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A new proposal targeting hidden fees charged by cable and satellite companies could force TV providers to clearly list their "all-in" prices. From a report The proposal announced today by Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel would require cable and direct-broadcast satellite providers to "state the total cost of video programming service clearly and prominently, including broadcast retransmission consent, regional sports programming, and other programming-related fees, as a prominent single line item on subscribers' bills and in promotional materials." TV providers generally advertise a low rate that doesn't include charges such as the "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees. Cable and satellite companies say these fees cover the amounts they have to pay for programming. But paying for programming is part of the cost of doing businessâ"there would be no TV channel lineup without channels, after all. By treating programming costs as separate fees, TV providers advertise rates that aren't even close to what customers actually have to pay. Comcast, for example, adds nearly $40 to monthly TV bills in the form of Broadcast TV and Regional Sports Network fees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember when Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky released an impassioned plea for someone, anyone, to make a small Android phone that would compete with the iPhone Mini? He's taking matters into his own hands. From a report: Now that Apple has stopped making new small phones, Migicovsky's Small Android Phone petition has evolved into a "community-based project" -- where that community includes a team working to design and produce the phone that Migicovsky wants. The petition got 38,700 signatures, and "almost all of that came from literally one article from The Verge," one team member revealed in a design call. The Small Android Phone team -- it's not a company, yet -- has been doing a lot of planning right under our noses. In a small Discord, they've quietly revealed their efforts to source a display, choose a chip, and design the body of the phone. They've even discussed how they might pay for it all. Diehard small phone enthusiasts are invited to give feedback at every step of the process as the team attempts to bend the phone market to their will.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How much energy does it take to play Xbox? Microsoft is helping developers find out. At the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the company announced a new toolkit for developers to measure real-time energy consumption from Xbox games. From a report: The toolkit, which Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft calls the first of its kind in the industry, will allow developers using the Xbox platform to monitor real-time energy use of the games they create -- "down to the nearest millisecond," the company noted in a press release. It will also help Microsoft establish a baseline for Xbox games, which could then serve as a benchmark for developers. The company hopes game-makers will also leverage the toolkit to experiment with approaches that reduce energy consumption. Some 60 years after the debut of the world's first video game, the industry has grown into a $214 billion global juggernaut. With that growth comes an increased environmental impact -- but one that can be difficult to quantify with precision, particularly as it varies widely by console, game and system setup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Justin Sun Wednesday on allegations of selling and airdropping unregistered securities, fraud and market manipulation. From a report: The SEC said in a press release it was suing Sun, the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation and BitTorrent (now known as Rainberry) over the sale of tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens, which it described as unregistered crypto asset securities. The regulator further alleged that the defendants "fraudulently manipulat[ed]" TRX's secondary market through an "extensive wash trading" scheme.The agency is also suing Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, Akon and Michele Mason on illegal touting charges for their roles allegedly promoting TRX and BTT without disclosing they were paid to do so. The majority of these celebrities settled the charges. Sun, who was named Grenada's ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year, tried to artificially inflate TRX's trading volume through the wash trading scheme, the SEC alleged, by having his own employees "engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of TRX between two crypto asset trading platform accounts he controlled." Somewhere between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX was traded daily through these wash trades, the agency said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Job listings site Indeed.com told employees on Wednesday that it's laying off 2,200 people, representing 15% of its headcount. From a report: Indeed CEO Chris Hyams broke the news to employees in an all-hands meeting on Wednesday morning, saying that the cuts would affect teams across the company and attributing the decision to broader economic pressures, a person who attended the meeting said. Employees whose jobs were cut were notified via email following the meeting, the person added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An ongoing internet disruption on one of Taiwan's islands is accelerating the self-governed territory's plans to launch an independent satellite network like SpaceX's Starlink, which would help ensure it remains connected in a potential Chinese invasion. From a report: Taiwan's National Communication Commission blamed Chinese vessels last month for cutting two undersea cables providing high-speed internet to Matsu, a Taiwanese island located only a few nautical miles off the coast of China's Fujian province. The cables have yet to be repaired; Matsu residents are currently relying on a microwave backup system and other fixes, such as using SIM cards from China. [...] Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang said last week that the territory would prioritize testing its satellite internet capabilities in outlying islands such as Matsu. She first announced in September that Taiwan was aiming to build a satellite system similar to the Starlink network run by Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has become instrumental to Ukraine in its war against Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of victims affected by a mass-ransomware attack, caused by a bug in a popular data transfer tool used by businesses around the world, continues to grow as another organization tells TechCrunch that it was also hacked. From the report: Canadian financing giant Investissement Quebec confirmed to TechCrunch that "some employee personal information" was recently stolen by a ransomware group that claimed to have breached dozens of other companies. Spokesperson Isabelle Fontaine said the incident occurred at Fortra, previously known as HelpSystems, which develops the vulnerable GoAnywhere file transfer tool. Hitachi Energy also confirmed this week that some of its employee data had been stolen in a similar incident involving its GoAnywhere system, but saying the incident happened at Fortra. Over the past few days, the Russia-linked Clop gang has added several other organizations to its dark web leak site, which it uses to extort companies further by threatening to publish the stolen files unless a financial ransom demand is paid. TechCrunch has learned of dozens of organizations that used the affected GoAnywhere file transfer software at the time of the ransomware attack, suggesting more victims are likely to come forward. However, while the number of victims of the mass-hack is widening, the known impact is murky at best. Since the attack in late January or early February -- the exact date is not known -- Clop has disclosed less than half of the 130 organizations it claimed to have compromised via GoAnywhere, a system that can be hosted in the cloud or on an organization's network that allows companies to securely transfer huge sets of data and other large files.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve just announced that Counter-Strike 2, made in Source Engine 2, will be released in Summer 2023. From a report: Accompanying the announcement, Valve also released three videos teasing what to expect in the Counter-Strike's massive and transformative update. Leveling up the World shows off the upgraded maps and overhauls, Moving Beyond Tick Rate announces that tick rate will no longer matter (moving and shooting will be "equally responsive"), and Responsive Smokes details the new "dynamic volumetric" nature of smoke grenades.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Top tech companies are mounting a push to limit how US intelligence agencies collect and view texts, emails and other information about their users, especially American citizens. From a report: The companies, including Alphabet's Google, Meta Platforms and Apple, want Congress to limit Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as they work to renew the law before it expires at the end of the year, according to three people familiar with the discussions. There is a growing bipartisan consensus in Congress to not only renew the law but to make changes in response to a series of reports and internal audits documenting abuses. That's left the tech industry optimistic that broader reforms will get through Congress this time, according to two lobbyists who asked not to be identified relaying internal discussions. The law, passed by Congress in 2008 in response to revelations of warrantless spying on US citizens by the Bush administration, granted sweeping powers that have been criticized over the years for different reasons. Civil liberties groups think more privacy protections are needed. Former President Donald Trump and his allies claim that spying powers enable intelligence agencies to conspire against conservatives. "Reforms are needed to ensure dragnet surveillance programs operate within constitutional limits and safeguard American users' rights, through appropriate transparency, oversight and accountability," said Matt Schruers, president of the tech trade group Computer & Communications Industry Association, which counts Apple, Google, Meta and Amazon among its members. Intelligence agencies say Section 702 is an essential tool that has generated critical information on the espionage and hacking activities of countries such as China and contributed to the successful drone strike that killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court will take a break on Wednesday from the unusually political mix of cases it decided to hear during its current term, to consider a case about poop jokes. From a report: Jack Daniel's v. VIP Products asks whether VIP Products, the nation's second-largest maker of dog toys, infringed upon the whiskey maker's trademarked bottle shape and label when it sold dog toys that resemble a bottle of Jack Daniel's. The dog toy, named "Bad Spaniels," juxtaposes imagery drawn from the whiskey maker's trademarks with a gag about a dog dropping âoethe old No. 2 on your Tennessee carpet." Jack Daniel's seeks a court order prohibiting VIP from continuing to sell this toy. Jack Daniel's is, on the surface, a very silly case, which prompted some very silly attempts by the whiskey maker's lawyers to explain why their client is so offended by this dog toy. Sample quote from their brief: "Jack Daniel's loves dogs and appreciates a good joke as much as anyone. But Jack Daniel's likes its customers even more, and doesn't want them confused or associating its fine whiskey with dog poop." Lurking below the surface, however, are very serious questions about the First Amendment. And about how far courts should go in second-guessing Congress's decisions about how to balance the needs of the marketplace with the demands of free speech. VIP has strong legal arguments that it should prevail in this case, but Jack Daniel's also raises strong claims that the lower courts did too much to undermine federal trademark law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. From a report: Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company's mission isn't to build just any AI -- its mission is to build AI that's open source and "trustworthy," according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the head of Mozilla.ai. "Working on trustworthy AI for almost five years, I've constantly felt a mix of excitement and anxiety," he told TechCrunch in an email interview. "The last month or two of rapid-fire big tech AI announcements has been no different. Really exciting new tech is emerging -- new tools that have immediately sparked artists, founders ... all kinds of people to do new things. The anxiety comes when you realize almost no one is looking at the guardrails." Surman was referring to the rash of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have worrisome real-world implications. At release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be prompted to write malware, identify exploits in open source code and create phishing websites that looked similar to well-trafficked sites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, has been co-opted to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes and ultra-graphic depictions of violence. The creators of these models say that they're taking steps to curb abuse. But Mozilla felt that not enough was being done. "We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, hoping other industry players with more AI expertise would step up to build more trustworthy tech," Surman said. "They haven't. So we decided mid-last year we needed to do it ourselves -- and to find like-minded partners to do it alongside us. We then set out to find someone with the right mix of academic and industry AI experience to lead it." Funded by a $30 million seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla.ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation -- much like the Mozilla Corporation (the org responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's VC fund). Its managing director is Moez Draief, who previously was the chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and the global chief scientist at consulting company Capgemini.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's GitHub unit created one of the first widely deployed programs using OpenAI's language-generation tools -- an app called Copilot that helped software developers write computer code. Now GitHub is adding a chat and voice feature that will let programmers ask how to accomplish certain coding tasks. From a report: The new version announced Wednesday is called Copilot X, which GitHub Chief Executive Officer Thomas Dohmke said he demonstrated to one of his children by asking it how to program a snake game in Python. The chat window can provide explanations of what segments of code are meant to do, create ways to test the code and propose fixes for bugs. Developers can also give instructions or ask questions using their voice. GitHub first previewed Copilot in 2021 and widely released it last year. The initial product contained a completion tool that suggested snippets of programming code as a software developer typed. It attracted hundreds of thousands of developers by November and its product name had become short-hand for Microsoft's strategy to deploy these kinds of assistive technologies to a wide array of its products, from Office software to security programs. Now that OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot has made a splash in popular culture, companies are trying to follow Microsoft in embedding the research lab's tools into products and business strategies. At the same time, rivals such as Alphabet's Google are releasing chatbot competitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the 1970s, Bob Metcalfe helped develop the primary technology that lets you send email or connect with a printer over an office network. From a report: In June 1972, Bob Metcalfe, a 26-year-old engineer fresh out of graduate school, joined a new research lab in Palo Alto, Calif., as it set out to build something that few people could even imagine: a personal computer. After another engineer gave up the job, Dr. Metcalfe was asked to build a technology that could connect the desktop machines across an office and send information between them. The result was Ethernet, a computer networking technology that would one day become an industry standard. For decades, it has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe. For his work on Ethernet, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced on Wednesday that Dr. Metcalfe, 76, would receive this year's Turing Award. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. When Dr. Metcalfe arrived at the Palo Alto Research Center -- a division of Xerox nicknamed PARC -- the first thing he did was connect the lab to the Arpanet, the wide-area network that later morphed into the modern internet. The Arpanet transmitted information among about 20 academic and corporate labs across the country. But as PARC researchers designed their personal computer, called the Alto, they realized they needed a network technology that could connect personal computers and other devices within an office, not over long distances. Further reading: Ethernet Creator Makes the Inventors Hall of Fame (2007).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Researchers have designed a robot that can create and cook a cake with up to seven ingredients, more than any other printed food to date. The scientists built their programmable patisserie by retrofitting a 3D printer with nozzles designed to squeeze out selected ingredients. They then programmed it to dispense those into layered cakes. Initial trials resulted in triangular gobs of sweet goo, so the researchers came up with a winning recipe that could hold its own. They nested softer ingredients, such as jelly and banana puree, inside of stiffer ingredients, such as peanut butter and Nutella, then reinforced those with hefty doses of graham cracker crust. Then, they broiled the crust with a laser and topped the cake with frosting and cherry glaze. The result? A cheesecake, of sorts. Despite its novelty, the computer-guided cook may not be able to battle it out under the stern eye of a guest judge any time soon -- each slice took about 30 minutes to print. Further in the future, however, better printers could make some cooking automatic, freeing people from kitchen tasks they may find tiring or repetitive -- assuming you don't enjoy those things. A food printer could also be programmed to dispense meals with precision-controlled nutrient and calorie content, helping prepare food for those on strict diets. The study has been published in the journal npj Science of Food.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On March 27th, Nintendo's eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles will be shut down. With many of the titles being original to those consoles and not available anywhere else, it's left archivists and historians scrambling to preserve them before it's too late. However, those preservation plans get complicated given Nintendo's litigious nature on matters of intellectual property. Techdirt's Timothy Geigner writes: Preventing the gaming public from continuing to buy games that rely on a company-operated backend infrastructure is one thing. After all, Nintendo can do what it wants when it comes to putting its products into commerce. But what really annoyed a ton of people, myself included, was how this would impact archivists and historians, or anyone else interested in preserving video game history and culture. With the impending shutdown, some of those entities are once again expressing concern: "While it's unfortunate that people won't be able to purchase digital 3DS or Wii U games anymore, we understand the business reality that went into this decision,' the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) tweeted when the eShop shutdowns were announced a year ago. 'What we don't understand is what path Nintendo expects its fans to take, should they wish to play these games in the future.'" Because Nintendo is litigious, utilizes DRM, and the DMCA exists, all of that combines to make it wildly unsafe for museums and archivists to actually retain copies of these games that will shortly no longer be found anywhere else. And, no, the exemptions built into the DMCA for content such as movies and literature simply don't exist for the video game space. [...] So what can be done? Not a whole lot, honestly, but some hobbyists are at least going to make a go of it: "In an effort to address this -- or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible -- YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries. He's now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks." As part of this effort, The Completionist has said he plans to donate all of this digital media to the VGHF. What they can do with all of that content still remains to be seen. All of the same copyright and DMCA rules still apply, so what access it can grant to researchers, never mind the public, is in question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have analyzed samples of the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil, one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples. Phys.Org reports: This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have been delivered to Earth by meteorites. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers extracted these molecules by soaking the Ryugu particles in hot water, followed by analyses using liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. This revealed the presence of uracil and nicotinic acid, as well as other nitrogen-containing organic compounds. "We found uracil in the samples in small amounts, in the range of 6-32 parts per billion (ppb), while vitamin B3 was more abundant, in the range of 49-99 ppb," Oba elaborated. "Other biological molecules were found in the sample as well, including a selection of amino acids, amines and carboxylic acids, which are found in proteins and metabolism, respectively." The compounds detected are similar but not identical to those previously discovered in carbon-rich meteorites. The team hypothesizes that the difference in concentrations in the two samples, collected from different locations on Ryugu, is likely due to the exposure to the extreme environments of space. They also hypothesized that the nitrogen-containing compounds were, at least in part, formed from the simpler molecules such as ammonia, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. While these were not detected in the Ryugu samples, they are known to be present in cometary ice -- and Ryugu could have originated as a comet or another parent body that had been present in low temperature environments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brew is so potent that practitioners report not only powerful hallucinations, but near-death experiences, contact with higher-dimensional beings, and life-transforming voyages through alternative realities. Often before throwing up, or having trouble at the other end. Now, scientists have gleaned deep insights of their own by monitoring the brain on DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, the psychedelic compound found in Psychotria viridis, the flowering shrub that is mashed up and boiled in the Amazonian drink, ayahuasca. The recordings reveal a profound impact across the brain, particularly in areas that are highly evolved in humans and instrumental in planning, language, memory, complex decision-making and imagination. The regions from which we conjure reality become hyperconnected, with communication more chaotic, fluid and flexible. "At the dose we use, it is incredibly potent," said Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. "People describe leaving this world and breaking through into another that is incredibly immersive and richly complex, sometimes being populated by other beings that they feel might hold special power over them, like gods." He added: "What we have seen is that DMT breaks down the basic networks of the brain, causing them to become less distinct from each other. We also see the major rhythms of the brain -- that serve a largely inhibitory, constraining function -- break down, and in concert, brain activity becomes more entropic or information-rich." For the latest study, Chris Timmermann, head of the DMT research group at Imperial College London, recruited 20 healthy volunteers who received a 20mg injection of DMT and a placebo on separate visits to the lab. All were screened to ensure they were physically and mentally suitable for the study. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the scientists recorded the participants' brain activity before, during and after the drug took hold. The volunteers gave updates throughout on how intense the experience felt. None vomited as the emetic is another ingredient in ayahuasca. The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the most advanced picture yet of the human brain on psychedelics. The recordings show how the brain's normal hierarchical organization breaks down, electrical activity becomes anarchic, and connectivity between regions soars, particularly those handling "higher level" functions such as imagination, which evolved most recently in humans. "The stronger the intensity of the experience, the more hyperconnected were those brain areas," said Timmermann. "We suspect that while the newer, more evolved aspects of the brain dysregulate under DMT, older systems in the brain may be disinhibited," said Carhart-Harris. "A similar kind of thing happens in dreaming. This is just the beginning in cracking the question of how DMT works to alter consciousness so dramatically."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By the end of 2022, global renewable generation capacity amounted to 3,372 gigawatts (GW), growing the stock of renewable power by 295 GW or 9.6%, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Renewables produced an overwhelming 83% of all power capacity added last year. Electrek reports: Renewable Capacity Statistics 2023, released today by IRENA, shows that renewable energy continues to grow at record levels despite global uncertainties, confirming the downward trend of fossil fuels. While many countries increased their renewable capacity in 2022, the significant growth of renewables is concentrated in Asia, the US, and Europe. IRENA reports that almost half of all new capacity in 2022 was added in Asia, resulting in a total of 1.63 terawatts (TW) of renewable capacity by 2022. China was the largest contributor, adding 141 GW to Asia's new capacity. Renewables in Europe and North America grew by 57.3 GW and 29.1 GW, respectively. Africa saw an increase of 2.7 GW, slightly above 2021. Oceania continued its double-digit growth with an expansion of 5.2 GW, and South America had a capacity expansion of 18.2 GW. The Middle East recorded its highest increase in renewables on record, with 3.2 GW of new capacity added in 2022, an increase of 12.8%. Although hydropower accounted for the largest share of the global total renewable generation capacity with 1,250 GW, solar and wind continued to dominate new generating capacity. Together, both technologies contributed 90% to the share of all new renewable capacity in 2022. Solar led with a 22% (191 GW) increase, followed by wind, which increased its generating capacity by 9% (75 GW).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google defended its use of "history-off chats" for many internal communications, denying the US government's allegation that it intentionally destroyed evidence needed in an antitrust case. The history-off setting causes messages to be automatically deleted within 24 hours. Ars Technica reports: The US government and 21 states last month asked a court to sanction Google for allegedly using the auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence and accused Google of falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices on chats subject to a legal hold. Google opposed the motion for sanctions on Friday in a filing (PDF) in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Google said it uses a "tiered approach" for preserving chats. "When there is litigation, Google instructs employees on legal hold not to use messaging apps like Google Chat to discuss the subjects at issue in the litigation and, if they must, to switch their settings to 'history on' for chats regarding the subjects at issue in the litigation, so that any such messages are preserved," the Google filing said. Google said the government plaintiffs "contend that the Federal Rules specifically mandate that Google should have applied a forced history on setting for all custodians for all chats created while the custodian was on legal hold, regardless of the possible relevance of the message to the litigation." But federal rules only require "reasonable steps to preserve" information, Google pointed out. "Google's vast preservation efforts here -- and specifically its methodology with respect to history-off chats -- were 'reasonable steps' under the Rule," Google argued. Google said the US and state attorneys general "have not been denied access to material information needed to prosecute these cases and they have offered no evidence that Google intentionally destroyed such evidence." Google also argued that the objections came too late, alleging that the government knew before litigation began "that there was a subset of chats not automatically retained." "Plaintiffs' motions are barred at the outset because they were on notice of Google's approach to chats for years, yet did not object until well after the close of discovery. Those tactics should not be countenanced," Google told the court. Google said its November 2019 disclosures in an ESI (Electronically Stored Information) questionnaire "show that the distinction between 'on-the-record' and other chats was apparent to anyone who wanted to pursue the matter from the outset of DOJ's investigation. For instance, the ESI Questionnaire response specifies that chat 'messages are generally retained for a period of 30 days if they have been marked on-the-record, and potentially longer if on-the-record messages are on legal hold.'" Google also said, "it is no secret how Google's Chat product operates" because it's a publicly available product and the Google Chat website explains the history-off feature. The Justice Department's motion last month said things happened very differently. "Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours" for nearly four years, the government motion said, continuing [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roblox is launching its first set of generative AI game creation tools: Code Assist and Material Generator. Engadget reports: Although neither tool is anywhere close to generating a playable Roblox experience from a text description, Head of Roblox Studio Stef Corazza told an audience at GDC 2023 that they can "help automate basic coding tasks so you can focus on creative work." For now, that means being able to generate useful code snippets and object textures based on short prompts. Roblox's announcement for the tools offers a few examples, generating realistic textures for a "bright red rock canyon" and "stained glass," or producing several lines of functional code that will that make certain objects change color and self-destruct after a player interacts with them. Code Assist looks promising, but Roblox is careful to state it's imperfect, and may generate "incorrect" or "misleading" information. "It is still up to you to review, test, and determine if the code suggestion is contextually appropriate." Even so, Roblox's Corazza seems confident that this is the first step towards making every user on the platform a creator, suggesting it may only be a few years before these tools can generate fully playable, interactive 3D scenes from a simple prompt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Last Energy Inc., a startup developing advanced, smaller nuclear power plants, completed four deals worth $18.9 billion to build 34 reactors in Europe. The Washington-based company expects to install the first of its 20-megawatt systems as soon as 2025, Chief Executive Officer Bret Kugelmass said in an interview Monday. Last is building its first system in Texas, but is still seeking approval from regulators in Poland and the UK, where it closed the Europe deals. Last is part of a wave of companies seeking to install smaller reactors that could be manufactured in factories and assembled on-site. The approach is expected to make them faster and cheaper to build than conventional nuclear plants, but the technology is still untested. Kugelmass said the agreements validate the strategy and show growing demand for nuclear energy. "It's huge for us, and it's a milestone for the whole industry," he said. Last plans to build and operate the plants, and the $18.9 billion value of the deals represents the revenue it anticipates over the course of power-purchase agreements that stretch as long as 24 years. The company must arrange financing for the estimated $100 million it will need for each system. The customers include a data-center operator and a hydrogen producer in the UK and an industrial zone in Poland. It announced last year agreements to build 12 systems for two additional customers in Poland. While the lack of regulatory approval is a key barrier, Last Energy's small design means that engineering and safety issues will be simpler than with larger reactors, said Jessica Lovering, executive director of Good Energy Collective, a pro-nuclear research group.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Reg has seen two recent incidents of Russian developers being blocked from public development of FOSS code. One was a refusal on the Linux kernel mailing list, the other a more general block on Github. In the last week, these events have both caused active, and sometimes heated, discussions in FOSS developer communities. From the report: The GitHub account of developer Alexander Amelkin has been blocked, and his repositories marked as "archived" â" including ipmitool, whose README describes it as "a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface." Unable to comment on Github itself, Amelkin described what happened on the project's older Soureforge page. Amelkin works for Russian chipbuilder Yadro, which we described as working on RISC-V chips back in 2021. Microsoft is just obeying US law in this: according to the War and Sanctions database of the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the NACP, Yadro is a sanctioned company. However, on LinkedIn, Amelkin disputes his employer's involvement. Over on Hacker News, commentators seem to be generally in favor of the move, although the discussion on LWN is more measured, pointing out both that there is little threat from server-management tools like this, but that Microsoft probably has no choice. Amelkin is not alone. Over on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, a contribution from Sergey Semin has been refused with the terse notice: "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization. Please withhold networking contributions until further notice." Semin is a developer at chipmaker Baikal Electronics, a company whose website has been suspended for a year now, as we noted a year ago in a story that also mentions Yadro. We were reporting on Baikal's efforts to develop its own CPUs nearly a decade ago, mere months after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And once again, there is spirited debate over the move on the Orange Site.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After five years attempting to make Intel into a competitor for Nvidia and AMD in the realm of discrete graphics for gamers and beyond -- with limited success -- Raja Koduri is leaving Intel to form his own generative AI startup. The Verge reports: Intel hired him away from AMD in 2017, where he was similarly in charge of the entire graphics division, and it was an exciting get at the time! Not only had Intel poached a chief architect who'd just gone on sabbatical but Intel also revealed that it did so because it wanted to build discrete graphics cards for the first time in (what would turn out to be) 20 years. Koduri had previously been poached for similarly exciting projects, too -- Apple hired him away from AMD ahead of an impressive string of graphics improvements, and then AMD brought him back again in 2013. Intel has yet to bring real competition to the discrete graphics card space as of Koduri's departure. [...] But the company has a long GPU roadmap, so it's possible things get better and more competitive in subsequent gens. It took a lot longer than five years for Nvidia and AMD to make it that far. By the time Koduri left, he wasn't just in charge of graphics but also Intel's "accelerated computing" initiatives, including things like a crypto chip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Sang Yup Lee, Hyundai's head of design, reiterated the company's commitment to buttons at the introduction of the new Hyundai Kona. As reported by CarsGuide, for the Korean automaker, it's a decision rooted in safety concerns. "We have used the physical buttons quite significantly the last few years. For me, the safety-related buttons have to be a hard key," said Lee. It's a design call that makes a lot of sense. In some modern vehicles, adjusting things like the volume or climate control settings can require diving into menus on a touch screen, or using your eyes to find a touch control on the dash. In comparison, the tactile feedback of real buttons, dials, and switches lets drivers keep their eyes on the road instead. "When you're driving, it's hard to control it. This is why when it's a hard key it's easy to sense and feel it," said Lee. As far as he is concerned, physical controls are a necessity for anything that could impact safety. Hence the physical buttons and dials for items like the HVAC system and volume control. Lee hinted that while this is a priority for Hyundai today, things may change in future. In particular, the company will likely look at using touch controls more heavily when autonomous driving becomes mainstream. "When it comes to Level 4 autonomous driving, then we'll have everything soft key," said Lee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: Crippled by war and sanctions, Russia now faces evidence that its already-struggling space program is falling apart. In the past three months alone, Roscosmos has scrambled to resolve two alarming incidents. First, one of its formerly dependable Soyuz spacecraft sprang a coolant leak. Then the same thing happened on one of its Progress cargo ships. The civil space program's Soviet predecessor launched the first person into orbit, but with the International Space Station (ISS) nearing the end of its life, Russia's space agency is staring into the abyss. "What we're seeing is the continuing demise of the Russian civil space program," says Bruce McClintock, a former defense attache at the US embassy in Moscow and current head of the Space Enterprise Initiative of the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. Around 10 years ago, Russian leaders chose to prioritize the country's military space program -- which focuses on satellite and anti-satellite technologies -- over its civilian one, McClintock says, and it shows. Russia's space fleet is largely designed to be expendable. The history of its series of Soyuz rockets and crew capsules (they both have the same name) dates back to the Soviet era, though they've gone through upgrades since. Its Progress cargo vessels also launch atop Soyuz rockets. The cargo ships, crewed ships, and rockets are all single-use spacecraft. Anatoly Zak, creator and publisher of the independent publication RussianSpaceWeb, estimates that Roscosmos launches about two Soyuz vehicles per year, takes about 1.5 to 2 years to build each one, and doesn't keep a substantial standing fleet. While Roscosmos officials did not respond to interview requests, the agency has been public about its recent technical issues.Plus this, which failed to make headlines here: "For crewed launches, Russia has long depended on its Baikonur spaceport in neighboring Kazakhstan. But the nation has charged costly annual fees, and in March Kazakhstan seized Russian spaceport assets, reportedly due to Roscosmos' debt."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has won dismissal of a private consumer antitrust lawsuit over its $69 billion proposed purchase of "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard, but the plaintiffs were given 20 days to refine their legal challenge. From a report: A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the lawsuit from a group of video game plaintiffs "lacks allegations" supporting their claim that the proposed acquisition would harm market competition. "Plaintiffs' general allegation that the merger may cause 'higher prices, less innovation, less creativity, less consumer choice, decreased output, and other potential anticompetitive effects' is insufficient," wrote U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Corley. "Why? How?" The decision does not affect the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) regulatory challenge to the largest-ever gaming industry deal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Variety has analyzed the often underappreciated process of selecting movie titles in Hollywood. As one of the most crucial aspects of a film's marketing strategy, the title serves as the first point of contact for potential audiences, shaping perceptions and driving intrigue. In a highly competitive industry, a captivating and effective title can be the difference between success and failure at the box office, the article argues. The naming process typically involves collaboration between a diverse range of stakeholders, including studio executives, marketing teams, producers, directors, and screenwriters. The title must not only align with the film's story and themes, but also appeal to target demographics, meet legal requirements, and translate well into foreign languages. As a result, naming a film can be a complex and lengthy endeavor. Some movies adopt their titles from pre-existing source material, such as books or plays, while others rely on brainstorming sessions, market research, and even audience testing. High-profile examples of title changes include "Pretty Woman," originally named "3000," and "Scream," initially titled "Scary Movie."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle today announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the popular programming language and development platform. From a report: The latest version of the 27-year-old language includes thousands of performance, stability and security improvements and features seven enhancement proposals to the Java Development Kit that are aimed at increasing developer productivity and enhancing performance, stability and security. Oracle has coordinated a disciplined rollout of new Java releases on a six-month cadence for the past five years and says it's the top contributor to the open-source project. Java is the world's third most widely used programming language, according to Tiobe Software BV, and is No. 1 in organizational development, according to Oracle. "The innovation pipeline has never been richer," said Chad Arimura, vice president of developer relations at Oracle. "The problem space is changing and developers have higher demands on their programming languages than ever."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe is jumping into the generative AI game with the launch of a new family of AI models called Firefly. From a report: Focused on bringing AI into Adobe's suite of apps and services, specifically AI for generating media content, Firefly will be made up of multiple AI models "working across a variety of different use cases,' Adobe VP of generative AI Alexandru Costin told TechCrunch in an email interview. It's an expansion of the generative AI tools Adobe introduced in Photoshop, Express and Lightroom during its annual Max conference last year, which let users create and edit objects, composites and effects by simply describing them. As the fervor around the tech grows, Adobe has raced to maintain pace, for example allowing contributors to sell AI-generated artwork in its content marketplace. "Firefly is the next step on our AI journey -- bringing together our new 'gentech' models with decades of investment in imaging, typography, illustration and more to produce assets," Costin said. "We'll bring this value to our customers' workflows where content is created across Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud and Document Cloud." Firefly as it exists today, in beta and without firm pricing (Adobe says that's coming), offers a single model designed to generate images and text effects from descriptions. Developed using hundreds of millions of photos, the model can create content across Adobe apps including Express, Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Experience Manager given a text prompt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we learned that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing's AI chatbot and ChatGPT. Don't have access to all that capital or space for all that hardware for your own LLM project? Nvidia's DGX Cloud is an attempt to sell remote web access to the very same thing. Announced today at the company's 2023 GPU Technology Conference, the service rents virtual versions of its DGX Server boxes, each containing eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory. The service includes interconnects that scale up to the neighborhood of 32,000 GPUs, storage, software, and "direct access to Nvidia AI experts who optimize your code," starting at $36,999 a month for the A100 tier. Meanwhile, a physical DGX Server box can cost upwards of $200,000 for the same hardware if you're buying it outright, and that doesn't count the efforts companies like Microsoft say they made to build working data centers around the technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photography and camera gear review site DPReview, writing in a blog post: After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year. The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content. Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we're grateful for the communities that formed around the site. Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you'll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has enraptured the business world since its November release and OpenAI is signing up customers eager to pay to use its artificial intelligence models in their own products. But the Microsoft-backed startup faces a surprising rival: Microsoft itself. From a report: As part of its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has the rights to sell the startup's software through its Azure cloud business, even as OpenAI licenses its own software directly to customers. Microsoft also gets a share of OpenAI's profits. The offerings cost the same, a fraction of a cent per query. Meanwhile, all of OpenAI's technology runs on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure rent free. The dual offerings mean the companies are at times pitching the same customers on nearly identical products, putting salespeople at Microsoft in the uneasy position of trying to lure customers away from OpenAI while touting its technology. While the profit-sharing agreement means sales of either offering theoretically benefit both companies, OpenAI pursues direct relationships with big customers, such as Microsoft rival Salesforce, which has licensed ChatGPT for a new suite of customer service software. It's not clear whether the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft dictates the price each company sets for the models. Microsoft gets 75% of OpenAI's profits until its investment is paid back and 49% of subsequent profits up to a certain cap, The Information previously reported. It's also not clear how much profit Microsoft returns to OpenAI for the models it sells through Azure OpenAI Service. [...] An internal Microsoft document, viewed by The Information, instructs Azure salespeople to tell potential customers that OpenAI's own licenses are "great [for] experimentation" but have "limited enterprise-grade capabilities" and fewer "security/privacy features."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft today announced that its new AI-enabled Bing will now allow users to generate images with Bing Chat. From a report: This new feature is powered by DALL-E, OpenAI's generative image generator. The company didn't say which version of DALL-E it is using here, except for saying that it is using the "very latest DALL-E models." Dubbed the "Bing Image Creator," this new capability is now (slowly) rolling out to users in the Bing preview and will only be available through Bing's Creative Mode. It'll come to Bing's Balanced and Precise modes in the future. The new image generator will also be available in the Edge sidebar. The right prompts will generate the now-familiar square of four high-res DALL-E images. There's one major difference, though: there will be a small Bing logo in the bottom left corner. The early Bing AI release was missing a few guardrails, but Microsoft quickly fixed those. The company is clearly hoping to avoid these issues with this release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Strains in the banking sector are roiling a roughly $8 trillion bond market considered almost as safe as U.S. government bonds. From a report: So-called agency mortgage bonds are widely held by banks, insurers and bond funds because they are backed by the mortgage loans from government-owned lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bonds are far less likely to default than most debt and are easy to buy and sell quickly, a crucial reason they were Silicon Valley Bank's biggest investment before it foundered.ÂBut agency mortgage-backed securities, like all long-term bonds, are vulnerable to rising interest rates, which pushed their prices down last year and saddled banks such as SVB with unrealized losses. Now that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has taken over SVB, investors expect the bonds to be sold off in coming months, adding supply to the weakened market and pushing prices lower. Last week, the risk premium on a widely followed Bloomberg index of agency MBS hit its highest level since October, when climbing interest rates turned global markets topsy-turvy. The move reflected fears that other regional banks might have to sell their holdings, bond-fund managers said. [...] When benchmark interest rates rise, bonds that were sold at times of lower rates lose value. Prices of such "low coupon" agency MBS started dropping about a year ago, when the Federal Reserve raised rates to fight inflation and indicated it might start selling MBS it owned.ÂSome of the bonds lost 15% or more in a matter of months, trading as low as 80 cents on the dollar, according to data from FactSet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google says it's ready to let the public use its generative AI chatbot,Bard. The company will grant tens of thousands of users access to the bot in a gradual rollout that starting Tuesday. From a report: Google says people will use the chatbot, which will be available online and as a mobile app, for things like generating ideas ("Bard, how do I keep my plants alive?"), researching ideas (in combination with Search), and drafting first drafts of letters, invites, or proposals. Google originally announced Bard February 6, alongside some generative AI search functions and developer tools. On March 14, it announced that it will integrate generative AI features across the apps in its Workspace productivity suite. But today marks the first time that Google has released a generative AI chatbot powered by a large language model to the public. Google says the bot is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India will not tolerate use of abusive language and display of obscene content in movies and TV shows on on-demand video streaming services, a key minister has warned in a move that illustrates how the nation's IT rules have "handed over direct ministerial power for censorship." From the report: Anurag Thakur, Union Minister of Information Broadcasting and Sports and Youth Affairs, said at a press conference that use of abusive language in the name of creativity will not be tolerated and that the government is receiving a growing list of complaints about increasing abusive and obscene content. Thakur warned that New Delhi will not shy away from "making any changes" in the rules to address this situation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Crypto ads in Belgium must be accurate and warn investors of the risks under new laws announced by the country's financial regulator Monday. Powers published in Belgium's Official Gazette on Friday mean any mass-media campaign to promote a digital currency would have to be submitted to the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) 10 days in advance, allowing the regulator to intervene if needed. "Virtual currencies are all the rage at the moment, but they involve considerable risk," the FSMA said in a statement. "They are often subject to wild price fluctuations and are vulnerable to fraud and IT-related risks." The new rules, which will take effect on May 17, require ads to state that "the only guarantee in crypto is risk." Belgium joins European countries such as Spain and the U.K. in imposing restrictions on publicity campaigns, which often mirror those already in place for traditional finance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears. From a report: The BBC seems to be the first UK media organisation to issue the guidance - and only the second in the world after Denmark's public service broadcaster. The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. [...] The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing. In an email to staff on Sunday, it said: "The decision is based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security. If the device is a BBC corporate device, and you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted from the BBC corporate mobile device." Staff with the app on a personal phone that they also use for work have been asked to contact the corporation's Information Security team for further discussions, while it reviews concerns around TikTok. Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of journalism industry trade publication the Press Gazette, said it would be interesting to see what other media organizations decide to do. He told the BBC: "I suspect everyone's chief technical officer will be looking at this very closely. Until now, news organizations have been very keen to use TikTok, because it's been one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for news publishers over the last year, and it's been a good source of audience and traffic. So most of the talk in the news media has been around encouraging TikTok rather than banning it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader drwho writes: A new type of propulsion system which uses no propellant, but rather only electricity, will be tested in a satellite to be launched from June 10's Falcon 9 launch. The IVO Quantum Drive utilizes an alternative theory of inertia known as "Quantum Inertia' by its originator Prof. Mike McCullough of U. Plymouth, which seeks to reconcile General Relativity (GR) with Quantum Field Theory (QFT). If successful, this would herald in a new era not only in satellite technology but in space travel as a whole. See this article for more details.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) has led a data recovery firm to conclude that "in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives." The statement comes from a Los Angeles-headquartered HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery firm aptly named Secure Data Recovery that has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved more than 100,000 cases. It studied the HDDs it received in 2022. "Most" of those drives were 40GB to 10TB, according to a blog post by Secure Data Recovery spotted by Blocks & Files on Thursday. Secure Data Recovery's March 8 post broke down the HDDs it received by engineer-verified "power-on hours," or the total amount of time the drive was functional, starting from when its owner began using it and ending when the device arrived at Secure Data Recovery. The firm also determined the drives' current pending sector count, depicting "the number of damaged or unusable sectors the hard drive developed during routine read-and-write operations." The company's data doesn't include HDDs that endured non-predictable failures or damage by unexpected events, such as electrical surges, malware, natural disasters, and "accidental mishandling," the company said. Among the sample, 936 drives are from Western Digital, 559 come from Seagate, 211 are Hitachi brand, 151 are Toshiba's, 123 are Samsung's, and there are 27 Maxtor drives. Notably, 74.5 percent of the HDDs came from either Western Digital or Seagate, which Secure Data Recovery noted accounted for 80 percent of hard drive shipments in 2021, citing Digital Storage Technology Newsletter data shared by Forbes. The average time before failure among the sample size was 2 years and 10 months, and the 2,007 defective HDDs had an average of 1,548 bad sectors. "While 1,548 bad sectors out of hundreds of millions or even billions of disk subdivisions might seem minuscule, the rate of development often increases, and the risk of data corruption multiplies," the blog said. "We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made before 2015," says Secure Data Recovery. "On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015." One of the reasons for this may have to do with HDD manufacturers "pushing the performance envelope," adds Ars. "This includes size limits that cut 'allowance between moving parts, appearing to affect mechanical damage and wear resistance.'" Secure Data Recovery also believes that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) impacts HDD reliability, as the disks place components under "more stress." "What this study shows is not the average working life of a hard disk drive," notes Blacks & Files. "Instead it provides the average working life if a failed disk drive. Cloud storage provider Backblaze issues statistics about the working life of its disk drive fleet and its numbers are quite different." A recent report of theirs found that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer component maker Acer built a lightweight electric bike called the Acer ebii. Electrek reports: This lightweight 35 lb. (16 kg) e-bike features a number of gadgets and gizmos we have yet to spot in the industry, such as built-in AI designed to predictively control the transmission and make use of collision detection sensors for a safer ride. There's also proximity unlocking feature that the company says "automatically locks your bike when you leave and unlocks it again when you're nearby." My Gogoro electric scooter has a similar function, though that's a highway-capable vehicle. Tracking capabilities are built into the ebii to help keep tabs on it 24/7. If the bike is ever stolen, it can be locked remotely and tracked using its built-in GPS locator. But don't think that you won't find typical bike parts here either, as the Acer ebii still features high-end components like a belt drive instead of a chain drive, 160mm hydraulic disc brakes, and 360-degree LED lighting. Airless tires are designed to remove the chance of flats, and a lefty-style fork does double duty as a conversation piece and a fancy weight saver. There's also a 460 Wh electric bicycle battery that is said to offer a range of up to 68 miles (110 km) per charge. A top speed of 15 mph (25 km/h) and a 250W rear hub motor look to keep the bike within European and Asian power and speed limits. There's no hand throttle, which means riders will have to rely on pedal assist that is activated when the rider spins the pedals. It appears that there's some confusion about the 2.5-hour charger included with the bike, as some in the industry seem to think it can be used to charge phones and batteries as well. In fact, it's actually the e-bike's removable battery itself that can function as a portable power station to charge up your mobile devices. Pricing and availability are not yet available. But there is a launch video to build up excitement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a years-long wait, Apple Pay today launched in South Korea, allowing those living in the country to use Apple's payment system to make contactless payments using the iPhone or Apple Watch. MacRumors reports: Apple has been working to bring Apple Pay to South Korea since 2017, but Apple was unable to be registered as an electronic financial business operator because regulators were investigating whether Apple Pay violated local regulations and laws. Apple was finally approved by financial regulators back in February. NFC terminal adoption was also low in retail stores in South Korea around when Apple Pay first launched, which continues to be an issue. There are more NFC terminals than there were six years ago, but The Korea Times suggests Apple Pay will face "significant challenges" in Korea due to the limited number of NFC terminals. At the current time, Apple Pay is limited to Hyundai Card users, which could see South Koreans interested in using the service picking up a Hyundai Card. No other card companies are participating in Apple Pay as of yet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a blog post shared last week, Ingka, the legal entity responsible for most of Ikea's stores, says it now has a total of 100 autonomous drones counting stock in its warehouses during nonoperational hours. The Verge reports: Ikea first partnered with the drone-making company Verity in 2020 to deploy the drones in Switzerland, but now, the company says they're zipping around 16 locations across Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Swedish furniture giant says the drones help improve the accuracy of product availability and also support "a more ergonomic workplace," as it saves employees from counting stock manually. Verity, which specializes in creating self-flying drones for warehouses and even concerts, was founded by Raffaello D'Andrea, one of the creators of Kiva Systems, or what's now called Amazon Robotics. As noted by D'Andrea in 2020, the drones work by taking off from a charging station and then going to each pallet in the warehouse to capture images, videos, and 3D depth scans of the items. Once the job is done, the drones return to their charging stations to download the collected data. The drones not only count inventory but also help employees determine if something's missing or in the wrong spot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the enduring legacies of the '90s browser wars has been an outsize attention to how Microsoft handles default app settings in Windows, especially browser settings. The company plans to make it more straightforward to change your app defaults in future versions of Windows 11, according to a new blog post that outlines a "principled approach to app pinning and app defaults in Windows." The company's principled approach is a combination of broad, vague platitudes ("we will ensure people who use Windows are in control of changes to their pins and their defaults") and new developer features. A future version of Windows 11 will offer a consistent "deep link URI" for apps so they can send users to the right place in the Settings app for changing app defaults. Microsoft will also add a pop-up notification that should be used when newly installed apps want to pin themselves to your Taskbar, rather than either pinning themselves by default or getting lost somewhere in your Start menu. These new features will be added to Windows "in the coming months," starting in the Dev channel Windows Insider Preview builds. Though Microsoft frames these changes as a way to make changing default apps easier and more consistent, they also serve as a gentle rebuke to developers who handle things differently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indian authorities severed mobile internet access and text messaging for a second day Sunday across Punjab, a state of about 27 million people, as officials sought to capture a Sikh separatist and braced for potential unrest. The Washington Post reports: The statewide ban -- which crippled most smartphone services except for voice calls and some SMS text messages -- marked one of the broadest shutdowns in recent years in India, a country that has increasingly deployed the law enforcement tactic, which digital rights activists call draconian and ineffective. The Punjab government, led by the opposition Aam Admi Party, initially announced a 24-hour ban starting midday Saturday as its security forces launched a sprawling operation to arrest the fugitive Amritpal Singh, then extended the ban Sunday for another 24 hours. Singh, a 30-year-old preacher, has been a popular figure within a separatist movement that seeks to establish a sovereign state in Punjab called Khalistan for followers of the Sikh religion. He rocketed to nationwide notoriety in February after his supporters stormed a police station to free one of his jailed supporters. The Khalistan movement is outlawed in India and considered a top national security threat by officials, but the movement has sympathizers across Punjab state, which is majority Sikh, and among members of the large Sikh diaspora who have settled in countries such as Canada and Britain. In a bid to forestall unrest and curtail what it called "fake news," Punjab authorities blocked mobile internet service beginning at noon Saturday, shortly after they failed to apprehend Singh as he drove through central Punjab with a cavalcade of supporters. Officials were probably also motivated by a desire to deprive Singh's supporters of social media, which they briefly used Saturday to seek help and organize their ranks. Singh was still on the run as of late Sunday, and the 4G blackout remained in effect. Three Punjab residents who spoke to The Washington Post said life had been disrupted since midday Saturday. Only essential text messages, such as confirmation codes for bank transfers, were trickling through. Wired internet services were not affected. "My entire business is dependent on internet," said Mohammad Ibrahim, who accepts QR code-based payments at his two clothing shops in a village outside of Ludhiana and also sells garments online. "Since yesterday, I've felt crippled."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch announced plans to lay off 400 employees at the company. It comes just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch's business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon's plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units. "Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2018, Pixel phones gained a built-in screenshot editor called "Markup" with the release of Android 9.0 Pie. The tool pops up whenever you take a screenshot, and tapping the app's pen icon gives you access to tools like crop and a few colored drawing pens. That's very handy assuming Google's Markup tool actually does what it says, but a new vulnerability points out the edits made by this tool weren't actually destructive! It's possible to uncrop or unredact Pixel screenshots taken during the past four years. The bug was discovered by Simon Aarons and is dubbed "Acropalypse," or more formally CVE-2023-21036. There's a proof-of-concept app that can unredact Pixel screenshots at acropalypse.app, and it works! There's also a good technical write-up here by Aarons' collaborator, David Buchanan. The basic gist of the problem is that Google's screenshot editor overwrites the original screenshot file with your new edited screenshot, but it does not truncate or recompress that file in any way. If your edited screenshot has a smaller file size than the original -- that's very easy to do with the crop tool -- you end up with a PNG with a bunch of hidden junk data at the end of it. That junk data is made up of the end bits of your original screenshot, and it's actually possible to recover that data. While the bug was fixed in the March 2023 security update for Pixel devices, it doesn't solve the problem, notes Ars. "There's still the matter of the last four years of Pixel screenshots that are out there and possibly full of hidden data that people didn't realize they were sharing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta's security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case. From the report: The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece. It demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation. The simultaneous tapping of the target's phone by the national intelligence service and the way she was hacked indicate that the spy service and whoever implanted the spyware, known as Predator, were working hand in hand. The latest case comes as elections approach in Greece, which has been rocked by a mounting wiretapping and illegal spyware scandal since last year, raising accusations that the government has abused the powers of its spy agency for illicit purposes. The Predator spyware that infected the device is marketed by an Athens-based company and has been exported from Greece with the government's blessing, in possible breach of European Union laws that consider such products potential weapons, The New York Times found in December. The Greek government has denied using Predator and has legislated against the use of spyware, which it has called "illegal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has announced that it has 40 games slated for launch this year and has 70 in development with its partners. The company also has 16 games currently being developed by its in-house game studios. Netflix launched games in November 2021 and has released 55 titles since then. From a report: The streaming service says it's committed to building out its games portfolio and will be bringing Ustwo's Monument Valley franchise to its platform, starting with Monument Valley 1 and Monument Valley 2, with more to come. In a briefing with reporters, Ustwo CEO Maria Sayans confirmed that the Netflix versions of the games won't be different than the current available versions, and that they will include all paid in-app purchases. The streaming service also announced that Mighty Quest: Rogue Palace, a rogue-lite game set in the universe some may remember from The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, will be launching in April 18. The game, which is from Ubisoft, features an improved formula, deepened narrative and upgraded frantic action gameplay. The launch is part of Netflix's partnership with Ubisoft, and is the second of three exclusive games from the developer to be released on Netflix. The first exclusive game, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, launched in January.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration is planning to take action soon on at least three of its half-dozen investigations of Amazon -- moves that could lead to a blitz of litigation to rein in the iconic tech-industry giant. From a report: The FTC has been investigating the internet titan on multiple fronts dating at least back to 2019, looking into its abuse of power within its online marketplace, as well as potential consumer-privacy violations connected to its Ring cameras and Alexa digital assistant. The agency is also reviewing Amazon's purchase of robot vacuum maker iRobot. Any suit against Amazon would be a high-profile move by the agency under chair Lina Khan, a Big Tech skeptic who rose to prominence with a 2017 academic paper specifically identifying Amazon as a modern monopolist needing to be reined in. Although Amazon has already been hit by local antitrust suits in Washington, D.C. and California, the coming federal cases would be the most significant challenges to the global company yet. The exact timing of any cases or settlements is unknown. POLITICO spoke to more than 10 people with direct knowledge of the investigations by the FTC's competition and consumer protection teams to put together a comprehensive picture of how the agency is now pursuing Amazon, why it didn't take action on the company's most recent major acquisition of One Medical and what is likely to happen in the coming months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.