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As the conflict between Israel and Hamas reaches its third week, internet connectivity in Gaza is getting worse. From a report: On Thursday, internet monitoring firm NetBlocks wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the Palestinian internet service provider NetStream "has collapsed days after the operator notified subscribers that service would end due to a severe shortage of fuel supplies." According to Doug Madory, an expert who for years has worked at various companies that monitor networks across the world, internet connectivity in Gaza is dramatically worsening. "The evidence of the crippled internet in Gaza is not hard to find. By every metric of internet connectivity, things are in bad shape," Madory, who is now the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch. Madory said that he monitored internet connectivity in Gaza during the 2014 war. At the time, despite some outages, "the ISPs were able to keep their connections to the outside world up using backup power, etc, even if many people were unable to access service due to power outages and infrastructure failures."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced the creation of a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the international governance of artificial intelligence. From a report: Members include tech company executives, government officials from Spain to Saudi Arabia, and academics from countries such as the U.S., Russia and Japan. Sony Chief Technology Officer Hiroaki Kitano, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Microsoft Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton are among the executives representing technology companies. Representatives also come from six continents with diverse backgrounds ranging from U.S.-based AI expert Vilas Dhar to Professor Yi Zeng fom China and Egyptian lawyer Mohamed Farahat. "The transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp," Guterres said in a statement. "And without entering into a host of doomsday scenarios, it is already clear that the malicious use of AI could undermine trust in institutions, weaken social cohesion and threaten democracy itself," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, Plumber Near Me -- businesses across the country picked names meant to outsmart Google Search. Does it actually work? From a report: Thai Food Near Me isn't the first business to think of the Google-first naming convention. There are reminders of Google's kingmaker status in online discoverability everywhere in cities across the country. Among the businesses I was able to find: a chain of half a dozen Affordable Dentist Near Me's in Texas; an Antiques Near Me two hours outside of New York City; seven Plumber Near Me businesses; a Phone Repair Near Me in Cape Cod, Massachusetts; a Psychic Near Me in Chicago; and more than 20 iterations of "Notary Near Me" across the US. Felix Silva decided on the name Barber Shop Near Me after considering more than 20 other options for his Coral Springs, Florida, store in 2019. The name is meant to be neutral and memorable -- another one in contention was "The Barber Shop" -- but Silva fully leaned into the Google joke: the logo is a red location pin resembling Google's own, with a blue, white, and red barber pole pattern in the middle. [...] As with Thai Food Near Me, the most powerful thing an SEO-driven name might be able to do is get customers in the door. From there, it's up to a business to give them a good experience, whether that's a great plate of pad see ew or the perfect haircut. Then, the cycle continues -- happy customers leave good reviews. Good reviews help the business's Google Maps profile rank higher. Silva uploads high-quality photos and videos to the page and shares updates, too. That's another SEO move; some experts say active profiles can improve a business's rankings. Still, the naming scheme has caught on: one acquaintance selling Christmas trees, for example, rebranded his business to be called Christmas Trees Near Me, Silva says. (Silva's is not the only Barber Shop Near Me, either -- there are also shops with the same name in Oak Park, Illinois; Queens, New York; and Muskogee, Oklahoma, according to Google Maps.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has delivered a petition to Microsoft calling on the company to rethink the impending abandonment of Windows 10 in the face of millions of PCs potentially being rendered eligible for landfill overnight. From a report: There are now less than two years until Microsoft is due to cut support for Windows 10, and at current estimates, 400 million PCs can't make the jump to Windows 11. The petition, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, criticizes its plans and states that customers expect their devices to last rather than be rendered obsolete by an arbitrary decision. PIRG warns that tipping that much hardware into landfills is somewhat at odds with the company's stance on the environment. The petition reads: "All software reaches a point at which it's no longer supported, but when the consequences to our environment are this large we shouldn't accept it." As a reminder, while Windows 10 was largely backwards-compatible with computers running older operating systems, Microsoft slapped hardware requirements on Windows 11 that rendered machines even just a few years old unable to upgrade -- the main issues center on the CPU and TPM requirements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, promised to scrap the hidden fees plaguing its ticketing service earlier this year. But one senator says the company's not doing nearly enough. From a report: In a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino Wednesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called on the company to turn on an "all-in" pricing filter that it added this year by default. Klobuchar said it's "still too difficult" for users to turn on the filter that's "buried within a tab that gives no indication that it contains" the option in the first place. "Millions of Americans rely on your company for the chance to see their favorite artist, band, or sports team," Klobuchar wrote. "In return for their business and trust, your customers expect a transparent and honest ticket buying process free from hidden fees." Back in June, Live Nation, along with AirBnB, SeatGeek, and DICE, pledged to disclose the full price of their tickets and services as part of an agreement with the White House to reduce "junk fees." At the time, Live Nation said that these new rules would start applying to events in September.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: As far as we know, Brazil-based file-sharing forum FileWarez.com first appeared in August 2004, its domain name having been registered the previous month. The default language was naturally Portuguese and according to this image from the Wayback Machine, potential members needed a basic grip of the language to sign up. After all, Google Translate wouldn't exist for another two years. At some point in the years that followed, FileWarez shifted to a Netherlands .NL domain supported by filewarez.no-ip.biz, which may suggest a site regularly on the move. In 2008, unspecified problems saw the .NL domain dumped in favor of a new one. Riding out problems, various issues, and bouts of downtime, FileWarez.tv stayed in place for the next 15.5 years. Then two weeks ago, after establishing itself as Brazil's oldest file-sharing forum, FileWarez suddenly vanished. In a press release Wednesday, global music industry group IFPI announced that "prominent illegal file-sharing forum, FileWarez," was shut down following co-ordinated action by record companies, anti-piracy body APDIF, and local cybercrime unit, Cyber Gaeco. "IFPI, the organization that represents the recorded music industry worldwide, alongside its Brazilian national group Pro-Musica, have welcomed the successful action against FileWarez.tv -- one of the most prominent illegal file sharing sites in Brazil -- by the Brazilian special cybercrime unit of prosecutor's office of Sao Paulo, Cyber Gaeco," the announcement reads. "FileWarez was the most established illegal filesharing forum in Brazil, dedicated to sharing illegal music content. While active, the site had more than 118,000 registered users with at least 24,000 monthly active users."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine finds that about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may combat the negative effects of prolonged sitting. Furthermore, they researchers found that as a person's activity level increases, the risk of dying prematurely from any cause goes down. NBC News reports: In the study, researchers looked at information from nearly 12,000 people ages 50 and older in four datasets from Norway, Sweden and the United States. In those datasets, the participants wore movement detection devices on their hips for 10 hours a day for at least four days. All of the individuals included in the new study were tracked for at least two years. In the new analysis, the researchers accounted for factors, including medical conditions, that could've affected risk of early death. About half of the participants spent 10 1/2 hours or more sedentary each day. When the researchers linked the participants' information with death registries in the different countries, they found that over an average of five years, 805 people, or 17%, had died. Of those who died, 357, or 6%, had spent less than 10 1/2 hours a day seated, while 448 averaged 10 1/2 hours or more sedentary. Sitting for more than 12 hours a day, the researchers found, was associated with a 38% increased risk of death as compared to eight hours, but only among those who managed to get less than 22 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a day. The risk of death went down with increasing amounts of physical activity. An extra 10 minutes a day translated into a 15% lower risk of death among those spending fewer than 10 1/2 hours seated and a 35% lower risk among those who spent more than 10 1/2 hours sedentary each day. Lower intensity activity only made a difference among participants who spent 12 or more hours sitting every day. The study's lead author, Edvard Sagelv, a researcher at The Arctic University of Norway, broke the findings down into manageable terms. "Think of it: only 20 minutes of this a day is enough, meaning, a small stroll of 10 minutes twice a day -- like jumping off the bus one stop before your actual destination to work and then when taking the bus back home, jumping off one stop before."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study published in iScience, the way pigeons problem-solve matches artificial intelligence. The Guardian reports: In the study, 24 pigeons were given a variety of visual tasks, some of which they learned to categorize in a matter of days, and others in a matter of weeks. The researchers found evidence that the mechanism that pigeons used to make correct choices is similar to the method that AI models use to make the right predictions. "Pigeon behavior suggests that nature has created an algorithm that is highly effective in learning very challenging tasks," said Edward Wasserman, study co-author and professor of experimental psychology at the University of Iowa. "Not necessarily with the greatest speed, but with great consistency." On a screen, pigeons were shown different stimuli, like lines of different width, placement and orientation, as well as sectioned and concentric rings. Each bird had to peck a button on the right or left to decide which category they belonged to. If they got it correct, they got food, in the form of a pellet; if they got it wrong, they got nothing. "Pigeons don't need a rule," said Brandon Turner, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. Instead they learn through trial and error. For example, when they were given a visual, say "category A", anything that looked close to that they also classified as "category A", tapping into their ability to identify similarities. Over the course of the experiments, pigeons improved their ability to make right choices from 55% to 95% of the time when it came to some of the simpler tasks. Presented with a more complex challenge, their accuracy went up from 55% to 68%. In an AI model, the main goal is to recognize patterns and make decisions. Pigeons, as research shows, can do the same. Learning from consequences, when not given a food pellet, pigeons have a remarkable ability to correct their errors. Similarity function is also at play for pigeons, by using their ability to find resemblance between two objects. "With just those two mechanisms alone, you can define a neural network or an artificial intelligent machine to basically solve these categorization problems," said Turner. "It stands to reason that the mechanisms that are present in the AI are also present in the pigeon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sam Bankman-Fried took the stand in his criminal trial today in an attempt to avoid decades in prison for alleged fraud at cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its affiliate Alameda Research. [...] Some of the alleged fraud relates to how Alameda borrowed money from FTX. In testimony today, "Bankman-Fried said he believed that under FTX's terms of service, sister firm Alameda was allowed in many circumstances to borrow funds from the exchange," the WSJ wrote. Bankman-Fried reportedly said the terms of service were written by FTX lawyers and that he only "skimmed" certain parts. "I read parts in depth. Parts I skimmed over," Bankman-Fried reportedly said after [U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan] asked if he read the entire terms of service document. Sassoon asked Bankman-Fried if he had "any conversations with lawyers about Alameda spending customer money that was deposited into FTX bank accounts," according to Bloomberg's live coverage. "I don't recall any conversations that were contemporaneous and phrased that way," Bankman-Fried answered. "I had so many conversations with lawyers later when we were trying to reconcile things in November 2022," Bankman-Fried also said. "There were conversations around Alameda being used as a payment processor, a payment agent for FTX. I frankly don't recall conversations with lawyers or otherwise about the usage of the funds or the North Dimension accounts." North Dimension was an Alameda subsidiary. The Securities and Exchange Commission has alleged that "Bankman-Fried directed FTX to have customers send funds to North Dimension in an effort to hide the fact that the funds were being sent to an account controlled by Alameda." [...] In an overview of the alleged crimes, the indictment said Bankman-Fried "misappropriated and embezzled FTX customer deposits and used billions of dollars in stolen funds... to enrich himself; to support the operations of FTX; to fund speculative venture investments; to help fund over a hundred million dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans to seek to influence cryptocurrency regulation; and to pay for Alameda's operating costs." He was also accused of making "false and fraudulent statements and representations to FTX's investors and Alameda's lenders." SBF's legal team decided that he would take the stand in his own defense -- a risky decision by legal observers as he will have to face cross-examination from federal prosecutors. In a rather unusual move, Judge Kaplan sent the jury home for a day to conduct a hearing on whether certain parts of Bankman-Fried's testimony are admissible. During his testimony, Bankman-Fried discussed various aspects of the case, including FTX's terms of service, loans from Alameda to him and other executives, a hack into FTX, and his use of the encrypted messaging service Signal. Live paywall-free updates of the trial are available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Illegal dumping is way too common, and often leads to no consequences," writes Slashdot reader Tony Isaac. "In some urban neighborhoods, people dump entire truckloads of waste in ditches along the streets. Maybe authorities have found a way to make a dent in this problem." Houston Chronicle reports: The Texas Game Wardens were recently able to track down and arrest a litterbug allegedly behind an illegal dumping of over 200 pounds of construction materials using a barcode left at the scene of the crime, according to a news release from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). The pile of trash, which included sheetrock, housing trim, two-by-fours and various plastic items, was reportedly dumped along a bridge and creek on private land instead of being properly disposed of. However, hidden among the garbage was also a box containing a barcode that would help identify the person behind the heap. A Smith County Game Warden used the barcode to track down the materials to a local store, and ultimately the owner of the credit card that was used for the purchase, TPWD said. The game warden interviewed the home owner who had reportedly just finished remodeling his home. "The homeowner explained that he paid someone familiar to the family who offered to haul off their used material and trash for a minimum fee," Texas Games Wardens said in a statement. "Unfortunately, the suspect kept the money and dumped the trash onto private property." Working with the game warden, Smith County Sheriff's Office environmental deputies eventually arrested the suspect on charges of felony commercial dumping. At the time of the arrest, the suspect's truck was reportedly found loaded with even more building materials and trash, TPWD said. The state agency did not identify the suspect or disclose when or where they were arrested.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: Three years ago, Apple introduced a privacy-enhancing feature that hid the Wi-Fi address of iPhones and iPads when they joined a network. On Wednesday, the world learned that the feature has never worked as advertised. Despite promises that this never-changing address would be hidden and replaced with a private one that was unique to each SSID, Apple devices have continued to display the real one, which in turn got broadcast to every other connected device on the network. [...] In 2020, Apple released iOS 14 with a feature that, by default, hid Wi-Fi MACs when devices connected to a network. Instead, the device displayed what Apple called a "private Wi-Fi address" that was different for each SSID. Over time, Apple has enhanced the feature, for instance, by allowing users to assign a new private Wi-Fi address for a given SSID. On Wednesday, Apple released iOS 17.1. Among the various fixes was a patch for a vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-42846, which prevented the privacy feature from working. Tommy Mysk, one of the two security researchers Apple credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability (Talal Haj Bakry was the other), told Ars that he tested all recent iOS releases and found the flaw dates back to version 14, released in September 2020. "From the get-go, this feature was useless because of this bug," he said. "We couldn't stop the devices from sending these discovery requests, even with a VPN. Even in the Lockdown Mode." When an iPhone or any other device joins a network, it triggers a multicast message that is sent to all other devices on the network. By necessity, this message must include a MAC. Beginning with iOS 14, this value was, by default, different for each SSID. To the casual observer, the feature appeared to work as advertised. The "source" listed in the request was the private Wi-Fi address. Digging in a little further, however, it became clear that the real, permanent MAC was still broadcast to all other connected devices, just in a different field of the request. Mysk published a short video showing a Mac using the Wireshark packet sniffer to monitor traffic on the local network the Mac is connected to. When an iPhone running iOS prior to version 17.1 joins, it shares its real Wi-Fi MAC on port 5353/UDP.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Threads is officially a success," writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland. 9to5Mac reports: During Meta's quarterly earnings call today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered an update on the Threads, saying that the service has "just under" 100 million monthly active users. When Threads launched in July, the app quickly rocketed to having 100 million users within just a few days. While that growth is believed to have slowed down, as expected when something takes off so quickly, Zuckerberg says the service is currently at almost 100 million active users. Note the difference in terms, too. Having 100 million "users" is one thing, while having 100 million monthly active users is quite different -- and more impressive. The number is also impressive when you consider that Threads isn't available to the millions of people who live in the European Union. As noted by The Verge, Zuckerberg also reiterated today that Meta's goal is to turn Threads into a "billion-person public conversations app" that is "a bit more positive" than some of the competition. According to Zuckerberg, Threads is on the way to achieving that goal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: T-Mobile caused a bit of a stir earlier this month when a leak revealed it planned to move people from older, cheaper plans to pricier ones starting with their November bill cycle. On Wednesday, the carrier officially walked back the changes with CEO Mike Sievert confirming that they would not happen. "We tend to do tests and pilots of things quite a bit to try to figure out what's the right answer," Sievert said on a company earnings call, in response to a question about industry pricing and how it could raise its average revenues per user, a key industry metric. "In this case, we had a test sell to try to understand customer interest in, and acceptance of, migrating off old legacy rate plans to something that's higher value, for them and for us." Sievert noted that the company was doing training around this test and said it wasn't planned to be a "broad, national thing." In its statement confirming the leak, the company told CNET earlier this month that the notices it was sending out was going to "a small number" of its users, but the carrier never clarified what a "small number" actually meant and didn't respond to that question when asked. At the time, the carrier said that the switch would generally see customers pay "an increase of approximately $10 per line" per month. With the "plenty of feedback" the company received following the leak, Sievert said that T-Mobile has learned that this "particular test sell isn't something that our customers are going to love." He mentioned that no migrations of plans have actually rolled out. As for what will happen going forward, the carrier will continue to do tests and pilots for different changes, Mike Katz, T-Mobile's president of marketing, strategy and products, said on the call.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Privacy advocate Alexander Hanff has filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) challenging YouTube's use of JavaScript code to detect the presence of ad blocking extensions in the browsers of website visitors," writes long-time Slashdot reader Dotnaught. "He claims that under Europe's ePrivacy Directive, YouTube needs to ask permission to run its detection script because it's not technically necessary. If the DPC agrees, it would be a major win for user privacy." The Register reports: Asked how he hopes the Irish DPC will respond, Hanff replied via email, "I would expect the DPC to investigate and issue an enforcement notice to YouTube requiring them to cease and desist these activities without first obtaining consent (as per [Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)] standard) for the deployment of their -spyware- detection scripts; and further to order YouTube to unban any accounts which have been banned as a result of these detections and to delete any personal data processed unlawfully (see Article 5(1) of GDPR) since they first started to deploy their -spyware- detection scripts." Hanff's use of strikethrough formatting to acknowledges the legal difficulty of using the term "spyware" to refer to YouTube's ad block detection code. The security industry's standard defamation defense terminology for such stuff is PUPs, or potentially unwanted programs. Hanff, who reports having a Masters in Law focused on data and privacy protection, added that the ePrivacy Directive is lex specialis to GPDR. That means where laws overlap, the specific one takes precedence over the more general one. Thus, he argues, personal data collected without consent is unlawful under Article 5(1) of GDPR and cannot be lawfully processed for any purpose. With regard to YouTube's assertion that using an ad blocker violates the site's Terms of Service, Hanff argued, "Any terms and conditions which restrict the legal rights and freedoms of an EU citizen (and the point of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive is specifically to protect the fundamental right to Privacy under Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union) are void under EU law." Therefore, in essence, "Any such terms which restrict the rights of EU persons to limit access to their terminal equipment would, as a result, be void and unenforceable," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Fiber plans to upgrade some users to 20Gbps service by the end of the year. Ars Technica reports: Google's Wednesday blog post calls this part of a "GFiber Labs" experiment and says the service "will initially be available as an early access offering to a small group of GFiber customers in select areas." The 20Gbps service is made possible by new networking gear: Nokia's 25G PON (passive optical network) technology, which lets Internet service providers push more bandwidth over existing fiber lines. Google says it's "one of the first" ISPs to adopt the technology for consumers, though at least one other US ISP, the Tennessee provider "EPB," has rolled out the technology. Customers will need new networking gear, too, and Google says you'll get a new fiber modem with built-in Wi-Fi 7. Fierce Telecom spoke with Google's Nick Saporito, head of product at Google Fiber, who said, "We definitely see a need" for 20Gbps service. For now, Saporito says the service is "a very early adopter product," but it will eventually roll out "in most, if not all, of our markets." According to that Fierce report, Fiber is built on Nokia's "Quillion" Fiber platform, which is upgradable, so Google only needed to "plug in a new optical module and replace the optical network terminal on the end-user side" to take its 5 and 8Gbps infrastructure to 20Gbps. There's no word yet on the price or which utopian Google Fiber cities will get access to the 20Gbps service, but Google has already run trials in Kansas City, Missouri. Currently, Google Fiber costs $70 for 1Gbps and $150 for 8Gbps. Interested customers can sign up for early access at this link.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Max Tegmark, a professor of physics and AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the world was "witnessing a race to the bottom that must be stopped." Tegmark organized an open letter published in April, signed by thousands of tech industry figures including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, that called for a six-month hiatus on giant AI experiments. "We're witnessing a race to the bottom that must be stopped," Tegmark told the Guardian. "We urgently need AI safety standards, so that this transforms into a race to the top. AI promises many incredible benefits, but the reckless and unchecked development of increasingly powerful systems, with no oversight, puts our economy, our society, and our lives at risk. Regulation is critical to safe innovation, so that a handful of AI corporations don't jeopardize our shared future." In a policy document published this week, 23 AI experts, including two modern "godfathers" of the technology, said governments must be allowed to halt development of exceptionally powerful models. Gillian Hadfield, a co-author of the paper and the director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, said AI models were being built over the next 18 months that would be many times more powerful than those already in operation. "There are companies planning to train models with 100x more computation than today's state of the art, within 18 months," she said. "No one knows how powerful they will be. And there's essentially no regulation on what they'll be able to do with these models." The paper, whose authors include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio -- two winners of the ACM Turing award, the "Nobel prize for computing" -- argues that powerful models must be licensed by governments and, if necessary, have their development halted. "For exceptionally capable future models, eg models that could circumvent human control, governments must be prepared to license their development, pause development in response to worrying capabilities, mandate access controls, and require information security measures robust to state-level hackers, until adequate protections are ready." The unrestrained development of artificial general intelligence, the term for a system that can carry out a wide range of tasks at or above human levels of intelligence, is a key concern among those calling for tighter regulation. Further reading: AI Risk Must Be Treated As Seriously As Climate Crisis, Says Google DeepMind ChiefRead more of this story at Slashdot.

iFixit has started selling genuine replacement parts for Microsoft Surface devices. From a report: The company now offers SSDs, batteries, screens, kickstands, and a whole bunch of other parts for 15 Surface products. Some of the devices on that list include the Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, Surface Go 4, Surface Studio 2 Plus, and others. You can check out the entire list of supported products and parts in this post on Microsoft's website. In addition to supplying replacement parts, iFixit also offers disassembly videos and guides for each product, as well as toolkits that include things like an opening tool, tweezers, drivers, and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's oil and gas regulator is coming under fire from environmental groups for using lawyers to try to prevent the publication of five key documents relating to the environmental impact of Shell's activities in the North Sea. From a report: At a hearing in December, a legal representative for the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is expected to argue against the publication of documents that contain details about the risk of pollution as a result of decommissioning the Brent oilfield, which was operated by Shell for more than 40 years. It says it opposes publication "on a matter of process basis." Shell has applied for an exemption from international rules that require all infrastructure to be removed from the field and the UK government is deciding whether it will allow the oil company to leave the 170-metre-high oil platform legs in place for the three platforms known as Bravo, Charlie and Delta. A total of 64 concrete storage cells are contained in the leg structures, 42 of which have previously been used for oil storage and separation. Most of the cells are the size of seven Olympic swimming pools, and collectively still contain an estimated 72,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment and 638,000 cubic metres of oily water. Environmental groups believe the documents held by the NSTA would reveal new information about long-term environmental dangers that is relevant to other North Sea oil developments, including Equinor's plans to develop Rosebank, the UK's largest untapped field.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has expanded its vulnerability rewards program (VRP) to include attack scenarios specific to generative AI. From a report: In an announcement shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication, Google said: "We believe expanding the VRP will incentivize research around AI safety and security and bring potential issues to light that will ultimately make AI safer for everyone." Google's vulnerability rewards program (or bug bounty) pays ethical hackers for finding and responsibly disclosing security flaws. Given that generative AI brings to light new security issues, such as the potential for unfair bias or model manipulation, Google said it sought to rethink how bugs it receives should be categorized and reported. The tech giant says it's doing this by using findings from its newly formed AI Red Team, a group of hackers that simulate a variety of adversaries, ranging from nation-states and government-backed groups to hacktivists and malicious insiders to hunt down security weaknesses in technology. The team recently conducted an exercise to determine the biggest threats to the technology behind generative AI products like ChatGPT and Google Bard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hyundai said this week that it will set up "mobile clinics" at five U.S. locations to provide anti-theft software upgrades for vehicles now regularly targeted by thieves using a technique popularized on TikTok and other social media platforms. From a report: The South Korean automaker will hold the clinics, which will run for two to three days on or adjacent to weekends, in New York City; Chicago; Minneapolis; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Rochester, New York. The clinics will take place between Oct. 28 and Nov. 18. Hyundai said it will also support single-day regional clinics run by dealerships before the end of 2023, although it didn't name locations or dates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI today announced that it's created a new team to assess, evaluate and probe AI models to protect against what it describes as "catastrophic risks." From a report: The team, called Preparedness, will be led by Aleksander Madry, the director of MIT's Center for Deployable Machine Learning. (Madry joined OpenAI in May as "head of Preparedness," according to LinkedIn, ) Preparedness' chief responsibilities will be tracking, forecasting and protecting against the dangers of future AI systems, ranging from their ability to persuade and fool humans (like in phishing attacks) to their malicious code-generating capabilities. Some of the risk categories Preparedness is charged with studying seem more... far-fetched than others. For example, in a blog post, OpenAI lists "chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear" threats as areas of top concern where it pertains to AI models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a noted AI doomsayer, often airing fears a" whether for optics or out of personal conviction -- that AI "may lead to human extinction." But telegraphing that OpenAI might actually devote resources to studying scenarios straight out of sci-fi dystopian novels is a step further than this writer expected, frankly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan on Thursday detailed challenges the search and advertising giant faces from smaller rivals, describing efforts to avoid becoming "the next road kill." From a report: Raghavan testified at the ongoing antitrust trial in the suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging Alphabet's Google unlawfully abused its dominance in the search-engine market to maintain monopoly power. Raghavan, asked about a 1998 article about Yahoo!'s dominance of search at the time, said he was acutely aware rivals from Expedia.com to Instagram to TikTok competed for users' attention. "I feel a keen sense not to become the next road kill," said Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google who reports to chief executive Sundar Pichai. Raghavan said Google had some 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality. Raghavan's description of Google struggling to stay relevant clashed with the Justice Department's depiction of a behemoth that broke antitrust law to retain dominance of online search and some aspects of advertising, including paying an estimated $10 billion annually to smartphone makers and wireless carriers to be the default search engine on devices. Google's share of the search engine market is near 90%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The UK's Online Safety Bill, a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to make the country "the safest place in the world to be online" received royal assent today and became law. The bill has been years in the making and attempts to introduce new obligations for how tech firms should design, operate, and moderate their platforms. Specific harms the bill aims to address include underage access to online pornography, "anonymous trolls," scam ads, the nonconsensual sharing of intimate deepfakes, and the spread of child sexual abuse material and terrorism-related content. Although it's now law, online platforms will not need to immediately comply with all of their duties under the bill, which is now known as the Online Safety Act. UK telecoms regulator Ofcom, which is in charge of enforcing the rules, plans to publish its codes of practice in three phases. The first covers how platforms will have to respond to illegal content like terrorism and child sexual abuse material, and a consultation with proposals on how to handle these duties is due to be published on November 9th.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NR Narayana Murthy, the founder of software consultancy giant Infosys, urged youngsters in India to work 70 hours a week if they want the nation to compete with other economies. From a report: Narayana Murthy, in conversation with former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai, said that India's work productivity is among the lowest in the world. In order to compete with countries like China, India's youngsters must put in extra hours of work -- like Japan and Germany did after World War 2. He also blamed other issues like corruption in the government and bureaucratic delays, saying: "India's work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. Unless we improve our work productivity, unless we reduce corruption in the government at some level, because we have been reading I don't know the truth of it, unless we reduce the delays in our bureaucracy in taking this decision, we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress." Murthy, 77, added his request to the youngsters of today. "So therefore, my request is that our youngsters must say, 'This is my country. I'd like to work 70 hours a week.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Negotiations to merge Western Digital's semiconductor memory business and Japan's Kioxia Holdings have been terminated, Nikkei reported Thursday. From the report: The companies were aiming to reach an agreement by the end of October. U.S.-based Western Digital by Thursday had notified Kioxia that it would exit the talks after the merger failed to secure approval from SK Hynix, an indirect shareholder in Kioxia. The companies were also unable to agree on the merger's conditions with Bain Capital, Kioxia's top shareholder. Kioxia, formerly known as Toshiba Memory, and Western Digital have both suffered a downturn in earnings amid headwinds in memory chips. They are each seeking capital infusions and other measures to help bolster operations. Kioxia ranks third in global market share for NAND flash memory, while Western Digital ranks fourth. The proposed merger would have resulted in an entity that rivals market leader Samsung Electronics, and the companies had hoped the larger scale would lead to greater profits and growth. But SK Hynix officially declared its opposition to the deal on Thursday. SK Hynix had invested about 400 billion yen ($2.67 billion at current rates) in the Bain-led consortium that acquired what is now Kioxia from Toshiba. The South Korean company is now second only to Samsung in NAND memory, and was worried that the Western Digital-Kioxia merger would hurt its position while derailing partnerships it had been exploring with Kioxia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing has warned of the threat of artificial intelligence to the publishing industry, saying tech groups are already using the work of authors to train up generative AI programmes. From a report: Nigel Newton, who signed Harry Potter author JK Rowling to Bloomsbury in the 1990s, also said ministers needed to act urgently to address competition concerns between large US tech groups and the publishing industry given their increasing market dominance in selling books across the world. The warning came as Bloomsbury reported its highest-ever first-half results on the back of the boom in fantasy novels, leading the publisher to boost its interim dividend. The group said revenues grew 11 per cent to $165.7mn, sending profits 11 per cent higher at $21.4mn, for the six months to August 31. Newton pointed to the "huge" growth in fantasy novels, with sales of books by Sarah J Maas and Samantha Shannon growing 79 per cent and 169 per cent respectively in the period and demand for Harry Potter books, 26 years after publication, remaining strong. The next Maas book, scheduled for January, has already received "staggering" pre-orders of 750,000 copies for the hardback edition, he said, underscoring the resurgence of the book-selling industry. The group's consumer division will also publish new books in the expanding Harry Potter franchise -- such as a new Wizarding Almanac this autumn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JPMorgan Chase's digital token JPM Coin now handles $1 billion worth of transactions daily and the bank plans to continue widening its usage, Global Head of Payments Takis Georgakopoulos said. From a report: "JPM Coin gets transacted on a daily basis mostly in US dollars, but we again intend to continue to expand that," Georgakopoulos said Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. JPM Coin enables wholesale clients to make dollar and euro-denominated payments through a private blockchain network. It's one of the few examples of a live blockchain application by a large bank, but remains a small fraction of the $10 trillion in US dollar transactions moved by JPMorgan on a daily basis. The company also runs a blockchain-based repo application, and is exploring a digital deposit token to accelerate cross-border settlements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has worried for years that Apple would one day expand its internet search technology, and has been working on ways to prevent that from happening. From a report: For years, Google watched with increasing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its longtime partner and sometimes competitor would eventually build its own search engine. Those fears ratcheted up in 2021, when Google paid Apple around $18 billion to keep Google's search engine the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The same year, Apple's iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users richer web results like those they could have found on Google. Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple's search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google's Chrome web browser instead of Apple's Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple's control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Google's anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company's complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google's mobile ads business for more than a decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world must treat the risks from artificial intelligence as seriously as the climate crisis and cannot afford to delay its response, one of the technology's leading figures has warned. Speaking as the UK government prepares to host a summit on AI safety, Demis Hassabis said oversight of the industry could start with a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hassabis, the British chief executive of Google's AI unit, said the world must act immediately in tackling the technology's dangers, which included aiding the creation of bioweapons and the existential threat posed by super-intelligent systems. "We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, like climate change," he said. "It took the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response to this, and we're living with the consequences of that now. We can't afford the same delay with AI." Hassabis, whose unit created the revolutionary AlphaFold program that depicts protein structures, said AI could be "one of the most important and beneficial technologies ever invented." However, he told the Guardian a regime of oversight was needed and governments should take inspiration from international structures such as the IPCC. "I think we have to start with something like the IPCC, where it's a scientific and research agreement with reports, and then build up from there." He added: "Then what I'd like to see eventually is an equivalent of a Cern for AI safety that does research into that -- but internationally. And then maybe there's some kind of equivalent one day of the IAEA, which actually audits these things." The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is a UN body that promotes the secure and peaceful use of nuclear technology in an effort to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons, including via inspections. However, Hassabis said none of the regulatory analogies used for AI were "directly applicable" to the technology, though "valuable lessons" could be drawn from existing institutions. Hassabis said the world was a long time away from "god-like" AI being developed but "we can see the path there, so we should be discussing it now." He said current AI systems "aren't of risk but the next few generations may be when they have extra capabilities like planning and memory and other things ... They will be phenomenal for good use cases but also they will have risks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has introduced a completely new way to interact with the Apple Watch without ever needing to use the touchscreen. It's called Double Tap and it arrives today via the watchOS 10.1 update. The Verge reports: With a quick pinching motion, you can use it to scroll through the new smart stack of widgets in watchOS 10, pause or end timers, skip music tracks, and answer phone calls. It's the sort of feature that you might read about and scoff at -- until you're unloading groceries from your car, hands full, and an important call comes through on your watch. [...] Double tap technically isn't a new gesture so much. In 2021, Apple introduced Assistive Touch, an accessibility feature designed for people with limb differences or mobility issues. The idea was to give these folks a way to navigate through menus and control the Apple Watch without needing a second hand. On the surface, it can seem like double tap is a rebadged version of Assistive Touch. That's led to understandable confusion as to how the two features differ -- and why double tap isn't available on older Apple Watches that support Assistive Touch (Series 4 or later, including the first-gen SE and Ultra). The short answer is that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 have a more powerful chip. Specifically, the new S9 features four neural engines for machine learning, which is what powers double tap. On older watches, Assistive Touch was run on the main CPU. But practically speaking, it's easier to see how Assistive Touch and double tap differ once you try using both. [...] Double tap isn't designed to help you navigate anything. The best way I can describe it is Assistive Touch is like the mouse to your computer. It scrolls, it selects, and it's highly programmable. Double tap is more like the double-click portion of using a mouse. You use it solely to perform the main action of an app. And to do that, Apple had to spend a lot of time researching what people wanted or expected a single double tap to do. [...] And, when double tap performs as intended, it does feel a bit like the watch can read my mind. It's genuinely cool to see double tap work with not just my index finger but the rest of them as well. To my surprise, it feels less gimmicky than I expected. But despite Apple's efforts, it doesn't take long to run into double tap's limitations...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alexandra Witze reports via Nature: A meteorite that slammed into Mars in September 2021 has rewritten what scientists know about the planet's interior. By analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after the impact, researchers have discovered a layer of molten rock that envelops Mars's liquid-metal core. The finding, reported today in two papers in Nature, means that the Martian core is smaller than previously thought. It also resolves some lingering questions about how the red planet formed and evolved over billions of years. The discovery comes from NASA's InSight mission, which landed a craft with a seismometer on Mars's surface. Between 2018 and 2022, that instrument detected hundreds of "marsquakes' shaking the planet. In July 2021, on the basis of the mission's observations of 11 quakes, researchers reported that the liquid core of Mars seemed to have a radius of around 1,830 kilometers3. That was bigger than many scientists were expecting. And it suggested that the core contained surprisingly high amounts of light chemical elements, such as sulfur, mixed with iron. But the September 2021 meteorite impact "unlocked everything," says Henri Samuel, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and lead author of one of today's papers1. The meteorite struck the planet on the side opposite to where InSight was located. That's much more distant than the marsquakes that InSight had previously studied, and allowed the probe to detect seismic energy traveling all the way through the Martian core4. "We were so excited," says Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol, UK, and a co-author of Samuel's paper. For Samuel, it was an opportunity to test his idea that a molten layer of rock surrounds Mars's core5. The way the seismic energy traversed the planet showed that what scientists had thought was the boundary between the liquid core and the solid mantle, 1,830 kilometers from the planet's centre, was actually a different boundary between liquid and solid. It was the top of the newfound layer of molten rock meeting the mantle (see 'Rethinking the Martian core'). The actual core is buried beneath that molten-rock layer and has a radius of only 1,650 kilometers, Samuel says. The revised core size solves some puzzles. It means that the Martian core doesn't have to contain high amounts of light elements -- a better match to laboratory and theoretical estimates. A second liquid layer inside the planet also meshes better with other evidence, such as how Mars responds to being deformed by the gravitational tug of its moon Phobos. The second paper in Nature today2, from a team independent of Samuel's, agrees that Mars's core is enveloped by a layer of molten rock, but estimates that the core has a radius of 1,675 kilometers. The work analyzed seismic waves from the same distant meteorite impact, as well as simulations of the properties of mixtures of molten elements such as iron, nickel and sulfur at the high pressures and temperatures in the Martian core. Having molten rock right up against molten iron "appears to be unique," says lead author Amir Khan, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich. "You have this peculiarity of liquid-liquid layering, which is something that doesn't exist on the Earth." The molten-rock layer might be left over from a magma ocean that once covered Mars. As it cooled and solidified into rock, the magma would have left behind a deep layer of radioactive elements that still release heat and keep rock molten at the base of the mantle, Samuel says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it's possible to have babies in space. Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth -- or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish? Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements. "Humanity needs a backup plan," he says. "If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species." Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space -- yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it's likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared. Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we're in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is "vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date." Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction -- from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth -- can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally.Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester -- a total of five days -- on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother's weakened state. To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space.After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Norwegian Volkswagen importer Moller Mobility Group has confirmed that it will stop selling combustion vehicles in Norway from 2024. Electricdrive.com reports: The farewell to the combustion engine in Norway is only logical: already today, e-cars regularly account for more than 80 percent of new registrations in the Scandinavian country, and the government wants them to reach a full 100 per cent by 2025. "It may seem strange to celebrate the milestone by removing model icons from our portfolio, but this has been an ambitious and important initiative over time," says Ulf Tore Hekneby, managing director of Volkswagen importer Harald A. Moller AS. "The goal has been to drive change that we believe is of critical importance." Harald A. Moller AS has been importing Volkswagens to Norway since 1948. According to the company, around 1.1 million VWs have been sold in the Scandinavian country during these 75 years. This includes a total of 102,000 electric cars in the past ten years. The sale of the last Golf in Norway this December marks the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one, Hekneby emphasised. "We encourage everyone to consider an electric car in their next car purchase. Switching to an electric car is a crucial step in reducing an individual's carbon footprint and an important overall contribution to combating climate change," he said. The top-selling car in the country is the Tesla Model Y, "dominating more than 20% of the market share with 15,452 units sold in the first half of this year," reports Electrek. "Almost one in four new passenger car registrations so far this year was Tesla Model Y."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jameson Dow reports via Electrek: As the latest step in the saga of recalled Chevy Bolts, GM is offering owners of '20-'22 Bolts early payment of $1,400 of an anticipated class action settlement in exchange for installing a piece of diagnostics software that the company says will detect whether batteries require a full replacement. [...] In June, GM announced that it would stop replacing 2020-2022 Chevy Bolt Batteries and would instead verify the integrity of the battery with software over a period of 6,200 miles in which Bolt owners were only allowed to charge their batteries to 80% or ~207 of the original EPA's 259-mile range. GM replaced most batteries on '17-'19 Bolts but then ended up offering software diagnostics instead of battery replacements to many '20-'22 model year Bolts. GM says that the software will detect which batteries actually require a fix, but the software requires 6,214 miles/10,000 km worth of driving to detect these problems, during which time charging must be limited to 80%. This left many customers aggrieved at being promised a new battery and not receiving it, and further, at needing to wait some number of months with restricted charging before receiving a solution. Or, in the case of low-mileage customers, that 6,214 miles might even take years -- which brings up a conflict with GM's insistence that the diagnostic period be finished by March 31, 2025, in order to qualify owners for an extended warranty for a replaced battery pack. Now, GM is trying to sweeten the pot to get customers to install the "software final remedy" by offering early/upfront payment of an anticipated $1,400 class action settlement. The payment comes in the form of a Visa eRewards card that can be used for online purchases. But you can only get this early payment if you install the "software final remedy" before December 31, 2023, and sign a legal release associated with taking the payment. If you don't, you'll have to wait for the class action to be sorted out. The compensation program only applies to owners involved in recall N212345944. If the class action settlement ends up being more than $1,400, GM says that the difference will still be paid out to owners who take advantage of this early compensation offer. As noted in The Verge's report, "[o]lder Chevy Bolt models that were made from 2017 to 2019 were initially provided 'fixes' in 2021 to keep the vehicles from catching fire, but it did not work." A different issue with the batteries appeared in 2020, "during which time at least 19 Bolts caught fire with full batteries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and author of the Network State, has announced his first Network State Conference.This is a conference for people interested in founding, funding, and finding new communities.Topics include startup societies, network states, digital nomadism, competitive government, legalizing innovation, and building alternatives. Speakers include Glenn Greenwald, Vitalik Buterin, Anatoly Yakovenko, Garry Tan, the Winklevosses, and Tyler Cowen. See presentations by startup society founders around the world, invest in them, and search for the community that fits you. With this and Joseon, the first legally recognized cyber state, the network state movement is beginning to get interesting. Another anonymous reader quotes from the Joseon Official X Account's reply to Balaji's announcement: Joseon, the first legally recognized cyber nation state, will be there.Interestingly, Joseon dons the same grey checkmark that is for governments on its X account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IFTTT in a blog post said that Amazon is removing the service from Alexa beginning October 31st. "Once the integration is severed, users won't be able to ask Alexa to trigger IFTTT applets," reports The Verge. "Certain automations will stick around in the IFTTT app, but some will be archived on November 1st unless you take action." From the report: If your IFTTT applets use a specific phrase or question as the trigger ("Alexa, trigger..." or "Alexa, what's on my to-do list?"), that will convert to using an IFTTT button widget that you can either use in the app or add to your smartphone's homescreen. But all other triggers set up through Alexa -- say, an automation that runs when you add something to your to-do list -- will be archived. You will also have to remove any Alexa ingredients from your applets or they'll stop working. IFTTT suggests a few alternatives to pursue to keep using it. In addition to button widgets, users can try Apple Shortcuts or the IFTTT note widget. It's also still integrated with Google Assistant, though voice commands have to start with "activate" before an applet will trigger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon has more than 181 million users in the European Union and directly employs more than 150,000 people in the region, the company said on Wednesday, in its first store transparency report as required by the EU Digital Services Act (DSA). In August, the Digital Services Act (DSA) imposed new rules on content moderation, user privacy and transparency for platforms and search engines labelled as very large online platforms (VLOP), which were defined as having more than 45 million users in the EU. Amazon has challenged its inclusion in the group, saying it was not the largest retailer in any of the EU countries in which it operates. Germany is by far the biggest market for Amazon store with more than 60 million monthly active users, followed by Italy with 38 million users, according to the report. The company has corporate offices across 50 European cities and 250 logistics centers in the block. In the first half of 2023, the company said it took 274 million actions on its own initiative to remove content that violates policy, or other types of non-illegal content. Amazon also received 8,863 legal requests from EU governments for information about users of its service in the first half of 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pebble, the first of the would-be Twitter replacements to emerge after Elon Musk bought Twitter, is shutting down. The social media platform -- previously known as T2 to indicate a desire to build a Twitter clone -- was founded by former Twitter employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle. Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Pebble was an early-stage, Twitter-like social network. Its goal was to become the "place to have the authentic conversations we've always wanted to have." Its founders, who were largely Twitter alumni, designed Pebble to look and feel like pre-Musk Twitter, with a 280-character limit and direct messaging. I rather liked it, but it appears I was in the minority. Pebble was always a bit rough around the edges, and it never made it past about 20,000 users. In what was still a surprising announcement, Pebble revealed its plans to shut down operations on November 1, 2023. In a letter to users, Pebble said: "The painful truth, however, is that we were not growing quickly enough for investors to believe that we will break out. Combine that with a crowded space of alternatives -- and the uphill climb is even steeper. In order to continue to build out a complete Pebble, we would have needed more investment, and more time." That was not to be -- and Pebble's backers ran out of money and time. A spokesperson for the platform stated: "While we are immensely proud of what we achieved with our dedicated team and an incredible community, the reality is that our growth rate was not meeting the expectations set by our investors." With the digital landscape burgeoning with alternative platforms, Pebble was competing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. As the platform prepares for its final curtain call, the team behind Pebble is shifting its focus to showing gratitude to its supportive community. They are exploring potential avenues to ensure that the connections formed on Pebble can continue in another guise. Further details are expected to be shared soon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Lenovo Tech World '23 in Austin, Texas, yesterday, Motorola demoed a bendable, bracelet-like smartphone that can wrap around your wrist. Ars Technica reports: On stage at the event, Lexi Valasek, 312 Labs innovation strategy and product research Lead for Motorola Mobility, proudly held a prototype. The smartphone looked ordinary to start: a slab of OLED with a chassis that's a bold orange on the backside. But Valasek quickly bent the phone into an arch shape, where it stood on her hand before she wrapped it around her wrist like a cuff. The phone seemed to adapt to its new positioning rapidly, quickly showing a large clock, making the device feel like a smartwatch. Interestingly, Valasek placed the phone around a silver band already wrapped around her wrist. Lenovo hasn't confirmed why, but The Verge suspects this could be critical to the phone being wearable by featuring a magnet for a secure hold. Videos Motorola shared with its press release today also show the user wearing some sort of metal-looking band on their wrist that the smartphone wraps around. And images of the device show a metal-looking strip that might be for connecting to the additional band in question. According to Motorola's press release, the concept device has "FHD+" resolution across the display, which has a 6.9-inch diagonal size when flat. Also when flat, the device runs the "full Android experience, just like any smartphone," according to Motorola. The concept shown this week differs slightly from the concept demoed at Lenovo Tech World '16 in that it can be arched or bent into an upright position. [...] But beyond that, Motorola doesn't seem any closer to releasing the design.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Two Ukrainian hacktivist groups are claiming to have broken into Russia's largest private bank, Alfa-Bank. In a blog post last week, the hackers from groups called KibOrg and NLB shared screenshots of what appears to be an internal database belonging to Alfa-Bank, as well as personal details of several Russian individuals as "confirmation" of the breach. Within the database, the hackers say there are over 30 million records including names, birthdates, account numbers and phone numbers of Russian customers. Adding some legitimacy to those claims, a Ukrainian intelligence official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation confirmed to NPR that Ukraine's top counterintelligence agency, the SBU, helped the hacktivists breach Alfa-Bank. The official did not share additional details about how the SBU participated or any further plans for sharing the stolen data. Ukrainian journalists including from cybersecurity website The Record previously reported on the connection to the SBU. While the hacktivists did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the breach, they wrote in the blog post -- posted on their own site -- that they would be sharing the data obtained from Alfa-Bank with investigative journalists. Alfa-Bank has not publicly responded to the news of the hack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple's Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices. From a report: iLeakage, as the academic researchers have named the attack, is practical and requires minimal resources to carry out. It does, however, require extensive reverse-engineering of Apple hardware and significant expertise in exploiting a class of vulnerability known as a side channel, which leaks secrets based on clues left in electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of a targeted system. The side channel in this case is speculative execution, a performance enhancement feature found in modern CPUs that has formed the basis of a wide corpus of attacks in recent years. The nearly endless stream of exploit variants has left chip makers -- primarily Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD -- scrambling to devise mitigations. The researchers implement iLeakage as a website. When visited by a vulnerable macOS or iOS device, the website uses JavaScript to surreptitiously open a separate website of the attacker's choice and recover site content rendered in a pop-up window. The researchers have successfully leveraged iLeakage to recover YouTube viewing history, the content of a Gmail inbox -- when a target is logged in -- and a password as it's being autofilled by a credential manager. Once visited, the iLeakage site requires about five minutes to profile the target machine and, on average, roughly another 30 seconds to extract a 512-bit secret, such as a 64-character string.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: The BBC reports that Pope Francis has endorsed a global project aimed at getting more children into computer programming. The Code with Pope initiative, championed by Cosmose AI founder Miron Mironiuk, aims to bridge "the glaring disparities in education" across the globe by providing access to Python coding education through the free online learning platform Codeforia for students aged 11-15 across Europe, Africa and Latin America. Mironiuk will meet the Pope at the Vatican, but he admits he's not anticipating the pontiff to emulate his students in acquiring new skills. "I don't expect him to know Python very well," he said. This is not the first time the Pope has encouraged young people to get into coding, having helped write a line of code together with tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in 2019. Pope Francis has also blessed AI's potential for good, meeting with Microsoft President Brad Smith (a Code.org Board member) to sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics early this year just ahead of Microsoft's $10B OpenAI investment and announcing "Artificial Intelligence and Peace" as the theme for World Day of Peace 2024 in August.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA is demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions -- showcasing the benefits infrared light can have for science and exploration missions transmitting terabytes of important data. NASA: The International Space Station is getting a "flashy" technology demonstration this November. The ILLUMA-T (Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload is launching to the International Space Station to demonstrate how missions in low Earth orbit can benefit from laser communications. Laser communications uses invisible infrared light to send and receive information at higher data rates, providing spacecraft with the capability to send more data back to Earth in a single transmission and expediting discoveries for researchers. Managed by NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, ILLUMA-T is completing NASA's first bi-directional, end-to-end laser communications relay by working with the agency's LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration). LCRD launched in December 2021 and is currently demonstrating the benefits of laser communications from geosynchronous orbit by transmitting data between two ground stations on Earth in a series of experiments. Some of LCRD's experiments include studying atmospheric impact on laser signals, confirming LCRD's ability to work with multiple users, testing network capabilities like delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) over laser links, and investigating improved navigation capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration on Monday is expected to unveil a long-anticipated artificial intelligence executive order, marking the U.S. government's most significant attempt to date to regulate the evolving technology that has sparked fear and hype around the world. Washington Post: The administration plans to release the order two days before government leaders, top Silicon Valley executives and civil society groups gather in Britain for an international summit focused on the potential risks that AI presents to society, according to four people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private plans. The sweeping order would leverage the U.S. government's role as a top technology customer by requiring advanced AI models to undergo assessments before they can be used by federal workers, according to three people involved in discussions about the order. The lengthy action would ease barriers to immigration for highly skilled workers, an attempt to boost the United States' technological edge. Federal government agencies -- including the Defense Department, Energy Department and intelligence agencies -- would be required to run assessments to determine how they might incorporate AI into their agencies' work, with a focus on bolstering national cyber defenses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cost overruns for the new Air Force One jets continue to pile on massive losses for Boeing. From a report: Boeing on Wednesday reported another $482 million in red ink on the contract to retrofit two 747 jets into the next generation of the presidential plane. Boeing has now lost more than $1 billion on each of the two jets. The company has been reporting losses on the planes for years, as CEO Dave Calhoun admitted last year that the company should never have signed the contract with the Air Force to produce the jets for $3.9 billion. Supplier costs have soared since then, and the delivery date has been continually pushed back. Boeing took $1.45 billion in losses on the planes last year, and $318 million in 2021. "Air Force One, I'm just going to call a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation. A very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn't have taken," Calhoun said in April last year when discussing $660 million of those losses reported at that time. "But we are where we are." The company said the latest loss on the program is a result of engineering changes, labor instability, as well as the resolution of negotiations with one of its suppliers. Very often higher costs on defense contracts can be passed onto US taxpayers, but under pressure from then-President Donald Trump, who was threatening to cancel the contract for the planes, Boeing agreed to a fixed price contract on the two new jets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's latest 14th Gen chips aren't a huge improvement over the 13th Gen in gaming performance, but a new Intel Application Optimization (APO) feature might just change that. From a report: Intel's new APO app simply runs in the background, improving performance in games. It offers impressive boosts to frame rates in games that support it, like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Metro Exodus. Intel Application Optimization essentially directs application resources in real time through a scheduling policy that fine-tunes performance for games and potentially even other applications in the future. It operates alongside Intel's Thread Director, a technology that's designed to improve how apps and games are assigned to performance or efficiency cores depending on the performance needs. The result is some solid gains to performance in certain games, with one Reddit poster seeing a 200fps boost in Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p. "Not all games benefit from APO," explained Intel VP Roger Chandler in a press briefing ahead of the 14th Gen launch. "As we test and verify games we will add those that benefit the most, so gamers can get the best performance from their systems."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's contribution to world-class research continues to decline, despite having one of the world's largest research communities, according to a report by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), released in English on 25 October. From a report: Masatsura Igami, the director of the Center for S&T Foresight and Indicators at the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) in Tokyo, and one of the authors of the 2023 edition of the Japanese Science and Technology Indicators report, says that the findings highlight several areas that Japan could explore to improve its global standing. "Japan's current research environment is far from ideal and is unsustainable. The research environment must shape up," he says. The report shows that Japan ranks third globally in the total number of researchers, following China and the United States. However, this workforce is not producing the same level of high-impact research as it was two decades ago. Japan's global share of research papers in the top 10% of most-cited articles has slipped from 6% to 2%, intensifying concerns in Japan about its dwindling international standing. Igami explains that the rest of the world has overtaken Japan in terms of quality research output. Some of the decline might be attributable to funding, Igami says. The 2023 report shows that research spending in the university sector has grown by roughly 80% in the United States and Germany, and 40% in France, has quadrupled in South Korea and has increased more than tenfold in China over the past two decades. By contrast, Japan's spending has increased by 10%. However, even if researchers receive more funding, producing high-impact research might still be challenging, because Japanese scientists have less time for actual research, Igami says. According to a 2020 analysis by MEXT, the proportion of time that university researchers dedicated to science decreased from 47% to 33% between 2002 and 2018. [...] The report's findings confirm those of a previous survey of early-career researchers that pointed to a lack of time for research as a notable factor in job dissatisfaction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The previously announced joint collaboration between Honda Motor and General Motors to develop a platform for affordable electric vehicles (EVs) has been cancelled, the firms said today. Initially publicized in April 2022, the collaboration aimed to produce lower-cost EVs for the North American, South American, and Chinese markets, with the first models expected to roll out in 2027. However, the companies disclosed that they have mutually agreed to disband the project. ArsTechnica: "After extensive studies and analysis, we have come to a mutual decision to discontinue the program. Each company remains committed to affordability in the EV market," Honda and GM said in a joint statement. "After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV," said Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe in an interview with Bloomberg. "GM and Honda will search for a solution separately. This project itself has been canceled," Mibe said. The now-canceled platform was supposed to use GM's Ultium batteries. GM debuted Ultium in 2020 as its third-generation lithium-ion cell, developed together with LG Chem. At the time, GM CEO Mary Barra said that Ultium cells would drop below the $100/kWh barrier "early in the platform's life." In 2022, the first Ultium-based EVs went into production -- the GMC Hummer EV, the Cadillac Lyriq, and the BrightDrop Zevo 600. Ultium cells were supposedly ready for mass production, but GM and LG Chem are struggling to make that a reality. In July, GM had to idle BrightDrop's production line in Canada due to a shortage of battery cells, and Kelly Blue Book's sales data for the first three quarters of 2023 show that just 6,920 Ultium-based EVs (which include the Chevrolet Blazer and Silverado EV, as well as the Hummer, Lyriq, and BrightDrop van) were delivered to customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is beta testing AI image generation tools for its advertisers, offering an easy way to create backgrounds or scenes around whatever product ad buyers are hoping to sell. From a report: The company says the new feature is "designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that helps improve their ads' performance." This could prove to be a quick, convenient option for brands that would otherwise be stuck working with boring standalone images of a product against a white background. Amazon says putting products in a lifestyle scene can lead to 40 percent higher click-through rates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Harris, reporting at IEEE: Expect traffic on the 101 highway in Mountain View, California, to be even worse in the days or weeks ahead, as motorists slow down to watch Google co-founder Sergey Brin's 124-meter long airship Pathfinder 1 launch into the air for the first time. IEEE Spectrum has learned that LTA Research, the company that Brin founded in 2015 to develop airships for humanitarian and cargo transport, received a special airworthiness certificate for the helium-filled airship in early September. That piece of paper allows the largest aircraft since the ill-fated Hindenburg to begin flight tests at Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport in Silicon Valley, with immediate effect. The certificate permits LTA to fly Pathfinder 1 within the boundaries of Moffett Field and neighboring Palo Alto airport's airspaces, at a height of up to 460 meters (1500 feet). That will let it venture out over the south San Francisco Bay, without interfering with planes flying into or out of San Jose and San Francisco International commercial airports. In a letter supporting its application for the certificate, LTA wrote: "Pathfinder 1's experimental flight test program is to demonstrate and establish the flight envelope for the airship.... LTA's test plan is tailored to include substantial indoor and outdoor ground testing, using a build-up approach to gradually increase the flight envelope." The huge airship will initially be attached to a mobile mast for outdoor ground testing, before conducting about 25 low-level flights, for a total of 50 hours' flight time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.