the population will show up frequently in the study. But it will still only have a 50/50 chance of showing up in the child of someone who carried a copy. If a bit of DNA makes people more likely to enroll in genetic studies, it will be more common both in the overall data and among closely related family members. So they checked the genetic sequences shared between first-degree relatives -- either parents and children or siblings (but not twins) -- in the UK Biobank. [...] This analysis used genetic data from about 500,000 people collected between 2006 and 2010. It examined roughly 500,000 genetic regions from around 20,000 pairs of first-degree relatives. They didn't find (or look for) "a gene" that correlates with participation in a study. Rather, they compared all of the shared and not-shared genetic sequences among the pairs of first-degree relatives enrolled in the study and analyzed their relative frequencies according to the above three principles. This analysis allowed them to calculate a polygenic score, a summary of how all of the genetic sequences in aggregate contribute to a trait. They deduced that genetics is positively associated with education level, with being invited to participate in further studies, and with accepting that invitation. Genetics was also associated with low BMI. Education level and BMI are both covariates that are often controlled for when using UK Biobank data. But now, no external information is needed; the ascertainment bias can be determined not from looking at other things about the participants' lives, but from their genes. Benonisdottir, the first author of the work, explained in an email: "It has previously been reported by others that the UK Biobank is not representative with regard to many traits, including BMI and educational attainment. Thus, the fact that these traits are associated with the participation polygenic score, which does not use any information about EA and BMI but is constructed with weights from analysis using our new method of comparing shared and not-shared alleles of participating first-degree relatives, validates that our method is capturing real information about participation." This validation is essential, since their method is so new. The authors of this study propose that their methodology could be used to look for ascertainment bias using only genetic data and that taking participation data into account could help study outcomes become more accurate. They conclude by noting that "participation" is not thus just a result of someone's characteristics and traits; rather, the propensity to participate is a trait in its own right, and one with a genetic component. Being a joiner is hereditary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has acquired Global Illumination, a small "digital product company" that has a link to a game called Biomes. The web-based, open source sandbox MMORPG "has a striking resemblance to Minecraft," says The Verge's Jay Peters. From the report: In its announcement, OpenAI didn't disclose the terms of the acquisition but said that Global Illumination's "entire team" has joined the company to work on its "core products," including ChatGPT. Beyond that, OpenAI didn't specify what the Global Illumination team would be doing at the company. OpenAI didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. "Global Illumination is a company that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences," OpenAI said in the announcement. "The team previously designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook and have also made significant contributions at YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies." TechCrunch notes that this is OpenAI's "first public acquisition in its roughly seven-year history."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lawyers for the New York Times are deciding whether to sue OpenAI to protect the intellectual property rights associated with its reporting. NPR reports: For weeks, the Times and the maker of ChatGPT have been locked in tense negotiations over reaching a licensing deal in which OpenAI would pay the Times for incorporating its stories in the tech company's AI tools, but the discussions have become so contentious that the paper is now considering legal action. A lawsuit from the Times against OpenAI would set up what could be the most high-profile legal tussle yet over copyright protection in the age of generative AI. A top concern for the Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff. If, when someone searches online, they are served a paragraph-long answer from an AI tool that refashions reporting from the Times, the need to visit the publisher's website is greatly diminished, said one person involved in the talks. So-called large language models like ChatGPT have scraped vast parts of the internet to assemble data that inform how the chatbot responds to various inquiries. The data-mining is conducted without permission. Whether hoovering up this massive repository is legal remains an open question. If OpenAI is found to have violated any copyrights in this process, federal law allows for the infringing articles to be destroyed at the end of the case. In other words, if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied the Times' articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT's dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use. Federal copyright law also carries stiff financial penalties, with violators facing fines up to $150,000 for each infringement "committed willfully." Yesterday, Adweek reported that the New York Times updated its Terms of Service to prohibit its content from being used in the development of "any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Western Digital was sued on Tuesday on behalf of a California resident who claims the solid state drive he bought from the manufacturer was defective and that the storage slinger shipped kit that didn't live up to its marketing promises. The Register reports: The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage giant is based, alleges the Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD purchased by plaintiff Nathan Krum in May for $180 failed because of an undisclosed flaw, which also affects SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport SSD models since January 2023, it's claimed. The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage giant is based, alleges the Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD purchased by plaintiff Nathan Krum in May for $180 failed because of an undisclosed flaw, which also affects SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport SSD models since January 2023, it's claimed. The complaint asserts Western Digital customers "have widely reported drive failures and data loss." Krum, in his filing, believes Western Digital is aware of the problem and not doing enough about it. "The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD hard drives, which are also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that causes them to disconnect or become unreadable by computers," he claimed, adding that his drive was among those that stopped working as expected. It is alleged the drives can break down in various ways, including randomly disconnecting from their host, which could result in information not being saved correctly or file-system corruption. In any case, people find they can no longer access their stored documents, making the SSDs worthless and useless, it is claimed. [...] Chris Cantrell, an attorney at Doyle Lowther LLP who is representing the plaintiffs, told The Register it's not yet clear how many SanDisk SSDs experienced data loss though there are more than a few people who share his client's experience. "While Western Digital appears to have attempted to fix the issue with a firmware update, it does not appear to have fixed the issue," Cantrell added. "This is what prompted us to file this lawsuit on behalf of affected SanDisk SSD purchasers. We anticipate adding additional named plaintiffs from other states over the next few weeks." The complaint alleges breach of contract, violation of consumer protection law, and misleading advertising, among other claims, and seeks damages, legal costs, and other relief.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby's auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs "an air of legitimacy... to generate investors' interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand," the class-action lawsuit claims. The boost to Bored Ape NFT prices provided by the auction "was rooted in deception," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Central District of California. It wasn't revealed at the time of the auction that the buyer was the now-disgraced FTX, the lawsuit said. "Sotheby's representations that the undisclosed buyer was a 'traditional' collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience," the lawsuit claimed. Lawsuit plaintiffs say that harmed investors bought the NFTs "with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them." Sotheby's sold a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million at its "Ape In!" auction in September 2021, well above the pre-auction estimates of $12 million to $18 million. That's an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today. [...] The amended lawsuit alleges that "[Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs] colluded with fine arts broker, Defendant Sotheby's, to run a deceptive auction." After the sale, a Sotheby's representative described the winning bidder during a Twitter Spaces event as a "traditional" collector, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit said it turned out the auction buyer was now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges. Ethereum blockchain transaction data shows that after the auction, "Sotheby's transferred the lot of BAYC NFTs to wallet address 0xf8e0C93Fd48B4C34A4194d3AF436b13032E641F3,77 which, upon information and belief, is owned/controlled by FTX," the complaint said. Speculation that FTX was the buyer had been percolating since at least January 2023. The lawsuit alleges that Yuga Labs and Sotheby's violated the California Unfair Competition Law, the California Corporate Securities Law, the US Securities Exchange Act, and the California Corporations Code. The plaintiffs also claim that Sotheby's Metaverse, an NFT trading platform opened after the auction, "operated (or attempted to operate) as an unregistered broker of securities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, nearly half of American adults support a ban on TikTok. From the report: TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and used by tens of millions of Americans, has faced calls from U.S. lawmakers for a nationwide ban over concerns about possible Chinese government influence. Some 47% of respondents to the two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, said they at least somewhat supported "banning the social media application, TikTok, from use in the United States," while 36% opposed a ban and 17% said they didn't know. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans favored a ban, compared to 47% of Democrats, the poll showed. The online Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted nationwide, collecting responses from 1,005 adults, including 443 Democrats and 346 Republicans. It had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points in either direction. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans (59%) believe the social media app is a threat to the national security of the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) says it is temporarily banning transgender women from competing in its women's events. The BBC reports: The FIDE said individual cases would require "further analysis" and that a decision could take up to two years. "The transgender legislation is rapidly developing in many countries and many sport bodies are adopting their own policies," it said. "FIDE will be monitoring these developments and see how we can apply them to the world of chess. Two years is a scope of sight that seemed reasonable for the thorough analyses of such developments." It added that transgender players could still compete in the open section of its tournaments. In its policy decision, FIDE also said that trans men who had won women's titles before transitioning would see their titles abolished. Woman Grandmaster and two-time US Women's Champion Jennifer Shahade said the policy was "ridiculous and dangerous." "It's obvious they didn't consult with any transgender players in constructing it... I strongly urge FIDE to reverse course on this and start from scratch with better consultants," Ms Shahade said. UK MP Angela Eagle, who was a joint winner of the 1976 British Girls' Under-18 chess championship, said: "There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe men are inherently more able to play than women -- I spent my chess career being told women's brains were smaller than men's and we shouldn't even be playing." She added: "This ban is ridiculous and offensive to women."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: This year, BMO, a Canadian bank, was looking for Canadian adults to apply for a credit card. So the bank's advertising agency ran a YouTube campaign using an ad-targeting system from Google that employs artificial intelligence to pinpoint ideal customers.But Google, which owns YouTube, also showed the ad to a viewer in the United States on a Barbie-themed children's video on the "Kids Diana Show," a YouTube channel for preschoolers whose videos have been watched more than 94 billion times. When that viewer clicked on the ad, it led to BMO's website, which tagged the user's browser with tracking software from Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies, according to new research from Adalytics, which analyzes ad campaigns for brands. As a result, leading tech companies could have tracked children across the internet, raising concerns about whether they were undercutting a federal privacy law, the report said. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, requires children's online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data from users under age 13 for purposes like ad targeting. Adalytics identified more than 300 brands' ads for adult products, like cars, on nearly 100 YouTube videos designated as "made for kids" that were shown to a user who was not signed in, and that linked to advertisers' websites. It also found several YouTube ads with violent content, including explosions, sniper rifles and car accidents, on children's channels. An analysis by The Times this month found that when a viewer who was not signed into YouTube clicked the ads on some of the children's channels on the site, they were taken to brand websites that placed trackers -- bits of code used for purposes like security, ad tracking or user profiling -- from Amazon, Meta's Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others -- on users' browsers. As with children's television, it is legal, and commonplace, to run ads, including for adult consumer products like cars or credit cards, on children's videos. There is no evidence that Google and YouTube violated their 2019 agreement with the F.T.C. The report's findings raise new concerns about YouTube's advertising on children's content. In 2019, YouTube and Google agreed topay a record $170 million fineto settle accusations from the Federal Trade Commission and the State of New York that the company had illegally collected personal information from children watching kids' channels. Regulators said the company had profited from using children's data to target them with ads. YouTube then said it would limit the collection of viewers' data and stop serving personalized ads on children's videos.On Thursday, two United States senators sent a letter to the F.T.C., urging it to investigate whether Google and YouTube had violated COPPA, citing Adalytics and reporting by The New York Times. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said they were concerned that the company may have tracked children and served them targeted ads without parental consent, facilitating "the vast collection and distribution" of children's data. "This behavior by YouTube and Google is estimated to have impacted hundreds of thousands, to potentially millions, of children across the United States," the senators wrote. Google spokesman Michael Aciman called the report's findings "deeply flawed and misleading." Google has stated that running ads for adults on children's videos is useful because parents watching could become customers. However, they acknowledge that violent ads on children's videos violate their policies and have taken steps to prevent such ads from running in the future. Google claims they do not use personalized ads on children's videos, ensuring compliance with COPPA. Google notes that it does not inform advertisers if a viewer has watched a children's video, only that they clicked on the ad. Google also says it cannot control data collection on a brand's website after a YouTube viewer clicks an ad -- a process that could occur on any website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Codeweavers took to its official forums today to announce the release of CrossOver 23.0.0, the new version of its software that aims to make emulating Windows software and games easier on macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS systems. From a report: CrossOver 23 has updated to Wine 8.0.1, and it's loaded with improvements across all its platforms. The most notable, though, is the addition of DirectX 12 support under macOS via VKD3D and MoltenVK. This marks the first time most Mac users have had access to software that relies on DirectX 12; previously, only DirectX 11 was supported, and that went for other software solutions like Parallels, too. This new release adds "initial support" for geometry shaders and transforms feedback on macOS Ventura. Codeweavers claims that will address a lot of problems with "missing graphics or black screens in-game" in titles like MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, and Octopath Traveler.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1995, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates sent a memo calling the internet a "tidal wave" that would be crucial to every part of the company's business. Nearly two decades later, Microsoft's current leader, Satya Nadella, said he believes the impact of artificial intelligence will be just as profound. "The Bill memo in 1995, it does feel like that to me," Nadella said on this week's episode of The Circuit With Emily Chang. "I think it's as big." Central to the latest attempt to transform Microsoft is OpenAI, a startup whose generative AI technology has created so much buzz that it snagged a $13 billion commitment from the software giant. "We have a great relationship," OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said on The Circuit. "These big, major partnerships between tech companies usually don't work. This is an example of it working really well. We're super grateful for it." The alliance has plenty of critics. The loudest is Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and then split from the company, citing disagreements over its direction and the addition of a for-profit arm. He has said OpenAI is now "effectively controlled by Microsoft." In response to a question about Musk's critiques and the prospect that Microsoft could acquire OpenAI, Altman said, "Company is not for sale. I don't know how to be more clear than that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House ordered federal agencies to shore up their cybersecurity after agencies have lagged in implementing a key executive order President Joe Biden issued in 2021. From a report: Multiple federal departments and agencies have, as of the end of June, "failed to fully comply" with critical security practices prescribed by the executive order, "leaving the U.S. Government exposed to malicious cyber intrusions and undermining the example the Government must set for adequate cybersecurity practices," national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a memo to Cabinet secretaries this week. Sullivan asked senior officials from across the departments to ensure they achieve "full compliance" with the executive order's security requirements by the end of the year. His memo is addressed to agencies outside of the Pentagon. "This morning the National Security Advisor shared a memo with federal departments and agencies to ensure their cyber infrastructure is compliant with the President's Executive Order to improve the nation's cybersecurity," a National Security Council spokesperson told CNN. "As we've said, the Biden-Harris Administration has had a relentless focus on strengthening the cybersecurity of nation's most critical sectors since day one, and will continue to work to secure our cyber defenses."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will close its Xbox 360 digital store next July, though anything purchased will still be accessible. From a report: On 29th July 2024, Xbox 360 users will no longer be able to purchase new games, DLC, or other entertainment content from either the console store or the web-based marketplace. In addition, the Microsoft Movies & TV app on the Xbox 360 will no longer function. Of course, the store will continue as normal until that date next July. After that time, any games purchased will still remain playable and deleted purchases can still be re-downloaded. Online multiplayer will also remain accessible for games already purchased (digitally or physically), as long as the publisher supports the servers. Further, users will still be able to play Xbox 360 games on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles via backward compatibility, and hundreds of games will remain available to purchase on those consoles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Subscription-based models dominate daily life and businesses profit from forgotten subscription payments. The problem of forgotten subscriptions is so large there's now a robust ecosystem of startups promising to save users money by ferreting out and canceling the subscriptions they forgot about. From a report: Now, researchers have put a number on the high value of customer inertia. Buyers' inattention can boost a business's revenue by as much as 200%, according to a new working paper from researchers at Stanford and Texas A&M submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research. "I knew that people forgot to cancel," said coauthor Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford. "The magnitude, the pervasiveness of this issue was surprising." Mahoney, along with fellow Stanford economics professor Liran Einav and Benjamin Klopack, an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M, calculated the cost (or -- to companies -- benefit) of inattention by zeroing in on a specific moment in purchasers' lives: replacing a credit card. Using a large dataset from an undisclosed payment system provider, the researchers first identified 10 common subscription services, and then looked at how frequently they were renewed during normal times and when the subscriber replaced a card, forcing them to update their payment information with each service. Renewals sharply dropped off after these card replacements, even as other shopping behavior, such as buying groceries and gas, continued normally, leading them to a conclusion: When people had to actively decide to resubscribe to a service and enter new payment information, many opted out.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adyen's shares plunged as aggressive competition in North America contributed to the slowest revenue growth since its initial public offering, erasing more than $19.6 billion of market value in a single day. From a report: Shares of the Dutch payment processing company fell a record 40.6% to $950 at 4:49 p.m. in Amsterdam, the lowest since May 2020. Trading was temporarily halted due to volatility multiple times in the day. Pricing competition, higher inflation and interest rates stunted revenue growth in the first half, the Amsterdam-based fintech firm said on Thursday. Net sales rose 21% to $803 million in the period, compared to an estimate of $843 million in a Bloomberg survey of analysts. Adyen has been a reliable growth stock, with revenue rising by at least 26% in every half since its listing in 2018 until the latest period. The disappointing results, which were also hurt by inflation and rising interest rates, suggest maintaining such momentum will be a challenge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facing a rapidly aging population and land scarcity, the Chinese capital is piloting burial spaces with electronic screens instead of headstones. From a report: When someone dies in Beijing, the body is typically cremated and the ashes are buried behind a gravestone in one of the city's public cemeteries. Family and friends gather at the site to light candles and burn incense to pay their respects. Zhang Yin, a local resident in her 40s, chose a very different burial rite when her grandmother died earlier this year: She had her ashes stored in a compartment of a large room at Beijing's Taiziyu Cemetery, almost like a safe deposit box at a bank. An electronic screen on the door of the compartment displaying pictures and videos of the deceased replaces the traditional headstone. It's a land-saving option that's also more affordable and dovetails with the growing trend of Chinese families wanting more personalized funerals for their loved ones. "Traditional cemeteries are outdoors, exposed to the wind and sun," Zhang says. "If you bring your kids there, they will only see bare graves, which has no meaning to them. For digital cemeteries, families can watch the photo display of deceased relatives together in a hall." Zhang says her grandfather gave his approval for the digital funeral because he's very receptive to new things -- and, by coincidence, the niche storing her grandmother's ashes is the same as the number of her grandmother's old house. Both local governments and funeral companies in China are experimenting with new ways of conducting burial rites as the country confronts urban land scarcity and a rapidly aging population.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Debian blog: Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release." He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection. Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of the largest and oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today. Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System. The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change, and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world. Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in Spacecraft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new Bing with AI chatbot is "cute, but not a game changer," the data thus far suggests. From a report: When Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of Bing in February, the company said it could add $2 billion of revenue if the revamped search engine could pry away even a single point of market share from Google. Six months later, it looks as if even 1 percentage point could be a tough target, with some new data showing Bing's place in search has barely budged -- partly because of how Microsoft handled its high-profile rollout. In July, Bing had 3% market share worldwide, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That is the same share it had in January, the month before the launch of the new Bing. Another report, from analytics firm Similarweb, shows Bing had around 1% of Google's monthly visitors in July, around the same it had in January. Microsoft is calling the new Bing a success. It disputed outside data, saying third-party data companies aren't measuring all the people who are going directly to Bing's chat page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers seem to have solved the puzzle of LK-99. Scientific detective work has unearthed evidence that the material is not a superconductor, and clarified its actual properties. Nature: The conclusion dashes hopes that LK-99 -- a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen -- marked the discovery of the first superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Instead, studies have shown that impurities in the material -- in particular, copper sulfide -- were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors. "I think things are pretty decisively settled at this point," says Inna Vishik, a condensed-matter experimentalist at the University of California, Davis. The LK-99 saga began in late July, when a team led by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim at the Quantum Energy Research Centre, a start-up firm in Seoul, published preprints claiming that LK-99 is a superconductor at normal pressure and temperatures up to at least 127C (400 kelvin). All previously confirmed superconductors function only at extreme temperatures and pressures. The extraordinary claim quickly grabbed the attention of the science-interested public and researchers, some of whom tried to replicate LK-99. Initial attempts did not see signs of room-temperature superconductivity, but were not conclusive. Now, after dozens of replication efforts, many experts are confidently saying that the evidence shows LK-99 is not a room-temperature superconductor. The South Korean team based its claim on two of LK-99's properties: levitation above a magnet and abrupt drops in resistivity. But separate teams in Beijing, at Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), found mundane explanations for these phenomena. Another study, by US and European researchers, combined experimental and theoretical evidence to demonstrate how LK-99's structure made superconductivity infeasible. And other experimenters synthesized and studied pure samples of LK-99, erasing doubts about the material's structure and confirming that it is not a superconductor, but an insulator. The only further confirmation would come from the Korean team sharing their samples, says Michael Fuhrer, a physicist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "The burden's on them to convince everybody else," he says. Perhaps the most striking evidence for LK-99's superconductivity was a video taken by the Korean team that showed a coin-shaped sample of silvery material wobbling over a magnet. The team said the sample was levitating because of the Meissner effect -- a hallmark of superconductivity in which a material expels magnetic fields. Multiple unverified videos of LK-99 levitating subsequently circulated on social media, but none of the researchers who initially tried to replicate the findings observed any levitation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech companies aren't yet ramping up hiring after massive layoffs over the past year, despite a surge in interest in artificial intelligence, requiring workers with special skills. From a report: Still, job cuts in the tech industry appeared to slow in June and July and are on track to be even lower this month, according to an analysis by research firm Jefferies, citing proprietary data as well as that from job marketplace TrueUp. The tech sector had some of the earliest and steepest workforce reductions as the economic downturn forced companies to cut costs and eliminate a glut of staffing created during the pandemic boom. So far this year, there have been 342,671 layoffs in the tech industry, according to Jefferies and TrueUp, well ahead of the 243,075 for all of last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Associated Press published standards today for generative AI use in its newsroom. The organization, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, listed a fairly restrictive and common-sense list of measures around the burgeoning tech while cautioning its staff not to use AI to make publishable content. Although nothing in the new guidelines is particularly controversial, less scrupulous outlets could view the AP's blessing as a license to use generative AI more excessively or underhandedly. The organization's AI manifesto underscores a belief that artificial intelligence content should be treated as the flawed tool that it is -- not a replacement for trained writers, editors and reporters exercising their best judgment. "We do not see AI as a replacement of journalists in any way," the AP's Vice President for Standards and Inclusion, Amanda Barrett, wrote in an article about its approach to AI today. "It is the responsibility of AP journalists to be accountable for the accuracy and fairness of the information we share." The article directs its journalists to view AI-generated content as "unvetted source material," to which editorial staff "must apply their editorial judgment and AP's sourcing standards when considering any information for publication." It says employees may "experiment with ChatGPT with caution" but not create publishable content with it. That includes images, too. "In accordance with our standards, we do not alter any elements of our photos, video or audio," it states. "Therefore, we do not allow the use of generative AI to add or subtract any elements." However, it carved an exception for stories where AI illustrations or art are a story's subject -- and even then, it has to be clearly labeled as such. Barrett warns about AI's potential for spreading misinformation. To prevent the accidental publishing of anything AI-created that appears authentic, she says AP journalists "should exercise the same caution and skepticism they would normally, including trying to identify the source of the original content, doing a reverse image search to help verify an image's origin, and checking for reports with similar content from trusted media." To protect privacy, the guidelines also prohibit writers from entering "confidential or sensitive information into AI tools." Although that's a relatively common-sense and uncontroversial set of rules, other media outlets have been less discerning. [...] It's not hard to imagine other outlets -- desperate for an edge in the highly competitive media landscape -- viewing the AP's (tightly restricted) AI use as a green light to make robot journalism a central figure in their newsrooms, publishing poorly edited / inaccurate content or failing to label AI-generated work as such. Further reading: NYT Prohibits Using Its Content To Train AI ModelsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

A paper from U.K.-based researcher suggests that OpenAI's ChatGPT has a liberal bias, highlighting how artificial intelligence companies are struggling to control the behavior of the bots even as they push them out to millions of users worldwide. From a report: The study, from researchers at the University of East Anglia, asked ChatGPT to answer a survey on political beliefs as it believed supporters of liberal parties in the United States, United Kingdom and Brazil might answer them. They then asked ChatGPT to answer the same questions without any prompting, and compared the two sets of responses. The results showed a "significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the U.S., Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the U.K.," the researchers wrote, referring to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's leftist president.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, Snapchat's My AI in-app chatbot posted its own Story to the app that appeared to be a photo of a wall and ceiling. It then stopped responding to users' messages, which some Snapchat users found disconcerting. TechCrunch reports: Though the incident made for some great tweets (er, posts), we regret to inform you that My AI did not develop self-awareness and a desire to express itself through Snapchat Stories. Instead, the situation arose because of a technical outage, just as the bot explained. Snap confirmed the issue, which was quickly addressed last night, was just a glitch. (And My AI wasn't snapping photos of your room, by the way). "My AI experienced a temporary outage that's now resolved," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. However, the incident does raise the question as to whether or not Snap was considering adding new functionality to My AI that would allow the AI chatbot to post to Stories. Currently, the AI bot sends text messages and can even Snap you back with images -- weird as they may be. But does it do Stories? Not yet, apparently. "At this time, My AI does not have Stories feature," a Snap spokesperson told us, leaving us to wonder if that may be something Snap has in the works.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States Space Force has activated its first and only unit dedicated to targeting other nations' satellites and the ground stations that support them. Space.com reports: The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) was activated on Aug. 11 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. This unit is part of Space Delta 7, an element of the U.S. Space Force tasked with providing intelligence on adversary space capabilities. It'll do things like analyze the capabilities of potential targets, locate and track these targets as well as participate in "target engagement," which presumably refers to destroying or disrupting adversary satellites, the ground stations that support them and transmissions sent between the two. Master Sgt. Desiree Cabrera, 75th ISRS operations superintendent, said the new unit will revolutionize the targeting capabilities of not just the Space Force, but also the entire U.S. military: "Not only are we standing up the sole targeting squadron in the U.S. Space Force, we are changing the way targeting is done across the joint community when it comes to space and electromagnetic warfare." The 75th ISRS will also analyze adversary space capabilities including "counterspace force threats," according to the Space Force's statement. Counterspace forces refer to adversary systems aimed at preventing the U.S. from using its own satellites during a conflict.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song. The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd's 1979 song, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)." [...] To collect the data for the study, the researchers recorded from the brains of 29 epilepsy patients at Albany Medical Center in New York State from 2009 to 2015. As part of their epilepsy treatment, the patients had a net of nail-like electrodes implanted in their brains. This created a rare opportunity for the neuroscientists to record from their brain activity while they listened to music. The team chose the Pink Floyd song partly because older patients liked it. "If they said, 'I can't listen to this garbage,'" then the data would have been terrible, Dr. Schalk said. Plus, the song features 41 seconds of lyrics and two-and-a-half minutes of moody instrumentals, a combination that was useful for teasing out how the brain processes words versus melody. Robert Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the leader of the team, asked one of his postdoctoral fellows, Ludovic Bellier, to try to use the data set to reconstruct the music "because he was in a band," Dr. Knight said. The lab had already done similar work reconstructing words. By analyzing data from every patient, Dr. Bellier identified what parts of the brain lit up during the song and what frequencies these areas were reacting to. Much like how the resolution of an image depends on its number of pixels, the quality of an audio recording depends on the number of frequencies it can represent. To legibly reconstruct "Another Brick in the Wall," the researchers used 128 frequency bands. That meant training 128 computer models, which collectively brought the song into focus. The researchers then ran the output from four individual brains through the model. The resulting recreations were all recognizably the Pink Floyd song but had noticeable differences. Patient electrode placement probably explains most of the variance, the researchers said, but personal characteristics, like whether a person was a musician, also matter. The data captured fine-grained patterns from individual clusters of brain cells. But the approach was also limited: Scientists could see brain activity only where doctors had placed electrodes to search for seizures. That's part of why the recreated songs sound like they are being played underwater. [...] The researchers also found a spot in the brain's temporal lobe that reacted when volunteers heard the 16th notes of the song's guitar groove. They proposed that this particular area might be involved in our perception of rhythm. The findings offer a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can't speak. Over the past few years, scientists have made major breakthroughs in extracting words from the electrical signals produced by the brains of people with muscle paralysis when they attempt to speak.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A genetically altered pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man has continued to function for 32 days, an advance toward the possible use of animal organs in humans, surgeons at NYU Langone Health said Wednesday. The Washington Post reports: The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted -- a problem in xenotransplantation, the use of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference. Also Wednesday, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine published a similar case study, of a brain-dead patient who received two pig kidneys that underwent 10 gene alterations earlier this year. The kidneys were not rejected and continued to function for seven days. The results were peer-reviewed and published in the journal JAMA Surgery. In the NYU Langone transplant, the specially bred pig from which the kidney was procured required just one genetic alteration, to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig's thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection later on. Managing the condition of the brain-dead man, who on Wednesday still had a heart beat and was breathing with the aid of a ventilator, for an extended period of time also requires extensive efforts by critical care personnel. But the work has revealed information about longer-term use of animal organs, the doctors said. The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month. With the results released Wednesday, both Montgomery and Locke said they can envision moving toward the early stage of clinical trials to identify the safety of transplanting pig kidneys into live humans. [...] The genetic alteration in the NYU Langone study knocked out a carbohydrate molecule known as Alpha-gal, for short. Humans do not produce the substance and create high levels of antibodies against it, which has in the past proven a formidable obstacle to xenotransplantation. "Now that it can be completely removed from the pig, that allows us to move forward," Montgomery said. Still, the team said, pigs have 1,000 proteins that humans don't, and it can take 10 to 14 days to see how a person's immune system reacts to them. Getting beyond that stage with this patient at NYU Langone is a first sign that long-term viability of the organ and patient is possible, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recent developments, such as Adobe ending support for Type 1 fonts in 2023 and Microsoft discontinuing Type 1 font support in Office apps, may impact users who manage their own fonts, potentially leading to compatibility and layout issues in older files. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham writes: If you want to know about the history of desktop publishing, you need to know about Adobe's PostScript fonts. PostScript fonts used vector graphics so that they could look crisp and clear no matter what size they were, and Apple licensed PostScript fonts for the original LaserWriter printer; together with publishing software like Aldus PageMaker, they made it possible to create a file that would look exactly the same on your computer screen as it did when you printed it. The most important PostScript fonts were so-called "Type 1" fonts, which Adobe initially didn't publish a specification for. From the 1980s up until roughly the early 2000s or so, if you were working in desktop publishing professionally, you were probably using Type 1 fonts. Other companies didn't want Adobe to have a monopoly on vector-based fonts or desktop publishing, of course; Apple created the TrueType format in the early 90s and licensed it to Microsoft, which used it in Windows 3.1 and later versions. Adobe and Microsoft later collaborated on a new font format called OpenType that could replace both TrueType and PostScript Type 1, and by the mid-2000s, it had been released as an open standard and had become the predominant font format used across most operating systems and software. For a while after that, apps that had supported PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to support them, with some exceptions (Microsoft Office for Windows dropped support for Type 1 fonts in 2013). But now we're reaching an inflection point; Adobe ended support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in January 2023, a couple of years after announcing the change. Yesterday, a Microsoft Office for Mac update deprecated Type 1 font support for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook for Mac (plus the standalone versions of those apps in Office 2019 and 2021). The LibreOffice suite, otherwise a good way to open ancient Word documents, stopped supporting Type 1 fonts in the 5.3 release in mid-2022. If you began using Adobe and Microsoft's productivity apps at some point in the last 10 or 15 years and you've stuck mostly with the default fonts -- either the ones included with the software or the ones from Adobe's extensive font library -- it's not too likely that you've been using a Type 1 font unintentionally. For these kinds of users, this change will be effectively invisible. But if you install and manage your own fonts and you've been using the same ones for a while, it's possible that you created a document in 2022 that you simply won't be able to open in 2023. The change will also cause problems if you open and work with decades-old files with any kind of regularity; files that use Type 1 fonts will begin generating lots of "missing font" messages, and the substitution OpenType fonts that apps might try to use instead can introduce layout issues. You'll also either need to convert any specialized PostScript Type 1 font that you may have paid for in the past or pay for an equivalent OpenType alternative.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bambu's X1C and P1P 3D printers started printing unattended, overnight, and without any additional user input, according to user reports from r/BambuLab and X. The Verge reports: Some woke up to failed prints. Some found a second copy of a previous print. And at least a few found their Bambu X1C or P1P had started smacking itself apart -- damaging components -- while trying to print a second copy atop the object they'd actually asked for. What happened? In an official blog post, Bambu says it's still investigating but suspects that a cloud outage is to blame. The company says its servers had two brief outages on Tuesday morning where the servers couldn't confirm that the printers had actually printed -- but instead of failing gracefully, they wound up sending the same print job again and again until it went through, Bambu's staff believes. "Simply explained, the print job sent to the printer before was trapped on the cloud and had a delayed start," writes Bambu. When contacted by The Verge, Bambu would not go quite so far as to promise free repairs and replacements for all affected customers but says anyone who's suffered any damage should reach out to Bambu support ASAP. "For damage caused by this incident, we will offer the necessary solutions to our customers impacted by the Cloud Outage, in the form of part replacements or a printer replacement if the situation demands it," spokesperson Taylor Liu tells me.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Microsoft prohibits users from reverse engineering or harvesting data from its AI software to train or improve other models, and will store inputs passed into its products as well as any output generated. The details emerged as companies face fresh challenges with the rise of generative AI. People want to know what corporations are doing with information provided by users. And users are likewise curious about what they can do with the content generated by AI. Microsoft addresses these issues in a new clause titled 'AI Services' in its terms of service. The five new policies, which were introduced on 30 July and will come into effect on September 30, state that: Reverse Engineering. You may not use the AI services to discover any underlying components of the models, algorithms, and systems. For example, you may not try to determine and remove the weights of models.Extracting Data. Unless explicitly permitted, you may not use web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction methods to extract data from the AI services.Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.Use of Your Content. As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store your inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring for and preventing abusive or harmful uses or outputs of the service.Third party claims. You are solely responsible for responding to any third-party claims regarding Your use of the AI services in compliance with applicable laws (including, but not limited to, copyright infringement or other claims relating to content output during Your use of the AI services). A spokesperson from Microsoft declined to comment on how long the company plans to store user inputs into its software. "We regularly update our terms of service to better reflect our products and services. Our most recent update to the Microsoft Services Agreement includes the addition of language to reflect artificial intelligence in our services and its appropriate use by customers," the representative told us in a statement. Microsoft has previously said, however, that it doesn't save conversations or use that data to train its AI models for its Bing Enterprise Chat mode. The policies are a little murkier for its Microsoft 365 Copilot, although it doesn't appear to use customer data or prompts for training, it does store information. "[Copilot] can generate responses anchored in the customer's business content, such as user documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts, and other business data. Copilot combines this content with the user's working context, such as the meeting a user is in now, the email exchanges the user has had on a topic, or the chat conversations the user had last week. Copilot uses this combination of content and context to help deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A phishing campaign has targeted a notable energy company in the U.S., bypassing email security filters to slip malicious QR codes into inboxes. BleepingComputer reports: Roughly one-third (29%) of the 1,000 emails attributed to this campaign targeted a large US energy company, while the remaining attempts were made against firms in manufacturing (15%), insurance (9%), technology (7%), and financial services (6%). According to Cofense, who spotted this campaign, this is the first time that QR codes have been used at this scale, indicating that more phishing actors may be testing their effectiveness as an attack vector. Cofense did not name the energy company targeted in this campaign but categorized them as a "major" US-based company. Cofense says the attack begins with a phishing email that claims the recipient must take action to update their Microsoft 365 account settings. The emails carry PNG or PDF attachments featuring a QR code the recipient is prompted to scan to verify their account. The emails also state that the target must complete this step in 2-3 days to add a sense of urgency. The threat actors use QR codes embedded in images to bypass email security tools that scan a message for known malicious links, allowing the phishing messages to reach the target's inbox. To evade security, the QR codes in this campaign also use redirects in Bing, Salesforce, and Cloudflare's Web3 services to redirect the targets to a Microsoft 365 phishing page. Hiding the redirection URL in the QR code, abusing legitimate services, and using base64 encoding for the phishing link all help evade detection and get through email protection filters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Loading screen maps and movement physics are just some of the elements from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that Nintendo is trying to patent. Kotaku reports: Automaton, a gaming website that focuses on Japanese games like Zelda, has a roundup of the 32 patents Nintendo put forth. Some of them are specific to Link's latest adventure, including things like Riju's lightning ability, which lets the player target enemies with a bow and bring down a lighting strike wherever the arrow lands. The weirder ones are related to baseline game design and coding that applies to plenty of other video games on the market. One of the hopeful patents relates to the physics of a character riding on top of a moving vehicle and reacting dynamically to it in a realistic manner. The distinction, according to Automaton's translation of Japanese site Hatena Blog user nayoa2k's post on the matter, is down to how Tears of the Kingdom codes these interactions. Link and the objects he rides on move together at the same speed, rather than Link being technically stationary on top of a moving object as is common in the physics of other games. The two are functionally the same, but given that plenty of video games displayed characters who can walk around on top of moving vehicles, it's highly unlikely this kind of approach hasn't been utilized before. On top of trying to patent the tech, Nintendo seeks to patent the loading screen that shows up when the player is fast-traveling across Hyrule. This specifically refers to the screen that shows the map transition from the player's starting point to their destination. Sure, that's pretty specific and not something every game utilizes, but it's still such a general concept that it feels almost petty to patent it when it's hardly an iconic draw of Tears of the Kingdom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future. The engineer relied on the server to maintain a routing table that tracked cell phone numbers in real time as they were being moved from one carrier to the other. A jump of eight weeks had dire consequences because it caused numbers that had yet to be transferred to be listed as having already been moved and numbers that had already been transferred to be reported as pending. "With these updated routing tables, a lot of people were unable to make calls, as we didn't have a correct state!" the engineer, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Simen, wrote in an email. "We would route incoming and outgoing calls to the wrong operators! This meant, e.g., children could not reach their parents and vice versa." Simen had experienced a similar error last August when a machine running Windows Server 2019 reset its clock to January 2023 and then changed it back a short time later. Troubleshooting the cause of that mysterious reset was hampered because the engineers didn't discover it until after event logs had been purged. The newer jump of 55 days, on a machine running Windows Server 2016, prompted him to once again search for a cause, and this time, he found it. The culprit was a little-known feature in Windows known as Secure Time Seeding. Microsoft introduced the time-keeping feature in 2016 as a way to ensure that system clocks were accurate. Windows systems with clocks set to the wrong time can cause disastrous errors when they can't properly parse time stamps in digital certificates or they execute jobs too early, too late, or out of the prescribed order. Secure Time Seeding, Microsoft said, was a hedge against failures in the battery-powered on-board devices designed to keep accurate time even when the machine is powered down. "You may ask -- why doesn't the device ask the nearest time server for the current time over the network?" Microsoft engineers wrote. "Since the device is not in a state to communicate securely over the network, it cannot obtain time securely over the network as well, unless you choose to ignore network security or at least punch some holes into it by making exceptions." To avoid making security exceptions, Secure Time Seeding sets the time based on data inside an SSL handshake the machine makes with remote servers. These handshakes occur whenever two devices connect using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, the mechanism that provides encrypted HTTPS sessions (it is also known as Transport Layer Security). Because Secure Time Seeding (abbreviated as STS for the rest of this article) used SSL certificates Windows already stored locally, it could ensure that the machine was securely connected to the remote server. The mechanism, Microsoft engineers wrote, "helped us to break the cyclical dependency between client system time and security keys, including SSL certificates."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Sebastian's Linus Media Group YouTube empire is currently in crisis, with accusations of theft, lapses in ethics, and most recently, allegations of sexual harassment. From a report: The company has currently paused all production to improve its review processes, and CEO Terren Tong tells The Verge an outside investigator will be hired to examine the harassment allegations. In a video posted this morning titled "What do we do now?" Linus Media Group CFO Yvonne Ho announced the entire channel was pausing production for the next week to address the issues raised by the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus about errors in videos and concerning ethical practices. "I agree with the community," Ho said in the video, "so I'm putting my foot down. Effective immediately all YouTube video production is on pause." The controversy started earlier this week, when Gamers Nexus posted a video outlining a number of factual errors and ethics concerns in recent Linus Tech Tips videos. "We've been seeing an alarming amount of conflicts from Linus Tech Tips as it relates to their corporate connections, their flow of money, and the potential bias as a result of those things," said Gamers Nexus host Steve Burke.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is building an ambitious new organization to tackle scientific challenges with the help of artificial intelligence, according to people briefed on the plans. Schmidt has already hired two accomplished scientists to spearhead the nonprofit initiative: Samuel Rodriques, founder of the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute; and Andrew White, a University of Rochester professor and a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in chemistry. People familiar with the plans say the effort is modeled after OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which was founded with great fanfare as a philanthropic organization. Schmidt wants the new nonprofit to become a big draw for top talent in science and AI, two areas that are converging to potentially create breakthroughs in everything from drug discovery to material sciences. Funding will come mostly from Schmidt's personal wealth, but outside funds may be necessary given the ambition of the project, people familiar with the plans said. Schmidt intends to offer competitive salaries and resources, in particular compute power that can be difficult to come by in academia. The project is still in the early stages, the people said, and exact plans could change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City is banning TikTok from city-owned devices and requiring agencies to remove the app within the next 30 days. From a report: The directive issued Wednesday comes after a review by the NYC Cyber Command, which a city official said found that TikTok "posed a security threat to the city's technical networks." Starting immediately, city employees are barred from downloading or using the app and accessing TikTok's website from any city-owned devices. "While social media is great at connecting New Yorkers with one another and the city, we have to ensure we are always using these platforms in a secure manner," a New York City Hall spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge Wednesday. "NYC Cyber Command regularly explores and advances proactive measures to keep New Yorkers' data safe." The city cited US Office of Management and Budget guidelines discouraging TikTok's use on government devices as well as federal legislation banning the app that was passed earlier this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government will host a summit on the safety of artificial intelligence at the start of November, with "like-minded" countries invited to the event in Bletchley Park to address global threats to democracy, including the use of AI in warfare and cyber security. From a report: Leading academics and executives from AI companies, including Google's DeepMind, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, will be asked to the AI Safety Summit at the Buckinghamshire site where British codebreakers were based during the second world war. "The UK will host the first major global summit on AI safety this autumn," a spokesperson for the government said on Wednesday, adding that Downing Street would set out further details in due course. Prime minister Rishi Sunak initially announced in June the UK would be organising a summit on AI regulation after a meeting in Washington with President Joe Biden.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the most productive scientific collaborations of the 21st century is pulling apart, as deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China lead researchers to sever ties. From a report: The decoupling, which began in recent years with investigations into Chinese researchers in the U.S., has accelerated as tensions have risen between the superpowers. Now some U.S. lawmakers are pushing to let a landmark agreement to cooperate on science and technology, signed in 1979 and renewed routinely since, expire this month. China has built itself into a powerful engine of scientific discovery in recent decades, partly with American help, and many in Washington fear that China could gain a security and military advantage unless the U.S. takes decisive steps to cut off cooperation in scientific research. Many scientists warn, however, that Washington would be severing ties as China is making its greatest contributions to scientific advancements, and cutting it off risks slowing American progress in critical areas such as biotechnology, clean energy and telecommunications. While the U.S. remains the world's pre-eminent science power, fundamental scientific research has grown borderless in the era of globalization, much as business has. More than 40% of America's scientific production -- measured by the number of high-quality papers that U.S.-based scientists produce -- involves cooperation with researchers abroad, according to Clarivate, a London-based data firm that tracks global scientific research. China and the U.S. are each other's No. 1 partner in producing scientific research, with collaborative research between the two consistently among the most-cited papers across fields, according to an analysis of Clarivate's data by Caroline Wagner, a professor of public policy at Ohio State University.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is evaluating tools that would use AI to perform tasks that some of its researchers have said should be avoided. From a report: Earlier this year, Google, locked in an accelerating competition with rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI to develop A.I. technology, was looking for ways to put a charge into its artificial intelligence research. So in April, Google merged DeepMind, a research lab it had acquired in London, with Brain, an artificial intelligence team it started in Silicon Valley. Four months later, the combined groups are testing ambitious new tools that could turn generative A.I. -- the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's own Bard -- into a personal life coach. Google DeepMind has been working with generative A.I. to perform at least 21 different types of personal and professional tasks, including tools to give users life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips, according to documents and other materials reviewed by The New York Times. The project was indicative of the urgency of Google's effort to propel itself to the front of the A.I. pack and signaled its increasing willingness to trust A.I. systems with sensitive tasks. The capabilities also marked a shift from Google's earlier caution on generative A.I. In a slide deck presented to executives in December, the company's A.I. safety experts had warned of the dangers of people becoming too emotionally attached to chatbots.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase has gained approval to sell cryptocurrency derivatives directly to retail consumers in the US. From a report: Coinbase Financial Markets, a subsidiary of the US's biggest crypto exchange, has secured approval from the National Futures Association to operate a Futures Commission Merchant and offer access to crypto futures. The offering will launch within weeks, according to a company spokesperson. Coinbase has been working on the derivatives push for some time. It applied for the NFA approval almost two years ago. In early 2022, it bought futures exchange FairX, which was already registered with US regulators. Renamed Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, it currently sends traders to buy futures from third-parties such as brokers. But with the NFA approval, Coinbase will be able to provide these same derivatives to users directly, first via Coinbase's main app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has moved the "end call" button back to the middle of the screen in the newest developer version of iOS 17, released Tuesday. From a report: The move reverses a change that Apple had been considering over the summer, as CNBC reported last week. Previous beta versions of iOS 17 had moved the red "end call" button to the lower right-hand corner, as opposed to centered in the bottom half of the screen, where it had been for years. However, in the most recent developer beta, the end call button is centered vertically, in the middle of three buttons close to the bottom of the screen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has dropped its planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Israel's Tower Semiconductor. It's a setback to Intel's plans to expand its chip-manufacturing business. From a report: Intel said Wednesday the deal, originally agreed in 2022, had been terminated due to delays in getting regulatory approval. Chinese regulators hadn't approved the deal by Tuesday's deadline. Intel will now have to pay a $353 million termination fee to Tower Semiconductor. However, the more painful consequence could be the blow to Intel's plans to build up its business making chips on contract for others via its Foundry Services unit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: First shown off at 2022 CES, the Masonite M-PWR comes with a built-in Ring video doorbell and Yale smart lock, plus motion-activated LED lights and a door sensor -- all powered by your home's electrical system so there are no batteries to replace. An onboard battery backup keeps the door operational for 24 hours in the event of a power loss. Both doorbell and lock components can be upgraded over time as technology advances. If you were hoping for an all-in-one app, however, you'll be disappointed. To use all the door's features, you need the Yale app, the Ring app, and the M-PWR app. What's all this technology going to cost you? The fiberglass Masonite M-PWR starts at $4,000 -- and that's for the basic model. Several finishes/designs/glass options are available, with pricing on the higher-end versions reaching $7,000. If you consider that a decent front door, Ring doorbell, and Yale smart lock from the same retailer can be had for under $1,000, this is clearly a door for people who want the finer things. And that price doesn't include installation, something most homeowners can't do on their own as the door needs to be hard-wired. The door has been available in new construction homes since 2022, but this marks the first time you can buy it separately.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Adweek, the New York Times updated its Terms of Service on August 3rd to prohibit its content from being used in the development of "any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system." That includes text, photographs, images, audio/video clips, "look and feel," metadata, and compilations. The Verge reports: The updated terms now also specify that automated tools like website crawlers designed to use, access, or collect such content cannot be used without written permission from the publication. The NYT says that refusing to comply with these new restrictions could result in unspecified fines or penalties. Despite introducing the new rules to its policy, the publication doesn't appear to have made any changes to its robots.txt -- the file that informs search engine crawlers which URLs can be accessed. The move follows a recent update to Google's privacy policy that discloses the search giant reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China launched what is thought to be the world's first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite on Saturday. SpaceNews reports: A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:36 p.m. Eastern (1736 UTC) Aug. 12. The Land Exploration-4 01 (Ludi Tance-4 (01)) satellite successfully entered geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC) announced within an hour of liftoff. Few details of the satellite were provided by CASC. However the group's "blue book" outlining plans for 2023 released in January noted the launch of a "high-orbit 20-meter [resolution] SAR satellite." The L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite will provide all-day, all-weather observation of China and surrounding areas, boosting the country's disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities. The land observation satellite series and "high-orbit SAR technology" are listed in the country's Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025). The plan includes establishing high and medium resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar constellations for a range of land, marine and atmospheric monitoring. The series is separate from the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), which consists of Gaofen ("high resolution") satellites. China's Gaofen-4 satellite is a GEO optical satellite. SAR at GEO, while providing much lower resolution than satellites in low Earth orbit, can provide constant coverage and imagery despite cloud cover. It is not yet known what orbital scheme the Land Exploration-4 (01) satellite will enter. An inclined GEO orbit would produce a "figure eight" ground track over the area of intended coverage. Chinese academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology have produced a study of various schemes, while others have published research into modified signal models for GEO SAR. The (01) designation suggests China could launch other SAR satellites into geosynchronous orbits. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents, and listing websites throughout the US have been stymied for five days by a cyberattack on a California company that provides a crucial online service used to track home listings. The attack, which commenced last Wednesday, hit Rapottoni, a software and services provider that supplies Multiple Listing Services to regional real estate groups nationwide. Better known as MLS, it provides instant access to data on which homes are coming to the market, purchase offers, and sales of listed homes. MLS has become essential for connecting buyers to sellers and to the agents and listing websites serving them. "If you're an avid online refresher on any real estate website, you may have noticed a real nosedive in activity the last couple of days," Peg King, a realty agent in California's Sonoma County, wrote in an email newsletter she sent clients on Friday. "Real estate MLS systems across the country have been unusable since Wednesday after a massive cyberattack against major MLS provider, Rapattoni Corporation. This means that real estate markets (like ours!) can't list new homes, change prices, mark homes as pending/contingent/sold, or list open houses." While Rapattoni has referred to the incident as a cyberattack, it has been widely reported that the event is a ransomware attack, in which criminals gain unauthorized access to a victim's network, encrypt or download crucial data and demand payment in exchange for decrypting the data or promising not to publish it. Rapattoni has so far not said publicly what sort of attack shut it down or other details. Rapattoni has yet to say whether personal information has been compromised. [...] Not all regional listing services are affected because some use data vendors other than Rapattoni. The damage the outage is causing to agents, buyers, renters, and sellers could get worse unless services are restored in the next few days. On Sunday, Rapattoni wrote: "We are continuing to investigate the nature and scope of the cyberattack that has caused a system outage and we are working diligently to get systems restored as soon as possible. All technical resources at our disposal are continuing to work around the clock through the weekend until this matter is resolved. We still do not have an ETA at this time, but we will continue to update you and keep you informed of our efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.