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CNBC reports that 84 Amazon delivery drivers at a California facility "joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union said Monday, in a win for labor organizers that have long sought to gain a foothold at the e-retailer." An anonymous reader shared this follow-up report from Vox:[T]hey unanimously ratified the contract, which will bring their wages from around $20 currently to $30 by September and would allow them to refuse to do deliveries they consider unsafe. But that victory is a bit complicated... They wear Amazon vests and drive Amazon-branded vehicles, have schedules dictated by Amazon, and can even be fired by Amazon. But they're technically employed by Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), one of approximately 3,000 delivery contract companies that make up Amazon's extensive delivery network. BTS voluntarily recognized the union after a majority of workers signed union authorization cards and negotiated the union contract. Amazon has told Vox that its contract with BTS, which exclusively delivers for Amazon, was terminated "well before" workers notified the tech giant Monday, but that the contract hasn't expired yet. The union said that the delivery people are still working for Amazon and that the contract goes through October, when it typically would auto-renew. What happens next depends on Amazon, the workers, and the interpretation of outdated US labor law... At the crux of the delivery driver issue is whether Amazon controls enough of what the workers do to be considered a joint employer. "If Amazon is able to get away with ignoring the workers' decision and hiding behind the subcontractor relationships, then I'm afraid we'll have yet another story of the failure of American labor law," said Benjamin Sachs, a labor professor at Harvard Law School. "If this leads to a recognition that these drivers are Amazon employees, joint employees, then this could be massively important." One element of note: These workers organized in California, which has a lower bar for who is considered an employee, and by extension, who enjoys union protections... Another element that the National Labor Relations Board will likely have to decide is whether Amazon terminated the contract with BTS in order to avoid working with a union, something that would be illegal if they were considered employees. The article also notes that elsewhere, 50 YouTube contractors also voted to unionize this week.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Earth's magnetic environment is filled with a symphony of sound that we cannot hear," NASA wrote this month. When solar winds approach earth, "it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves... a cacophonous operetta portraying the dramatic relationship between Earth and the Sun." So NASA is now announcing "a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP — or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas " that has "turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes..." Or, as the Washington Post puts it, "NASA wants your help listening in on the universe." From NASA's news release: In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth's magnetic "harp" — its magnetosphere — as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth's magnetosphere. "THEMIS can sample the whole harp," said Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. "And it's been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data." The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds... Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a "reverse harp" — frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated... "Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos," said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. "We're hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that's the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit." To start exploring these sounds, visit the HARP website. "Think listening to years' worth of wave patterns is a job for artificial intelligence? Think again," writes the Washington Post.In a news release, HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London says humans are often better at listening than machines. "The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool," Archer says. "We're essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Since the pandemic began, Lyft employees have been able to work remotely," notes the New York Times, "logging into videoconferences from their homes and dispersing across the country like many other tech workers. Last year, the company made that policy official, telling staff that work would be 'fully flexible' and subleasing floors of its offices in San Francisco and elsewhere."No longer. On Friday, David Risher, the company's new chief executive, told employees in an all-hands meeting that they would be required to come back into the office at least three days a week, starting this fall. [Although the Times adds later that "People will be allowed to work remotely for one month each year, and those living far from offices would not be required to come in."] It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling ride-hailing company since starting this month, and it came just a day after he laid off 26 percent of Lyft's work force."Things just move faster when you're face to face," Mr. Risher said in an interview. Remote work in the tech industry, he said, had come at a cost, leading to isolation and eroding culture. "There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem." The decision, combined with the layoffs and other changes, signals the beginning of a new chapter at Lyft. It could also be an indication that some tech companies — particularly firms that are struggling — may be changing their minds on flexibility about where employees work. Nudges toward working in the office could soon turn into demands, as they have at companies like Disney and Apple... Lyft also planned to tell employees that it would reduce their stock grants this year, according to a person familiar with the decision. Risher "said the cost savings from the layoffs would go toward lower prices for riders and higher earnings for drivers," the Times adds, noting that last month Lyft's two founders said they'd step down after disappointing financial results. (Lyft's stock price closed Friday at $10.25 — down from a peak of $78.) Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor and organizational psychologist, suggests another possible motivation to the Times: executives worried about financial stress "feel compelled to increase their own illusion of control."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week TechCrunch reported that just like Stability AI, startup Hugging Face "has released an open source alternative to OpenAI's viral AI-powered chabot, ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat."Available to test through a web interface and to integrate with existing apps and services via Hugging Face's API, HuggingChat can handle many of the tasks ChatGPT can, like writing code, drafting emails and composing rap lyrics. The AI model driving HuggingChat was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION — the German nonprofit responsible for creating the dataset with which Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI model, was trained. Open Assistant aims to replicate ChatGPT, but the group — made up mostly of volunteers — has broader ambitions than that. "We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone," Open Assistant writes on its GitHub page. "And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware..." HuggingChat joins a growing family of open source alternatives to ChatGPT. Just last week, Stability AI released StableLM, a set of models that can generate code and text given basic instructions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Magazine argues that System76's Pop!_OS offers "something rare: a commercial distribution that was integrated into the hardware, with utilities designed specifically for System76 computers and keyboards."The only other example of an integrated commercial distro of which I am aware is Purism, a company in the same niche... With hardware and software coming from the same source — what business calls vertical integration — distributions like System76/Pop!_OS offer Linux users their first experiences with what Windows and macOS users have always enjoyed — to say nothing of the closest they can currently get to open hardware. Could Linux be finally becoming mainstream at last? They interviewed System76 CEO Carl Richell (along with a marketing director and media relations manager), who remembered how System76 was actually founded in Carl's basement around 2005:He wanted to show the world how far Linux and open source software had come by delivering it preinstalled on high-quality computers backed by caring, knowledgeable customer support. Carl felt that making Linux computers that highlight the work of the community would be a great way to introduce the broader public to open source technology and its potential... LM: What other hardware might System76 offer in the future? S76: We are in the research and development process of designing our own in-house laptop. We'll eventually refresh our Meerkat mini desktop with a new Thelio-style aesthetic. That project will start sometime after our first in-house laptops start shipping. [In addition,] Launch keyboards and the System76 Keyboard Configurator work on macOS and Windows! We've also prepared ISO layouts for most Launch models but don't have a time frame for release. LM: What are you willing to say at this point about the company's future directions? S76: We're developing COSMIC DE — a desktop environment written in Rust — as well as a prototype for an open hardware laptop manufactured in-house. Finally, Nebula, a line of computer cases based on Thelio desktops will be arriving in the coming months. My favorite line from the interview? "Seeing a flat sheet of aluminum transformed into a beautiful desktop is strikingly rewarding."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California has approved a groundbreaking rule to cut greenhouse gas emissions by limiting rail pollution, banning locomotives over 23 years old by 2030, increasing the use of zero-emissions technology for freight transportation, and imposing restrictions on idling. The Associated Press reports: The rule will ban locomotive engines more than 23 years old by 2030 and increase the use of zero-emissions technology to transport freight from ports and throughout railyards. It would also ban locomotives in the state from idling longer than 30 minutes if they are equipped with an automatic shutoff. The standards would also reduce chemicals that contribute to smog. They could improve air quality near railyards and ports. The transportation sector contributed the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But rail only accounts for about 2% of those emissions. Other states can sign on to try to adopt the California rule if it gets the OK from the Biden administration. The rule is the most ambitious of its kind in the country. "The locomotive rule has the power to change the course of history for Californians who have suffered from train pollution for far too long, and it is my hope that our federal regulators follow California's lead," said Yasmine Agelidis, a lawyer with environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of Senators on Wednesday announced bipartisan legislation that seeks to prevent an AI system from making nuclear launch decisions. "The Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act would prohibit the use of federal funds for launching any nuclear weapon by an automated system without 'meaningful human control,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: The new bill builds on existing US Department of Defense policy, which states that in all cases, "the United States will maintain a human 'in the loop' for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment." The new bill aims to codify the Defense Department principle into law, and it also follows the recommendation of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which called for the US to affirm its policy that only human beings can authorize the employment of nuclear weapons. "While US military use of AI can be appropriate for enhancing national security purposes, use of AI for deploying nuclear weapons without a human chain of command and control is reckless, dangerous, and should be prohibited," Buck said in a statement. "I am proud to co-sponsor this legislation to ensure that human beings, not machines, have the final say over the most critical and sensitive military decisions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Department of Justice, Mandiant, and Microsoft stumbled upon the SolarWinds breach six months earlier than previously reported, WIRED has learned, but were unaware of the significance of what they had found. The breach, publicly announced in December 2020, involved Russian hackers compromising the software maker SolarWinds and inserting a backdoor into software served to about 18,000 of its customers. That tainted software went on to infect at least nine US federal agencies, among them the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms including Microsoft, Mandiant, Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks. The hackers had been in these various networks for between four and nine months before the campaign was exposed by Mandiant. WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months earlier, in late May 2020 -- but the scale and significance of the breach wasn't immediately apparent. Suspicions were triggered when the department detected unusual traffic emanating from one of its servers that was running a trial version of the Orion software suite made by SolarWinds, according to sources familiar with the incident. The software, used by system administrators to manage and configure networks, was communicating externally with an unfamiliar system on the internet. The DOJ asked the security firm Mandiant to help determine whether the server had been hacked. It also engaged Microsoft, though it's not clear why the software maker was also brought onto the investigation. It's not known what division of the DOJ experienced the breach, but representatives from the Justice Management Division and the US Trustee Program participated in discussions about the incident. The Trustee Program oversees the administration of bankruptcy cases and private trustees. The Management Division advises DOJ managers on budget and personnel management, ethics, procurement, and security. Investigators suspected the hackers had breached the DOJ server directly, possibly by exploiting a vulnerability in the Orion software. They reached out to SolarWinds to assist with the inquiry, but the company's engineers were unable to find a vulnerability in their code. In July 2020, with the mystery still unresolved, communication between investigators and SolarWinds stopped. A month later, the DOJ purchased the Orion system, suggesting that the department was satisfied that there was no further threat posed by the Orion suite, the sources say. According to WIRED, the DOJ said it "notified the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) about the breach at the time it occurred -- though a US National Security Agency spokesperson expressed frustration that the agency was not also notified." "But in December 2020, when the public learned that a number of federal agencies were compromised in the SolarWinds campaign -- the DOJ among them -- neither the DOJ nor CISA revealed to the public that the operation had unknowingly been found months earlier. The DOJ initially said its chief information officer had discovered the breach on December 24."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VICE's Ade Adeniji booted up The Crew 2, GTA V, GTA San Andreas, Saints Row, and Watch Dogs 2, and noticed a interesting pattern: there are no suburbs to be seen. "We are transported to major cities and vast countrysides, but nothing that really speaks to the in between -- to the suburbs," writes Adeniji. "[H]ow can open world games leave out a space that we fundamentally see as Americana? Is this about design choices and constraints, or does it speak to something deeper about how we really view American suburbs -- and how desperately we want to escape them?" Here's an excerpt from the report: I figured I would first take my suburbia question to someone who has been creating games since the early 1970s. Don Daglow, pioneer of the MMORPG genre with Neverwinter Nights, broke down his answer into three parts: scale, visual interest, and stereotypes. In terms of scale, suburbs typically have lots of smaller, more repetitive environmental elements when compared to cities. Think strip malls and identical homes versus the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. "Big objects in the environment create vertical movement opportunities as well as horizontal movement in 3D spaces. You can support superhero skills, think Spider Man, and jumping, think early Assassins Creed." Daglow said. "Godzilla never attacked a small suburb on the rail line north of Tokyo. Why would he waste his time there when there's so much more to chomp downtown?" Lazlow Jones, voice of GTA III's Chatterbox FM and a longtime director, writer, and producer at Rockstar Games, agreed. But Rockstar itself made a gradual progression from the chaotic cities of GTA to the open natural worlds of Red Dead. Then the company brought the two together in GTA V. "When I was at Rockstar, we started off focusing on open world games set in urban areas because it gave us great density," Lazlow began. "But over the years we expanded to rural environments while keeping them interesting and engaging." [...] Carly Kocurek, who teaches in the Game Design and Experiential Media program at Illinois Tech, says suburbs operate in the realm of "perceived beigeness" making it hard to imagine them as settings for the kinds of stories and worlds we see most often in open world games. To the extent that suburbia does show up strongly, these spaces often serve as a starting or transition point for a character, akin to maybe the first 10 minutes of a film, or the movie's midpoint. There are other design reasons why suburbs don't feature prominently in video games and why sparse areas away from intriguing points of interest are often the first to get cut. "You're really trying to compress a massive space in real life, into a virtual space which is actually really small. It's like taking something and cutting it down by 10x," explained Will Harris, who led the open world design team at Light Speed LA. Harris says that in world building, one of the first steps is thinking about defining features. What makes Chicago, for instance, feel different than Washington D.C.? Huge landmarks immediately orient us in a specific space and differentiate it from others. And woe unto you if you do try to architect suburbs in large numbers. Developers could try to build out distinct houses, began Erik Villarreal, an environmental artist at Visual Concepts/2K. "But this requires a developer to create homes that stand out from each other, which can be time consuming and tie up a lot of resources," he said. Harris adds that there are only so many mechanics in sandbox gameplay and design. He calls the suburbs "interstitial spaces." But the larger these spaces become, the more unwieldy, and the more quickly the player realizes that these spaces are superficial. We've all had the frustrating experience in gaming where we reach a certain part of a map, but then discover there's nothing actually to do there. "So the Staten Island kit gets vaporized. We trim the fat." Harris says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the My Health, My Data bill into law, requiring companies to receive a user's explicit consent before they can collect, share, or sell their health data. When the law comes into effect in March 2024, users will have the right to withdraw consent at any time and have their data deleted. The Verge reports: The law should help shield users' health data from the companies and organizations not included under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which prevents certain medical providers from disclosing "individually identifiable" health information without consent. The HIPAA Privacy Rule doesn't cover many of the health apps and sites that collect medical data, allowing them to freely collect and sell this information to advertisers. Under Washington's new law, which comes into effect in March 2024, medical apps and sites must ask a user for permission to collect their health data in a nondeceptive manner that "openly communicates a consumer's freely given, informed, opt-in, voluntary, specific, and unambiguous written consent." The site and apps must also disclose what kind of data they plan to collect and if they plan to sell it. Additionally, the bill will block medical providers from using geofencing to collect location information about the patients that visit the facility.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ChatGPT's maker said Friday that the artificial intelligence chatbot is available again in Italy after the company met the demands of regulators who temporarily blocked it over privacy concerns. From a report: OpenAI said it fulfilled a raft of conditions that the Italian data protection authority wanted satisfied by an April 30 deadline to have the ban on the AI software lifted. "ChatGPT is available again to our users in Italy," San Francisco-based OpenAI said by email. "We are excited to welcome them back, and we remain dedicated to protecting their privacy." Last month, Italian watchdog, known as Garante, ordered OpenAI to temporarily stop processing Italian users' personal information while it investigated a possible data breach. The authority said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but emphasized the importance of following the European Union's strict data privacy rules. OpenAI said it "addressed or clarified the issues" raised by the watchdog. The measures include adding information on its website about how it collects and uses data used to train the algorithms that power ChatGPT, giving European Union users a new form they can use to object to having their data used for training, and adding a tool to verify users' ages when signing up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Tencent Cloud has announced it's offering a digital human production platform -- essentially Deepfakes-as-a-Service (DFaaS). According to Chinese media and confirmed to The Reg by Tencent, the service needs just three minutes of live-action video and 100 spoken sentences -- and a $145 fee -- to create a high-definition digital human. Gestating the creation requires just 24 hours. Making people hasn't been that quick since Eden. The digital characters are available in half bodies or full bodies, and the service is available in both Chinese and English. Some aspects, like background and tone, are customizable. The videos avoid the flat intonation and single speech rhythm that plagues traditional acoustic models by using an in-house small-sample timbre customization technology that relies on deep learning acoustic models and neural network vocoders. [...] Tencent offers five styles for its digital humans: 3D realistic, 3D semi-realistic, 3D cartoon, 2D real person, and 2D cartoon. Customized Q&As can be created for the digital human, turning them into a type of deepfaked chatbot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony says it sold a total of 38.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles, according to the company's latest earnings release. In the first three months of the year, it shipped 6.3 million units -- "more than triple what the company shipped in the same quarter the previous year (2 million)," reports The Verge. From the report: On the software side things were more mixed, Bloomberg notes. Revenue from game software was up overall, but units shipped fell from 70.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 68 million in the same quarter of 2022. PlayStation Network monthly active users were up slightly from 106 million to 108 million, but the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers were flat at 47.4 million. This disparity partly reflects the lack of major first-party games releases in the quarter. But there are also concerns that the PS5's earlier hardware supply issues are having a knock on effect on software sales and subscriptions, which are important if the company wants to build a "virtuous cycle" of mutually reinforcing console and game sales. CNBC notes that the company reported an operating profit of a record 1.21 trillion yen (around $8.9 billion) for the year, with revenue in the quarter rising 35 percent to 3.06 trillion yen (around $22.5 billion).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chinese hackers vastly outnumber U.S. cyber intelligence staff "by at least 50 to 1." CNBC reports: "To give you a sense of what we're up against, if each one of the FBI's cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI Cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1," Wray said in prepared remarks for a budget hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. The disclosure highlights the massive scale of cyber threats the U.S. is facing, particularly from China. Wray said the country has "a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations -- big or small -- combined." The agency is requesting about $63 million to help it beef up its cyber staff with 192 new positions. Wray said this would also help the FBI put more cyber staff in field offices to be closer to where victims of cyber crimes actually are.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a new fast-charging network coming to North America. It's called Greenlane, and it's a $650 million joint venture between Daimler, NextEra Energy Resources, and a BlackRock investment fund. But it's unlikely you'll recharge your passenger EV at a Greenlane site any time soon -- this new network is being designed specifically for medium- and heavy-duty commercial EVs. [...] Based on the company's renderings, Greenlane's sites will be much more comfortable for big rigs. The first of these sites will be in Southern California, and Greenlane says it will build out a network along critical freight routes on the East and West Coasts, as well as in Texas. To begin with, the company will focus on commercial EV recharging, but refueling infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cell EVs will follow. In time, Greenlane plans to add chargers for passenger (or light-duty) EVs. "Greenlane is designed to begin to tackle one of the greatest hurdles to the trucking industry's decarbonization -- infrastructure," said John O'Leary, Daimler Trucks North America's president and CEO. "The nation's fleets can only transform with the critical catalyst of publicly accessible charging designed to meet the needs for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. Together with our strong partners, BlackRock and NextEra Energy Resources, we are launching Greenlane to address the unique demands of the industry, support our mutual customers, and provide a dual benefit to all electric vehicle drivers who will be able to utilize this new network. We're excited to take this next step and look forward to sharing more of Greenlane's plans in the future," O'Leary said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Space Agency appears to have a slight problem: a critical antenna is jammed on their Jupiter-bound spacecraft launched two weeks ago. From the Associated Press: The 52-foot (16-meter) radar antenna on Juice unfolded only one-third of the way following liftoff, according to the space agency. Engineers suspect a tiny pin may be protruding. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft's engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose. If that doesn't work, they said they have plenty of time to solve the problem. Juice, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won't reach the giant planet until 2031. It's taking a roundabout path to get there, including gravity-assist flybys of Earth and our moon, and Venus. The radar antenna is needed to peer beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life, a major goal of the nearly $1.8 billion mission. Its targets include Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zimbabwe's central bank plans to sell a gold-backed digital currency to the public from May 8 in another attempt to stabilize its tumbling currency and offer an alternative to the US dollar. From a report: The tokens, to be sold through banks in local and foreign currency at a 20% margin above the interbank mid-rate, will be introduced in two phases, central bank governor John Mangudya, said in an emailed statement on Friday. The currency will initially be used for investment and then for transactions. "The issuance of the gold backed digital tokens is meant to expand the value-preserving instruments available in the economy and enhance the divisibility of the investment instruments and widen their access and usage by the public," Mangudya said. This year, Zimbabwe's local currency has declined 35% against the US dollar, which superseded it as the preferred currency for transactions. The central bank has been building gold reserves and acquiring other precious minerals since the introduction of a policy in 2022 that compels miners to pay part of their royalties in cash and metal. It's banking on the stash to help it with the latest plan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents. From a report: The approvals, analysed by Greenpeace, reveal that between January and March this year, at least 20.45 gigawatts of coal power was approved, up from 8.63GW in the same period in 2022. In the whole of 2021, 18GW of coal was approved. A Chinese Communist party (CCP) five-year plan from 2016 had placed a heavy emphasis on reducing the use of coal and developing clean energy sources. In 2020 Xi Jinping, China's leader, pledged that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. This prompted an era of reduced coal power approvals as local governments sought to keep their local economies in check with Beijing's priorities. A rise in coal power approvals came in 2020 when the five-year plan came to an end, as local governments anticipated even tighter restrictions on coal expansion in the next round. But in 2021, China suffered huge power outages, leading to a dramatic shift in the CCP's energy priorities. In September the price of electricity soared as factories reopened to service global demand as the rest of the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. But the government had capped prices, so many power plants reduced output rather than operated at a loss.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Venmo soon will allow users to transfer their Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash to outside wallets -- as well as to other users of the popular payment app. From a report: The feature will roll out starting in May, according to a statement from PayPal, which acquired Venmo in 2013. Users can also transfer crypto to their PayPal wallets, which released a similar ability for users in 2022. Crypto transfers on Venmo will be irreversible, just like crypto transactions more broadly -- a function of cryptocurrency's use of blockchains, or immutable public ledgers. To roll out the transfer system, PayPal is partnering with Paxos, a crypto firm that specializes in stablecoins. "We're excited to connect Venmo's customers to the community, other wallets and exchanges, and we intend to continue to roll out additional crypto products and services in the year ahead," PayPal said in its statement. The announcement from PayPal is one of the first drips of crypto updates from the payments giant since February, when it was reported that the publicly traded company was pausing work on its own stablecoin after reports that Paxos, its partner in the effort, was under investigation from the New York Department of Financial Services, a key player among U.S. cryptocurrency regulators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers. From a report: David "dwizzle" Weston, director of OS security for Windows, announced the arrival of Rust in the operating system's kernel at BlueHat IL 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel, last month. "You will actually have Windows booting with Rust in the kernel in probably the next several weeks or months, which is really cool," he said. "The basic goal here was to convert some of these internal C++ data types into their Rust equivalents." Microsoft showed interest in Rust several years ago as a way to catch and squash memory safety bugs before the code lands in the hands of users; these kinds of bugs were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in its own products since 2006. The Rust toolchain strives to prevent code from being built and shipped that is exploitable, which in an ideal world reduces opportunities for miscreants to attack weaknesses in software. Simply put, Rust is focused on memory safety and similar protections, which cuts down on the number of bad bugs in the resulting code. Rivals like Google have already publicly declared their affinity for Rust.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration says it has found evidence that several dozen small technology companies have colluded to increase the chances that their prospective foreign hires will win a coveted H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers in this year's lottery. From a report: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that awards H-1B visas, said it has found that a small number of companies are responsible for entering the same applicants into the lottery multiple times, with the alleged goal of artificially boosting their chances of winning a visa. The findings were laid out in a notice to employers viewed by The Wall Street Journal and set to be released Friday. That practice, according to the agency, is in large part responsible for inflating demand for the visas to a record high this year, with 781,000 entries into the lottery for 85,000 visa slots. Some of that increase in demand is organic, government data shows. About 350,000 applicants for H-1B visas submitted one entry into the lottery this year, compared with about 307,000 last year. A much greater share of the increase, the data shows, can be attributed to applicants whose names were submitted by multiple companies. A large proportion of the duplicate entries, the immigration agency says, were submitted by a handful of the same companies. Some 96,000 people submitted multiple visa entries, for a total of about 408,000 entries. Though it isn't technically illegal for a foreign worker to have multiple companies submit visa applications on their behalf, companies submitting applications must attest that they have a real job for the employee in question if they win a visa. If companies that win a visa then quickly contract an employee out to third parties, or lay off an employee on the visa so he or she can switch companies, that could potentially amount to fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A former Apple employee has been sentenced to three years in prison and must pay back over $19 million in restitution for stealing around $17 million from the tech giant through mail and wire fraud schemes. From a report: Dhirendra Prasad, 55, was originally charged in March 2022 and later pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud Apple and related tax crimes back in November last year. Prasad was employed at the company between 2008 and 2018, mostly working as a buyer in Apple's global service supply chain, purchasing parts and services from vendors. In his written plea agreement, Prasad admitted he started siphoning money from his employer around 2011 by accepting kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices, and fraudulently charging Apple for goods that were never delivered. He also admitted to evading tax on the proceeds of his schemes and conspiring on these activities with the owners of two vendor companies, who have been charged in separate cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwan's top chip design company MediaTek is focusing more resources on chips for cars and AI computing as its smartphone clients face a supply glut and inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty dent demand for consumer electronics. From a report: "We are definitely moving our resources very, very rapidly towards the automotive and computing areas, because those areas will provide our growth in the next three to five years," MediaTek Chief Executive Rick Tsai told an earnings call. "In this very demanding environment, we are not reducing people. We're not increasing either. The critical thing is to allocate those precious resources," he said. Tsai said everyone, including MediaTek, was rushing to claim that they were able to support generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. "We're confident that we will be able to provide the capability to our customers," Tsai said. MediaTek is investing heavily in AI because the new areas the company is focusing on are all related to computing, Tsai said. The development of autonomous vehicles, for instance, requires AI chips.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A shocking number of organizations -- including banks and healthcare providers -- are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. From the report: The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in. Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in. However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization's private information and lead to potential data leaks. Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant's full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows 10 22H2 will be the final version of the operating system, Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday. From a report: Moving forward, all editions of Windows 10 will be supported with monthly security updates until October 14th, 2025, when Microsoft will end support. (Some releases on the Long-Term Servicing Channel, or LTSC, will get updates past that end of support date.) Microsoft is encouraging users to now transition to Windows 11 because Windows 10 won't be getting any new features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mastercard will expand its cryptocurrency payment card programme by seeking more partnerships with crypto firms, the company's head of crypto and blockchain said, even as the sector comes under closer scrutiny from regulators and banks grow wary. From a report: Mastercard has already partnered with crypto exchanges including Binance, Nexo and Gemini to offer crypto-linked payment cards in some countries. The Binance cards allow users to make payments in traditional currencies, funded by their cryptocurrency holdings on the exchange. "We have dozens of partners around the world who offer crypto card programmes and they continue to expand," Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard's head of crypto and blockchain, told Reuters on Thursday. "Providing access to crypto in a safe way is also part of our value proposition and we're continuing to do that." Banks have become wary of crypto clients after a number of big crypto firms collapsed last year, including the bankruptcy of major exchange FTX. Meanwhile, U.S. regulators are increasingly cracking down on what they say is a lack of compliance in the market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says. From a report: Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors." A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a result. But the government says only services posing the highest risk to children will need age verification. Wikipedia has millions of articles in hundreds of languages, written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world. It is the eighth most-visited site in the UK, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb. The Online Safety Bill, currently before Parliament, places duties on tech firms to protect users from harmful or illegal content and is expected to come fully into force some time in 2024. Neil Brown, a solicitor specialising in internet and telecoms law, says that under the bill, services likely to be accessed by children must have "proportionate systems and processes" designed to prevent them from encountering harmful content. That could include age verification.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hacker News: Google on Wednesday said it obtained a temporary court order in the U.S. to disrupt the distribution of a Windows-based information-stealing malware called CryptBot and "decelerate" its growth. The tech giant's Mike Trinh and Pierre-Marc Bureau said the efforts are part of steps it takes to "not only hold criminal operators of malware accountable, but also those who profit from its distribution." CryptBot is estimated to have infected over 670,000 computers in 2022 with the goal of stealing sensitive data such as authentication credentials, social media account logins, and cryptocurrency wallets from users of Google Chrome. The harvested data is then exfiltrated to the threat actors, who then sell the data to other attackers for use in data breach campaigns. CryptBot was first discovered in the wild in December 2019. The malware has been traditionally delivered via maliciously modified versions of legitimate and popular software packages such as Google Earth Pro and Google Chrome that are hosted on fake websites. [...] The major distributors of CryptBot, per Google, are suspected to be operating a "worldwide criminal enterprise" based out of Pakistan. Google said it intends to use the court order, granted by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, to "take down current and future domains that are tied to the distribution of CryptBot," thereby kneecapping the spread of new infections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Rolling Stone: It was a busy day for the live music industry in Washington [on Wednesday] as senators introduced multiple pieces of legislation aimed at improving transparency and competition in ticketing. One of the most common complaints among music fans in a long list of gripes about the modern ticketing industry is the hidden fees that get tacked on at the very end of a purchase, adding a deceptive extra costs customers won't even see until they've already selected their seats based on a different price. The Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing, or TICKET Act, could end that annoyance. Introduced on Tuesday by U.S. Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) and committee ranking member Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the bill, if passed, would require ticket sellers for concerts and sporting events to disclose the total price of a ticket including fees right away. Fees themselves can be a significant addition for concert tickets, usually adding a 20 to 30-percent extra charge on tickets but sometimes well exceeding that. Joe Biden pushed for a reform on "junk fees" earlier this year. While passing the new legislation wouldn't stop the actual fees themselves, it would certainly be a step forward in making the business more transparent for consumers. While the bill would pass all-in prices on a federal level, some states like New York already enacted the policy. "Right now, one company is leveraging its power to lock venues into exclusive contracts that last up to ten years, ensuring there is no room for potential competitors to get their foot in the door," Klobuchar said, seemingly referencing Ticketmaster but not mentioning it by name. "Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences. The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act would help consumers, artists, and independent venue operators alike by making sure primary ticketing companies face pressure to innovate and improve."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader canux writes: In an effort to continue to power Voyager 2's five on-board scientific instruments, NASA engineers have devised a software update that disables the probe's electrical supply safety system [to redirect the power to them]. "Although the spacecraft's voltage will not be tightly regulated as a result, even after more than 45 years in flight, the electrical systems on both probes remain relatively stable, minimizing the need for a safety net," according to NASA JPL. "The engineering team is also able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. If the new approach works well for Voyager 2, the team may implement it on Voyager 1 as well." The Voyager probes each contain a Multihundred-Watt Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for their power which use Plutonium-238 to generate heat to produce electricity with a thermocouple. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of a little over 87 years which means that Voyager 2 has seen a greater than 25% reduction in its power output since it was launched.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Palantir, the company of billionaire Peter Thiel, is launching Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), software meant to run large language models like GPT-4 and alternatives on private networks. In one of its pitch videos, Palantir demos how a military might use AIP to fight a war. In the video, the operator uses a ChatGPT-style chatbot to order drone reconnaissance, generate several plans of attack, and organize the jamming of enemy communications. In Palantir's scenario, a "military operator responsible for monitoring activity within eastern Europe" receives an alert from AIP that an enemy is amassing military equipment near friendly forces. The operator then asks the chatbot to show them more details, gets a little more information, and then asks the AI to guess what the units might be. "They ask what enemy units are in the region and leverage AI to build out a likely unit formation," the video said. After getting the AI's best guess as to what's going on, the operator then asks the AI to take better pictures. It launches a Reaper MQ-9 drone to take photos and the operator discovers that there's a T-80 tank, a Soviet-era Russia vehicle, near friendly forces. Then the operator asks the robots what to do about it. "The operator uses AIP to generate three possible courses of action to target this enemy equipment," the video said. "Next they use AIP to automatically send these options up the chain of command." The options include attacking the tank with an F-16, long range artillery, or Javelin missiles. According to the video, the AI will even let everyone know if nearby troops have enough Javelins to conduct the mission and automate the jamming systems. [...] What Palantir is offering is the illusion of safety and control for the Pentagon as it begins to adopt AI. "LLMs and algorithms must be controlled in this highly regulated and sensitive context to ensure that they are used in a legal and ethical way," the pitch said. According to Palantir, this control involves three pillars. The first claim is that AIP will be able to deploy these systems into classified networks and "devices on the tactical edge." It claims it will be able to parse both classified and real-time data in a responsible, legal, and ethical way. According to the video, users will then have control over what every LLM and AI in the Palantir-backed system can do. "AIP's security features what LLMs and AI can and cannot see and what they can and cannot do," the video said. "As operators take action, AIP generates a secure digital record of operations. These capabilities are crucial for mitigating significant legal, regulatory, and ethical risks in sensitive and classified settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK fusion company Tokamak Energy claims to have made a breakthrough in fusion magnets, developing technology capable of withstanding the electromagnetic bombardment from a fusion reaction while holding the reaction in place. It plans to put its technology to the test at a U.S. gamma ray facility in the desert. The Register reports: At its Oxford headquarters, Tokamak Energy, which is collaborating with the UK government's nuclear fusion program, has built a specialist gamma radiation cryostat system, designed around a vacuum device which insulates the magnets from fusion energy. The system is now set to be disassembled, shipped, and rebuilt at the Gamma Irradiation Facility based at the US Department of Energy's Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Tokamak Energy said Sandia was one of the few places in the world capable of housing the system while exposing the company's superconducting magnets to gamma radiation comparable with the expected emissions of a fusion power plant. Research and analysis on sets of individual magnets will run for six months at the New Mexico facility, which is so powerful it can do a 60-year lifetime test in just two weeks, Tokamak Energy said. The company recently signed an agreement with UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to jointly develop technology, and share resources and equipment for the development of a Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the company's first-quarter earnings results (PDF) on Wednesday, Intel reported a 133% annual reduction in earnings per share. "Revenue dropped nearly 36% year over year to $11.7 billion," adds CNBC. From the report: In the first quarter, Intel swung to a net loss of $2.8 billion, or 66 cents per share, from a net profit of $8.1 billion, or $1.98 per share, last year. Excluding the impact of inventory restructuring, a recent change to employee stock options and other acquisition-related charges, Intel said it lost 4 cents a share, which was a narrower loss than analyst had expected. Revenue decreased to $11.7 billion from $18.4 billion a year ago. It's the fifth consecutive quarter of falling sales for the semiconductor giant and the second consecutive quarter of losses. It's also Intel's largest quarterly loss of all time, beating out the fourth quarter of 2017, when it lost $687 million. Intel hopes that by 2026 that it can manufacture chips as advanced as those made by TSMC in Taiwan, and it can compete for custom work like Apple's A-series chips in iPhones. Intel said on Thursday it was still on track to hit that goal. Intel's Client Computing group, which includes the chips that power the majority of desktop and laptop Windows PCs, reported $5.8 billion in revenue, down 38% on an annual basis. Intel's server chip division, under its Data Center and AI segment suffered an even worse decline, falling 39% to $3.7 billion. Its smallest full line of business, Network and Edge, posted $1.5 billion in sales, down 30% from the same time last year. One bright spot was Mobileye, which went public last year but is still controlled by Intel. Mobileye makes systems and software for self-driving cars, and reported 16% sales growth to $458 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points -- and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they're reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware. NTT says it's successfully tested network sharing with a scheme that starts by asking operators of Wi-Fi access points or other connections if they're open to sharing their bandwidth and allowing random netizens to connect. In return they get a share of revenue from those connections. Under the scheme, netizens search for available networks and, as they connect, a contract would be executed allowing a link to be made. That contract would use Ethereum Proof of Authority to verify identities and initiate the back-end billing arrangements before allowing signed-up users and devices to join private networks. The operator of the Wi-Fi access point gets paid, the punter gets a connection, and everything's on a blockchain so the results can be read for eternity. [...] If this all scales, NTT estimates Tokyo won't need to add any more Wi-Fi access points or private 5G cells, even as demand for connectivity increases. The company also suggests it can enable networks to scale without requiring commensurate increases in energy consumption, and that spectrum will also be freed for other uses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clubhouse, the audio app that peaked in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, is laying off more than half of its employees. Axios reports: CEO Paul Davison tweeted that the move was about forming a smaller team focused "relentlessly on product," rather than because of the economic environment. He added it wasn't a financial decision and the San Francisco-based company has "plenty of runway." No specifics on layoff numbers, but a Clubhouse spokesperson says that company headcount never surpassed 100. Clubhouse raised around $300 million in total venture capital funding (most recently in 2021 led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation). In a memo sent to employees, Clubhouse said it would provide those impacted with salaries through April and four months paid severance, accelerated vesting, health insurance through the end of August and help with possible immigration issues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After security researchers criticized Google for not including end-to-end encryption with Authenticator's account-syncing update, the company announced "plans to offer E2EE" in the future. "Right now, we believe that our current product strikes the right balance for most users and provides significant benefits over offline use," writes Google product manager Christiaan Brand on Twitter. "However, the option to use the app offline will remain an alternative for those who prefer to manage their backup strategy themselves." The Verge reports: Earlier this week, Google Authenticator finally started giving users the option to sync two-factor authentication codes with their Google accounts, making it much easier to sign into accounts on new devices. While this is a welcome change, it also poses some security concerns, as hackers who break into someone's Google account could potentially gain access to a trove of other accounts as a result. If the feature supported E2EE, hackers and other third parties, including Google, wouldn't be able to see this information. Security researchers Mysk highlighted some of these risks in a post on Twitter, noting that "if there's ever a data breach or if someone obtains access to your Google Account, all of your 2FA secrets would be compromised." They added that Google could potentially use the information linked to your accounts to serve personalized ads and also advised users not to use the syncing feature until it supports E2EE. Brand pushed back against the criticism, stating that while Google encrypts "data in transit, and at rest, across our products, including in Google Authenticator," applying E2EE comes at the "cost of enabling users to get locked out of their own data without recovery."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto exchange Coinbase offered a fiery response on Thursday to last month's Wells notice from the SEC, telling the federal regulator that an enforcement action against the crypto exchange would pose "major programmatic risks" to the SEC that would "fail on the merits." From a report: "Coinbase does not list, clear, or effect trading in securities," the company's response said. The analysis SEC did staffers to justify an enforcement action "appears to rest on superficial and incorrect analogies to products and services offered by others," Coinbase wrote in a blog post from chief legal officer Paul Grewal. Separately, Grewal told CNBC, "At the time when we went public we had detailed discussions with the SEC about the very aspects of our business that are now -- two years later -- the subject of the Wells notice. Nothing has changed." The SEC indicated to Coinbase in a March wells notice that its spot trading, staking, custody and institutional trading businesses were at risk. The SEC's warning to Coinbase noted that the regulator would allege Coinbase was offering and selling unregistered securities, in violation of federal law. The SEC has used unregistered offering and sale violations to force other crypto exchanges to close services in the U.S., including the crypto exchange Kraken's staking-as-a-service product.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new set of patches have been released for the Intel Linux graphics driver that "can provide 10-15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode," reports Phoronix. From the report: The set of Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patches are about exposing the Intel RPS (Requested Power State) up/down thresholds. Right now the Intel Linux kernel driver has static values set for the up/down thresholds between power states while these patches would make them dynamically configurable by user-space. Google engineer Syed Faaiz Hussain raised the issue that they experimented with the Intel RPS tuning and were able to manage up to 15% better performance. With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with OpenGL was a 14.5% boost, CS:GO with Vulkan was 12.9% faster, and Civilization VI with OpenGL was 11% faster while Strange Brigade was unchanged. No other game numbers were provided. But as this is about changing the threshold for how aggressively the Intel graphics hardware switches power states, the proposed patches leave it up to user-space to adjust the thresholds as they wish. Google engineers are interested in hooking this into Feral's GameMode so that the values could be automatically tuned when launching games and then returning to their former state when done gaming, in order to maximize battery life / power efficiency. The only downside with these current patches are that they work only for non-GuC based platforms... So the latest Alder/Raptor Lake notebooks as well as Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics currently aren't able to make use of this tuning option.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The low-profile firm that has become crucial to a half-trillion-dollar global industry. From a report: In 1984, Martin van den Brink, a young Dutch engineer, joined a newly created venture in a quiet corner of the Netherlands. Little did he know then that about 40 years on the company would be so crucial to the $580 billion semiconductor industry that it would be the epicenter of a US-China chip war. ASML Holding NV, where Van den Brink is now the chief technology officer, practically owns the market for a critical piece of equipment needed to produce the brains of everything that makes modern life possible -- from cars and smartphones to computers, microwaves and airplanes. With the company's high-end machines churning out chips that can also go into state-of-the-art weapons and artificial intelligence devices, ASML is effectively being treated as critical infrastructure for US national security and has become a target of industrial espionage for China. "I never expected to be where we are today," said Van den Brink. Over his nearly four decades at the company, ASML has gone from a bit player competing with the likes of Nikon, Canon and Ultratech to the world's only maker of very high-end semiconductor lithography equipment. Its ascent has made it Europe's most valuable technology company, with a market capitalization of over $247 billion -- more than twice that of its customer Intel. In an industry where devices typically cost $10 million, ASML commands about $180 million for its current top-end machine. And although the chip market has softened recently, ASML is still growing and its long-term outlook seems intact, thanks to the insatiable demand for computing power. "This is a company that the world can't exist without," said Jon Bathgate, a fund manager at NZS Capital in Denver, which has about $2 billion under management, with ASML as one of its biggest holdings. "They've got a 20-year head start... Investors have clearly realized how important ASML is as a company and how difficult it would be to replicate. It's a natural monopoly with secular growth winds. That's unique." As chips become for geopolitics in the 21st century what oil was in the last one, ASML's singular success has thrust it squarely in the crosshairs of the intensifying tensions between the US and China. With the US focused on the strategic importance of semiconductors, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have done everything to ensure that China is a couple of generations behind in chips. No company is more critical to that effort than ASML.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will no longer manufacture mice, keyboards, and webcams that are Microsoft-branded. Instead, Microsoft is now focusing on its Surface-branded PC accessories, which include mice, keyboards, pens, and more. From a report: It brings an end to the legacy of Microsoft-branded PC hardware after the company first launched its first mouse in 1983 and bundled it with Microsoft Word and Notepad. "Going forward, we are focusing on our Windows PC accessories portfolio under the Surface brand," says Dan Laycock, senior communications manager at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "We will continue to offer a range of Surface branded PC Accessories -- including mice, keyboards, pens, docks, adaptive accessories, and more. Existing Microsoft branded PC accessories like mice, keyboards, and webcams will continue to be sold in existing markets at existing sell-in prices while supplies last."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously -- the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn't been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now. The move is also going to be disastrous for the continuity of the internet. Like Photobucket before it, Imgur has been widely used to host millions of photos that are linked to, embedded, or used elsewhere, and lots of these photos were uploaded by people who didn't bother to sign up for accounts. Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit, meaning the content of those old posts could suddenly disappear off the internet. The move will likely also break embeds in various forum posts and blog posts all over the internet, creating an unpleasant form of link rot. (The Archive Team, generally a harbinger of shuttering sites, is working on backing up this material, according to an announcement on Reddit.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intellectual property laws cannot handle possibility artificial intelligence could invent things on its own. From a report: When members of the US supreme court refused this week to hear a groundbreaking case that sought to have an artificial intelligence system named as the inventor on a patent, it appeared to lay to rest a controversial idea that could have transformed the intellectual property field. The justices' decision, in the case of Thaler vs Vidal, leaves in place two lower court rulings that only "natural persons" can be awarded patents. The decision dealt a blow to claims that intelligent machines are already matching human creativity in important areas of the economy and deserve similar protections for their ideas. But while the court's decision blocked a potentially radical extension of patent rights, it has done nothing to calm growing worries that AI is threatening to upend other aspects of intellectual property law. The US Patent and Trademark Office opened hearings on the issue this week, drawing warnings that AI-fuelled inventions might stretch existing understandings of how the patent system works and lead to a barrage of litigation. The flurry of concern has been prompted by the rapid rise of generative AI. Though known mainly from OpenAI's ChatGPT, the same technology is already being used to design semiconductors and suggest ideas for new molecules that might form the basis of useful drugs. For now, such uses of AI do not appear to pose a serious challenge to the patent system since the technology is being used as a tool to help humans shape ideas rather than operating independently, said Chris Morgan, an IP partner at law firm Reed Smith. However, referring to the possibility that AI systems might one day come up with inventions on their own, she added: "Our laws are not equipped, the way they're written right now, to handle that scenario."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brave browser: Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We've removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful," CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors Wednesday. From a report: While he was vague about how exactly Meta will add generative AI to its apps, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed preview yet during the company's earnings call for the first quarter of this year, when it reported $28.6 billion in revenue and a record 2 billion daily users of the Facebook app, beating Wall Street's estimates. Meta's profit for the quarter was $5.7 billion, a 24 percent decrease from the same time last year. "We're exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well," Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. "I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience. Over time, this will extend to our work on the metaverse, too, where people will much more easily be able to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code to tie all of them together."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mrflash818 writes: Colorado has enacted the nation's first state law guaranteeing farmers a right to repair tractors and other equipment themselves or at independent repair shops. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed the bill yesterday. "I am proud to sign this important bipartisan legislation that saves hardworking farmers and ranchers time and money on repairs, and supports Colorado's thriving agriculture industry... Farmers and ranchers can lose precious weeks and months when equipment repairs are stalled due to long turnaround times by manufacturers and dealers. This bill will change that," Polis said. The state House voted 46-14 in favor of the bill on April 11, while the Senate voted 21-12 on March 30. "The legislation advanced through long committee hearings, having been propelled forward mostly by Democrats even though a Republican lawmaker co-sponsored the bill," the Associated Press wrote. "The proposal left some GOP lawmakers stuck between their farming constituents pleading for the ability to repair their equipment and the manufacturers who vehemently opposed it." The law's requirements are scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2024. Farm equipment manufacturers will have "to provide parts, embedded software, firmware, tools, or documentation, such as diagnostic, maintenance, or repair manuals, diagrams, or similar information (resources), to independent repair providers and owners of the manufacturer's agricultural equipment," according to the legislature's summary of the Consumer Right To Repair Agricultural Equipment bill.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission proposed rules on Thursday to govern patents increasingly in demand for technologies used in smart devices such as drones, connected cars and mobile phones, to try to reduce litigation. From a report: The Commission said the system for what are known as standard-essential patents (SEPs), was fragmented, lacked transparency, led to lengthy disputes and that self-regulation had not worked. SEPs protect technology such as for 5G, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth that is needed by equipment producers to comply with international standards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's president Brad Smith said the UK regulator's decision to prevent its acquisition of 'Call of Duty' maker Activision Blizzard "had shaken confidence" in Britain as a destination for tech businesses. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which operates independently from government, blocked the deal on Wednesday, saying it could hit competition in the nascent cloud gaming market. Microsoft hit back on Thursday, saying it was "probably the darkest day in our four decades in Britain" and sent the wrong message to the global tech industry about the UK. "If the government of the United Kingdom wants to bring in investment, if it wants to create jobs (...) it needs to look hard at the role of the CMA, the regulatory structure in the United Kingdom, this transaction, and the message that the United Kingdom has just said to the world," he told BBC radio. "We continue to believe that the UK has an extremely attractive tech sector and a growing games market," he said. "We will continue to engage proactively with Microsoft and other companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloud storage giant Dropbox today joined the fray of tech companies announcing layoffs. From a report: The company today announced that it would be laying off 16% of its staff, equivalent to about 500 employees, due to slowing growth, and -- in the words of CEO Drew Houston -- because "the AI era of computing has finally arrived." These appear to be the first layoffs the company has made since January 2021, when it laid off 315 employees in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Climate scientists already know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own. But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure a "hidden vulnerability" that will make matters far worse: The coastline is also sinking. From a report: It's a phenomenon known as subsidence, and it's poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems. New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds that the Atlantic coast -- home to more than a third of the US population -- is dropping by several millimeters per year. In Charleston, South Carolina, and the Chesapeake Bay, it's up to 5 millimeters (a fifth of an inch). In some areas of Delaware, it's as much as twice that. Five millimeters of annual sea-level rise along a stretch of coastline, plus 5 millimeters of subsidence there, is effectively 10 millimeters of relative sea-level rise. Atlantic coastal cities are already suffering from persistent flooding, and the deluge will only get worse as they sink while seas rise. Yet high-resolution subsidence data like this isn't yet taken into account for coastal hazard assessments. "What we want to do here is to really bring awareness about this missing component, that based on our analysis actually makes the near-future vulnerability a lot worse than what you would expect from sea-level rise alone," says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and coauthor of the new paper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has revealed App Store metrics in Europe in response to the European Digital Services Act. From the legal compliance post: iOS App Store: 101 millioniPadOS App Store: 23 millionmacOS App Store: 6 milliontvOS App Store: 1 millionwatchOS App Store: under 1 millionApple Books: under 1 millionPodcasts paid subscriptions: under 1 millionRead more of this story at Slashdot.