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Google -- under fire in court for allegedly resting on its laurels thanks to its 90% market dominance -- only made an effort to beef up the quality of its search engine in the European Union after being hit by a record antitrust fine, according to internal documents revealed in the US Justice Department's monopolization case against the tech giant. From a report: The Justice Department is arguing at a trial in Washington that Google's failure to improve its products -- unless put under pressure -- proves that it's illegally maintaining its monopoly. Alphabet's Google planned to improve its European search results only after a record 2018 European antitrust fine, according to the documents, which revealed that Google executives discussed a plan dubbed "Go Big in Europe." The plan aimed to improve results in France and Germany in 2019 and 2020 with changes such as adding post-game soccer video highlights, more local content and news, pronunciation practice for different languages and more information on local television options available for streaming. The catalyst was a 2018 EU antitrust order that forced Google to offer a choice screen giving Android phone users five search engine options to choose from, according to US antitrust enforcers trying the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD's remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. From a report: In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD's extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and "functionality updates as available." For AMD users keeping a close eye on their driver releases, they'll likely recognize that AMD already began this process back in September -- though AMD hasn't officially documented the change until now. As of AMD's September Adrenaline 23.9 driver series, AMD split up the RDNA and GCN driver packages, and with that they have also split the driver branches between the two architectures. As a result, only RDNA cards are receiving new features and updates as part of AMD's mainline driver branch (currently 23.20), while the GCN cards have been parked on a maintenance driver branch - 23.19.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has halved the number of live service games it plans to release over the next few years, it's confirmed. From a report: SIE had previously said it planned to have 12 live service titles in the market by its fiscal year ending in March 2026 -- up from three during its last business year ended this March. However, earlier this year PlayStation's management team confirmed that it had partnered with Destiny studio Bungie for a "rigorous portfolio review" process. According to press reports, this has led to some projects being scaled back. During an earnings call on Thursday, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki seemingly confirmed that this review had resulted in some games being pushed back due to quality concerns. "We are reviewing this... we are trying as much as possible to ensure [these games] are enjoyed and liked by gamers for a long time," he said. "[Of] the 12 titles, six titles will be released by FY25 -- that's our current plan. [As for] the remaining six titles, we are still working on that. That's the total number of live service and multiplayers titles [and] mid-to-long-term we want to [push] this kind of service and that's the unchanged policy of the company. It's not like we stick to certain titles, but game quality should be the most important [thing]."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Humane, the startup founded by former Apple design and engineering team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, has officially launched its long-awaited Ai Pin -- making a splashy foray into the nascent field of artificial intelligence hardware. From a report: The device can magnetically clip onto clothing and will cost $699 with a $24-a-month subscription -- which will come with unlimited data and phone calls. The company also said it would partner with T-Mobile for phone service and Microsoft and OpenAI for AI technology. The device will be available to order starting Nov. 16. Tech and AI enthusiasts have watched Humane closely after Chaudhri and Bongiorno, husband-and-wife co-founders, started the company in 2018. It has kept most of its work under wraps, with some notable exceptions. In April, Chaudhri gave a demo of the device at a TED Talk. In September, the pin adorned models including Naomi Campbell at Paris Fashion Week. The Humane Ai Pin is meant to eventually be a smartphone replacement. The subscription plan comes with its own phone number, and it doesn't need to be paired with a phone. The device is screenless, and people will interact with it via voice, touchpad, gesture or by holding up objects. It also features a laser projector that can emit text onto the user's hand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has confirmed in court that Epic was offered a $147 million deal to launch its hit game Fortnite on Android's Google Play Store. From a report: The deal, which Google's VP of Play partnerships, Purnima Kochikar, says was approved and presented to Epic but not accepted, would have seen the money dispensed over a three-year period of "incremental funding" (ending in 2021) to the games publisher. It was meant to stem a potential "contagion" of popular apps bypassing Android's official store and, with it, Google's lucrative in-app purchase fees. Epic launched Fortnite on Android in 2018 directly through its website, avoiding the Play Store. That allowed it to sell Fortnite's in-game currency, V-Bucks, without paying the commission required of Play Store apps. It relented in 2020, saying that "scary, repetitive security pop-ups" and other factors had put it at a severe disadvantage. But in an antitrust lawsuit filed later that year -- and currently being argued before a jury -- it alleged its initial decision had thrown Google into a panic. It cited internal documents claiming Google feared a "contagion risk" if other game developers (including Blizzard, Valve, Sony, and Nintendo) followed Epic's lead, and it claimed Google attempted to forestall it by offering special benefits or even buying Epic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sphere in Las Vegas reported an operating loss of $98.4 million for the fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30, Sphere Entertainment Co. said this morning on an earnings call. From a report: Additionally, the company lost its chief financial officer, as Gautam Ranji has resigned, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Ranji's exit was "not a result of any disagreement with the company's independent auditors or any member of management on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure or internal controls," the company said in the filing.The New York Post reported Tuesday that Ranji suddenly quit after a bout of yelling and screaming from CEO James Dolan. Ranji, who had been on the job for 11 months, will be replaced on an interim basis by Greg Brunner, the company's senior vice president, according to the filing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft now wants you to explain exactly why you're attempting to close its OneDrive for Windows app before it allows you to do so. From a report: Neowin has spotted that the latest update to OneDrive now includes an annoying dialog box that asks you to select the reason why you're closing the app every single time you attempt to close OneDrive from the taskbar. Closing OneDrive is already buried away and not a simple task, with Microsoft hiding it under a "pause syncing" option when you right-click on OneDrive in the taskbar. But now, the quit option is grayed out until you select a reason for quitting OneDrive from a drop-down box. Here are the options:1. I don't want OneDrive running all the time2. I don't know what OneDrive is3. I don't use OneDrive4. I'm trying to fix a problem with OneDrive5. I'm trying to speed up my computer6. I get too many notifications7. OtherRead more of this story at Slashdot.

After months of high-level meetings and discussions, government officials and Big Tech leaders have agreed on one thing about artificial intelligence: The potentially world-changing technology needs some ground rules. But many in Silicon Valley are skeptical. WashingtonPost: A growing group of tech heavyweights -- including influential venture capitalists, the CEOs of midsize software companies and proponents of open-source technology -- are pushing back, claiming that laws for AI could snuff out competition in a vital new field. To these dissenters, the willingness of the biggest players in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI to embrace regulation is simply a cynical ploy by those firms to lock in their advantages as the current leaders, essentially pulling up the ladder behind them. These tech leaders' concerns ballooned last week, when President Biden signed an executive order laying out a plan to have the government develop testing and approval guidelines for AI models -- the underlying algorithms that drive "generative" AI tools such as chatbots and image-makers. "We are still in the very early days of generative AI, and it's imperative that governments don't preemptively anoint winners and shut down competition through the adoption of onerous regulations only the largest firms can satisfy," said Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based start-up incubator that helped nurture companies including Airbnb and DoorDash when they were just starting. The current discussion hasn't incorporated the voices of smaller companies enough, Tan said, which he believes is key to fostering competition and engineering the safest ways to harness AI. Companies like influential AI start-up Anthropic and OpenAI are closely tied to Big Tech, having taken huge amounts of investment from them. "They do not speak for the vast majority of people who have contributed to this industry," said Martin Casado, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which made early investments in Facebook, Slack and Lyft. Most AI engineers and entrepreneurs have been watching the regulatory discussions from afar, focusing on their companies instead of trying to lobby politicians, he said. "Many people want to build, they're innovators, they're the silent majority," Casado said. The executive order showed those people that regulation could come sooner than expected, he said. Casado's venture capital firm sent a letter to Biden laying out its concerns. It was signed by prominent AI start-up leaders including Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Mistral's Arthur Mensch, as well as more established tech leaders such as e-commerce company Shopify's CEO Tobi Lutke, who had tweeted "AI regulation is a terrible idea" after the executive order was announced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Omegle, a popular online chat service that allowed individuals to connect and chat with strangers, has shut down after 15 years citing growing misuse of the platform, including in committing "unspeakably heinous crimes." From a report: The site, founded in 2009 by a then 18-year-old programmer and high school student Leif K-Brooks, was bootstrapped throughout its existence. Though it waned in popularity over the years, it still pulled about 50 million visitors last month, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Amazon Prime members will be able to access US healthcare provider One Medical's suite of benefits, for a fee, as the ecommerce company looks to expand its presence in the $4 trillion American healthcare industry. Prime members in the US who opt in will have access to unlimited, on-demand virtual healthcare via One Medical, the subscription-based group that Amazon acquired last year for $3.9 billion. They will also be able to schedule in-person appointments that they will either pay for themselves or that will be covered by insurance. The addition to Amazon's flagship Prime membership program comes as the company looks to "stack" healthcare services together and broaden its reach in the sector, which would be "big for us if we do a good job," said Neil Lindsay, senior vice-president of Amazon Health. The subscription will cost Amazon Prime members $9 per month or $99 per year, compared with the standard One Medical subscription fee of $199 per year. That will come on top of the $139 per year, or $14.99 a month, price for a Prime subscription. The move is Amazon's latest effort to leverage its loyal base of Prime members and become a big player in the healthcare industry. In January, following its 2018 acquisition of mail-order pharmacy PillPack for about $1 billion, Amazon launched RxPass, which allows Prime members to order an unlimited amount of some unbranded prescription medications for $5 a month. It has also rolled out a "Clinic" telehealth service that connects patients with clinicians and a broader mail-order pharmacy service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Velcroman1 writes: Overclocking master Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch surfaced on Tom's Hardware to detail his work with liquid nitrogen to set a slew of new world records with Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh" CPUs. They include 15 world records with the Core i7-14700K and eight records with the Core i5-14600K, along with four records with the Core i9-14900K, spanning benchmarks from Cinebench to wPrime and H265. "My top speeds were 7,730.11 MHz on all cores on the 14900K, 7,859.05 MHz on the 14600K and 7,600 MHz on the 14700K," writes Splave. "All of these achieved in Cinebench R23 while using Liquid Nitrogen cooling." "At the end of a week of playing around, I broke the 8-core Cinebench record at a crazy 7.73 GHz on all cores," concludes Splave. "Overall, these CPUs potentially OC better than their predecessors and cost the same. It was a rather refreshing refresh, I would say."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Angela Watercutter and Will Bedingfield report via Wired: After 118 days on the picket lines, the longest such strike in Hollywood's history, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both sides were mum about the terms of the deal Wednesday night, but it comes following a long struggle over the use of artificial intelligence on actors' performances and actors' demands for residual payments for shows and films that play on streaming services. A committee from SAG, which represents thousands of film and television actors, approved the agreement Wednesday. The strike itself, which has featured pickets outside the offices of Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others, will end Thursday morning. It's expected that the tentative deal will head to the union's national board to be approved on Friday. Undeniably, this is a huge milestone for Hollywood, a $130 billion-plus industry that has all but ground to halt this year, as both the Writers Guild of America and SAG dug in their heels over fair wages and the use of AI in their work. WGA members went on strike in May; SAG walked off the job in July, the first time the industry had faced a dual work stoppage since 1960. The WGA strike ended in September with a historic deal that put up guardrails to protect writers from AI encroaching on their work. As this year's negotiations between SAG and AMPTP dragged on, generative AI became the major sticking point. Back in July, studios claimed they offered a "groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses." SAG countered that the proposal stipulated background performers could be scanned, paid for the day, and then turned into digital characters that studios could use "for the rest of eternity." (AMPTP disputed this.) The issue was volleyed back and forth until last weekend, when SAG reviewed the studios' "last, best, and final" offer and rejected it, claiming "there are several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI. A follow-up story in The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the AMPTP proposal sought to allow studios to pay for AI scans of what are known as Schedule F performers and, following the actors' death, allow studios to use the scans without the consent of the estate or SAG. Schedule F performers include anyone who makes more than the minimum rate for TV series regulars or feature films. The guild wanted compensation for reuse of the scans, along with consent. On Tuesday, the studios reportedly agreed to adjust the AI language in their proposal, a move that seems to have been the tipping point. Even though the terms of the tentative deal reached Thursday are unclear, it's hard to imagine the actors didn't get at least some of the AI protections they were seeking.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris. The underlying goal of the program is to promote a more "open and collaborative" approach to AI development across the French technology world. The timing of the announcement is notable, coming amid a growing push for regulation and a marked conflict between the "open" and "closed" AI realms. [...] While Meta itself has been open sourcing its own generative AI models, Hugging Face -- a billion-dollar VC-backed startup in its own right -- has set out its stall as a sort of open source alternative to OpenAI, replete with open alternatives to the likes of ChatGPT and spearheading community projects such as BigScience. So in many ways, Meta and Hugging Face's tie-up today makes a great deal of sense, given their respective stances on the whole "open" versus "closed" AI discussion. "For me, open source AI is the most important topic of the decade as it is the cornerstone toward democratizing ethical AI," Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said in a statement. From today through December 1 (2023), startups can apply to join the new "AI Startup Program" at Station F, with five winners proceeding to the accelerator program that will run from January to June. The chosen startups, selected by a panel of judges from Meta, Hugging Face and French cloud company Scaleway, will have at least one thing in common -- they will be working on projects substantively built on open foundation models, or at the very least can demonstrate a "willingness to integrate these models into their products and services," according to the announcement issued by Meta today. "With the proliferation of foundation models and generative artificial intelligence models, the aim is to bring the economic and technological benefits of open, state-of-the-art models to the French ecosystem," the announcement noted. Indeed, the winning startups will receive mentoring from researchers and engineers at Meta, gain access to Hugging Face's various platforms and tools, and compute resources from Scaleway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from CNN Business: Cruise, General Motors' self-driving vehicle subsidiary, has recalled all 950 of its autonomous vehicles for a software update. Late last month, Cruise paused all its public testing operations while it investigated the incident that led to the recall. [...] The update will alter the way the car responds after an impact is detected. In [that infamous San Francisco accident], the vehicle had incorrectly determined that it was struck on the side rather than hitting something in the front, according to a report (PDF) Cruise filed with NHTSA. The report did not detail exactly what the software update changes, only that it "remedies the issue described in this notice." The cars can be returned to service once the updates are completed, Cruise said in its report to NHTSA. Cruise doesn't sell its self-driving vehicles so all the cars are owned by either Cruise or GM, which produces the heavily modified Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles. The company will perform the software updates itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has beat Apple to the chase by introducing a new generative AI model that's expected to come to its devices soon. The model is called Samsung Gauss after Carl Friedrich Gauss, "the legendary mathematician who established normal distribution theory, the backbone of machine learning and AI." CNBC reports: The AI system has a number of features: the first, Samsung Gauss Language, is a generative language model which can help compose emails and translate content, as well as "enhance the consumer experience by enabling smarter device control when integrated into products." The second feature allows in-house software developers to write code quickly, while the third, Samsung Gauss Image, can generate or edit images. "Samsung Gauss is currently used on employee productivity but will be expanded to a variety of Samsung product applications to provide new user experience in the near future," Samsung said in a press release on Wednesday. Samsung could be amongst the first handset makers in the world to introduce generative AI to its devices. Daniel Araujo, Samsung's vice president of the mobile business, said on the company's earnings call last month that generative AI technology will likely reach customers next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: A federal judge on Tuesday refused to bring back a class action lawsuit alleging four auto manufacturers had violated Washington state's privacy laws by using vehicles' on-board infotainment systems to record and intercept customers' private text messages and mobile phone call logs. The Seattle-based appellate judge ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors, which are defendants in five related class action suits focused on the issue. One of those cases, against Ford, had been dismissed on appeal previously. The plaintiffs in the four live cases had appealed a prior judge's dismissal. But the appellate judge ruled Tuesday that the interception and recording of mobile phone activity did not meet the Washington Privacy Act's standard that a plaintiff must prove that "his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation" has been threatened. In an example of the issues at stake, plaintiffs in one of the five cases filed suit against Honda in 2021, arguing that beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company's vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system. An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla's software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Hardwick reports via MacRumors: WhatsApp has introduced a new privacy feature that lets you hide your IP address from whoever you call over the encrypted communications platform. As it stands, one-to-one calls over WhatsApp are established as a direct peer-to-peer connection between users. While this ensures the best possible voice quality, it means the connected devices must reveal their IP addresses to each other. According to WhatsApp, the new privacy setting introduced today works differently by relaying all of your calls through WhatsApp's servers to obfuscate your location, rather than connecting you directly to the person you are calling. Meta engineers elaborated on the feature in a blog post: "Most calling products people use today have peer-to-peer connections between participants. This direct connection allows for faster data transfers and better call quality, but it also means that participants need to know each other's IP addresses so that call data packets can be delivered to the correct device -- meaning that the IP addresses are visible to both callers on a 1:1 call. IP addresses may contain information that some of our most privacy-conscious users are mindful of, such as broad geographical location or internet provider. To address this concern, we introduced a new feature on WhatsApp that allows you to protect your IP address during calls. With this feature enabled, all your calls will be relayed through WhatsApp's servers, ensuring that other parties in the call cannot see your IP address and subsequently deduce your general geographical location." WhatsApp notes that call quality might be reduced as a result of using the new setting. The feature can be enabled under "Advanced" privacy settings in the app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A robot in a South Korea distribution center crushed a man to death after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling. The Guardian reports: The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot's sensor operations at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province. The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box, Yonhap reported, citing the police. The robotic arm pushed the man's upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap. He was transferred to the hospital but died later, the report said. The BBC notes that the man was "checking the robot's sensor operations ahead of its test run [...] scheduled for November 8." It was originally planned for November 6th, "but was pushed back by two days due to problems with the robot's sensor," the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Koebler reports via 404 Media: Voters in Maine overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure Tuesday that enshrines the right to repair cars, a major win for consumers and a blow to auto manufacturers who have spent millions lobbying against similar legislation and fighting against it in the courts. "Question 4," which enshrines consumers' data access to car diagnostics for the purposes of repair, passed by a margin of 84.3-15.7 in Tuesday's election with 94 percent of the votes tallied. The yes/no question was simple: "Do you want to require vehicle manufacturers to standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to owners and independent repair facilities?" "Maine residents have won the right to control their destiny when it comes to car repairs," Tommy Hickey, director of the Maine Automotive Right to Repair Coalition, told 404 Media. "There's a new technology in cars, they've become computers on wheels, and with this law owners in Maine will be the gatekeepers of that information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: People who buy a Fire TV from Amazon are probably looking for a cheap and simple way to get an affordable 4K smart TV. When Amazon announced its first self-branded TVs in September 2021, it touted them as being a "great value." But owners of the devices will soon be paying for some of those savings in the form of more prominently displayed advertisements. Charlotte Maines, Amazon's director of Fire TV advertising, monetization, and engagement, detailed the new types of ads that Amazon is selling on Fire TVs. In a StreamTV Insider report from November 1, Amazon said the new ads will allow advertisers to reach an average of 155 million unique monthly viewers. Some of the changes targeting advertisers, like connecting display placement ads with specific in-stream video ads, seem harmless enough. Others could jeopardize the TV-watching experience for owners. For example, Amazon is preparing to make Alexa with generative AI more useful for finding content on Fire TVs. This could help Alexa, which has struggled alongside other tech giants' voice assistants to generate significant revenue. Amazon gets money every time someone interacts with digital content through Alexa. However, the company is double-dipping on this idea by also tying ads to generative AI on Fire TVs. When users ask Alexa to help them find media with queries such as "play the show with the guy who plays the lawyer in Breaking Bad," they will see ads that are relevant to the search. [...] Finally, Amazon is adding "contextual sponsored tiles" that use machine learning to show ads based on whatever content genre or search term the Fire TV user is browsing. Amazon Fire TV users will also start seeing banner ads on the device's home screen for things that have nothing to do with entertainment or media. This ad space was previously reserved for advertising media and entertainment, making the ads feel more relevant, at least. Amazon opening the ad space to more types of advertisers is similar to a move Google TV made early this year. The banner ads will occupy the first slot in the rotating hero area, which Amazon believes is the first thing Fire TV users see.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Next April a new LTS Ubuntu arrives, and alongside it will be a whole new immutable desktop edition. At this year's Ubuntu conference in Riga, Latvia, Canonical revealed more details about its forthcoming immutable desktop distro. From a report: Core Desktop is not the next version of Ubuntu itself. Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren't going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors. Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04. Ubuntu Core is Canonical's Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays. It is an immutable distro, meaning that the root filesystem is read-only and there's no conventional package manager. Rather than being a basis for customization, like a conventional Linux, the idea is that immutable distros are rolled out and updated more like a phone or tablet OS: there's a single fixed and heavily tested OS image, and it's deployed onto the devices out in the field without modification. Updates are monolithic: a whole fresh image is pushed out, and all the OS components are upgraded in a single operation to the same combination. That isn't unique. Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE's next-gen enterprise OS ALP. As well as the well-known ChromeOS, another immutable desktop is the educational distro Endless OS. [...] Canonical believes it has some unique new angles. Core Desktop is constructed as additional layers on top of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, and like Core, it's entirely built with a single packaging system: Ubuntu's Snap. While Snap remains controversial, it does have some compelling advantages over both SUSE and Red Hat's tooling. SUSE's transactional_update tool, while simpler than its rivals in implementation, requires a snapshot-capable filesystem, meaning that its immutable distros must use Btrfs. While it has many admirers, the number and the contents of the orange and red cells in the feature tables here in its own documentation reflect the FOSS desk's serious reservations about Btrfs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the world's largest mobile data brokers, Kochava, has lost its battle to stop the Federal Trade Commission from revealing what the FTC has alleged is a disturbing, widespread pattern of unfair use and sale of sensitive data without consent from hundreds of millions of people. ArsTechnica: US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill recently unsealed a court filing, an amended complaint that perhaps contains the most evidence yet gathered by the FTC in its long-standing mission to crack down on data brokers allegedly "substantially" harming consumers by invading their privacy. The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing "a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States. According to the FTC, Kochava's customers, ostensibly advertisers, can access this data to trace individuals' movements -- including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters" -- over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged. Beyond that, the FTC alleged that Kochava also makes it easy for advertisers to target customers by categories that are "often based on specific sensitive and personal characteristics or attributes identified from its massive collection of data about individual consumers." These "audience segments" allegedly allow advertisers to conduct invasive targeting by grouping people not just by common data points like age or gender, but by "places they have visited," political associations, or even their current circumstances, like whether they're expectant parents. Or advertisers can allegedly combine data points to target highly specific audience segments like "all the pregnant Muslim women in Kochava's database," the FTC alleged, or "parents with different ages of children."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world is set to have been hotter in 2023 than in any other year on record, scientists have declared, before a landmark climate summit this month. From a report: "We can say with near certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, and is currently 1.43C above the pre-industrial average," said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. "The sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into Cop28 has never been higher." The Copernicus scientists found last month was the hottest October on record globally, with temperatures 1.7C above what they were thought to have been during the average October in the late 1800s. By burning fossil fuels and destroying nature, humans have pumped heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere that have raised the temperature of planet by 1.2C since the Industrial Revolution. The global temperature anomaly for October 2023 was the second highest across all months in its dataset, the scientists found, behind only the month before. "The fact that we're seeing this record hot year means record human suffering," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. "Within this year, extreme heatwaves and droughts made much worse by these extreme temperatures have caused thousands of deaths, people losing their livelihoods, being displaced etc. These are the records that matter. That is why the Paris agreement is a human rights treaty, and not keeping to the goals in it, is violating human rights on a vast scale."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has bowed to the inevitable and said it "expects to make" App Store policy changes to comply with EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). From a report: The iPhone-maker has updated the language pertaining to its risk factors in the fiscal year 2023 Form 10-K filing, with the revised text presenting a shift from the company's previous position, indicating a more definitive stance on potential modifications to the App Store policies. Apple said that future changes could also affect how the company charges developers for access to its platforms; how it manages distribution of apps outside of the App Store; and "how, and to what extent, it allows developers to communicate with consumers inside the App Store regarding alternative purchasing mechanisms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows Central: Microsoft began rolling out its new AI assistant for Windows earlier this year with the Windows 11 version 23H2 release, which adds a new Microsoft Copilot button directly to the Taskbar. Microsoft has been putting its Copilot in front of every user it can, but there's still a large chunk of PC users on the older Windows 10 OS which hasn't seen any of Microsoft's recent AI additions. That may soon be changing. According to my sources, Microsoft is planning to bring the same Microsoft Copilot to Windows 10 in an update coming soon. Just like Windows 11, this update to Windows 10 will place a Copilot button directly on the Windows 10 taskbar, which will open the exact same Copilot sidebar experience found on Windows 11.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model (LLMs), hoping it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet. From a report: The model, codenamed as "Olympus," has 2 trillion parameters, the people said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, one of the best models available, is reported to have one trillion parameters. The team is spearheaded by Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to CEO Andy Jassy. As head scientist of artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Amazon, Prasad brought in researchers who had been working on Alexa AI and the Amazon science team to work on training models, uniting AI efforts across the company with dedicated resources.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The scientific literature is polluted with fake manuscripts churned out by paper mills -- businesses that sell bogus work and authorships to researchers who need journal publications for their CVs. But just how large is this paper-mill problem? From a report: An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. Around 70,000 of these were published last year alone. The analysis estimates that 1.5-2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%. Without individual investigations, it is impossible to know whether all of these papers are in fact products of paper mills. But the proportion -- a few per cent -- is a reasonable conservative estimate, says Adam Day, director of scholarly data-services company Clear Skies in London, who conducted the analysis using machine-learning software he developed called the Papermill Alarm. In September, a cross-publisher initiative called the STM Integrity Hub, which aims to help publishers combat fraudulent science, licensed a version of Day's software for its set of tools to detect potentially fabricated manuscripts. Paper-mill studies are produced in large batches at speed, and they often follow specific templates, with the occasional word or image swapped. Day set his software to analyse the titles and abstracts of more than 48 million papers published since 2000, as listed in OpenAlex, a giant open index of research papers that launched last year, and to flag manuscripts with text that very closely matched known paper-mill works. These include both retracted articles and suspected paper-mill products spotted by research-integrity sleuths such as Elisabeth Bik, in California, and David Bimler (also known by the pseudonym Smut Clyde), in New Zealand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The App Defense Alliance (ADA), an initiative set up by Google back in 2019 to combat malicious Android apps infiltrating the Play app store, has joined the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), a Linux Foundation project focused on helping organizations working on technical specifications, standards, and related efforts. From a report: The App Defense Alliance had, in fact, already expanded beyond its original Android malware detection roots, covering areas such as malware mitigation, mobile app security assessments (MASA), and cloud app security assessments (CASA). And while its founding members included mobile security firms such as ESET, Lookout and Zimperium, it has ushered in new members through the years including Trend Micro and McAfee. Today's news, effectively, sees ADA join an independent foundation, a move designed to open up the appeal to other big tech companies, such as Facebook parent Meta and Microsoft, both of which are now joining the ADA's steering committee. The ultimate goal is to "improve app security" through fostering greater "collaborative implementation of industry standards," according to a joint statement today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iMessage serves as "an important gateway between business users and their customers" and should be regulated as a "core" service under the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA), said Google and a group of major European telcos in a letter sent to the European Commission. From a report: Being designated as a "core platform service" would be significant for iMessage, as it could compel Apple to make it interoperable with other messaging services. The letter arrives as the European Commission investigates whether iMessage meets the requirements to be regulated under the bloc's strict DMA rules. Google has been very vocal about its desire for Apple to adopt RCS, the cross-platform messaging standard pitched as the successor to SMS, with its #GetTheMessage campaign. "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy," Google senior vice-president Hiroshi Lockheimer posted on X, then known as Twitter, last year. "Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The airship -- its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway -- has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles. "It's been 10 years of blood, sweat and tears," LTA CEO Alan Weston told TechCrunch on the eve of the unveiling. "Now we must show that this can reliably fly in real-world conditions. And we're going to do that." A series of increasingly ambitious flight tests lie ahead, before Pathfinder 1 is moved to Akron, Ohio, where LTA Research is planning an even larger airship, the Pathfinder 3. The company eventually hopes to produce a family of airships to provide disaster relief where roads and airports are damaged, as well as zero-carbon passenger transportation. For the next year however, the gigantic airship looks set to become a Silicon Valley landmark as its novel materials and systems are methodically put through their paces within shouting distance of companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. "I'm excited about the potential of not building just one airship, but laying the foundation for many airships to be built," said Weston. "The innovations and the technologies that we're about to demonstrate have the potential to lay the foundation for a new industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rockstar Games, a division of Take-Two Interactive Software, plans to announce the next highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto game as early as this week, according to Bloomberg. From a report: The company plans to then publish a trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI next month to celebrate Rockstar's 25th anniversary, said the people, who asked to not be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for Rockstar didn't immediately respond to a request for comment sent after business hours. No video game has driven more fervor from fans and investors than Grand Theft Auto VI, which is expected to be one of the most significant entertainment releases of the decade. Its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto V, has sold more than 185 million copies and is the second-best selling video game of all time, behind Minecraft, which had the advantage of also being playable on phones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Scientists have long thought that the glaciers in North Greenland have been stable -- a vital condition, as they contain enough ice to raise the sea level by nearly 7 feet. But a new study published on Tuesday found that ice shelves in the region have lost more than a third of their volume in the last half-century because of rising temperatures -- and if it continues, scientists say there could be "dramatic consequences" for glaciers, and the planet. Using thousands of satellite images and climate modeling, the study, published in Nature Communications, found that North Greenland's ice shelves "have lost more than 35% of their total volume" since 1978. Ice shelves are the part of ice sheets -- a form of glacier -- that float over water. Three of those shelves in North Greenland have "completely" collapsed, researchers said, and of the five main shelves that remain, they said they have seen a "widespread increase" in how much mass they have lost, mostly due to the warming of the ocean. One of the shelves, called Steenbsy, shrank to just 34% of its previous area between 2000 and 2013. Along with the loss of overall ice shelf volume, scientists said the area of floating ice decreased by more than a third of its original extent since 1978. This observation could pose a major problem, as the Greenland ice sheet is the second-largest contributor to sea level rise. From 2006 to 2018, scientists noted that the single sheet was responsible for more than 17% of sea level rise in that period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo has confirmed that it's working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, directed by Wes Ball and produced by Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto. The Verge reports: "This is Miyamoto. I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films," Miyamoto said in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. We might be waiting a while for the movie, however; Miyamoto said, "It will take time until its completion, but I hope you look forward to seeing it." While there aren't many details on the movie itself, Nintendo says that it will be co-financed by itself and Sony, with Nintendo footing more than 50 percent of the bill. "By producing visual contents of Nintendo IP by itself, Nintendo is creating new opportunities to have people from around the world to access the world of entertainment which Nintendo has built, through different means apart from its dedicated game consoles," the company said in a statement about the Zelda film. "By getting deeply involved in the movie production with the aim to put smiles on everyone's faces through entertainment, Nintendo will continue its efforts to produce unique entertainment and deliver it to as many people as possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Europe's Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe. Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional. Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy. The 1.4 billion euro Euclid telescope went into space in July. Since then, engineers have been fine-tuning it. There were some early worries. Initially, Euclid's optics couldn't lock on to stars to take a steady image. This required new software for the telescope's fine guidance sensor. Engineers also found some stray light was polluting pictures when the observatory was pointed in a certain way. But with these issues all now resolved, Euclid is good to go -- as evidenced by the release of five sample images on Tuesday. "No previous space telescope has been able to combine the breadth, depth and sharpness of vision that Euclid can," notes the BBC. "The astonishing James Webb telescope, for example, has much higher resolution, but it can't cover the amount of sky that Euclid does in one shot."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [A] new tech startup, Prophetic, aims to bring lucid dreams to a much wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to spark the experience when desired. Prophetic is the brainchild of Eric Wollberg, its chief executive officer, and Wesley Louis Berry III, its chief technology officer. The pair co-founded the company earlier this year with the goal of combining technologies, such as ultrasound and machine learning models, "to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams" with a device called the Halo according to the company's website. [...] Prophetic does not make any medical claims about its forthcoming products -- Halo is tentatively slated for a 2025 release -- though Wollberg and Berry both expressed optimism about broader scientific research that suggests lucid dreams can reduce PTSD-related nightmares, promote mindfulness, and open new windows into the mysterious nature of consciousness. To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company. The collaboration will also explore one of central technologies behind Prophetic's vision, known as transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS). This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain, and interact with neural activity, with a depth and precision that cannot be achieved with previous methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation. At this point, both the possibilities and limits of Prophetic's concept remain unclear. While ultrasound devices have been widely used in medicine for decades, the process of stimulating parts of the brain with TUS is a relatively new development. Within the past few years, scientists have shown that TUS "has the potential to be used both as a scientific instrument to investigate brain function and as a therapeutic modality to modulate brain activity," according to a 2019 study, and "could be a useful tool in the treatment of clinical disorders characterized by negative mood states, like depression and anxiety disorders," according to a 2020 study. What is not known, yet, is whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, though the Prophetic team is banking on a positive answer to this open question. Its wearable headband prototype, the Halo, was developed with the company Card79 and can currently read EEG data of users. Over the next year, Prophetic aims to use the dataset from their partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users with ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy reports via The Verge: The Chamberlain Group -- owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech -- has announced it's shut off all "unauthorized access" to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for. The move comes a year after Chamberlain discontinued its official Apple HomeKit integration and a few months after it finally killed support for Google Assistant. It's sadly another example of how the company continues to be hostile to the interoperable smart home. Last week, in a blog post, Dan Phillips, chief technology officer of Chamberlain, explained the reasons behind its latest move: "Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps. This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users." When asked what customers that relied on these now-defunct integrations do, a spokesperson for the company said: "We have a number of authorized partners that we will be happy for people to use," pointing to its partner webpage. "However, those partners are primarily smart security companies with monthly subscriptions (such as Alarm.com and Vivint) and car manufacturers," notes The Verge. Some alternatives to a MyQ smart garage controller are mentioned in the report, such as Tailwind's $90 iQ3 Pro smart garage controller, Meross' $60 Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener, iSmartgate's $40 iSmartgate Mini, and Ratgdo's $30 Wi-Fi control board. The moral for smart home users, as summed up by Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen, is: "Buy products that work locally and won't stop functioning when management wants an additional revenue stream."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel may receive billions in U.S. government funding to build secret facilities that produce microchips for the military. SiliconANGLE reports: The facilities, which have not yet been disclosed, would be designated as a "secure enclave" to reduce the military's dependence on chips imported from East Asia, particularly Taiwan, which is at risk of a future invasion from China. The funding for the new facilities would come from the $52.7 billion allocated under the Chips Act, signed into law by President Biden in August 2022. The Chips Act, which had bipartisan support, promotes chipmaking and scientific research through funding and tax credits. The law is aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and helping U.S. companies compete with China in developing cutting-edge technologies. The new Intel facilities, presuming they go ahead, could reside partly at Intel's Arizona factory complex, according to sources referenced in the Journal report. The exact amount of funding that will be made available is not yet known, but "people familiar with the situation" tell the Journal that they could cost about $3 billion to $4 billion, which would come from the $39 billion set aside in the Chips Act for manufacturing grants. Officials from the Commerce Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department are said to be negotiating the project with Intel but have not yet made a final decision. The first manufacturing grants under the Chip Act are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The program was reported to have had more than 500 entities express interest and more than 130 have submitted applications or pre-applications for funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lora Kolodny reports via CNBC: Cruise CEO and founder Kyle Vogt posted comments on Hacker News on Sunday responding to allegations that his company's robotaxis aren't really self-driving, but instead require frequent help from humans working in a remote operations center. First, Vogt confirmed that the General Motors-owned company does have a remote assistance team, in response to a discussion under the header, "GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve 'autonomous' driving." The CEO wrote, "Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn't a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations." Cruise recently took the drastic move of grounding all of its driverless operations following a collision that injured a pedestrian in San Francisco on October 2. The collision and Cruise's disclosures around it led to state regulators stripping the company of its permits to operate driverless vehicles in California, unless there is a driver aboard. [...] A New York Times story followed last week diving into issues within Cruise that may have led to the safety issues, and setback for Cruise's reputation and business. The story included a stat that at Cruise, workers intervened to help the company's cars every 2.5 to five miles. Vogt explained on Hacker News that the stat was a reference to how frequently Cruise robotaxis initiate a remote assistance session. He wrote, "Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode." CNBC asked Cruise to confirm and provide further details on Monday. The Cruise spokesperson wrote in an e-mail, that a "remote assistance" session is triggered roughly every four to five miles, not every 2.5 miles, in Cruise's driverless fleet. [...] CNBC also asked Cruise for information about typical response time for remote operations, and how remote assistance workers at Cruise are trained. "More than 98% of sessions are answered within 3 seconds," the spokesperson said. As far as the ratio of remote assistance advisors to driverless vehicles on the road, the Cruise spokesperson said, "During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data. Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch. [...] One feature of Waze that was unique for a long time was its ability to crowdsource traffic information. Users add live traffic information to the app as they drive, like a car stopped by the side of the road or a crash. Waze now leverages that data, together with geographic information, including road layout and elevation, plus typical traffic levels, to determine whether a particular stretch of road has a high crash rate. Should that be the case, the app will warn the driver. However, Waze says that to minimize distractions, it won't show these alerts on regularly traveled roads and will limit alerts on unfamiliar roads to prevent driver overload.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Coinbase, America's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has announced they are completely removing all support for Bitcoin SV (BSV) by January 9. All current holders of that cryptocurrency on the exchange will need to withdraw or the assets will be liquidated after that date. Bitcoin SV is not the original Bitcoin but a fork supported by Craig Wright. This removal follows a delisting in 2021 after the cryptocurrency suffered a "51% attack." Since that time clients have not been about to buy or sell Bitcoin SV on the exchange. According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin SV is currently the 53rd biggest digital assets, with a market cap of $967 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader RobHart writes: During the night, the entire Optus mobile network went down and remains down. This is the second largest mobile network in Australia and it is the first time a network has gone down nationwide. It is affecting the trains in Melbourne and any business across Australia that uses the Optus service for phones or data. "Optus is aware of an issue that may be impacting some of our mobile and internet customers," the company wrote in a statement. "We are currently working to identify the cause and apologize for any inconvenience. In case of an emergency customers can still call triple zero." Authorities are checking whether the outage is the result of a cyberattack, although they don't believe it is.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Though negotiators from both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) met this past weekend in hopes of bringing Hollywood's ongoing labor strike to an end, contract talks have reportedly stalled once again due to the desire of studios to own performers' digitally scanned likenesses in perpetuity. Previously, the AMPTP insisted that its most recent proposed contract was its "best and final" offer. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, SAG-AFTRA refused and walked away from the negotiations over the AMPTP's insistence on pushing for new rules regarding the use of people's likenesses that would ultimately leave actors in the lurch. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the AMPTP's newest contract would allow studios to secure the digitally scanned likenesses of all Schedule F performers -- members of the guild making more than the minimum $32,000 / episode rate for series or more than $60,000 for feature films. The AMPTP has been trying to get SAG-AFTRA on board with the idea of studios paying actors for their likenesses since the strike began earlier this year. Because this most recent proposal would allow studios to use digital scans of dead actors without the consent of their estates or the guild, however, SAG-AFTRA has refused and expressed its desire for changes that would require the studios to pay actors each time their faces are used and receive consent from those actors before doing so. On Monday evening, SAG-AFTRA posted a short message to X (formerly Twitter) stating, "There are several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an attempt to boost broadband competition, Canada's telecom regulator is forcing large phone companies to open their fiber networks to competitors. Smaller companies will be allowed to buy network capacity and use it to offer competing broadband plans to consumers. From a report: Evidence received during a comment period "shows that competition in the Internet services market is declining," the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in its announcement. The CRTC said the "decrease is most significant in Ontario and Quebec, where independent competitors now serve 47 percent fewer customers than they did just two years ago. At the same time, several competitors have been bought out by larger Internet providers. This has left many Canadians with fewer options for high-speed Internet services." The CRTC hasn't made a final decision on fiber resale. But in the meantime, until a more permanent ruling is made, large telcos in Ontario and Quebec will be "required to provide competitors with access to their fibre-to-the-home networks within six months," the CRTC said. The six-month period is intended to give companies time to prepare their networks and develop information technology and billing systems, the agency said. "On a temporary and expedited basis, the CRTC is providing competitors with a workable way to sell Internet services using the fibre-to-the-home networks of large telephone companies in Ontario and Quebec, where competition has declined most significantly," the agency said. "The CRTC is also setting the interim rates that competitors will pay when selling services over these fibre-to-the-home networks. These rates were chosen to allow Canada's large Internet companies to continue investing in their networks to deliver high-quality services to Canadians."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is coming for Honey and other deal-finding tools by introducing new features on Search and Chrome to help users find discounts. From a report: The tech giant announced on Tuesday that it's adding a designated page for deals on Search, while Chrome is getting features that proactively look for discount codes and provide users with price insights. The new deals search results page on Search is designed to help users find products that are on sale from across the web in one designated spot. The page will display deals in categories like apparel, electronics, toys and beauty. You'll also find deals from different types of merchants, including big box stores, DTC brands, luxury multi-brand retailers, designer labels and local stores. Users can scroll through deals by category and also see popular stores that have deals on what you're looking for. If you see something you're interested in, you can click on the product or visit the merchant site to learn more. Google says that if you're signed into your Google account, the page will take into account what you usually like to shop. To access the new deals page, you need to search "shop deals." Or, if you're looking for something specific, you can search for categories like "shop sneaker deals."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech groups have called on ministers to clarify the extent of proposed powers that they fear would allow the UK government to intervene and block the rollout of new privacy features for messaging apps. FT: The Investigatory Powers Amendment Bill, which was set out in the King's Speech on Tuesday, would oblige companies to inform the Home Office in advance about any security or privacy features they want to add to their platforms, including encryption. At present, the government has the power to force telecoms companies and messaging platforms to supply data on national security grounds and to help with criminal investigations. The new legislation was designed to "recalibrate" those powers to respond to risks posed to public safety by multinational tech companies rolling out new services that "preclude lawful access to data," the government said. But Meredith Whittaker, president of private messaging group Signal, urged ministers to provide more clarity on what she described as a "bellicose" proposal amid fears that, if enacted, the new legislation would allow ministers and officials to veto the introduction of new safety features. "We will need to see the details, but what is being described suggests an astonishing level of technically confused government over-reach that will make it nearly impossible for any service, homegrown or foreign, to operate with integrity in the UK," she told the Financial Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor -- a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance -- capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure. From a report: The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. "They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied," it says, adding that these co-authors "have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper." It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year. "It is at this point hardly surprising that the team of Dias and Salamat has a third high-profile paper being retracted," says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and at Ames National Laboratory. Many physicists had seen the Nature retraction as inevitable after the other two -- and especially since The Wall Street Journal and Science reported in September that 8 of the 11 authors of the paper -- including Salamat -- had requested it in a letter to the journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a rare move, Apple hit pause on development of next year's software updates for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other devices so that it could root out glitches in the code. From a report: The delay, announced internally to employees last week, was meant to help maintain quality control after a proliferation of bugs in early versions, according to people with knowledge of the decision. Rather than adding new features, company engineers were tasked with fixing the flaws and improving the performance of the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Apple's software -- famous for its clean interfaces, easy-to-use controls and focus on privacy -- is one of its biggest selling points. That makes quality control imperative. But the company has to balance a desire to add new features with making sure its operating systems run as smoothly as possible. [...] When looking at new operating systems due for release next year, the software engineering management team found too many "escapes" -- an industry term for bugs missed during internal testing. So the division took the unusual step of halting all new feature development for one week to work on fixing the bugs. With thousands of different Apple employees working on a range of operating systems and devices -- that need to work together seamlessly -- it's easy for glitches to crop up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Baidu ordered AI chips from Huawei this year, Reuters reported citing two people familiar with the matter, adding to signs that U.S. pressure is prompting Chinese acceptance of the firm's products as an alternative to Nvidia's. From the report: One of the people said Baidu, one of China's leading AI firms, which operates the Ernie large language model, placed the order in August, ahead of widely anticipated new rules by the U.S. government that in October tightened restrictions on exports of chips and chip tools to China, including those of U.S. chip giant Nvidia. Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's 910B Ascend AI chips - which the Chinese firm developed as an alternative to Nvidia's A100 chip - for 200 servers, the source said, adding that by October, Huawei had delivered more 60% of the order, or about 1,000 chips, to Baidu. The second person said that the order's total value was approximately 450 million yuan ($61.83 million) and that Huawei was to deliver all of the chips by the end of this year. Although the order is tiny relative to the thousands of chips top Chinese tech firms have historically ordered from Nvidia, the sources said it was significant, as it showed how some firms could shift away from the U.S. company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the midst of an AI chip shortage, Microsoft wants to give a privileged few startups free access to "supercomputing" resources from its Azure cloud for developing AI models. From a report: Microsoft today announced it's updating its startup program, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, to include a no-cost Azure AI infrastructure option for "high-end," Nvidia-based GPU virtual machine clusters to train and run generative models, including large language models along the lines of ChatGPT. Y Combinator and its community of startup founders will be the first to gain access to the clusters in private preview. Why Y Combinator? Annie Pearl, VP of growth and ecosystems, Microsoft, called YC the "ideal initial partner," given its track record working with startups "at the earliest stages." "We're working closely with Y Combinator to prioritize the asks from their current cohort, and then alumni, as part of our initial preview," Pearl said. "The focus will be on tasks like training and fine-tuning use cases that unblock innovation." It's not the first time Microsoft's attempted to curry favor with Y Combinator startups. In 2015, the company said it would give $500,000 in Azure credits to YC's Winter 2015 batch, a move that at the time was perceived as an effort to draw these startups away from rival clouds. One might argue the GPU clusters for AI training and inferencing are along the same self-serving vein.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Combing through the code of the new version of Google Photos app for Android, some users have found that Google plans to restrict Magic Editor, a feature it unveiled at Google I/O this year, from making certain kinds of edit. AndroidAuthority: Summarizing the strings above, it seems Magic Editor will refuse to edit:1. Photos of ID cards, receipts, and other documents that violate Google's GenAI terms.2. Images with personally identifiable information.3. Human faces and body parts.4. Large selections or selections that need a lot of data to be generated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.