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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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The US can stop Twitter from releasing details about the government's demands for user information in national security investigations, a court ruled (PDF), in the same week House Republicans are to grill national security officials over surveillance. Twitter had protested the government's redactions to a 2014 "transparency report" that featured a numerical breakdown of national security-related data requests from the previous year. The US appeals court in San Francisco on Monday agreed with a lower-court judge that the Justice Department had shown a "compelling" interest in keeping that information secret. Based on classified and unclassified declarations provided by government officials, the court was "able to appreciate why Twitter's proposed disclosure would risk making our foreign adversaries aware of what is being surveilled and what is not being surveilled -- if anything at all," US Circuit Judge Daniel Bress wrote for the three-judge panel. Although the case is almost a decade old, the ruling comes just as lawmakers and US national security agencies gear up for a bruising fight over making changes to a key surveillance program. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, described by intelligence officials as a key authority, expires on Dec. 31 unless Congress votes to renew it. US agencies use the authority to compel internet and technology companies to turn over information about suspected foreign terrorists and spies. Changes to Section 702 could include altering what companies like Twitter are required to do in response to government demands. "The case at issue in Monday's decision involved efforts by Twitter to share information about two types of federal law enforcement demands on the social media company: 'national security letters' for subscriber information, which would cover metadata but not the substance of any electronic communications, and orders under FISA, which could include content," adds Bloomberg. Judge Daniel Bress wrote: "The government may not fend off every First Amendment challenge by invoking national security. But we must apply the First Amendment with due regard for the government's compelling interest in securing the safety of our country and its people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

German police said Monday they have disrupted a ransomware cybercrime gang tied to Russia that has been blackmailing large companies and institutions for years, raking in millions of euros. From a report: Working with law enforcement partners including Europol, the FBI and authorities in Ukraine, police in Duesseldorf said they were able to identify 11 individuals linked to a group that has operated in various guises since at least 2010. The gang allegedly behind the ransomware, known as DoppelPaymer, appears tied to Evil Corp, a Russia-based syndicate engaged in online bank theft well before ransomware became a global scourge. Among its most prominent victims were Britain's National Health Service and Duesseldorf University Hospital, whose computers were infected with DoppelPaymer in 2020. A woman who needed urgent treatment died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment. Ransomware is the world's most disruptive cybercrime. Gangs mostly based in Russia break into networks and steal sensitive information before activating malware that scrambles data. The criminals demand payment in exchange for decryption keys and a promise not to dump the stolen data online. In a 2020 alert, the FBI said DoppelPaymer had been used since late 2019 to target critical industries worldwide including healthcare, emergency services and education, with six- and seven-figure ransoms routinely demanded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Streaming boxes had so much potential. They were going to reinvent the cable box for the internet age and make it easier for users to find and organize and watch everything available in this era of infinite content. They were going to turn our TVs, the hub of our homes, into smart gadgets through which we could do almost anything. They were going to be game consoles. Streaming boxes were the next big thing. Instead, well, streaming boxes suck. From a report: You can't find a single product on the market that comes even remotely close to satisfying this vision. Instead of a thriving hardware and software category, streaming boxes have turned into ever-cheaper commodity items. At the Walgreens down the street from my house, crammed in between AA batteries and bizarrely unbranded wired headphones, sits a Roku Express HD for $30. And it's as good a buy as anything else. Streaming boxes are bad, and they're getting worse instead of better. You could almost argue that in their current form, streaming boxes don't need to exist at all. By most measures, a majority of consumers in the US already own a smart TV -- and if you're in the market for a new set, you can barely find one that doesn't have some operating system built in. Of course, most of those smart TVs are slow, riddled with ads, and try to track your every move. That's why a good streaming box is such a good idea, at least in theory. The rest of tech's evolution has made good TV hardware and software even more important -- cloud gaming is improving all the time, our homes are getting smarter, we're even using our TVs to video chat. Streaming boxes let you upgrade without throwing out your big screen and add new features that might not come baked into the set itself. Plus, a good box could mitigate some of the worst ills of the smart TV world. To borrow an old-TV analogy: the built-in smart TV stuff is like the rabbit ears of old, and we need the cable box.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is getting ready to publicly test major new Windows features even earlier. While the software giant has been previewing changes to Windows for nearly a decade, a new Canary channel for Windows Insiders will allow anyone to try out "hot off the presses" builds of Windows that include major changes to the kernel, APIs, and other big parts of Windows. From a report: It feels like this new Canary channel is preparation work for Windows 12, which Intel and Microsoft have both been hinting at recently. "The new Canary Channel is going to be the place to preview platform changes that require longer-lead time before getting released to customers," says Amanda Langowski, Microsoft's head of the Windows Insider program, in a blog post today. "Some examples of this include major changes to the Windows kernel, new APIs, etc." We've seen Microsoft test underlying platform changes to Windows before that eventually shipped in a future version of Windows. Microsoft tested some display changes to Windows 10 preview builds before Windows 11 was announced, and the changes only ended up shipping in what became Windows 11. Likewise, x64 emulation for Windows 10 on Arm was tested early on and only ever shipped in Windows 11.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have announced a major cybersecurity find -- the world's first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer's boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. From a report: Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what's known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware hijack the UEFI -- short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface -- the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC's device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It's located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch. Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to run malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced. As appealing as it is to threat actors to install nearly invisible and unremovable malware that has kernel-level access, there are a few formidable hurdles standing in their way. One is the requirement that they first hack the device and gain administrator system rights, either by exploiting one or more vulnerabilities in the OS or apps or by tricking a user into installing trojanized software. Only after this high bar is cleared can the threat actor attempt an installation of the bootkit. The second thing standing in the way of UEFI attacks is UEFI Secure Boot, an industry-wide standard that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of software used during startup is trusted by a computer's manufacturer. Secure Boot is designed to create a chain of trust that will prevent attackers from replacing the intended bootup firmware with malicious firmware. If a single firmware link in that chain isn't recognized, Secure Boot will prevent the device from starting.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is making Outlook for Mac free to use today. From a report: Outlook is now available free in Apple's App Store, and you no longer need a Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license to use it. It's a surprise move that coincides with Microsoft's push to make its Windows desktop Outlook email client more web-powered. Outlook for Mac includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and any email provider that has IMAP support. Microsoft redesigned its Mac email client in 2020, with a user interface that's optimized for Apple's latest macOS design changes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ministers must consider changing the law to allow scientists to carry out genome editing of human embryos for serious genetic conditions -- as a matter of urgency. That is the key message of a newly published report by a UK citizens' jury made up of individuals affected by genetic conditions. From a report: The report is the first in-depth study of the views of individuals who live with genetic conditions about the editing of human embryos to treat hereditary disorders and will be presented at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing, which opens at the Crick Institute in London this week. Scientists say that in a few years, they will be ready to use genome editing techniques to alter genes and induce changes in physical traits, such as disease risk, in future generations. In the UK, around 2.4 million people live with a genetic condition. These include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, various cancers, and some forms of hereditary blindness. "Genome editing offers the prospect of preventing such conditions affecting future generations but there needs to be a full national debate on the issues," said Prof Anna Middleton of Cambridge University, the project's leader. "These discussions need to start now because genome editing is advancing so quickly. Many affected individuals want to debate the ethical issues and explore what implementation might look like." Genome editing acts like a pair of molecular scissors that can cut a strand of DNA at a specific site, allowing scientists to alter the structure of a gene, a form of manipulation that does not involve the introduction of DNA from other organisms. In the UK, as in most countries worldwide, it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that lead to pregnancy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It has been more than a decade since Jeff Bezos excitedly sketched out his vision for Alexa on a whiteboard at Amazon's headquarters. His voice assistant would help do all manner of tasks, such as shop online, control gadgets, or even read kids a bedtime story. But the Amazon founder's grand vision of a new computing platform controlled by voice has fallen short. From a report: As hype in the tech world turns feverishly to generative AI as the "next big thing," the moment has caused many to ask hard questions of the previous "next big thing" -- the much-lauded voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. A "grow grow grow" culture described by one former Amazon Alexa marketing executive has now shifted to a more intense focus on how the device can help the ecommerce giant make money. "If you have anything you can do that you might be able to directly monetise, you should do it," was the recent diktat from Amazon leaders, according to one current employee on the Alexa team. Under new chief executive Andy Jassy's tenure this change of focus has resulted in significant lay-offs in Amazon's Alexa team late last year as executives scrutinise the product's direct contribution to the company's bottom line. The belt-tightening came as part of broader cuts that have seen the ecommerce giant slash 18,000 jobs across the group amid pressure to improve profits during a global tech downturn. At Microsoft, whose chief executive Satya Nadella declared in 2016 that "bots are the new apps," it is now acknowledged that voice assistants, including its own Cortana, did not live up to the hype. "They were all dumb as a rock," Nadella told the Financial Times last month. "Whether it's Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri, all these just don't work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end to a lot of [information] that didn't work." Nadella can afford to be blunt: Microsoft's recent introduction of AI chatbot ChatGPT to its Bing search engine means the company is now seen as a leader in the field, having previously been mostly forgotten by the majority of internet users. ChatGPT's ability to understand complex instructions left existing voice assistants looking comparatively stupid, said Adam Cheyer, the co-creator of Siri, the voice assistant acquired by Apple in 2010 and introduced to the iPhone a year later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Cheaters are an annoying part of almost every online video game. And banning them has become an important routine for game developers and publishers to keep their users happy. The publisher of Escape from Tarkov, a game developed by the Russian company Battlestate Games, has added an unusual twist to the routine: naming and shaming the cheaters. In the last week, Battlestate Games said it banned 6,700 cheaters, and it published all their nicknames on publicly available spreadsheets. "We want honest players to see the nicknames of cheaters to know that justice has been served and the cheater who killed them in a raid has been punished and banned," Battlestate Games' spokesperson Dmitri Ogorodnikov told TechCrunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft, having brought artificial intelligence to its battle with Google over search, is now turning to the latest AI technology to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market such as Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. From a report: The software giant is introducing an AI assistant -- called Dynamics 365 Copilot -- for applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. It can help marketers come up with customer categories to target, and write product listings for e-commerce. The new capabilities are being released in preview form on Monday and are being tested by hundreds of early customers. For example, Italian aperitif maker Campari is trying out the marketing tools to concoct targeted campaigns for events around the Negroni cocktail. Microsoft also said its next set of AI announcements, planned for March 16, will relate to "workplace productivity," a term the software maker usually uses to mean Office software. Business applications are the latest Microsoft programs to get an AI makeover so far this year as the company adds language-generation tools and chatbots to everything from its Bing internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software. The strategy follows a successful debut for an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot last year and Microsoft's expansion of its investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in January. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has said the company plans to overhaul its whole product lineup using AI and tools from OpenAI. In the business applications category, where Microsoft has operated for more than two decades but lagged behind rivals, Nadella ultimately wants to use AI to break down silos between formerly separate programs, each with their own workflows and acronyms, like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, he said, they should be blended and have one AI copilot that can retrieve information and help workers with tasks. Still, like the Bing bot, Nadella noted Microsoft's Dynamics tool will also make mistakes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has unveiled Video Super Resolution (VSR) -- an "experimental" video upscaling feature for its Edge web browser that uses machine learning to increase the resolution of low-quality video. From a report: Announced on the Edge Insiders blog, Microsoft's VSR technology can "remove blocky compression artifacts" and improve text clarity for videos on platforms such as YouTube. The feature is still in testing and availability is currently restricted to half of the users running the Canary channel of Edge in Microsoft's Insider program. If you want to try it for yourself, there are a few stipulations: Microsoft VSR will only work on video resolutions of 720p or lower (provided both the height and width of the video exceeds 192 pixels), and the video itself can't be protected with digital rights management (DRM) technology like PlayReady or Widevine, which makes frames inaccessible to the browser for processing. That particular restriction could impact what content you can upscale with the feature, as most popular streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max all leverage DRM tech for copyright protection. Unlike Nvidia's RTX Super Resolution, Microsoft's Video Super Resolution feature supports both Nvidia and AMD GPUs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Federal Reserve Zoom event with more than 220 people was canceled after a user hijacked proceedings and displayed pornographic content, Reuters reports. From a report: The hijack left Fed Governor Christopher Waller unable to deliver his opening remarks because graphic images from a call participant named "Dan" began to pop up on the screen. In a statement to Reuters, Brent Tjarks, executive director of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the Zoom event, said: "We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret. We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us." Tjarks adds that he suspects a security switch for the Zoom event that would have muted users and prevented them from sharing their screens was incorrectly set, though he could not confirm. The MBCA, whose roughly 100 members include banks with between $10 billion and $100 billion in assets, made the decision to cancel the event minutes after it was scheduled to commence, citing "technical difficulties."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Platforms' WhatsApp has agreed to be more transparent about changes to its privacy policy introduced in 2021, the European Commission said on Monday, following complaints from consumer bodies across Europe. From a report: The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and the European Network of consumer authorities told WhatsApp last year that it had not clarified the changes in plain and intelligible language, violating the bloc's laws. EU members' national regulators can sanction companies for breaches. WhatsApp has now agreed to explain changes to EU users' contracts and how these could affect their rights, and has agreed to display prominently the possibility for users to accept or reject the changes and ensure that users can easily close pop-up notifications on updates. The company also confirmed that users' personal data is not shared with third parties or other Meta companies, including Facebook, for advertising purposes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM," writes LWN.net, "claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology..." Two decades later, "It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago...."It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its opinion, Linux was stolen property: "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion. As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to collect a tax for use of the system. Though this has never been proven, it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. To SCO's management, it may well have seemed like a good idea at the time. IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company, instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did much of the rest of the technology industry. Over the course of the following years — far too many years — SCO's case fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and eventually collapsed into bankruptcy.... Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning the "Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement" that they "should wake up". SCO was suggesting a license fee of $1,399 — per-CPU — to run Linux.... Such an effort, in less incompetent hands, could easily have damaged Linux badly. As it went, SCO, despite its best efforts, instead succeeded in improving the position of Linux — in development, legal, and economic terms — considerably. The article argues SCO's lawsuit ultimately proved that Linux didn't contain copyrighted code "in a far more convincing way than anybody else could have." (And the provenance of all Linux code contributions are now carefully documented.) The case also proved the need for lawyers to vigorously defend the rights of open source programmers. And most of all, it revealed the Linux community was widespread and committed. And "Twenty years later, it is fair to say that Linux is doing a little better than The SCO Group. Its swaggering leader, who thought to make his fortune by taxing Linux, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020."Read more of this story at Slashdot.