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Last month, Volkswagen garnered plenty of bad publicity when it emerged that the company's connected car service refused to help track a stolen car -- with a 2-year-old child still on board -- until someone paid to reactivate the service. Now, the automaker says it's very sorry this happened, and it's making its connected vehicle emergency service free to most model-year 2020-2023 Volkswagens. Ars Technica reports: "The family was thankfully reunited, but the crime and the process failure are heartbreaking for me," said Rachael Zaluzec, VW's SVP for customer experience and brand and marketing. "As a mom and an aunt, I can imagine how painful this incident must have been. Words can't adequately express how truly sorry I am for what the family endured." "Volkswagen must and will do better for everyone that trusts our brand and for the law enforcement officials tasked with protecting us. In addition to a full investigation of what went wrong and actions taken to address the failure, we want to make it right for the future. Today, we are setting a new standard for customer peace of mind. As of June 1, we will make these connected vehicle emergency services free for five years as one significant step we can take as a commitment to our owners and their families," Zaluzec said in a statement sent to Ars. Most MY2020 or newer VWs can use connected services, apart from MY2020 Passats. From June, owners can sign up for five years of free Car-Net Safe and Secure, which uses the vehicle's onboard modem to connect to the emergency services via the car's SOS button. In gasoline-powered VWs, there is also an anti-theft alert. VW says it will make Car-Net Remote Access free for five years as well. This lets owners interact with their car via a mobile app and can lock and unlock the doors, honk the horn and flash the lights, and, if fitted, remote-start the vehicle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The Dutch government confirmed for the first time Wednesday it will impose new export controls on microchips manufacturing equipment, bowing to U.S. pressure to block the sale of some of its prized chips printing machines to China. The U.S. and the Netherlands reached an agreement to introduce new export restrictions on advanced chip technology to China at the end of January, but until now, the Dutch government hadn't commented publicly on it. The deal, which also included Japan, involves the only three countries that are home to manufacturers of advanced machines to print microchips. It is a U.S.-led initiative to choke off the supply of cutting-edge chips to China. "Given the technological developments and geopolitical context, the government has concluded that it is necessary for the (inter)national security to expand the existing export controls on specific manufacturing equipment for semiconductors," Foreign Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher wrote in a letter to Dutch lawmakers published Wednesday evening. The Dutch government wants to prevent Dutch technology from being used in military systems or weapons of mass destruction, Schreinemacher wrote — echoing the U.S. reasoning when it imposed its own export controls in October. The Netherlands also wants to avoid losing its pole position in producing cutting-edge chip manufacturing tools: Schreinemacher said the government wants to uphold "Dutch technological leadership." While China is not explicitly named in Schreinemacher's letter, the new policy is targeted at Chinese efforts to overtake the U.S. and others like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and leading European countries in the global microchips supply chain. The new export restrictions deal a blow to ASML, the global leader in producing advanced microchips printing machines based in Veldhoven, in southern Netherlands. In the letter, Schreinemacher said the new export control measures include the most advanced deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines, which are part of ASML's advanced chips printers portfolio. The Dutch firm, which is the highest-valued tech company in Europe, already did not receive export licenses for selling its most advanced machines using extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) technology to China since 2019. ASML in a statement confirmed it will now "need to apply for export licenses for shipment of the most advanced immersion DUV systems," but it noted it has not yet received more details about what "most advanced" means.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's government could use TikTok to control data on millions of American users, FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. Senate hearing on Wednesday, saying the Chinese-owned video app "screams" of security concerns. Reuters reports: Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. security that the Chinese government could also use TikTok to control software on millions of devices and drive narratives to divide Americans over Taiwan or other issues. "Yes, and I would make the point on that last one, in particular, that we're not sure that we would see many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening," Wray said of concerns China could feed misinformation to users. "This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government - and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns," Wray said. Yesterday, the White House said it backed a bill in Congress to give the Biden administration new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign technologies that could pose security threats.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. The Register reports: Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city. Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they're published online. "We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial," he said, according to The Guardian. "It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor." "There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content," Mullen admitted. "The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written." Mullen's comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: In the past month, bed and breakfast owner Chen Yu-lin had to tell his guests he couldn't provide them with the internet. Others living on Matsu, one of Taiwan's outlying islands closer to neighboring China, had to struggle with paying electricity bills, making a doctor's appointment or receiving a package. For connecting to the outside world, Matsu's 14,000 residents rely on two submarine internet cables leading to Taiwan's main island. The National Communications Commission, citing the island's telecom service, blamed two Chinese ships for cutting the cables. It said a Chinese fishing vessel is suspected of severing the first cable some 50 kilometers (31 miles) out at sea. Six days later, on Feb. 8, a Chinese cargo ship cut the second, NCC said. Taiwan's government stopped short of calling it a deliberate act on the part of Beijing, and there was no direct evidence to show the Chinese ships were responsible. The islanders in the meantime were forced to hook up to a limited internet via microwave radio transmission, a more mature technology, as backup. It means one could wait hours to send a text. Calls would drop, and videos were unwatchable. "A lot of tourists would cancel their booking because there's no internet. Nowadays, the internet plays a very large role in people's lives," said Chen, who lives in Beigan, one of Matsu's main residential islands. Apart from disrupting lives, the loss of the internet cables, seemingly innocuous, has huge implications for national security. As the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shown, Russia has made taking out internet infrastructure one of the key parts of its strategy. Some experts suspect China may have cut the cables deliberately as part of its harassment of the self-ruled island it considers part of its territory, to be reunited by force if necessary. The cables had been cut a total of 27 times in the past five years, but it was unclear which country the vessels hailed from, based on data from Chunghwa Telecom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a blog: Google Groups is dying. Its epitaph is not yet inscribed on the Killed by Google website, but the end is easily seen from here (although it should also be noted its death was called as early as 13 years ago). The deficiencies in Google Groups search, supposedly Google's forte, have long been noted. Lately though basic features have just stopped working. Why care? Google Groups is, for whatever reason, the de-facto standard community website in the formal methods community. TLA+ uses it, PRISM uses it, SMT-LIB uses it, and a number of other tools I could find at least have presences on the platform. These communities take time to build: their value resides in the number of people who think of them first whenever they want to ask a question or just talk about these tools. Many websites link to these groups or to specific answers. What's broken? Beyond search's perpetual brokenness, Monospace fonts have just stopped rendering. This makes code samples significantly more difficult to read. Then (precipitating this post) messages or replies submitted to the group have started intermittently just self-deleting. Not in a graceful way, either: the post will successfully be submitted, but then all that will show up is a deleted message. Hope you didn't spend twenty minutes typing a thorough, detailed response! My attempt to submit a link to this very post also deleted itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A YouTube star who built a sizable following with slickly produced videos flaunting his fleet of luxury and sports cars, collection of diamond-encrusted bling, and his spacious Swedesboro home will be forced to give up nearly all of it after he was sentenced Tuesday to 5 and a half years in prison for the illegal business that allowed him to amass those trappings of success. From a report: Bill Omar Carrasquillo -- better known to his more than 800,000 online followers as "Omi in a Hellcat" -- pleaded guilty last year to running one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the U.S. government. As part of his sentencing Tuesday, he was ordered to forfeit more than $30 million in assets, including nearly $6 million in cash; cars including Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys, and McLarens; and a portfolio of more than a dozen properties he'd amassed across Philadelphia and its suburbs. "Thirty million dollars is a lot of money [but] tangible objects aren't everything," U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III said in announcing the punishment during a hearing in federal court. "You have a large following and there may be people who think if you can get away with it, they can too." Carrasquillo, 36, apologized to his family, his employees, and the cable companies he'd cheated through his business, which illegally sold content hijacked from cable boxes to thousands of online subscribers paying fees as low as $15 a month. "I really didn't know the significance of this crime until I was picked up [by the FBI] at my home," he said. "I feel like I let everybody down." But while prosecutors described Carrasquillo's crimes -- which included counts of conspiracy, copyright infringement, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion -- as serious, much of Tuesday's hearing focused on Carrasquillo's remarkable rags-to-riches story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is expanding VPN access to all Google One members on all plans and rolling out a new dark web report feature for all subscribers. From a report: VPN by Google One was previously only available to members on the Premium 2TB plan, but will now be available to all Google One members, including those on the Basic plan that starts at $1.99 per month. The tech giant notes that VPN by Google One adds more protection to your internet activity no matter what apps or browsers you use, shielding it from hackers or network operators by masking your IP address. Google is also introducing a new feature called "dark web report" for Google One members on all plans in the United States to help users monitor their personal information on the dark web. Dark web report will start rolling out over the next few weeks to members across all Google One plans in the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel pushed back against criticism of the company's pricing plans for its Covid-19 vaccine at Wall Street Journal Health Forum. From the report: U.S. politicians including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Peter Welch (D., Vt.) have questioned the company's strategy around commercial pricing, which could be unveiled in the coming months. Moderna received funding from the U.S. government related to development of its Covid-19 vaccine. The chief executive said the company's mRNA platform was funded by investors, not the government, and the public funding accelerated development of the vaccine. "We didn't get a penny,â Mr. Bancel said of Moderna's fundraising efforts, adding that the company unsuccessfully sought funding in the first half of 2020 from countries and foundations to help with manufacturing. He said a company plant was built before the pandemic by private funding. Moderna has said it is considering pricing its Covid-19 vaccine in a range of $110 to $130 a dose in the U.S. when it shifts from government contracting to commercial distribution of the shots. Mr. Bancel on Monday declined to say what the price will be. He said the company has plans so that the vaccine won't cost anything to individuals. After promising early-stage data of the shot came out, Moderna raised money, which it put toward manufacturing doses of the vaccine, still without knowing whether it would work, Mr. Bancel said. The company worked with suppliers to increase manufacturing, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning, local time in Tanegashima, failed after the vehicle's second-stage engine did not ignite. From a report: In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 am (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation." The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine. The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost. Japanese officials expressed dissatisfaction after the rocket's failure. Japan's minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Science, Keiko Nagaoka, said the launch failure was "extremely regrettable." She added that a task force would work with JAXA to "promptly and thoroughly" determine what caused the failure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A brand new version of Spotify is being unveiled to millions of subscribers on Wednesday, marking the largest change to the platform since it became available on phones more than a decade ago. From a report: In an exclusive interview airing Thursday on "CBS Mornings," Spotify's CEO and founder, Daniel Ek, said the updates include an "entirely new" home feed that is "completely redesigned from the ground up." "You'll see Spotify, I think, come alive. You're gonna see a lot more interactive content," he said. The popular digital music streaming service allows users to access a vast library of songs and podcasts. Ek said with the change, users will be able to see recommended content in the form of clips, and other visual components.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial sweeteners and other sugar substitutes sweeten foods without extra calories. But studies show the ingredients can affect gut and heart health. From a report: Table sugar, or sucrose, is still the dominant sweetener in the food supply, and eating a lot of ultra-processed foods with added sugar has been linked to chronic illness and obesity. The number of new food products containing sucrose has fallen by 16 percent in the last five years. Use of high-fructose corn syrup and agave syrup also have declined. "These low-calorie sweeteners are ubiquitous in the food supply, and so people often aren't even aware that they're consuming them," said Allison Sylvetsky, an associate professor in the department of exercise and nutrition sciences at George Washington University. Many sugar substitutes are known as high-intensity sweeteners because they're often hundreds of times sweeter than table sugar. Some are synthetic, like sucralose, aspartame, and saccharin, while others, like allulose, stevia and monk fruit extract, are referred to as "natural" because they're derived from plants. Sugar substitutes can be found in ingredient lists on food packages, often with names that many consumers don't recognize, like adventame, neotame and acesulfame potassium. Foods that claim "no artificial sweeteners" often are sweetened with stevia and other so-called "natural" sugar substitutes. A variety of these sweeteners are turning up in cereals, juices and other packaged foods marketed to kids -- even though public health groups have discouraged their use among children. Sucralose and acesulfame potassium are regularly used in Greek yogurts, tortilla wraps and other foods served in school meals. Schools in some states have experimented with serving chocolate milk sweetened with a blend of sugar and monk fruit extract. [...] Scientists used to think that non-nutritive sweeteners were largely inert, activating sweet receptors on our tongues and passing through our bodies without causing metabolic changes. But questions remain about the health effects of consuming large amounts of these ingredients. The World Health Organization cautioned people to limit their intake of sugar substitutes because of their potential for "undesirable" long-term effects, including detrimental effects on gut and metabolic health.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As media executives look to pop the stock of flagging publicly traded companies, tech advances are becoming the new gimmick to wow (even temporarily) the investing class. From a report: When Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel opened his company's earnings call with prepared remarks Feb. 28, a casual listener hearing him tout the UFC and WME might have missed the most interesting part: Emanuel wasn't speaking at all. Well, he sort of was. The words were his, and the voice was his, but rather than Emanuel speaking into a microphone (opening remarks on earnings calls are often pretaped), the comments were the product of a generative artificial intelligence firm calledâSpeechify. Indeed, artificial intelligence has been hard to avoid for Wall Street watchers this year. And it's easy to understand why: AI news has led to share price surges at companies like BuzzFeed (which uses it and saw its stock price more than double) and Microsoft (whose rise was in the high singleâdigits). After the public release of OpenAI's large language model (LLM) chatbot ChatGPT (and the stock bounce it gave to Microsoft, which is OpenAI's tech partner), it seems that every company wants a piece of the AI action, or at least wants to send the message that it's thinking about it. Companies with close ties to media and entertainment are no exception. In his first letter to creators as CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan wrote March 1 that "the power of AI is just beginning to emerge in ways that will reinvent video and make the seemingly impossible possible," and that it will be a priority for him. Spotify, led by CEO Daniel Ek, released on Feb. 22 what it is calling an "AI DJ," powered by technology from OpenAI. The DJ takes the music a Spotify user listens to and combines it with recommendations from music experts and an AI-generated voice to create a totally personalized radio show. Snap, run by Evan Spiegel, released an assistant called "My AI," based on ChatGPT, bringing the capabilities of that LLM to Snapchat+ users. And at small digital publishers like the Jonah Peretti-led BuzzFeed and Arena Group Holdings (the owner of Sports Illustrated), AI is being touted as a fount of new types of storytelling that "can create enterprise value for our brands and partners," per Arena Group CEO Ross Levinsohn. To be sure, AI's potential for transforming business is real (in a March 2 research report, Morgan Stanley called it a "$6 trillion opportunity"), but it remains just that: an opportunity, rather than today's reality. Wall Street is still very bullish on AI in the long term, with Bank of America's Haim Israel and Martyn Briggs writing in a Feb. 28 thematic report that AI is "at a defining moment -- like the internet in the '90s," but the consensus is that while big tech firms like YouTube owner Alphabet, Amazon and Apple will reap the rewards at some point, what it means for smaller companies in the present is less clear. For entertainment companies, the potential is obvious, even if the business models are not. The Morgan Stanley report noted the logic in AI recommendations on streaming services like Spotify and Netflix (Spotify's DJ is a first step in that direction), and it isn't a stretch to think that content itself can be made faster and at less cost with generative technology (applications could include special effects, which are labor intensive and costly). For companies like Endeavor and CAA, generative voice technology (like that from Speechify) and deepfake tech (like Deep Voodoo, a deepfake company from the creators of South Park that counts the CAA-affiliated Connect Ventures as an investor), could mean new opportunities for old actors (see Robert Zemeckis' upcoming movie Here, which will use AI from Metaphysic to de-age Tom Hanks).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is warning employees that fewer of them will receive promotions to more senior levels this year than in the past. From a report: "The process is manager-led and will be largely similar to last year -- though with our slower pace of hiring, we are planning for fewer promotions into L6 and above than when Google was growing quickly," the company said in an email that was viewed by CNBC. The L6 distinction refers to the first layer of staff that's considered senior and typically includes people with about a decade of experience. The changes come as Google implements a new performance review system called Google Reviews and Development (GRAD), which as CNBC reported in December, will result in more Google employees receiving low performance ratings and fewer receiving high marks. Like many large tech companies, Google has a sprawling middle management. According to last year's internal survey results that affected the company's ability to ship products efficiently. Google also is in the midst of trying to cut costs as growth decelerates and recession concerns persist. The company has slowed hiring and announced in January that it's cutting 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of the workforce. In Monday's email, the tech giant said it's promoting fewer people to senior roles "to ensure that the number of Googlers in more senior and leadership roles grows in proportion to the growth of the company."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft said it would license Activision Blizzard's "Call of Duty" (CoD) to Sony for 10 years to address concerns raised by Britain over its $69 billion takeover of the games maker, according to a document published by the regulator. From a report: "Microsoft is proposing a package of licensing remedies which (i) guarantee parity between the PlayStation and Xbox platforms in respect of CoD and (ii) ensure wide availability of CoD and other Activision titles on cloud gaming services," Microsoft said in the document published on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has extended its spot market share across crypto exchanges for a fourth consecutive month. From a report: The exchange market share increased from 59.4% in January to 61.8% in February, according to a report from crypto market data provider CryptoCompare. Binance had a 13.7% increase in its spot volumes to $504 billion, an all-time high market share for the exchange. This comes as regulators in the U.S. and beyond have ratcheted up their scrutiny of the exchange in recent months. Most recently, a U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC) official said that agency staff believe Binance.US may be operating an unregistered securities exchange in the U.S., an assertion to which Binance.US objected. Binance is a corporate entity that operates in US through Binance.US. "Despite the recent criticism the exchange has received, market participants continue to take shelter on Binance under the premise that the largest exchange is seen as one of the safer trading venues," said Jacob Joseph, a research analyst at CryptoCompare, in an interview with CoinDesk. Joseph also attributes the exchange's dominance to the vast amount of liquidity available on Binance, which means reduced slippage costs and spreads, an attractive benefit for traders. "It is one of the exchanges with the most trading pairs and services available," Joseph said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has followed Microsoft and Google to become the latest veteran search player to dip its beak in the generative AI trend -- announcing the launch today in beta of an AI-powered summarization feature, called DuckAssist, which can directly answer straightforward search queries for users. From a report: DDG says it's drawing on natural language technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, an AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, to power the natural language summarization capability, combined with its own active indexing of Wikipedia and other reference sites it's using to source answers (the encyclopedia Britannia is another source it mentions). Founder Gabe Weinberg tells TechCrunch the sources it's using for DuckAssist are -- currently -- "99%+ Wikipedia." But he notes the company is "experimenting with how incorporating other sources could work, and when to use them" -- which suggests it may seek to adapt sourcing to the context of the query (so, for example, a topical news-related search query might be better responded to by DuckAssist sourcing information from trusted news media). So it remains to be seen how DDG will evolve the feature -- and whether it might, for example, seek to ink partnerships with reference sites. At launch, DuckAssist is only available via DDG's apps and browser extensions -- but the company says it plans to roll it out to all search users in the coming weeks. The beta feature is free to use and does not require the user to be logged in to access it. It's only available in English for now. Per Weinberg, the AI models DDG is ("currently") using to power the natural language summarization are: The Davinci model from OpenAI and the Claude model from Anthropic. He also notes DDG is "experimenting" with the new Turbo model OpenAI recently announced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon on Tuesday defeated a proposed class action lawsuit on behalf of nearly 7,000 workers in California that claimed the company should have reimbursed employees who worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic for home office expenses. U.S. District Judge Vincent Chhabria in San Francisco said the named plaintiff, David Williams, failed to show that Amazon had a company-wide policy of not reimbursing employees for internet, cell phone and other costs, and the judge denied his motion to certify the workers as a class. The judge said that more than 600 of the 7,000 proposed class members were reimbursed $66.49 on average for home internet expenses, and some were reimbursed in full. Williams' motion for class certification was denied without prejudice, meaning he can file a renewed motion later on. Craig Ackermann, a lawyer for Williams, said he plans to file a new motion excluding the 619 workers who received reimbursements from the proposed class. Williams sued Amazon in 2021 individually and added class-action claims last year. He has accused Amazon of violating a California law requiring employers to reimburse workers for reasonable work-related expenses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Temple reports via MIT Technology Review: In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting an experiment deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada. It pumped water thousands of feet underground and then held it there, watching for what would happen. Geothermal power plants work by circulating water through hot rock deep beneath the surface. In most modern plants, it resurfaces at a well head, where it's hot enough to convert refrigerants or other fluids into vapor that cranks a turbine, generating electricity. But Houston-based Fervo Energy is testing out a new spin on the standard approach -- and on that day, its engineers and executives were simply interested in generating data. The readings from gauges planted throughout the company's twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours. The results from the initial experiments -- which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively -- suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag. There are remaining questions about how well, affordably, and safely this will work on larger scales. But if Fervo can build commercial plants with this added functionality, it will fill a critical gap in today's grids, making it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems. "We know that just generating and selling traditional geothermal is incredibly valuable to the grid," says Tim Latimer, chief executive and cofounder of Fervo. "But as time goes on, our ability to be responsive, and ramp up and down and do energy storage, is going to increase in value even more."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Orion spacecraft performed better than expected on its first deep-space flight despite experiencing unpredicted loss of its heat shield material. Space.com reports: During Tuesday's call, NASA program managers revealed that Orion's heat shield did not perform as expected, losing more material than the agency had planned for. Nevertheless, NASA leadership is confident that everything will be ready for the crewed around-the-moon flight of Artemis 2, which is planned for next year. Howard Hu, manager of NASA's Orion Program, lauded the crew module's performance during the test flight, noting that NASA was able to accomplish 161 overall test objectives planned for the mission, even adding an additional 21 during the flight based on the spacecraft's performance. "We also accomplished what our number one objective was, which is returning the crew module back to Earth safely from 24,500 miles per hour to a landing about 16 miles per hour when it touched down, and we were able to land within 2.4 miles of our target," Hu said during Tuesday's teleconference. "Our requirement was 6.2 miles. So, really great performance as we were able to return back from the moon." "Some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted," Hu said. "So we had more liberation of the charred material during reentry before we landed than we had expected." Hu explained that NASA teams are investigating a wide range of data related to the performance of Orion's heat shield, including images and videos of reentry, onboard sensor readings, and even X-ray images of sample materials taken from the shield. "Overall, there's a lot of work to be done in this investigation going forward," Hu said. "We are just starting that effort because we've just gotten together all those pieces of information. Those samples, the videos, images, and the data from the spacecraft itself and correlated them together. And now we're assessing that data and moving forward with that assessment." Despite the heat shield issue, NASA says they feel confident that the crewed Artemis 2 mission will be able to launch on schedule in 2024. "NASA is currently aiming to launch Artemis 2 in November 2024," adds Space.com. "The mission will send a crew of astronauts on an eight-day mission around the moon and back to test Orion's performance, crew interfaces, and guidance and navigation systems."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining. According to Google, when given a high-level command, such as "bring me the rice chips from the drawer," PaLM-E can generate a plan of action for a mobile robot platform with an arm (developed by Google Robotics) and execute the actions by itself. PaLM-E does this by analyzing data from the robot's camera without needing a pre-processed scene representation. This eliminates the need for a human to pre-process or annotate the data and allows for more autonomous robotic control. It's also resilient and can react to its environment. For example, the PaLM-E model can guide a robot to get a chip bag from a kitchen -- and with PaLM-E integrated into the control loop, it becomes resistant to interruptions that might occur during the task. In a video example, a researcher grabs the chips from the robot and moves them, but the robot locates the chips and grabs them again. In another example, the same PaLM-E model autonomously controls a robot through tasks with complex sequences that previously required human guidance. Google's research paper explains (PDF) how PaLM-E turns instructions into actions. PaLM-E is a next-token predictor, and it's called "PaLM-E" because it's based on Google's existing large language model (LLM) called "PaLM" (which is similar to the technology behind ChatGPT). Google has made PaLM "embodied" by adding sensory information and robotic control. Since it's based on a language model, PaLM-E takes continuous observations, like images or sensor data, and encodes them into a sequence of vectors that are the same size as language tokens. This allows the model to "understand" the sensory information in the same way it processes language. In addition to the RT-1 robotics transformer, PaLM-E draws from Google's previous work on ViT-22B, a vision transformer model revealed in February. ViT-22B has been trained on various visual tasks, such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and image captioning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Butcher writes via TechCrunch: SidekickWas it the pandemic? Did everyone follow too many ADHD TikTokers? Have smartphones fried our brains? Whatever the case, there is a boom in ADHD tech solutions, from online drug deliveries to web sites and apps. [...] Now there is a Sidekick, who's pitch is that it's a "productivity browser." Today it's launching a host of features geared to ADHD sufferers and the attention distracted more generally. The company claims users with ADHD noticed a "significant improvement" after using the browser. The Chromium-based browser was founded by Dmitry Pushkarev (a Stanford PhD in Molecular Biology, ex-Amazon exec and ADHDer). So how does it work? To nullify distractions, the browser incorporates AdBlock 2.0; a Focus Mode Timer disables all sounds, badges and notifications for a selected time or indefinitely; a Task Manager organizes your day; and there's a built-in Pomodoro timer; it also claims to run 3x faster than Chrome, which, apparently, is important for ADHD sufferers. Suffice it to say, it has a number of other distraction-killing features; however, I'm not going to list them all here. CEO and founder Dmitry Pushkarev said, in a statement, "Modern browsers are not designed for work, but for consuming web pages. This gap really hurts hundreds of millions of users. We are convinced that lowering web distraction reduces anxiety and increases the quality of people's work and the quality of their lives." He says the startup plans to make money via corporate subscribers, who will pay to get their ADHD-afflicted workers into a more productive mode.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube is relaxing some of the profanity rules it introduced late last year -- "with an update outlining a less restrictive policy that will allow the use of moderate and strong profanity to be used without risking demonetization," reports Engadget. From the report: The original policy, first introduced in November, would flag any video that used rude language in the first several seconds as ineligible for advertising, with little delineation between "strong" or "moderate" swearing. The policy also seemed to apply retroactively, with many creators claiming that videos they published before the updated policy had lost their monetization status. Now, YouTube is reversing course with a tweaked set of rules that allows some swearing. Now, creators who use colorful language in the first seven seconds of a video are still eligible for advertising, with some conditions. If the profanity is "moderate," the video won't face any restrictions -- but strong profanity in those opening seconds could result in a video only receiving "limited ads." Under the original rules, the update notes, both of these scenarios would have caused a video to be completely demonetized. Creators will be able swear more frequently after the first seven seconds without fear of losing advertising revenue, though YouTube notes that excessive swearing will still put content at risk of being demonetized or limited. The update also clarifies that strong language in background, outro or intro music should not affect monetization status.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called "country code top level domains" (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau. Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, presumably as a way to encourage users to pay for related services, such as registering a .com or .net domain, for which Freenom does charge a fee. On March 3, 2023, social media giant Meta sued Freenom in a Northern California court, alleging cybersquatting violations and trademark infringement. The lawsuit also seeks information about the identities of 20 different "John Does" -- Freenom customers that Meta says have been particularly active in phishing attacks against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users. The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted for the European Commission, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers. "The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers' identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes," the complaint charges. "Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers." Freenom has not yet responded to requests for comment. But attempts to register a domain through the company's website as of publication time generated an error message that reads: "Because of technical issues the Freenom application for new registrations is temporarily out-of-order. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. We are working on a solution and hope to resume operations shortly. Thank you for your understanding." Although Freenom is based in The Netherlands, some of its other sister companies named as defendants in the lawsuit names are incorporated in the United States. It remains unclear why Freenom has stopped allowing domain registration, but it could be that the company was recently the subject of some kind of disciplinary action by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit entity which oversees the domain registrars. In June 2015, ICANN suspended Freenom's ability to create new domain names or initiate inbound transfers of domain names for 90 days. According to Meta, the suspension was premised on ICANN's determination that Freenom "has engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking in or use of domain names identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark of a third party in which the Registered Name Holder has no rights or legitimate interest."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The White House said Tuesday it backs a bill in Congress to give the Biden administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign technologies that could pose security threats. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the bipartisan bill sponsored by a dozen senators "would strengthen our ability to address discrete risks posed by individual transactions, and systemic risks posed by certain classes of transactions involving countries of concern in sensitive technology sectors." "We look forward to continue working with both Democrats and Republicans on this bill, and urge Congress to act quickly to send it to the President's desk," he said. The bill in question is called the "Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act." The bill, introduced by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD), doesn't single out TikTok to be banned. "Instead, Warner avoids making his bill all about TikTok," reports Ars Technica. "His office told Reuters that the RESTRICT Act will 'comprehensively address the ongoing threat posed by technology from foreign adversaries,' citing TikTok as an example of tech that could be assessed as a threat." "[T]he RESTRICT Act is superior to the DATA Act because it provides a legal framework for the US to review all 'foreign technology coming into America,' not just from China, but also from Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. It's designed to give the US 'a systemic approach to make sure we can ban or prohibit' emerging technology threats 'when necessary.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is readying a new batch of Macs to launch "between late spring and summer." This includes a 15-inch MacBook Air and a new 24-inch iMac. From the report: Apple's next iMac desktop is at an advanced stage of development called engineering validation testing, or EVT, and the company is conducting production tests of the machine. The next iMac will continue to come in the same 24-inch screen size as the current model, which was announced in April 2021. The versions being tested also come in the same colors as the current iMac, a palette that includes blue, silver, pink and orange. The new iMacs will, of course, be more powerful -- with a new M-series chip to replace the M1. There also will be some behind-the-scenes changes. The computer will see some of its internal components relocated and redesigned, and the manufacturing process for attaching the iMac's stand is different. While development of the new iMacs -- codenamed J433 and J434 -- has reached a late stage, it's not expected to go into mass production for at least three months. That means it won't ship until the second half of the year at the earliest. Still, this is a great development for anyone disappointed that Apple's all-in-one desktop hasn't been updated in nearly two years. Aside from the iMac, Apple is scheduled to launch about three new Macs between late spring and summer, I'm told. Those three models are likely to be the first 15-inch MacBook Air (codenamed J515), the first Mac Pro with homegrown Apple chips (J180) and an update to the 13-inch MacBook Air (J513). The big remaining question is which processors these new Macs will run on. We already know the Mac Pro will include the M2 Ultra, which will provide up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. We also know that Apple has developed the next iMac on the same timeline as the M3 chip, so I'd expect it to be one of the company's first M3-based machines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence discussed the emergence of spatial audio, the state of the smart home, and how a seemingly endless stream of lawsuits between Sonos and Google impact its day to day. Here's what he had to say about looming right-to-repair legislation and how it impacted the company's focus on reparability: We factor in everything. But I would say that our team has been on this for a long time, in terms of being the right thing to do. Also, I think we're learning. When we were first bringing out our products 20 years ago, we were like, "How do you build these things so they'll make the sound you want?" So we had to use things like adhesives. We've been able to come up with ways and inventions that allow us to disassemble these products. It comes into our thinking more broadly about what we're building and how you live up to the law of the land, but even before that, we were already starting to use recycled materials. We were already starting to use things that allow it to be more easily repaired. In late 2021, the company announced plans to extend the lifespan of its products and use less energy. They started a "Design for Disassembly" program that "includes changes like swapping out adhesives for fasteners, which can make it easier for consumers to take apart Sonos products for repair," reports The Verge. When asked for additional information about the program, Sonos wouldn't confirm whether it will also make replacement parts and repair manuals available. All of its products by the end of 2023 will use post-consumer recycled plastic and they will include "sleep mode," a feature that cuts down on power consumption while the device is idle. The goal is for Sonos products to ultimately use less than 2 watts while idle," adds The Verge. In the longterm, Sonos aims to cut emissions from its products' energy use by 45 percent by 2040. They also want to essentially cancel its entire footprint by that date by relying on a mixture of carbon offsets and new technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: A nuclear power plant in Georgia has begun splitting atoms in one of its two new reactors, Georgia Power said Monday, a key step toward reaching commercial operation at the first new nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades in the United States. The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said operators reached self-sustaining nuclear fission inside the reactor at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta. That makes the intense heat that will be used to produce steam and spin turbines to generate electricity. A third and a fourth reactor were approved for construction at Vogtle by the Georgia Public Service Commission in 2009, and the third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016. The company now says Unit 3 could begin commercial operation in May or June. Unit 4 is projected to begin commercial operation sometime between this November and March 2024. The cost of the third and fourth reactors was originally supposed to be $14 billion. The reactors are now supposed to cost more than $30 billion. That doesn't include $3.68 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners after going bankrupt, which brings total spending to more than $34 billion. Georgia Power said Unit 3 would continue startup testing to show that its cooling system and steam supply system will work at the intense heat and pressure that a nuclear reactor creates. After that, operators are supposed to link the reactor to the electrical grid and gradually raise it to full power.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has completed development of its Intel 18A (1.8nm-class) and Intel 20A (2nm-class) fabrication processes that will be used to make the company's own products, as well as chips for clients of its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) division, reports UDN. From a report: Wang Rui, president and chairman of Intel China, said at an event that the company had finalized the development of its Intel 18A (18 angstroms-class) and Intel 20A (20 angstroms-class) fabrication processes. This does not mean that the production nodes are ready to be used for commercial manufacturing, but rather that Intel has determined all specifications, materials, requirements, and performance targets for both technologies. Intel's 20A fabrication technology will rely on gate-all-around RibbonFET transistors and will use backside power delivery. Shrinking metal pitches, introducing all-new transistor structure and adding backside power delivery at the same time is a risky move, but it is expected that 20A will allow Intel to leapfrog the company's competitors -- TSMC and Samsung Foundry. Intel plans to start using this node in the first half of 2024. Intel's 18A manufacturing process will further refine the company's RibbonFET and PowerVia technologies, as well as shrink transistor sizes. Development of this node is apparently going so well that Intel pulled in its introduction from 2025 to the second half of 2024. Intel originally planned to use ASML's Twinscan EXE scanners with a 0.55 numerical aperture (NA) optics for its 1.8 angstroms node, but because it decided to start using the technology sooner, it will have to rely on extensive use of existing Twinscan NXE scanners with 0.33 NA optics, as well as EUV double patterning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The AI Education Project has developed curriculum to help teachers and students understand artificial intelligence. From a report: With students taking advantage of ChatGPT for homework and term papers, there's a lot of handwringing about whether artificial-intelligence tools are appropriate for school. Alex Kotran said his group wants to make sure those tools are used even more. Kotran is the chief executive officer of the AI Education Project (aiEDU), a nonprofit backed by companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and AT&T, that provides free materials and teacher training to boost AI understanding in school districts. The idea is to teach kids about the technology, its limits and promise, and prepare them jobs where they'll need to use AI. The group on Tuesday is announcing a national call for AI education with an expanded list of backers and partner schools at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, Texas. So far, aiEDU has reached 100,000 students and has relationship with districts representing 1.5 million low-income and underserved kids across the country. The non-profit was founded in 2019, and Kotran thought it would take a few years before there was widespread demand from educators for these kinds of programs. "We were kind of wearing the T-shirt before the band was cool," he said. Instead the rapid increase in interest in generative AI with the popularity of programs like OpenAI's chatbot and Dall-E, its tool for digital images, has dramatically boosted demand, and the group could use more funding, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden's nominee to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) withdrew her name Tuesday after two years of partisan gridlock delayed her confirmation, the White House confirmed. From a report: "We appreciate Gigi Sohn's candidacy for this important role. She would have brought tremendous talent, intellect and experience, which is why the president nominated her in the first place," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a briefing. "We also appreciate her dedication to public service, her talent and her years of work as one of the nation's leading public advocates on behalf of American consumers and competition," she added. In a statement, Sohn said she asked Biden to withdraw her nomination after discussions with her family and "careful consideration." She said the "unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks" on her character and career from cable and media lobbyists "have taken an enormous toll on me and my family. It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators. And with the help of their friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's something you don't see everyday: fewer ads on YouTube. Well, fewer ad formats, at least. From a report: YouTube's latest forum post says the company will be doing away with "Overlay ads" on YouTube videos. These are the old-school banner ads that pop up over the video player, obstructing the view of whatever you were trying to watch. YouTube says the ads are going away on April 6, calling them a "legacy ad format." The ads only worked on desktop, the company said, and they "are disruptive for viewers." Now the only ads in the video player will be video ads that can play before, in the middle of, or after a video. The "view product" pop-up ad is also allowed, and there will still be banner ads in the recommended video list.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook's large language model, which is usually only available to approved researchers, government officials, or members of civil society, has now leaked online for anyone to download. From a report: The leaked language model was shared on 4chan, where a member uploaded a torrent file for Facebook's tool, known as LLaMa (Large Language Model Meta AI), last week. This marks the first time a major tech firm's proprietary AI model has leaked to the public. To date, firms like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have kept their newest models private, only accessible via consumer interfaces or an API, ostensibly to control instances of misuse. 4chan members claim to be running LLaMa on their own machines, but the exact implications of this leak are not yet clear. In a statement to Motherboard, Meta did not deny the LLaMa leak, and stood by its approach of sharing the models among researchers. "It's Meta's goal to share state-of-the-art AI models with members of the research community to help us evaluate and improve those models. LLaMA was shared for research purposes, consistent with how we have shared previous large language models. While the model is not accessible to all, and some have tried to circumvent the approval process, we believe the current release strategy allows us to balance responsibility and openness," a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. senators will introduce legislation on Tuesday that would give Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats, Senator Mark Warner said. From a report: "I think it is a national security threat," Warner said on CNBC, adding that the bill would give Raimondo "the ability to do a series of mitigation up to and including banning" TikTok and other technologies that pose national security risks. Warner said it would apply to foreign technologies from six nations -- China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. The group, led by Warner and Republican Senator John Thune, includes Democrats Tammy Baldwin, Joe Manchin, Michael Bennett, Kirsten Gillibrand and Martin Heinrich along with Republicans Deb Fischer, Jerry Moran, Dan Sullivan, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, Warner's office said. TikTok, the ByteDance-owned app used by more than 100 million Americans, has come under increasing fire over fears user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests. TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew is due to appear before Congress on March 23.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government's ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance. WashingtonPost: The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent. Many of the records relate to the Janus program, a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or IARPA, the high-level research arm of the U.S. intelligence community modeled after the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the nation's leading computer-vision experts to design and test software that would quickly and accurately process the "truly unconstrained face imagery" recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared with The Washington Post. In a 2019 presentation, an IARPA program manager said the goal had been to "dramatically improve" the power and performance of facial recognition systems, with "scaling to support millions of subjects" and the ability to quickly identify faces from partially obstructed angles. One version of the system was trained for "Face ID ... at target distances" of more than a half-mile. To refine the system's capabilities, researchers staged a data-gathering test in 2017, paying dozens of volunteers to simulate real-world scenarios at a Defense Department training facility made to resemble a hospital, a subway station, an outdoor marketplace and a school, the documents show. The test yielded thousands of surveillance videos and images, some of which were captured by a drone. The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces, the documents show. The Horus tool has since been offered for use to at least six federal agencies, and their feedback is "continuing to be used to refine the tool," Department of Homeland Security officials said last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting bit of news out of Mobile World Congress: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as the "world's first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)." ArsTechnica: What the heck is an iSIM? Didn't we just go through a SIM card transition with eSIM? We did, but iSIM is better than eSIM. We'll explain, but the short answer is that iSIM is the next step in the continual march to reduce the size of SIM cards. [...] eSIMs are still a chip taking up space on your motherboard, and that's not ideal if you want to squeeze every square millimeter of space out of a phone. The next shrinking step is iSIM -- an Integrated Subscriber Identity Module. Rather than a chip on the motherboard, iSIMs are integrated directly onto the SoC. SoC (system on a chip) integration is the technology that makes smartphones possible. Instead of a thousand little chips for things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, modem, and a bunch of other things, everything gets packed into one single do-everything piece of silicon. Individual chips require more space and power thanks to having to make motherboard traces to connect everything and having to deal with chip packages. Building everything in one chip, with the tiniest transistors you can muster, is the cheapest and most space-efficient and power-efficient way to do things, and now SIM cards are going to disappear into that big block of stuff. iSIMs will be measured in fractions of a millimeter, and as part of the SoC, they will continually shrink every year as chip process nodes hit ever-smaller nm measurements. It sounds like this is the endgame for SIM technology, and besides helping out phones, will be great for evermore space-constrained devices like smartwatches.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police were investigating his neighbor. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home. From a report: The week of last Thanksgiving, Michael Larkin, a business owner in Hamilton, Ohio, picked up his phone and answered a call. It was the local police, and they wanted footage from Larkin's front door camera. Larkin had a Ring video doorbell, one of the more than 10 million Americans with the Amazon-owned product installed at their front doors. His doorbell was among 21 Ring cameras in and around his home and business, picking up footage of Larkin, neighbors, customers and anyone else near his house. The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of "suspicious activity" between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Larkin cooperated, and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 times in that time frame. He thought that was all the police would need. Instead, it was just the beginning. They asked for more footage, now from the entire day's worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras -- whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself. As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin's case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people's own expectation of privacy for the devices they own -- a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn't fully grappled with. Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy. And when law enforcement gets involved, even the slim existing legal protections evaporate. "It really takes the control out of the hands of the homeowners, and I think that's hugely problematic," said Jennifer Lynch, the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. In the debate over home surveillance, much of the concern has focused on Ring in particular, because of its popularity, as well as the company's track record of cooperating closely with law enforcement agencies. The company offers a multitude of products such as indoor cameras or spotlight cameras for homes or businesses, recording videos based on motion activation, with the footage stored for up to 180 days on Ring's servers. They amount to a large and unregulated web of eyes on American communities -- which can provide law enforcement valuable information in the event of a crime, but also create a 24/7 recording operation that even the owners of the cameras aren't fully aware they've helped to build.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey writes: Electronics giant Acer has confirmed getting hacked after a hacker offered to sell 160 Gb of files allegedly stolen from the company's systems. "We have recently detected an incident of unauthorized access to one of our document servers for repair technicians. While our investigation is ongoing, there is currently no indication that any consumer data was stored on that server," Acer told SecurityWeek in an emailed statement. Acer issued the statement after a hacker announced on a popular cybercrime forum that he is selling more than 2,800 files totaling 160 Gb for an unspecified amount of Monero cryptocurrency. The cybercriminal claims the files include confidential slides, staff manuals, confidential product documentation, binary files, information on backend infrastructure, disk images, replacement digital product keys, and BIOS-related information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Silicon Valley VCs fearing a repeat of falling crypto values warn against pouring cash into hype-fuelled start-ups. From a report: Gordon Ritter, founder of San Francisco-based venture fund Emergence Capital, believes that recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence represent a significant technological advance. He just cannot see a way to make money out of them. "Everyone has stars in their eyes about what could happen," says Ritter, whose firm was an early investor in successful start ups such as Zoom. "There's a flow [of opinion that AI] will do everything. We're going against that flow." The scepticism reflects a tension among Silicon Valley VCs, who are caught between excitement over AI and a broader tech downturn that has led to falling investment in start-ups over the past year. But the recent launch of "generative AI" tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, capable of answering complex questions with text in natural-sounding language, has resulted in fresh excitement over the potential emergence of a new group of industry-defining companies. [...] Many VCs express caution, put off not only by eye-watering valuations, but also the huge amount of capital AI groups require as they build "foundation models" -- machine-learning systems that require huge amounts of data and computing power to operate. One investor said that, because of the huge amount of capital and computing resources required, recent leaps in generative AI were comparable to landing on the moon: a massively impressive technical achievement, only replicable by those with nation-state level wealth. "Companies are extremely overvalued and the only justifiable investment thesis is to get in incredibly early," said another veteran investor. "Otherwise you're only buying in because of FOMO."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly everyone -- 99 percent of the global population -- is exposed to unhealthy levels of tiny and harmful air pollutants, known as PM 2.5, according a new study released Monday in Lancet Planet Health. From a report: The findings underline a growing urgency for policymakers, public health officials and researchers to focus on curbing major sources of air pollution, such as emissions from power plants, industrial facilities and vehicles. "Almost no one is safe from air pollution," Yuming Guo, the lead author of the study and professor at Monash University, said in an email. "The surprising result is that almost all parts of the world have annual average PM 2.5 concentrations higher than air quality guidelines recommended by the World Health Organization." Nearly 7 million people worldwide died from air pollution in 2019, according to recent estimates. What's known as PM 2.5, small air particles that measure 2.5 microns or less in width rank as one of the most concerning toxic air pollutants for human health. The tiny pollutants -- one-thirtieth the width of a human hair -- can travel into our lungs and bloodstream. They can cause ailments including heart disease or lung cancer. Guo and his colleagues assessed daily and annual PM 2.5 concentrations across the globe from 2000 to 2019 using a computer model, which incorporated traditional air quality observations from ground stations, chemical transport model simulations and meteorological data. Overall, the highest concentrations were located in eastern Asia, southern Asia and northern Africa. In 2019, they found 0.001 percent of the global population is exposed to levels of PM 2.5 pollution that the World Health Organization deems safe. The agency has said annual concentrations higher than 5 micrograms per cubic meter are hazardous. Additionally, the study found that across the globe, 70 percent of days in a year were above recommended PM 2.5 levels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economic Times: Meta, the owner of Facebook andInstagram, is planning a fresh round of layoffs and will cut thousands of employees as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The world's largest social networking company is eliminating more jobs, on top of a 13% reduction in November, in a bid to become a more efficient organization. In its earlier round of cuts, Meta slashed 11,000 workers in what was its first-ever major layoff. The company has also been working to flatten its organization, giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams it deems nonessential, Bloomberg News reported in February, a move that is still being finalized and could affect thousands of staffers. The imminent round of cuts is being driven by financial targets and is separate from the "flattening," said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Meta, which has seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and has shifted focus to a virtual-reality platform called the metaverse, has been asking directors and vice presidents to make lists of employees that can be let go, the people said. This phase of layoffs could be finalized in the next week, according to the people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany's government is planning on forbidding telecoms operators from using certain components from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE in their 5G networks, German paper Zeit Online reported on Monday. Reuters reports: The ban could include components already built into the networks, requiring operators to remove and replace them, Zeit Online wrote, citing government sources. The government, which is now in the midst of a broader re-evaluation of its relationship with top trade partner China, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. A source, however, confirmed the report to Reuters. Critics of Huawei and ZTE say that their close links to China's security services mean that embedding them in the ubiquitous mobile networks of the future could give Chinese spies and even saboteurs access to swathes of essential infrastructure. Huawei, ZTE and the Chinese government reject these claims, saying that they are motivated by a protectionist desire to support non-Chinese rivals. Zeit Online said the government's cybersecurity agency and interior ministry had for months been checking if there were components in the growing 5G networks that could put German security at risk. The survey had not officially been ended, but the result was already clear, the paper said, citing government sources. The government would ban operators from using certain controlling elements from Huawei and ZTE in 5G networks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unprecedented access to space is leading to all sorts of cool new ideas, including the prospect of storing data on the lunar surface. Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest funding round, taking it one step closer to this very goal. Gizmodo reports: The Florida-based company raised $5 million in seed funding to establish lunar data centers, Lonestar announced in a press release on Monday. Lonestar wants to build a series of data centers on the Moon and establish a viable platform for data storage and edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth) on the lunar surface. "Data is the greatest currency created by the human race," Chris Stott, founder of Lonestar, said in an April 2022 statement. "We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth's ever more fragile biosphere. Earth's largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future." In December 2021, Lonestar successfully ran a test of its data center on board the International Space Station. The company is now ready to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface later this year as part of Intuitive Machines's second lunar mission, IM-2 (the company's first mission, IM-1, is expected to launch in June). Intuitive Machines is receiving funding from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for delivering research projects to the Moon as part of the space agency's Artemis program. The lunar data centers will initially be geared towards remote data storage and disaster recovery, allowing companies to back up their data and store it on the Moon. In addition, the data centers could assist with both commercial and private ventures to the lunar environment. The miniature data center weighs about 2 pounds (1 kilogram) and has a capacity of 16 terabytes, Stott told SpaceNews. He said the first data center will draw power and communications from the lander, but the ones that will follow (pending its success) will be standalone data centers that the company hopes to deploy on the lunar surface by 2026. The test is only supposed to last for the duration of the IM-2 mission, which is expected to be around 11-14 days, an Intuitive Machines spokesperson told SpaceNews.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 "super-emitter" sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars. Separate data also reveals 55 "methane bombs" around the world -- fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions. Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a "scary" surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say. The two new datasets identify the sites most critical to preventing methane-driven disaster, as tackling leaks from fossil fuel sites is the fastest and cheapest way to slash methane emissions. Some leaks are deliberate, venting the unwanted gas released from underground while drilling for oil into the air, and some are accidental, from badly maintained or poorly regulated equipment. Fast action would dramatically slow global heating as methane is short-lived in the atmosphere. An emissions cut of 45% by 2030, which the UN says is possible, would prevent 0.3C of temperature rise. Methane emissions therefore present both a grave threat to humanity, but also a golden opportunity to decisively act on the climate crisis. [...] The methane super-emitter sites were detected by analysis of satellite data, with the US, Russia and Turkmenistan responsible for the largest number from fossil fuel facilities. The biggest event was a leak of 427 tonnes an hour in August, near Turkmenistan's Caspian coast and a major pipeline. That single leak was equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67m cars, or the hourly national emissions of France. Future methane emissions from fossil fuel sites -- the methane bombs -- are also forecast to be huge, threatening the entire global "carbon budget" limit required to keep heating below 1.5C. More than half of these fields are already in production, including the three biggest methane bombs, which are all in North America.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is permanently closing eight of its 29 Amazon Go convenience stores that offer customers the ability to shop without any kind of checkout process. From a report: Amazon debuted the Go store in Seattle in 2016. It hailed the stores as the future of shopping, especially for convenience stores in busy downtowns of major cities. At one point Amazon expected there to be hundreds if not thousands of the stores nationwide, according to published reports that were never confirmed by the company. But they never lived up to those expectations. [T]he closings, first reported by Geekwire, are another sign of cost-cutting efforts at the online shopping giant. [...] The stores being closed include two in downturn Seattle that had already been shut on a temporary basis, leaving five in the city. In addition it is closing two in New York City and four in San Francisco. The six closings of stores still operating are due to take place April 1. In addition to the 21 Amazon Go stores that will remain, there are two locations in New York that the brand shares with Starbucks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's progressing toward its goal of building an AI language model that supports 1,000 different languages. The Verge reports: In an update posted on Monday, Google shared more information about the Universal Speech Model (USM), a system Google describes as a "critical first step" in realizing its goals. Last November, the company announced its plans to create a language model supporting 1,000 of the world's most-spoken languages while also revealing its USM model. Google describes USM as "a family of state-of-the-art speech models" with 2 billion parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech and 28 billion sentences across over 300 languages. USM, which YouTube already uses to generate closed captions, also supports automatic speech recognition (ASR). This automatically detects and translates languages, including English, Mandarin, Amharic, Cebuano, Assamese, and more. Right now, Google says USM supports over 100 languages and will serve as the "foundation" to build an even more expansive system. You can read more about USM and how it works in the research paper Google posted here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google-owned Fitbit is removing several community-focused features on March 27, including Challenges and open groups. Christine Persaud writes via XDA Developers reports: For me, challenges were one of Fitbit's main strengths. You could strap a fitness tracker or smartwatch to your wrist, set up an account, and chances are at least a handful of your contacts were also Fitbit users. Then, you could add them as friends to compete and compare your progress. This seems like an insignificant "nice to have" feature, but the motivation it provides is precisely the aim of wearing a fitness tracker in the first place. And without open groups, you wouldn't have the opportunity to get to know like-minded users from around the world. This decision eliminates one of the platform's best features: a sense of community. Reportedly, more than 31 million people use Fitbit at least once a week. That's a staggering number and a group of customers ripe for creating and maintaining an active community. At a time when the market is flooded with competing fitness tracker and smartwatch brands, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out. According to Statista, Fitbit has been leading the wearables space since 2014, accounting for almost half the worldwide market share at 45%. The company's solid grasp on the market (though it now faces stiff competition from the likes of Apple, Garmin, and others) is partly because of the unique Challenges and groups. While other companies, like Apple, have a version of Challenges, they're not as robust as what Fitbit supports. "Nonetheless, for anyone new to the market looking for a fitness tracker or smartwatch that can do it all and connect them to a wealth of information and a community of people, this news makes Fitbit a less appealing platform to consider," adds Persaud. "All we can do is hope for bigger and better things to come with Google integration in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: The U.S. Air Force's Global Strike Command awarded a new $75.5 million contract to New York-based firm Persistent Systems. The aim is to build a unified security system for 400 operational Minuteman III intercontinental-range nuclear missile silos secured in remote areas throughout the U.S. It will be the world's largest wireless ad-hoc network, helping secure the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal amid growing concerns over global nuclear security. Persistent Systems will roll out its Infrastructure-based Regional Operation Network (IRON) offering across three Air Force bases as part of the Regional Operating Picture (ROP) program. According to the company, the new security network will cover an area of 25,000 square miles (64,750 sq km), making it the world's largest wireless ad-hoc network. The IRON offering is an easy-to-deploy Integrated MANET Antenna System on fixed towers and poles. It will allow the U.S. Air Force to connect 75 operation centers and more than 1,000 Security Force vehicles. The ROP program will allow constant communication to an Operations Center via the towers. Meanwhile, the personnel at that Operations Center will know the exact location of any Security Forces on a digital map. Both will be able to share critical data seamlessly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As highlighted by Daring Fireball's John Gruber, Roku doesn't support IPv6 -- a next-gen Internet Protocol standard intended to eventually replace IPv4, the protocol many Internet services (including Roku) still use today. "DingleBog3899" writes on the Roku community forum: I work for a Native American tribe in the PNW. We scrambled to get the reservation reliable internet in the later part of 2019. We managed to cover most of the reservation with wi-max and wifi with a fiber back haul configuration. We are now slowly getting more stable and reliable fiber to the home(FttH) service installed to as many homes as we can, but it is slow process covering the mostly rural landscape doing all the work in house. Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic. We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from Roku devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale (POS) equipment. So we cut Roku some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices. First off I despise both Apple and that other evil empire (house of mouse) I want nothing to do with either of them. Now with that said I am one of four individuals that suggested and lobbied 15 other tribal nations to offer a new AppleTV device in exchange for active Roku devices. Other nations are facing the same dilemma. Spend an exorbitant amount of money to support a small amount of antiquated devices or replace the problem devices at fraction of the cost. "Now if Roku cannot be proactive at keeping up with connectivity standards they are going to be wiped out by their own complacency," adds DingleBob3899. "Judging by the growing number of offers to replace their devices for free their competitors are already proactively exploiting that complacency. When we approached Apple to see about a discount to purchase a large number of their devices, for the exchange, they eagerly offered to supply their devices for free."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Nvidia GPU driver update has caused some users to see inflated CPU usage after closing 3D games, which persists until a reboot. Nvidia confirmed the problem with driver update 531.18, and will post a hotfix on March 7. PCWorld reports: The company confirmed the problem with the latest driver update, 531.18, which was published on February 28th. An updated list of open issues (including some that didn't make it into the full release notes) was posted to Nvidia's support forum, and spotted by VideoCardz.com. Issue number 4007208 reads, "Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container may be observed after exiting a game." Some users are showing CPU usage of up to 10-15 percent in these conditions -- not enough to seriously hamper most gaming desktops, but more than enough to be an annoyance, especially if you use your PC for other intensive tasks. Like opening three Chrome tabs at once. At the moment there's no easy fix, so the immediate solution if you're affected is to roll back your driver to version 528.49 from February 8th, available for manual download here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.