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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thousands of Airbnbs and short-term rentals are about to be wiped off the map in New York City. Local Law 18, which came into force Tuesday, is so strict it doesn't just limit how Airbnb operates in the city -- it almost bans it entirely for many guests and hosts. From now on, all short-term rental hosts in New York must register with the city, and only those who live in the place they're renting -- and are present when someone is staying -- can qualify. And people can only have two guests. Gone are the days of sleek downtown apartments outfitted for bachelorette parties, cozy two- and three-bedroom apartments near museums for families, and even the option for people to rent out their apartment on weekends when they're away. While Airbnb, Vrbo, and others can continue to operate in New York, the new rules are so tight that Airbnb sees it as a "de facto ban" on its business. The rules "are a blow to its tourism economy and the thousands of New Yorkers and small businesses in the outer boroughs who rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet," says Theo Yedinsky, global policy director for Airbnb. "The city is sending a clear message to millions of potential visitors who will now have fewer accommodation options when they visit New York City: You are not welcome." According to Inside Airbnb, there are currently more than 40,000 Airbnbs in New York -- 22,434 of those are short-term rentals. "While the number of rentals may be small compared to New York City's population of 8 million people, Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, says some desirable neighborhoods are overly burdened by short-term rentals, which can result in housing shortages and higher rents," reports Wired. "The new law, in theory, could open these homes to local residents." The implementation of the law shows "very clearly you can cut down on short-term rentals," says Cox, who was part of the Coalition Against Illegal Hotels, a group that advocated for the registration law. "You can make these platforms accountable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a deal that could be worth $200 million, Microsoft announced that it is purchasing 315,000 metric tons of carbon removal over a multi-year period from climate tech startup Heirloom Carbon. It's one of the biggest deals of its kind, reports The Wall Street Journal (paywalled). GeekWire reports: San Francisco-based Heirloom is harnessing a geologic approach to catching and holding carbon dioxide. Limestone naturally binds to carbon, but Heirloom's technology dramatically speeds up the process, cutting it from years to days. The startup operates the only U.S. facility permanently capturing carbon. Even more important than the volume of carbon to be removed is the deal's ability to unlock additional funding and investments to grow Heirloom's business and the sector more broadly. Microsoft previously invested in Heirloom through its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund. The new deal represents a financially empowering "bankable agreement," said Heirloom CEO Shashank Samala. "Bankable agreements of this magnitude enable Heirloom to raise project finance for our rapid scale-up, fueling exponential growth like what we've seen in the renewable energy industry," Samala said in a statement. The guaranteed cash flow can facilitate financing needed to build Heirloom's next two commercial sites. The deal is also "an example of the impact of the Biden administration's 2021 infrastructure bill," notes the report. "[T]he purchase was tied to Heirloom being selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of the nation's direct air capture (DAC) hubs. It will receive $600 million of matching funding thanks to the designation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan Salame, a top FTX executive who played a key role in the exchange's political fundraising operations, will forfeit $1.5 billion after pleading guilty on Thursday to federal criminal charges tied to the exchange. CoinDesk reports: Salame, who was co-CEO of FTX's Bahamas entity FTX Digital Markets, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to make unlawful contributions and defraud the Federal Election Commission and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transferring business. "I made political contributions in my name that were funded by transfers from an Alameda subsidiary," Salame told Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is also overseeing Bankman-Fried's trial, as he entered his guilty plea. The transfers were "categorized as loans," Salame said, but "it was understood that the would not be repaid." The donations, according to Salame, "were for the benefit of initiatives introduced by others but supported by Sam Bankman-Fried." As part of his plea agreement with the government, Salame has been ordered to forfeit more than $1.5 billion dollars. He agreed to forfeit $6 million before his sentencing, expected in March of next year. To help cover this amount, Salame has already agreed to give the government a "2021 Porsche automobile" and multiple properties, including two Massachusetts homes and ownership of the East Rood Farm Corporation, an entity Salame owns. Additionally, Salame was ordered to pay more than $5.5 million in restitution to FTX debtors. According to a DOJ document (PDF), the $1.5 billion Salame will forfeit represents "property involved in" the unlicensed money transmitter charge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to Windows Insiders that lets you remove an image's background in Paint with a single click. The Verge reports: To use the tool, testers can open an image with Paint and then hit the background removal button on the left side of Paint's toolbar. From there, Paint will automatically detect the subject of an image and cut away the background. Microsoft notes that you can also manually select the portion of the background that you want to remove.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clubhouse, the invite-only social audio app that went viral during the pandemic, is trying to make a comeback by rebranding itself as a better alternative for group texting. Engadget reports: The audio app is pivoting from its signature "drop-in" audio conversations to friend-centric voice chats, the company said in an update. Instead of sprawling rooms where users host live-streamed conversations open to any and all of the app's users, the new Clubhouse will instead encourage users to join groups with people they know. The groups are, somewhat confusingly, called "chats," and allow friends and friends-of-friends to exchange voice messages. There's still a "drop-in" element, but it's less focused on real-time talking and geared more toward something like an Instagram Story -- a destination for checking in and sharing quick updates. The app is also ditching text-based direct messages in favor of private audio messages which, yes, it's calling voicemails or VMs. The biggest shift, however, isn't just the format of the conversations but that Clubhouse is now positioning itself as more of a Snapchat, where smaller groups of friends communicate privately or semi-privately, than a Twitter, where all the app's users are shouting into the void. "It's not about passively listening to people speaking," the company wrote in an update. "You can listen to great conversations on podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, and a lot of other platforms. It's about talking with people ... and becoming real-life friends with your friends' friends, and people you never would have met otherwise."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Google's Privacy Sandbox, a controversial set of tools and settings meant to replace third-party cookies, is now on almost every single Chrome browser, according to a company blog post published Thursday. Google says Privacy Sandbox is now available to around 97% of Chrome users, and that number will reach 100% in the next few months. The news comes on the heels of the browser's 15th anniversary, which Google is celebrating by redesigning Chrome to make it look and feel more closely aligned with the design paradigm of Android and the rest of the Google suite. The final step in this process comes in 2024, when Google will disable third-party cookies in Chrome for good, marking the end of their decades-long reign of privacy-violating terror. Back in 2019, Google said the cookie era was coming to a close. In place of third-party cookies, Privacy Sandbox will implement a long list of new tools for the ad industry. Google, after all, makes all of its money by spying on you and turning the insights into ads, so it's not about to put itself out of business. In fairness, this new system is really more private, though it's private on Google's terms. The biggest change is "Ad Topics," a.k.a. the Topics API if you're a huge nerd who's been following this stuff for years. With Topics, Chrome will keep track of all the websites you're looking at and sort you into a variety of categories. This tracking happens in your browser and the data stays on your device. Neither Google nor anyone else gets to see your browsing history or learn anything about you as an individual throughout this process. Websites and advertising companies will know there's a person interested in a certain Topic, but they won't be able to tell who you are specifically. There's also an extremely complicated technique websites can use to tag you with subjects they want you to see ads about, called "Site Suggested Ads." Google is also rolling out a tool called "Ad Measurement," which helps companies keep track of how well their ads are working through metrics such as the time of day you saw an ad and whether you clicked on it. Google gives users some control over how these tools are implemented. With the rollout of Privacy Sandbox comes new settings listed as "Ad privacy controls," which you can adjust in Chrome's preferences. Further reading: Chrome is About To Look a Bit DifferentRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly half of LGBTQ dating app Grindr's workforce has quit after the company enacted a strict two-day-per-week in-office requirement -- and furious staffers claim the mandate was in retaliation for their campaign to unionize. From a report: Last month, Grindr informed employees that they had two weeks to decide whether they would relocate to a "hub" office location and work on site two days per week or terminate their employment, according to the labor group Communications Workers of America. Through the end of August, about 80 employees -- roughly 45% of Grindr's 180-person workforce -- had left the company due to the mandate, union organizers said. Grindr offered a severance package for employees who could not or would not comply with the relocation requirement -- a move that the group described as an attempt "to silence workers from speaking out about their working conditions." "These decisions have left Grindr dangerously understaffed and raises questions about the safety, security and stability of the app for users," said Erick Cortez, a member of Grindr United-CWA. "It is clear Grindr wants workers to be silenced and deterred from exercising our right to organize, regardless of the expense." Grindr employees had announced their intent to unionize on July 20 through CWA, but the labor drive has yet to receive formal recognition. The company announced its return-to-office mandate on Aug. 4. The CWA has filed a formal complaint on behalf of Grindr employees with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company's actions amounted to unlawful retaliation. "It is unimaginably disappointing that dozens of our colleagues have had to leave their jobs because Grindr management did not want to sit down with workers and respect our right to organize," Cortez added. A Grindr spokesperson said in a statement: "We have full confidence in our team and their ability to continue to drive the business forward and make the world and lives of our users freer, more tolerant, and more just. We are looking forward to returning to the office in a hybrid model in October and further improving productivity and collaboration for our entire team."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Morgan Stanley is rolling out a generative AI chatbot this month to help bankers quickly find research or forms without needing to sift through hundreds of thousands of documents. According to Reuters, it's being developed with OpenAI. From the report: The bank is also developing technology which eventually, with clients' permission, could create a meeting summary of the conversation, draft a follow-up email suggesting next steps, update the bank's sales database, schedule a follow-up appointment, and learn how to help advisers manage clients' finances on areas such as taxes, retirement savings and inheritances. The details of the program have not yet been reported. While the bot will give insights and administrative support to financial advisers, investment advice will remain the purview of humans. "The adviser is still at the center," said [Sal Cucchiara, Morgan Stanley's chief information officer of wealth and investment management, who is among the executives driving the bank's push into AI]. For now, employees view the technology as a helpful tool and aren't worried that they'll be replaced by bots, he said. The AI initiative is part of Morgan Stanley's strategy to drive its wealth division, where net revenue surged 16% to a record in the second quarter and new client assets grew $90 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday. Chinese Communist Party-affiliated "covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed," according to the report, which focused on the rise in "digital threats from East Asia." The Microsoft report also cautioned that some Chinese influence campaigns are now using generative artificial intelligence to create visual content that's "already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic" users, a trend the company said began around March. Chinese influence campaigns have historically struggled to gain traction with intended targets, who in this case are U.S. voters and residents. But since the 2022 midterm elections, those efforts have become more effective, Microsoft warned. Microsoft found content from Chinese influence campaigns on multiple apps, including Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and X. In August, Facebook parent Meta announced it had disrupted the largest ever identified disinformation campaign and linked it to China state-affiliated actors. Microsoft's report included screenshots of two different X posts in April that were identified as CCP-affiliated disinformation. Both were about the Black Lives Matter movement and had the same graphic. The first came from an automated CCP-affiliated account. The second, Microsoft said, was uploaded by an account impersonating a conservative U.S. voter seven hours later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has removed TypeScript from the forthcoming version 8 of the Turbo framework, saying he has "never been a fan," but many Turbo users have protested that the decision was rushed and the change is unwelcome. From a report: A comment on the GitHub pull request that removes TypeScript states that this "is a step back, for both library users and contributors." This comment has -- at the time of writing -- 357 likes and just 8 downvotes, suggesting wide support. Turbo is a framework for delivering HTML pages intended to "dramatically reduce the amount of custom JavaScript," and is sponsored by Hannson's company 37signals, whose products include the Basecamp project management platform and the Hey messaging system. Turbo is the engine of Hotwire, short for "HTML over the wire," because it prefers sending HTML itself rather than JSON data and JavaScript code. Although Turbo itself is not among the most popular frameworks, Ruby on Rails is well-known and used by major web sites including GitHub and Shopify. Hansson posted that TypeScript "pollutes the code with type gymnastics that add ever so little joy to my development experience, and quite frequently considerable grief. Things that should be easy become hard." The community around the open source Turbo project though is for the most part perplexed and disappointed, not only by the change itself, but also by the manner in which it was made.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence chatbot launched in November, saw monthly website visits decline for the third month in a row in August, though there are signs the decline is coming to an end, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Reuters: Worldwide desktop and mobile website visits to the ChatGPT website decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion in August, following approximately 10% drops from each of the previous two months. The amount of time visitors spent on the website has also been declining monthly since March, from an average of 8.7 minutes on site to 7 minutes on site in August. But August worldwide unique visitors ticked up to 180.5 million users from 180 million. School coming back into session in September may help ChatGPT's traffic and usage, and some schools have begun to embrace it. U.S. ChatGPT traffic in August rose slightly, in concert with American schools being back in session. "Students seeking homework help appears to be part of the story: the percentage of younger users of the website dropped over the summer and is now starting to bounce back," said David F. Carr of Similarweb, who regularly tracks ChatGPT and its competitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial intelligence, according to Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway's huge $1.4tn oil fund, is like being "in a rocket on the way into space ... It's hugely exciting, but it's also scary." Stretching the metaphor to its limits, the head of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund adds: "We hope we're in Apollo 11, not Challenger. The mission statement is to return safely." All this might just seem to be a glib soundbite, but the Norwegian fund is among the most advanced of any of the world's big traditional investors in publicly articulating its thoughts on AI. This is not just on the balance between risk and opportunity from AI but also what it thinks the companies it invests in should be doing. As the importance of AI only grows, the oil fund's stance is going to be well worth following. [...] The first is ensuring boards are accountable for the responsible development and use of AI. Here, Tangen is damning. "Boards are absolutely not on top of this," he says. Given how many companies have long struggled to get enough expertise on cyber security, AI is likely to be an even tougher ask. The oil fund could vote against those that do nothing, Tangen adds. The second relates to how transparent companies are on how they use AI and how they explain how those systems have been designed and tested. As well as the tech industry itself, the fund is paying particular attention to those sectors using AI with consumers such as healthcare, financial and consumer goods. The final element is risk management. The fund argues that companies should be proactive, and ensure outside verification and auditing of their AI systems and risk management processes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Senate today approved a nominee to fill the vacant, fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Senate voted 55 to 43 to approve Anna Gomez as the fifth FCC Commissioner. Her term will be for five years from July 1, 2021, so effectively about three years. From a report: Gomez most recently has served as a senior advisor on communications policy at the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. She was also deputy administrator at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2013. The NTIA is not only important as the advisor to the President on national spectrum policy, but the agency is also currently overseeing the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says it will defend buyers of its artificial intelligence products from copyright infringement lawsuits, an effort by the software giant to ease concerns customers might have about using its AI "Copilots" to generate content based on existing work. From a report: The Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers as long as they've "used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products" Hossein Nowbar, General Counsel, Corporate Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary at Microsoft, said in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright. "We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products," Nowbar said. "We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers' problem." Generative AI applications scoop up existing content such as art, articles and programming code and use it to generate new material that can simplify or automate a range of tasks. Microsoft is baking the technology, developed with partner OpenAI, into many of its biggest products, including Office and Windows, potentially putting customers in legal jeopardy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is killing off the last vestiges of Google Play Movies & TV, a service that sold premium Hollywood films and TV shows as part of Google's once-cohesive string of Google Play content stores. From a report: The company emailed users of Android TV to say that the "Google Play Movies & TV app will no longer be available on your Android TV device from 05 October 2023. You can continue to buy or rent movies directly through the Shop tab on your Android TV." Play Movies has been going through a slow death as Google shuffles around its media content. The smartphone Play Movies app became "Google TV" in 2022, and that same year, the Play Store app was stripped of movie and TV sales. On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021. On Android TV, the new "Shop" tab seems to just be an OS-integrated Google TV content store. If you think this sounds confusing, you're not alone. Google's support page reflects the ridiculous state of Google's video apps, instructing users that "in Your Library, you can find content that you bought from: Google Play Movies & TV, YouTube, Android TV, Google TV." How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report says that a PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews for over five years. From a report: Moviegoers, critics, and the average internet user have all used the aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes at one point or another. The website categorizes films and shows from "fresh" to "rotten," with rotten being those with lower ratings. Now it looks like the site's scores have been manipulated for more than five years. As noted by Vulture, it looks like a PR firm has manipulated movie scores on Rotten Tomatoes by paying the critics directly. This has been happening for years. The PR firm, named Bunker 15, is said to pay as much as $50.00 for a single Rotten Tomatoes review. The payments, which aren't typically disclosed, are usually given to obscure critics who happen to be part of a pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. Though it's worth noting that the aggregation site's rules prohibit "Reviewing based on a financial incentive." Director Paul Schrader, also a critic, spoke out against Rotten Tomatoes which he says is part of a "broken" system. "The system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do." The site responded by delisting a variety of Bunker 15 films from their website. Furthermore, they issued a warning to any critics that reviewed them. The warning emphasizes that they do not tolerate manipulation on their platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In Cologne last month, Nintendo's public Gamescom showfloor booth let you play Pikmin 4 and Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. But behind the scenes, the company had more up its sleeves. Developer presentations for Switch 2 took place behind closed doors, Eurogamer understands, with partners shown tech demos of how well the system is designed to run. One Switch 2 demo is a souped up version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to hit the Switch 2's beefier target specs. (To be clear, though - this is just a tech demo. There's no suggestion the game will be re-released.) Nintendo is yet to publicly discuss plans for its inevitable Switch successor, though its new hardware is widely-expected to launch at some point in 2024. Word that it is now being shown to external developers comes as details have begun to emerge around when we may see the system launch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chrome on the desktop is about to get a new look. From a report: Google's widely used browser is getting an update based on its Material You design language in the coming weeks, and in this case, that will include refreshed icons with "a focus on legibility" and new color palettes that "better complement your tabs and toolbar," according to a blog post from Chrome VP Parisa Tabriz.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BMW has made a U-turn on a controversial subscription service that saw drivers pay a fee to activate the heated seats already fitted to their car. From a report: First announced in 2020, the subscription was intended to be one of many ways to offer flexibility to customers, who could opt in to pay for vehicle functions when it suited them, then stop paying when they were no longer wanted. But instead of options like increased electric car performance -- as was later offered by Mercedes -- or other technology-driven functions like autonomous parking or a 5G data connection, BMW drew criticism for charging a subscription for heated seats already installed at the factory. Now though, BMW will no longer offer such a service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb. The Weizmann Institute team say their "embryo model", made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo. It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab. The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives. This research, published in the journal Nature, is described by the Israeli team as the first "complete" embryo model for mimicking all the key structures that emerge in the early embryo. Instead of a sperm and egg, the starting material was naive stem cells which were reprogrammed to gain the potential to become any type of tissue in the body. Chemicals were then used to coax these stem cells into becoming four types of cell found in the earliest stages of the human embryo: epiblast cells, which become the embryo proper (or foetus); trophoblast cells, which become the placenta; hypoblast cells, which become the supportive yolk sac; and extraembryonic mesoderm cells. A total of 120 of these cells were mixed in a precise ratio -- and then, the scientists step back and watch. About 1% of the mixture began the journey of spontaneously assembling themselves into a structure that resembles, but is not identical to, a human embryo. The embryo models were allowed to grow and develop until they were comparable to an embryo 14 days after fertilization. In many countries, this is the legal cut-off for normal embryo research. The hope is embryo models can help scientists explain how different types of cell emerge, witness the earliest steps in building the body's organs or understand inherited or genetic diseases. Already, this study shows other parts of the embryo will not form unless the early placenta cells can surround it. There is even talk of improving in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates by helping to understand why some embryos fail or using the models to test whether medicines are safe during pregnancy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists are reporting that this year's summer was the hottest on record -- and by a significant margin. CNN reports: June to August was the planet's warmest such period since records began in 1940, according to data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The global average temperature this summer was 16.77 degrees Celsius (62.19 Fahrenheit), according to Copernicus, which is 0.66 degrees Celsius above the 1990 to 2020 average -- beating the previous record, set in August 2019, by nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius. Typically these records, which track the average air temperature across the entire world, are broken by hundredths of a degree. This is the first set of scientific data to confirm what many had believed was inevitable. The planet experienced its hottest June on record, followed by the hottest July -- both breaking previous records by large margins. August was also the warmest such month on record, according to the new Copernicus data, and warmer than every other month this year except for July. The global average temperature for the month was 16.82 degrees Celsius -- 0.31 degrees warmer than the previous record set in 2016. Both July and August are estimated to have been 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus, a key threshold scientists have long warned the world must stay under to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. With four months of the year remaining, 2023 currently ranks as the second warmest on record, according to Copernicus, only 0.01 degrees Celsius below 2016, which is currently the warmest year on record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The App Store for Apple's Vision Pro headset will include all compatible iPhone and iPad apps "by default." The Verge reports: In an update on Tuesday, Apple said it will release the new App Store with the developer beta of visionOS this fall. Both iPad and iPhone apps will appear alongside visionOS apps in the new App Store. As Apple has said previously, it will automatically import iOS and iPadOS apps to its new mixed reality operating system "with no additional work required." Developers can still optimize their apps if needed. "By default, your iPad and/or iPhone apps will be published automatically on the App Store on Apple Vision Pro," Apple notes. "Most frameworks available in iPadOS and iOS are also included in visionOS, which means nearly all iPad and iPhone apps can run on visionOS, unmodified." Developers also have the option of building an app for Vision Pro using Apple's visionOS software development kit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million. The Register reports: Contributing to the publication of a legal Section 114 Notice, which says the $4.3 billion revenue organization is unable to balance the books, is a bill of up to $954 million to settle equal pay claims. In a statement today, councillors John Cotton and Sharon Thompson, leader and deputy leader respectively, said the authority was also hit by financial stress owing to issues with the implementation of its Oracle IT system. The council has made a request to the Local Government Association for additional strategic support, the statement said. In May, Birmingham City Council said it was set to pay up to $125.5 million for its Oracle ERP system -- potentially a fourfold increase on initial estimated expenses -- in a project suffering from delays, cost over-runs, and a lack of controls. After grappling with the project to replace SAP for core HR and finance functions since 2018, the council reviewed the plan in 2019, 2020, and again in 2021, when the total implementation cost for the project almost doubled to $48.5 million. The project, dubbed Financial and People, was "crucial to an organisation of Birmingham City Council's size," a spokesperson said at the time. Cotton said the system had a problem with how it was "tracking our financial transactions and HR transactions issues as well. That's got to be fixed," he said. Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization." They said the previous SAP system had been heavily customized to meet the council's needs and it was struggling to recreate these functions in Oracle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Due to confidence issues and difficulties interviewing, neurodivergent individuals often face higher unemployment rates than their non-neurodivergent counterparts. However, they may possess specialized skills that can enhance team productivity by up to 30% in suitable work settings. A startup backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman aims to help these job seekers find suitable employment opportunities, leveraging technology and assessments to match individuals with roles that best align with their abilities and skills. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from TechCrunch: Enter Mentra. The Charlotte, N.C.-based startup, whose three co-founders are all autistic is building what it describes as an AI-powered "neuroinclusive employment network." Specifically, its tech platform leverages artificial intelligence to help large enterprises hire employees with cognitive differences such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The startup's unique premise caught the early attention of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who first invested in the company with a $1 million pre-seed investment in February 2022 through his venture firm, Hydrazine Capital. Mentra also won an AI for accessibility grant from Microsoft. Shine Capital led its $3.5 million seed round this year, which also included participation from Altman's fund, Verissimo, Full Circle, Charlotte Fund, as well as angel investors including David Apple and Dawn Dobras. What sets Mentra apart is its approach to job fit, maintains Mentra co-founder and CEO Jhillika Kumar. The startup goes beyond keywords in resumes to match employers with talent, she said, considering factors around a person's neurotype, aptitude, environmental sensitivities. To date, its one-year retention rate has remained at an impressive 97.5%. [...] One way Mentra uses AI is to parse through job descriptions to make sure they are cognitively accessible and broken down in a consistent format that is not exclusionary. "Then we are able to use an algorithm to go through the jobseekers on our platform to identify who's the best fit based on mostly neuro type," Kumar told TechCrunch. "One person might be extremely good at hyper focusing, very detail-oriented, very process-oriented or very strategic, and you have specific skills that map to their strengths in the role." Over 70% of the data Mentra collects is not collected by an Indeed or a traditional job-finding platform. It uses that holistic data to make the match between the job and the individual. The startup's current revenue model is free for neurodivergent jobseekers, and it charges an annual subscription for enterprise companies to access the platform. It is also building out a neuroinclusion marketplace for service providers such as consultancies and training firms to provide hands-on services to companies that accompany Mentra's core platform. "In the future, we plan to have a similar marketplace available for neurodivergents to access tailored services as well throughout the life of their career such as bootcamps and job coaches," Kumar added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a press release today, the Federal Aviation Administration said UPS delivery drones are now allowed to fly longer distance flights beyond the sight of ground operators. "This is the kind of move that opens the door for drone delivery companies like Wing, FedEx, and Zip to deliver packages across a wider area and service more customers," reports The Verge. From the report: UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) without spotters on the ground monitoring the route and skies for other aircraft, using SwissDrones SVO 50 V2 drones. The FAA also announced authorizations for two other companies to fly beyond sight for commercial purposes. That includes uAvionix Corp. and, last week, infrastructure inspection company Phoenix Air Unmanned. UPS first received government approval to operate its drone service in 2019, the same year the FAA authorized Alphabet's Wing service to operate commercially. The company first focused on building a drone delivery network for US hospital campuses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Mozilla's *Privacy Not Included project, every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards in new internet-connected models, and all 25 of the brands Mozilla examined flunked the organization's test. Gizmodo reports: Mozilla found brands including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, and Subaru collect data about drivers including race, facial expressions, weight, health information, and where you drive. Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn't expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla. [...] The worst offender was Nissan, Mozilla said. The carmaker's privacy policy suggests the manufacturer collects information including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data, though there's no details about how exactly that data is gathered. Nissan reserves the right to share and sell "preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes" to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties. Other brands didn't fare much better. Volkswagen, for example, collects your driving behaviors such as your seatbelt and braking habits and pairs that with details such as age and gender for targeted advertising. Kia's privacy policy reserves the right to monitor your "sex life," and Mercedes-Benz ships cars with TikTok pre-installed on the infotainment system, an app that has its own thicket of privacy problems. The privacy and security problems extend beyond the nature of the data car companies siphon off about you. Mozilla said it was unable to determine whether the brands encrypt any of the data they collect, and only Mercedes-Benz responded to the organization's questions. Mozilla also found that many car brands engage in "privacy washing," or presenting consumers with information that suggests they don't have to worry about privacy issues when the exact opposite is true. Many leading manufacturers are signatories to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation's "Consumer Privacy Protection Principles (PDF)." According to Mozilla, these are a non-binding set of vague promises organized by the car manufacturers themselves. Questions around consent are essentially a joke as well. Subaru, for example, says that by being a passenger in the car, you are considered a "user" who has given the company consent to harvest information about you. Mozilla said a number of car brands say it's the drivers responsibility to let passengers know about their car's privacy policies -- as if the privacy policies are comprehensible to drivers in the first place. Toyota, for example, has a constellation of 12 different privacy policies for your reading pleasure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Toyota says a recent disruption of operations in Japan-based production plants was caused by its database servers running out of storage space. On August 29th, it was reported that Toyota had to halt operations on 12 of its 14 Japan-based car assembly plants due to an undefined system malfunction. As one of the largest automakers in the world, the situation caused production output losses of roughly 13,000 cars daily, threatening to impact exports to the global market. In a statement released today on Toyota's Japanese news portal, the company explains that the malfunction occurred during a planned IT systems maintenance event on August 27th, 2023. The planned maintenance was to organize the data and deletion of fragmented data in a database. However, as the storage was filled to capacity before the completion of the tasks, an error occurred, causing the system to shut down. This shutdown directly impacted the company's production ordering system so that no production tasks could be planned and executed. Toyota explains that its main servers and backup machines operate on the same system. Due to this, both systems faced the same failure, making a switchover impossible, inevitably leading to a halt in factory operations. The restoration came on August 29th, 2023, when Toyota's IT team had prepared a larger capacity server to accept the data that was partially transferred two days back. This allowed Toyota's engineers to restore the production ordering system and the plants to resume operations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has been expanding its computing budget for building artificial intelligence to millions of dollars a day. The Information: One of its goals is to develop features such as one that allows iPhone customers to use simple voice commands to automate tasks involving multiple steps, according to people familiar with the effort. The technology, for instance, could allow someone to tell the Siri voice assistant on their phone to create a GIF using the last five photos they've taken and text it to a friend. Today, an iPhone user has to manually program the individual actions. The moves come four years after Apple's head of AI, John Giannandrea, authorized the formation of a team to develop conversational AI, known as large-language models, before the technology became a focus of the software industry, according to people with knowledge of the team. That move now seems prescient following the launch last fall of ChatGPT, a chatbot that catalyzed a boom in language models. Although Giannandrea has repeatedly expressed skepticism to colleagues about the potential usefulness of chatbots powered by AI language models, the fact that Apple wasn't completely unprepared for the language model boom could be considered an accomplishment -- and is the result of changes he made to the company's software research culture, several colleagues said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's worst air-traffic outage in a decade was caused by an anomaly in the airspace manager's software system, which confused two geographical checkpoints separated by some 4,000 nautical miles. From a report: The UK's Civil Aviation Authority said Wednesday it will conduct an independent review of the incident, which forced hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed last week after an error in processing an airline's flight plan. The glitch triggered a shutdown of the software system run by NATS for safety reasons, according to a preliminary report from the public-private partnership formerly called National Air Traffic Services. This forced air-traffic staff to input flight plans manually, drastically reducing the amount of air traffic that could be processed. The event sent airlines and airports in the UK into turmoil on Aug. 28, leaving planes out of position and passengers stranded. Nearly 800 flights leaving UK airports were canceled, with a similar number of arrivals scrapped, according to analytics firm Cirium. The report by NATS showed that on the day of the incident, an airline entered a plan into the system which led through UK airspace. NATS Chief Executive Officer Martin Rolfe declined to discuss details of the flight, such as its route or the airline involved, saying the specifics weren't pertinent to the outage. While the flight plan wasn't faulty, it threw off the system because the software used by NATS received duplicate identities for two different points on the map. There are an infinite number of flight-plan waypoints in the world, and duplicates remain despite work to remove them, according to Rolfe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An exploit for a bug in Windows appears to increase the performance of File Explorer in Microsoft's flagship operating system. From a report: Spotted over the weekend by Xitter user @VivyVCCS, the hack is triggered by a swift jab of the F11 key to switch File Explorer in and out of full-screen mode. According to the post, load performance is improved markedly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tlhIngan writes: Starfield, a Bethesda space-based RPG that was recently released, was criticized for not having Nvidia DLSS support -- instead the game was primarily written to feature AMD's FSR support. This isn't too surprising since the major consoles all use AMD processors and GPUs. However, an enterprising modder created a mod that enables players with Nvidia cards to enable DLSS. This isn't the unusual bit -- the mod makes DLSS2 (ca. 2020) available for free, while the version enabling DLSS3 (which adds the ability to use AI to generate frames in-between) is behind a Patreon paywall. This has lead to several other people to crack the DRM protecting the mod itself (note: this is not the DRM on the game itself -- the game's Steam page doesn't seem to imply use of 3rd party DRM beyond Steam). Imagine that -- DRM on a game mod because it requires payment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube is trying out games as its next experimental offering. The company is adding a new "Playables" section on the site that will include games that can be played on both the desktop website and mobile devices. From a report: Playables will only appear for "a limited number of users to start," and there was no list of game titles published at this time. 9to5Google reports that one of the games to grace the new YouTube Playables experiment includes Stack Bounce, which involves a 3D ball bouncing on top of rings you must smash through with well-timed clicks. If you've heard of the game before, it's because Google already offers it on its minigames service, GameSnacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roku will cut more than 300 staffers -- laying off 10% of its workforce -- as the streaming-platform company continues its battle to control costs. From a report: In addition, Roku will remove certain licensed and owned content from its platform as part of a "strategic review of its content portfolio," resulting in an impairment charge of up to $65 million in the current quarter, the company disclosed in an SEC filing Wednesday. Other cost-cutting measures Roku outlined are consolidating office space and reducing outside services expenses. The goal is to reduce year-over-year operating expense growth rate, the company said. The layoffs represent Roku's third round of job cuts in less than a year, after it pink-slipped 200 staffers in November 2022 and another 200 in March 2023. As of the end of 2022, Roku had approximately 3,600 full-time employees. The company, in addition to the layoffs, said it also plans to cut back on new hires.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slash_Account_Dot writes: An artificial intelligence company, whose founder Forbes included in a 30 Under 30 list recently, promises to use machine learning to convert clients' 2D illustrations into 3D models. In reality the company, called Kaedim, uses human artists for 'quality control.' According to two sources with knowledge of the process interviewed by 404 Media, at one point, Kaedim often used human artists to make the models. One of the sources said workers at one point produced the 3D design wholecloth themselves without the help of machine learning at all. The news pulls back the curtain on a hyped startup and is an example of how AI companies can sometimes overstate the capabilities of their technology. Like other AI startups, Kaedim wants to use AI to do tedious labor that is currently being done by humans. In this case, 3D modeling, a time consuming job that video game companies are already outsourcing to studios in countries like China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon is considering the development of a vast network of AI-powered technology, drones and autonomous systems within the next two years to counter threats from China and other adversaries. WSJ: Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, will provide new details in a speech later Wednesday about the department's plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an array of thousands of air-, land- and sea-based artificial-intelligence systems that are intended to be "small, smart, cheap." The U.S. is seeking to keep pace with China's rapidly expanding military amid concerns that the Pentagon bureaucracy takes too long to develop and deploy cutting-edge systems. [...] One approach could be to build on the capabilities demonstrated by Task Force 59, the U.S. Navy's network of drones and sensors designed to monitor Iran's military activities in the Middle East.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government will concede it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is "technically feasible" to do so, postponing measures that critics say threaten users' privacy. Financial Times: A planned statement to the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon will mark an eleventh-hour bid by ministers to end a stand-off with tech companies, including WhatsApp, that have threatened to pull their services from the UK over what they claimed was an intolerable threat to millions of users' security. The statement is set to outline that Ofcom, the tech regulator, will only require companies to scan their networks when a technology is developed that is capable of doing so, according to people briefed on the plan. Many security experts believe it could be years before any such technology is developed, if ever. "A notice can only be issued where technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content," the statement will say. The online safety bill, which has been in development for several years and is now in its final stages in parliament, is one of the toughest attempts by any government to make Big Tech companies responsible for the content that is shared on their networks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes: The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists. On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today's tech giants become dominant by breaking the law? The case -- U.S. et al v. Google -- is the federal government's first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power. Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults. Taylor Monahan is founder and CEO of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people, Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto. Monahan said virtually all of the victims she has assisted were longtime cryptocurrency investors, and security-minded individuals. Importantly, none appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto heist, such as the compromise of one's email and/or mobile phone accounts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China ordered officials at central government agencies not to use Apple's iPhones and other foreign-branded devices for work or bring them into the office, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: In recent weeks, staff were given the instructions by their superiors in workplace chat groups or meetings, the people said. The directive is the latest step in Beijing's campaign to cut reliance on foreign technology and enhance cybersecurity, and comes amid a campaign to limit flows of sensitive information outside of China's borders. The move by Beijing could have a chilling effect for foreign brands in China, including Apple. Apple dominates the high-end smartphone market in the country and counts China as one of its biggest markets, relying on it for about 19% of its overall revenue. It wasn't clear how widely the orders were being distributed, but similar messages were communicated to employees at some central government regulators. Beijing has for years restricted government officials at some agencies from using iPhones for work, but the order has now been widened, the people said. The latest order also signals an intensified effort by Beijing to ensure its rules are strictly enforced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: At its Cloud Next conference today, Google revealed a handful of new AI-powered features coming soon to Meet. One of the biggest new AI-enabled features is the ability for Google's Duet AI to take notes in real time: click "take notes for me," and the app will capture a summary and action items as the meeting is going on. If you're late to a meeting, Google will be able to show you a mid-meeting summary so that you can catch up on what happened. During the call, you'll be able to talk privately with a Google chatbot to go over details you might have missed. And when the meeting is over, you can save the summary to Docs and come back to it after the fact; it can even include video clips of important moments. These AI-enabled features could be a way to free up people from being dedicated meeting-note scribes and make it easier to catch up both during and after calls. Another new Meet feature lets Duet "attend" a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click an "attend for me" button, and Google can auto-generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them. This could be another handy time-saving feature. If you're double-booked or suddenly have to bail on a meeting because of something going on in your life, I can see the value in sharing some notes about what you'd planned to bring up. But I worry that people might use this feature to dodge meetings they really should attend and add an unnecessary burden to the people who actually show. (If everyone in the meeting sends their AI assistant, I'm told, Meet will figure it out and quickly end the call.) This feature is a little ways out, arriving sometime next year to Labs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greece is working with Israel on developing artificial intelligence technology that would help in early detection of dangerous wildfires, the Greek prime minister said Monday. The Associated Press reports: After talks with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu and Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia, Kyriakos Mitsotakis also said that Israel could be brought into the European Union fold when it comes to civil protection initiatives to better coordinate firefighting efforts. Mitsotakis said Greece could act as a proving ground for Israeli AI technology in early detection of wildfires. "We are already talking to Israel about AI-based solutions that will offer us early detection capabilities," Said Mitsotakis. Netanyahu said the three leaders discussed "going well beyond" dispatching firefighting aircraft and crews by deploying AI systems for early detection. "This is really one of those areas where when we say we'll do it better together, there's no question that that's the case," Netanyahu said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British Conservative government has eased planning rules and lifted restrictions that had effectively prohibited the construction of new onshore wind farms in England. The Independent reports: Rules introduced in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who also led a Conservative administration, allowed a single objection to a wind turbine application to block its development. The regulations led to a dramatic decline in the number of new turbines granted planning permission. Some Conservatives pressured the current government to overturn the rules. Lawmaker Alok Sharma, who was president of the 2021 U.N. climate change conference and led the lobbying campaign, called them "outdated" and "not a sensible way for a planning system to operate." Authorities said Tuesday that the eased restrictions mean that onshore wind projects supported by local residents will get approved more quickly. They said elected local officials will have the ability to make final decisions based on the prevailing view of their communities, not just a small number of objectors. Communities that back wind turbines in their areas will also benefit from cheaper electricity, officials said, adding that the way such energy discounts work would be considered later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: A Florida marathoner is facing federal charges after the U.S. Coast Guard spotted him 70 nautical miles off Tybee Island, Georgia on Aug. 26, in a homemade Hydro Pod, as Hurricane Franklin bore down on the Eastern Seaboard. Reza Baluchi claimed he was headed to London in the human-powered vessel, a hamster wheel-like contraption which a newly filed criminal complaint describes as being "afloat as a result of wiring and buoys." When Coast Guard officers told Baluchi they were cutting short his "manifestly unsafe" voyage, Baluchi threatened to kill himself with a 12-inch knife if anyone tried to apprehend him, and claimed to have a bomb aboard, which turned out to be fake, according to the complaint. Three days later, Baluchi -- who authorities have intercepted in his Hydro Pod at least three times previously -- finally surrendered, the complaint states. Baluchi made national news for a 2021 attempt to get from Florida to New York in the Hydro Pod, but washed ashore 25 miles later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Gizmodo's parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Espanol and began replacing them with AI translations of English-language articles. "G/O Media's decision to eschew human writers for AI is part of a recent trend of media companies experimenting with AI tools as a way to maximize content output while minimizing human labor costs," reports Ars Technica. "However, the practice remains controversial within the broader journalism community." The Verge first reported the news. From the report: Previously, Gizmodo en Espanol had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo's English articles. The site represented Gizmodo's first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee. Newly published articles on the site now contain a link to the English version of the article and a disclaimer stating (via our translation from Google Translate), "This content has been automatically translated from the source material. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there may be slight differences. For the original version, click here." So far, Gizmodo's pivot to AI translation hasn't gone smoothly. On social media site X, journalist and Gizmodo reader Victor Millan noted that some of the site's new articles abruptly switch from Spanish to English midway through, possibly due to glitches in the AI translation system. [...] For Spanish-speaking audiences seeking news about science, technology, and Internet culture, the loss of original reporting from Gizmodo en Espanol is potentially a major blow. And while AI translation technology has improved significantly over the past decade, experts say it still can't fully replace human translators. Subtle errors, mistranslations, and lack of cultural knowledge can impair the quality of automatically translated content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Arm's IPO documents, Apple has signed a new deal with the chipmaker for technology that "extends beyond 2040." Reuters reports: Arm unveiled pricing on Tuesday for what it hopes will be a $52 billion initial public offering, which would be the largest such deal in the U.S. this year. Arm owner SoftBank plans to offer 95.5 million American depository shares of the United Kingdom-based company for $47 to $51 apiece, Arm said in a filing. Arm owns the intellectual property behind the computing architecture for most of the world's smartphones, which it licenses to Apple and many others. Apple uses Arm's technology in the processes of designing its own custom chips for its iPhones, iPads and Macs. The two companies have a long history -- Apple was one of the initial companies that partnered to found the firm in 1990, before the release of its "Newton" handheld computer in 1993, which used an Arm-based processor chip. The Newton flopped, but Arm went on to become dominant in mobile phone chips because of its low power consumption, which helps batteries last longer. The deal disclosed on Tuesday was not mentioned in Arm's previous IPO filing documents made public on Aug. 21, implying that the deal was signed between then and Sept. 5.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting in December, Facebook users in the U.K., France and Germany will no longer see a dedicated section for news articles. CNBC reports: Meta said Tuesday that it is plans to "deprecate" the Facebook News tab in early December for users in those European countries as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most." The company added that it plans to spend more time and money on short-form video, as best exemplified by its TikTok-like Reels product. News represents less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said. Meta said it would honor the Facebook News obligations it had made to publishers in those countries, but said it won't enter into new deals and has no plans to offer new products for news publishers. In June, Meta removed all news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada, following the passage of a bill requiring big tech companies to compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rick Klein and his team have been preserving TV adverts, forgotten tapes, and decades-old TV programming for years. Now operating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television has called YouTube home since 2007. However, copyright notices sent on behalf of Sony, protecting TV shows between 40 and 60 years old, could shut down the project in 48 hours. "Our YouTube channel with 150k subscribers is in danger of being terminated by September 6th if I don't find a way to resolve these copyright claims that Markscan made," Klein told TorrentFreak on Friday. "At this point, I don't even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not -- I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes. I am willing to remove the material manually to get the strikes reversed." Over the weekend Klein shared details of the copyright complaints filed with YouTube. Two of the claims can be seen in the image below and on first view, appear straightforward enough. Two episodes of the TV series Bewitched dated 1964 aired on ABC Network and almost sixty years later, archive copies of those transmissions were removed from YouTube for violating Sony copyrights, with MCCTv receiving a strike. A claim targeting an upload titled Bewitched -- 'Twitch or Treat' -- WPWR Channel 60 (Complete Broadcast, 8/6/1984) follows the same pattern, but what isn't shown are the details added by MCCTv to place the episode (and the included commercials) in historical context. Another takedown target -- Bewitched -- 'Sam in the Moon' (Complete 16mm Network Print, 1/5/1967) is accompanied by even more detail, including references in the episode to then-current events. Given that copyright law locks content down for decades, Klein understands that can sometimes cause issues, although 16 years on YouTube suggests that the overwhelming majority of rightsholders don't consider his channel a threat. If they did, the option to monetize the recordings can be an option. [...] Klein says MCCTv certainly doesn't set out to hurt copyright holders. However, there's always a balance between preserving "rare pieces of video ephemera" and the likelihood that nobody needs to enforce any rights, versus unusual circumstances like these where unexpected complaints need to be resolved with impossible-to-reach parties. Klein says the team is happy to comply with Sony's wishes and they hope that given a little leeway, the project won't be consigned to history. Perhaps Sony will recall the importance of time-shifting while understanding that time itself is running out for The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank shares a report from Axios: AI experts at leading universities favor creating a federal "Department of AI" or a global regulator to govern artificial intelligence over leaving that to Congress, the White House or the private sector. That's the top-level finding of the new Axios-Generation Lab-Syracuse University AI Experts Survey of computer science professors from top U.S. research universities. The survey includes responses from 213 professors of computer science at 65 of the top 100 U.S. computer science programs, as defined by SCImago Journal rankings. The survey found experts split over when or if AI will escape human control -- but unified in a view that the emerging technologies must be regulated. "Regulation" was the top response when asked what action would move AI in a positive direction. Just 1 in 6 said AI shouldn't or can't be regulated. Only a handful trust the private sector to self-regulate. About 1 in 5 predicted AI will "definitely" stay in human control. The rest were split between those saying AI will "probably" or "definitely" get out of human control and those saying "probably not." "No one individual is highly trusted to deal with AI issues," adds Axios. "President Biden took the top spot, with 9% of respondents -- slightly higher than Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump drew 2% and 1%, respectively."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will acquire the major Swedish classical music record label BIS Records, intending to fold it into Apple Music Classical and Platoon. MacRumors reports: BIS Records was founded in 1973 by Robert von Bahr. The label focuses on a range of classical music, with particular focus on works that are not well represented by existing recordings. It is an award-winning name in the world of classical music, acclaimed for its vast catalog and impressive audio quality. The label celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. The company announced its impending acquisition by Apple earlier today. BIS is set to become a part of Apple Music Classical and the Apple-owned label Platoon. Apple acquired Platoon, a London-based A&R startup focused on discovering rising music artists, in 2018. In 2021, Apple announced that it had purchased the classical music streaming service Primephonic and would be folding it into Apple Music via a new app dedicated to the genre. Apple released the Apple Music Classical app in March. The app offers a simpler interface for interacting with classical music specifically. Unlike the main Apple Music app, Apple Music Classical allows users to search by composer, work, conductor, catalog number, and more. Users can get more detailed information from editorial notes and descriptions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Two weeks after Intel said it would cancel its plan to acquire Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion amidst pushback from regulators, the two companies intend to work together anyway. Intel today said that it would provide foundry services and 300mm manufacturing capacity to Tower. As part of the deal, Tower would use Intel's plant in New Mexico, operated by Intel Foundry Services (IFS), investing up to $300 million to "acquire and own equipment and other fixed assets" that would be installed in the manufacturing facility. The deal will give Tower a new capacity corridor, it said, of "over 600,000 photo layers per month" to meet expected demand for 300mm chips. The deal will mean that Intel will be manufacturing Tower's 65-nanometer power management BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) flows. Tower itself also owns its own manufacturing facilities in owns manufacturing facilities in Israel (150mm and 200mm), the U.S. (200mm), Japan (200mm and 300mm) and soon in Italy in partnership with STMicroelectronics. "We launched Intel Foundry Services with a long-term view of delivering the world's first open system foundry that brings together a secure, sustainable, and resilient supply chain with the best of Intel and our ecosystem. We're thrilled that Tower sees the unique value we provide and chose us to open their 300mm U.S. capacity corridor," said Stuart Pann, Intel SVP and GM of Intel Foundry Services, in a statement. "We are excited to continue working with Intel," added Tower CEO Russell Ellwanger. "As we look to the future, our primary focus is to expand our customer partnerships through high-scale manufacturing of leading-edge technology solutions. This collaboration with Intel allows us to fulfill our customers' demand roadmaps, with a particular focus on advanced power management and radio frequency silicon on insulator (RF SOI) solutions, with full process flow qualification planned in 2024. We see this as a first step towards multiple unique synergistic solutions with Intel."Read more of this story at Slashdot.