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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Long-term exposure to even comparatively low levels of air pollution could cause depression and anxiety, according to a study exploring the links between air quality and mental ill-health. Tracking the incidence of depression and anxiety in almost 500,000 UK adults over 11 years, researchers found that those living in areas with higher pollution were more likely to suffer episodes, even when air quality was within official limits. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry, the researchers, from the universities of Oxford and Beijing and Imperial College London, said their findings suggested a need for stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control. The researchers drew on the data of 389,185 participants from the UK Biobank, modeling and giving a score to the air pollution, including PM2.5 and PM10, nitrogen dioxide and nitric oxide for the areas in which they lived. They found 13,131 cases of depression and 15,835 of anxiety were identified among their sample within a follow-up period of about 11 years. As air pollution increased, the researchers found, so did cases of depression and anxiety. Exposure-response curves were non-linear, however, with steeper slopes at lower levels and plateauing trends at higher exposure, suggesting that long-term exposure to low levels of pollution were just just as likely to lead to diagnoses as exposure to higher levels. "Considering that many countries' air quality standards are still well above the latest World Health Organization global air quality guidelines 2021, stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control should be implemented in the future policy making," the researchers wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A radioactive capsule that was reported lost in Western Australia on January 25 has been found. The BBC reports: On 25 January, when mining company Rio Tinto reported that one of their Caesium-137 radioactive capsules had gone missing, Western Australian authorities faced a seemingly impossible task. They had to locate a pea-sized capsule anywhere along a 1,400km (870 mile) route stretching from the Gudai-Darri mine in the north of the state to a depot just north of Perth's city centre. Authorities sprung into action, mobilizing specialist search crews to look for the capsule, with firefighters among those asked to foray from their usual summer tasks. [...] Before notifying the public to the threat, on 26 January, authorities began searching in Perth and around the mine site in Newman. On January 27, an urgent health warning was issued to notify the public about the risk posed by the radioactive capsule. Health authorities had a simple message to anyone who may come across it: Stay away. "It emits both beta rays and gamma rays so if you have it close to you, you could either end up with skin damage including skin burns," the state's Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson warned. By January 27, search parties were in full force looking for the tiny capsule. But they were not scouting for it using their eyes - they were using portable radiation survey meters. The survey meters are designed to detect radioactivity within a 20m radius. Police focused their efforts on the GPS route the truck had taken, and on sites close to Perth's metropolitan and high-density areas. One site along the Great Northern Highway was prioritized by police on 28 January after unusual activity on a Geiger counter - a device used for measuring radioactivity - was reported by a member of public. But that search did not uncover the capsule. The next day, additional resources requested from Australia's federal government had been approved and those overseeing the search began planning its next phase. With the new equipment in Western Australia and ready for use by 30 January, the search ramped up. An incident controller at the state's emergency services department, Darryl Ray, described the new tools provided by the government only as "specialized radiation detection equipment." Local media reported that radiation portal monitors and a gamma-ray spectrometer were among the new items being used by search crews. But by the end of 31 January, the capsule continued to evade search crews. So the next morning, when the government revealed the capsule had been found just two meters off the side of the highway at 11:13 local time Wednesday, it seemed the all-but-impossible had been achieved. "You can only imagine it's a pretty lonely stretch of road from Newman down to Perth," Fire and Emergency Services Commissioner Darren Klemm said at a press conference on Wednesday. "You can't help but imagine there was an element of surprise from the people in the car when the equipment did spike up." While hesitant to give the exact location the radioactive capsule was found, Mr Klemm described it as "the best possible outcome." Local media reports suggest it was found some 74km from Newman - so around 200km from the mine site. No one appeared to have been injured by the capsule, according to authorities, and it did not seem to have moved from where it fell. Mr Klemm said the additional resources from the federal government proved key to finding the capsule.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday's fourth-quarter earnings call, Snapchat maker Snap revealed that its future AR glasses will be powered by generative AI technology. TechCrunch reports: Social media company and Snapchat maker Snap has for years defined itself as a "camera company," despite its failures to turn its photo-and-video recording glasses known as Spectacles into a mass-market product and, more recently, its decision to kill off its camera-equipped drone. [...] Snap CEO Evan Spiegel agreed that, in the near term, there were a lot of opportunities to use generative AI to make Snap's camera more powerful. However, he noted that further down the road, AI would be critical to the growth of augmented reality, including AR glasses. The exec said that, initially, generative AI could be used to do things like improve the resolution and clarity of a Snap after the user captures it, or could even be used for "more extreme transformations," editing images or creating Snaps based on text input. (We should note that generative AI, at least in the way the term is being thrown around today, is not necessarily required to improve photo resolution.) Spiegel didn't pin any time frames to these types of developments or announce specific products Snap had in the works, but said the company was thinking about how to integrate AI tools into its existing Lens Studio technology for AR developers. "We saw a lot of success integrating Snap ML tools into Lens Studio, and it's really enabled creators to build some incredible things. We now have 300,000 creators who built more than 3 million lenses in Lens Studio," Spiegel told investors. "So, the democratization of these tools, I think, will also be very powerful," he added, in reference to the future integrations of AI tech. What's most interesting, perhaps, was the brief insight Spiegel offered about how Snap foresees the potential for AI when used in AR glasses. Though Snap's Spectacles have not broken any sales records, the company continues to develop the product. The most recent version, the Spectacles 3, expands beyond recording standard photos and video with the addition of new tools like 3D filters and AR graphics. Spiegel suggested that AI could have an impact on this product as well, thanks to its ability to improve the process of building for AR. "We can use generative AI to help build more of these 3D models very quickly, which can really unlock the full potential of AR and help people make their imagination real in the world," Spiegel added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2023 event today, Samsung announced the Galaxy Book3 Ultra, a 16-inch workstation laptop with a 120Hz OLED screen, an H-Series Core i7 or Core i9, and an RTX 4050 or 4070 GPU. "Samsung makes a number of Galaxy Book models, but this is the first one of the past few years that has really targeted the deep-pocketed professional user -- that is, the core audience for Apple's high-powered and wildly expensive MacBook Pro 16," reports The Verge. "It'll start at $2,399.99 ($100 cheaper than the base MacBook Pro 16), with a release date still to be announced." From the report: Like its siblings in the Galaxy Book3 line, a big draw of this workstation will be its screen. It's got a 2880 x 1800 120Hz 16:10 OLED display (a welcome change from the 16:9 panels that adorned last year's Galaxy Book2) rated for 400 nits of brightness [...]. Elsewhere, using the device felt pretty similar to using any number of other Samsung Galaxy Books, with a satisfyingly clicky keyboard, a smooth finish, a high-quality build, and a compact chassis. The Ultra is 0.65 inches thick and 3.9 pounds, which is slightly thinner and close to a pound lighter than the 16-inch MacBook Pro that Apple just released [...]. I was able to use a number of Samsung's continuity features, including Second Screen (which allows you to easily use a Galaxy Tab as a second monitor) and Quick Share (which allows you to quickly transfer images and other files between Samsung devices). For Samsung enthusiasts, those seem like handy features that aren't too much of a hassle to set up. The one feature I had issues with was the touchpad -- it registered some of my two-finger clicks as one-finger clicks and wasn't quite picking up all of my scrolls. The units in Samsung's demo area were preproduction devices, so I hope this is a kink Samsung can iron out before the final release. Unfortunately, we don't yet know how it will stack up when it comes to battery life. The M2 generation of MacBooks is very strong on that front -- and given that the Galaxy Book3 Ultra is running a high-resolution screen, a power-hungry H-series processor, and a very power-hungry RTX GPU, I'm a little bit nervous about that. If Samsung can pull off a device that lasts nearly as long as Apple's do, given those factors, hats off to them. Further reading: The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Is a Minor Update To a Spec Monster Samsung, Google and Qualcomm Team Up To Build a New Mixed-Reality PlatformRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Millions of Americans have used GoodRx, a drug discount app, to search for lower prices on prescriptions like antidepressants, H.I.V. medications and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases at their local drugstores. But U.S. regulators say the app's coupons and convenience came at a high cost for users: wrongful disclosure of their intimate health information. On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission accused the app's developer, GoodRx Holdings, of sharing sensitive personal data on millions of users' prescription medications and illnesses with companies like Facebook and Google without authorization. [...] From 2017 to 2020, GoodRx uploaded the contact information of users who had bought certain medications, like birth control or erectile dysfunction pills, to Facebook so that the drug discount app could identify its users' social media profiles, the F.T.C. said in a legal complaint. GoodRx then used the personal information to target users with ads for medications on Facebook and Instagram, the complaint said, "all of which was visible to Facebook." GoodRx also targeted users who had looked up information on sexually transmitted diseases on HeyDoctor, the company's telemedicine service, with ads for HeyDoctor's S.T.D. testing services, the complaint said. Those data disclosures, regulators said, flouted public promises the company had made to "never provide advertisers any information that reveals a personal health condition." The company's information-sharing practices, the agency said, violated a federal rule requiring health apps and fitness trackers that collect personal health details to notify consumers of data breaches. While GoodRx agreed to settle the case, it said it disagreed with the agency's allegations and admitted no wrongdoing. The F.T.C.'s case against GoodRx could upend widespread user-profiling and ad-targeting practices in the multibillion-dollar digital health industry, and it puts companies on notice that regulators intend to curb the nearly unfettered trade in consumers' health details. [...] If a judge approves the proposed federal settlement order, GoodRx will be permanently barred from sharing users' health information for advertising purposes. To settle the case, the company also agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty for violating the health breach notification rule.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During Samsung's Unpacked event on Wednesday where it unveiled its new Galaxy S23 smartphones, the company said it'll work with Google and Qualcomm on an upcoming mixed-reality platform. Samsung didn't mention any specific products or timeline. CNET reports: "It's more of a declarative announcement about how we are going to get it right in trying to build the XR ecosystem," TM Roh, president of Samsung's mobile division, said in an interview with CNET through a translator ahead of the event. "Google's been investing for a long time across both experiences and technology in AR and VR," Lockheimer said onstage. "Delivering this next generation of experiences requires cutting-edge advanced hardware and software. That's why our collaboration with Samsung and Qualcomm is so exciting." Samsung has been relatively quiet about virtual reality aside from its Gear VR headset, which it launched several iterations of between 2015 and 2017. That device is a head-mounted holster for smartphone-powered VR experiences. Roh says there's been more demand from consumers for augmented and virtual reality, which is why the company chose this time to start discussing its plans. He says that the company has been researching the category for a while. "And now we believe that we have reached a certain threshold," he said. The collaboration makes sense since Samsung, Google and Qualcomm already work together to develop smartphones. Samsung builds the hardware of its Galaxy phones, while Qualcomm supplies the processor and Google manages the software's underlying Android operating system. Roh said Google and Qualcomm will play similar roles in the development of this upcoming XR platform, although they will likely overlap in certain areas. Even though Qualcomm would supply the processor, for example, Samsung might make some optimizations, just as it's done for the chip inside the Galaxy S23 lineup. "Each player is taking leadership in each category, and then we will be working very closely together across the different categories," Roh said.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, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and ETH Zurich released a paper outlining an adversarial attack that can extract a small percentage of training images from latent diffusion AI image synthesis models like Stable Diffusion. It challenges views that image synthesis models do not memorize their training data and that training data might remain private if not disclosed. Recently, AI image synthesis models have been the subject of intense ethical debate and even legal action. Proponents and opponents of generative AI tools regularly argue over the privacy and copyright implications of these new technologies. Adding fuel to either side of the argument could dramatically affect potential legal regulation of the technology, and as a result, this latest paper, authored by Nicholas Carlini et al., has perked up ears in AI circles. However, Carlini's results are not as clear-cut as they may first appear. Discovering instances of memorization in Stable Diffusion required 175 million image generations for testing and preexisting knowledge of trained images. Researchers only extracted 94 direct matches and 109 perceptual near-matches out of 350,000 high-probability-of-memorization images they tested (a set of known duplicates in the 160 million-image dataset used to train Stable Diffusion), resulting in a roughly 0.03 percent memorization rate in this particular scenario. Also, the researchers note that the "memorization" they've discovered is approximate since the AI model cannot produce identical byte-for-byte copies of the training images. By definition, Stable Diffusion cannot memorize large amounts of data because the size of the 160,000 million-image training dataset is many orders of magnitude larger than the 2GB Stable Diffusion AI model. That means any memorization that exists in the model is small, rare, and very difficult to accidentally extract. Still, even when present in very small quantities, the paper appears to show that approximate memorization in latent diffusion models does exist, and that could have implications for data privacy and copyright. The results may one day affect potential image synthesis regulation if the AI models become considered "lossy databases" that can reproduce training data, as one AI pundit speculated. Although considering the 0.03 percent hit rate, they would have to be considered very, very lossy databases -- perhaps to a statistically insignificant degree. [...] Eric Wallace, one of the paper's authors, shared some personal thoughts on the research in a Twitter thread. As stated in the paper, he suggested that AI model-makers should de-duplicate their data to reduce memorization. He also noted that Stable Diffusion's model is small relative to its training set, so larger diffusion models are likely to memorize more. And he advised against applying today's diffusion models to privacy-sensitive domains like medical imagery.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Samsung's first Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, the company unveiled its new Galaxy S23 devices: the Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and Galaxy S23 Ultra. Here's what The Verge's Allison Johnson says about the most premium phone of the bunch, the Galaxy S23 Ultra: Compared to the outgoing model, it comes with an updated processor, a new 200-megapixel main camera sensor, and a tweak to the form factor. The built-in S Pen is still here, naturally. And thankfully the price hasn't inflated. In fact, the starting MSRP of $1,199.99 now comes with 256GB of storage -- double last year's base model. It's a little extra shine on what was already Samsung's star smartphone. [...] The S23 Ultra also features a very slight exterior redesign. The long edges of the phone are slightly less curved, so there's more of a flat surface to grip when you're holding the device. The back panel and the screen also curve around the sides a bit less, so you might be less likely to run your S Pen off the edge of the device, which tended to happen with the more rounded design. [...] That's the short list of what's new. What's not new is basically everything else: a 5,000mAh battery, IP68 dust and water resistance, and either 8GB or 12GB of RAM depending on the configuration. Your color options this year are phantom black, lavender, green, and cream [...]. [T]he S23 Ultra is up for preorder today and starts shipping on February 17th. "Samsung's trio of flagships for 2023 offer some refined designs -- which look a little iPhone-like, if I'm being candid -- with some camera, battery, and processor improvements over last year's S22 generation," adds The Verge's Antonio G. Di Benedetto. You can view a full list of specs here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the past year, a new term has arisen to describe an online scam raking in millions, if not billions, of dollars per year. It's called "pig butchering," and now even Apple is getting fooled into participating. From a report: Researchers from security firm Sophos said on Wednesday that they uncovered two apps available in the App Store that were part of an elaborate network of tools used to dupe people into putting large sums of money into fake investment scams. At least one of those apps also made it into Google Play, but that market is notorious for the number of malicious apps that bypass Google vetting. Sophos said this was the first time it had seen such apps in the App Store and that a previous app identified in these types of scams was a legitimate one that was later exploited by bad actors. Pig butchering relies on a rich combination of apps, websites, web hosts, and humans -- in some cases human trafficking victims -- to build trust with a mark over a period of weeks or months, often under the guise of a romantic interest, financial adviser, or successful investor. Eventually, the online discussion will turn to investments, usually involving cryptocurrency, that the scammer claims to have earned huge sums of money from. The scammer then invites the victim to participate. Once a mark deposits money, the scammers will initially allow them to make withdrawals. The scammers eventually lock the account and claim they need a deposit of as much as 20 percent of their balance to get it back. Even when the deposit is paid, the money isn't returned, and the scammers invent new reasons the victim should send more money. The pig-butchering term derives from a farmer fattening up a hog months before it's butchered.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has unveiled its plans to prevent password sharing between people in households outside of an account owner's primary location. From a report: As reported by gHacks, the streaming service has detailed how it aims to crackdown on account sharing in an updated FAQ. The information varies between countries, but it looks like the company will be paying careful attention to the devices used to log in to accounts from now on. The FAQ pages for US and UK subscribers currently highlight that devices may require verification if they are not associated with the Netflix household or if they attempt to access an account outside the subscriber's primary location for an extended period of time. The FAQ pages for countries where Netflix is testing extra membership fees for account sharing have tweaked the rules. The Costa Rican Help Center states that devices must connect to the Wi-Fi at the primary location and watch something on Netflix "at least once every 31 days." The company will use information "such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity" to determine whether a device signed into an account is connected to the primary location. A device may be blocked from watching Netflix if it's deemed to fall outside of the household. As further set out in the guidelines, if you are the primary account owner and you find yourself travelling between locations, you can request a temporary code to access Netflix for seven consecutive days. Alternatively, you can update your primary location if it has changed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A startup founded by SpaceX veterans aims to realize the potential of a technology whose big promises have never quite come through. From a report: 3D printers -- which create objects by layering materials according to a plan sent by a computer -- have gained a reputation for being unwieldy, expensive and slow. There has been more progress on industrial uses, although there, too, major players have fallen into a multiyear funk. Venture capitalists continue to dedicate significant resources to startups promising innovations to fix the technology's underlying flaws. One particularly radical approach comes from Freeform Future, a five-year-old startup based in Los Angeles. The company has raised $45 million so far from investors including Founders Fund, Threshold Ventures and Valor Equity Partners. Instead of trying to build a single machine that can print three-dimensional objects, Freeform is looking to turn entire buildings into automated 3D-printing factories that would use dozens of lasers to create rocket engine chambers or car parts from metal powder. The company, which has never before discussed its approach publicly, says the technique could allow it to make metal parts 25 to 50 times faster than is possible with current methods and at a fraction of the cost. Freeform's co-founder and chief executive officer, Erik Palitsch, spent a 10-year stint at SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace company. [...] Freeform, on the other hand, is creating machines that can fill a warehouse. Its current factory, in Hawthorne, California, used to serve as Keanu Reeves's motorcycle storage facility. (Freeform still ends up with some of the actor's mail.) Inside, machines shuffle objects back and forth along rapidly moving conveyors, so the system can work on many things at once. Other companies have set up multiple printers in a single facility, but this strategy doesn't improve their speed, it just increases scale by having them work in parallel. Freeform, by contrast, is redesigning the process by which 3D printing can turn raw materials into finished products. In a sense, it's akin to the establishment of the assembly-line process pioneered by 20th century industrialists like Henry Ford. "We have to achieve a state of mass production to open this up to more industries," says Palitsch. "And you simply can't get there with a conventional machine."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As the PC industry flounders, Intel suffered from such disastrous sales last quarter that it instituted pay cuts and other extreme measures going forward. AMD's client PC sales also dropped dramatically -- a whopping 51 percent year-over-year -- but the company managed to eke out a small profit despite the sky falling. So why aren't CPU and GPU prices falling too? In a call with investors Tuesday night, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has been "undershipping" chips for a while now to balance supply and demand (read: keep prices up). "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," Su said, as spotted by PC Gamer. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1." With the pandemic winding down and inflation ramping up, far fewer people are buying CPUs, GPUs, and PCs. It's a hard, sudden reverse from just months ago, when companies like Nvidia and AMD were churning out graphic cards as quickly as possible to keep up with booming demand from cryptocurrency miners and PC gamers alike. Now that GPU mining is dead, shelves are brimming with unsold chips. Despite the painfully high price tags of new next-gen GPUs, last-gen GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards are still selling for very high prices considering their two-year-old status. Strategic under-shipping helps companies maintain higher prices for their wares.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is rushing to release its own artificial intelligence products in the wake of OpenAI's ChatGPT. From a report: The search engine pioneer is working hard and fast on a "code red" effort to respond to ChatGPT with a large language chatbot and testing new ways to incorporate that AI-powered bot into search, according to a report from CNBC. The new report backs up earlier news from the New York Times and elsewhere, which outlined a rapid re-alignment in Google's priorities in direct response to the rise of ChatGPT. CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly re-assigned employees and "upended" meetings to boost the amount of resources going towards the company's AI development. CNBC's Tuesday account offers further details. Google's new chatbot, reportedly named "Apprentice Bard," is based on the company's pre-existing LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) technology. The application looks and functions similarly to ChatGPT: Users input a question in natural language and receive a generated text response as an answer. But Apprentice Bard seemingly has a couple of important skills beyond what ChatGPT can do. For one, it can draw on recent events and information, according to CNBC, unlike ChatGPT which is limited to online information from before 2021. And it may be better at achieving that elusive AI accuracy. For instance, LaMDA correctly responded to a math riddle that ChatGPT failed to grasp, as recorded in company documents viewed by CNBC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aiming to monetize what's become a viral phenomenon, OpenAI today launched a new pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT, its text-generating AI that can write convincingly human-like essays, poems, emails, lyrics and more. From a report: Called ChatGPT Plus and starting at $20 per month, ChatGPT Pro delivers a number of benefits over the base-level ChatGPT, OpenAI says, including general access to ChatGPT even during peak times, faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new Biden administration report describes Apple and Google as "gatekeepers" of mobile app stores and suggests legislation is needed to spur competition and give app makers and consumers more choices. From a report: The White House is pushing for tech antitrust action in the new Congress, with a new Department of Commerce report laying out what it sees as a harmful app store environment for both consumers and app makers. The report, from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is the Biden administration's fullest effort to lay out concerns about the app store ecosystem. There is "real potential harm for consumers" in the way Apple and Google run their app stores, with the companies "inflating prices and reducing innovation," Alan Davidson, NTIA administrator, said in a call with reporters. "We're looking forward to seeing what legislation gets introduced on Capitol Hill.... Our hope is that this analysis can inform how people are thinking about these issues," he said. "We have a real opportunity to make progress on tech and competition in this Congress," said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council. "We're highly committed to reform in this space and we will work closely with Congress to see whatever is possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working to incorporate a faster version of OpenAI's ChatGPT, known as GPT-4, into Bing in the coming weeks in a move that would make the search engine more competitive with Google, according to a new report from Semafor. From a report: The integration would see Bing using GPT-4 to answer search queries. People familiar with the matter told Semafor that the main difference between ChatGPT and GPT-4 is speed. Although ChatGPT sometimes takes a up to a few minutes to form a response, GPT-4 is said to be a lot quicker in responding to queries. The latest software's responses are also said to be more detailed and more humanlike. The planned incorporation of ChatGPT into Microsoft products is expected to trigger new competition in internet search, which has largely been dominated by Google. By using GPT-4, Bing would be able to provide users with humanlike answers, as opposed to just simply displaying a list of links.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pakistan has "degraded" Wikipedia in the country for 48 hours for not removing "sacrilegious contents" and warned of fully blocking the site if the online encyclopedia fails to comply with the directions. From a report: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the nation's telecom regulator, said Wednesday afternoon that it had approached Wikipedia to block or remove certain "blasphemous" contents by issuing court orders, but said the online encyclopedia neither complied nor appeared before the authority. If the "intentional failure" on Wikipedia's part persists, the regulator will move to block the online encyclopedia within the country, it warned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electronic Arts announced it is canceling its Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile games. And as a result, it is shutting down its Industrial Toys game studio. From a report: Apex Legends Mobile debuted last year, bringing Respawn Entertainment's hot Apex Legends shooter game to mobile devices. It won Apple's Game of the Year for 2022 as well as the same for Google Play. Now the game will shut down in 90 days. Battlefield Mobile was in soft launch, but it will also end. In a blog post, Respawn Entertainment cited slipping quality for Apex Legends Mobile's updates as a reason for shutting down the title. EA made the announcement as it released earnings for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As nations around the world scramble to secure crucial semiconductor supply chains over fears about relations with China, the U.K. is falling behind. From a report: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the world's heavy reliance on Taiwan and China for the most advanced chips, which power everything from iPhones to advanced weapons. For the past two years, and amid mounting fears China could kick off a new global security crisis by invading Taiwan, Britain's government has been readying a plan to diversify supply chains for key components and boost domestic production. Yet according to people close to the strategy, the U.K.'s still-unseen plan -- which missed its publication deadline last fall -- has suffered from internal disconnect and government disarray, setting the country behind its global allies in a crucial race to become more self-reliant. A lack of experience and joined-up policy-making in Whitehall, a period of intense political upheaval in Downing Street, and new U.S. controls on the export of advanced chips to China, have collectively stymied the U.K.'s efforts to develop its own coherent plan. The way the strategy has been developed so far "is a mistake," said a former senior Downing Street official. During the pandemic, demand for semiconductors outstripped supply as consumers flocked to sort their home working setups. That led to major chip shortages -- soon compounded by China's tough "zero-COVID" policy. Since a semiconductor fabrication plant is so technologically complex -- a single laser in a chip lithography system of German firm Trumpf has 457,000 component parts -- concentrating manufacturing in a few companies helped the industry innovate in the past. But everything changed when COVID-19 struck.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel, struggling with a rapid drop in revenue and earnings, is cutting management pay across the company to cope with a shaky economy and to preserve cash for an ambitious turnaround plan. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger is taking a 25% cut to his base salary, the chipmaker said Tuesday. His executive leadership team will see their pay packages decrease by 15%. Senior managers will take a 10% reduction and mid-level managers a 5% cut. Intel shares climbed 0.1% in premarket trading in New York Wednesday. The stock lost almost half its value last year. "As we continue to navigate macroeconomic headwinds and work to reduce costs across the company, we've made several adjustments to our 2023 employee compensation and rewards programs," Intel said in a statement. "These changes are designed to impact our executive population more significantly and will help support the investments and overall workforce needed to accelerate our transformation and achieve our long-term strategy." The move follows a gloomy outlook from Intel last week, when the company predicted one of the worst quarters in its more than 50-year history. Stiffer competition and a sharp slowdown in personal-computer demand has wiped out profits and eaten into Intel's cash reserves. At the same time, Gelsinger wants to invest in the company's future. He's two years into a turnaround effort aimed at restoring Intel's technological leadership in the $580 billion chip industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: Wind and solar supplied more of the EU's electricity than any other power source for the first time ever in 2022, new analysis finds. They together provided a record one-fifth of the EU's electricity in 2022 -- a larger share than gas or nuclear, according to a report by the climate thinktank Ember. Record additions of new wind and solar in 2022 helped Europe survive a 'triple crisis' created by restrictions on Russian gas supplies, a dip in hydro caused by drought and unexpected nuclear outages, the analysis says. Around 83% of the dip in hydro and nuclear power was met by wind and solar -- and falling electricity demand. The rest was met by coal, which grew at a slower pace than some had expected amid a drop in fossil fuel supplies from Russia. Solar generation across the EU rose by a record 24% in 2022, helping to avoid --10bn Euro in gas costs, according to the findings. Some 20 EU nations sourced a record share of their power from solar, including the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Wind and solar growth is expected to continue this year, while hydro and nuclear generation is likely to recover. As a result, fossil fuel power generation could drop by an unprecedented 20% in 2023 -- double the previous record observed in 2020, the analysis projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Biden administration has stopped approving licenses for U.S. companies to export most items to China's Huawei, according to three people familiar with the matter. Huawei has faced U.S. export restrictions around items for 5G and other technologies for several years, but officials in the U.S. Department of Commerce have granted licenses for some American firms to sell certain goods and technologies to the company. Qualcomm in 2020 received permission to sell 4G smartphone chips to Huawei. One person familiar with the matter said U.S. officials are creating a new formal policy of denial for shipping items to Huawei that would include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, Wifi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing and cloud items. Another person said the move was expected to reflect the Biden administration's tightening of policy on Huawei over the past year. Licenses for 4G chips that could not be used for 5g, which might have been approved earlier, were being denied, the person said. Toward the end of the Trump administration and early in the Biden administration, officials had still granted licenses for items specific to 4G applications. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that China opposes the United States abusing an overly broad notion of national security to suppress Chinese firms unreasonably. The move "goes against the principles of the market economy and rules of international trade and finance, hurts the confidence the international community has in the U.S business environment and is blatant technological hegemony," Mao said during a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify packed on 10 million Premium customers in the last three months of 2022 to stand at 205 million, topping its previous guidance. Variety reports: The growth of its paid subs, up 14% year over year, was "aided by promotional intake and household plans," the company said. Overall, the streamer gained 33 million total monthly active users in the fourth quarter -- a record high -- to reach 489 million (free and paid), up 20% year over year. Amid signs of a flagging economy, Spotify posted 3.17 billion euros in revenue, up 18% from the year-earlier period an in-line with guidance, and a net loss of 270 million euros (versus a net loss of 39 million euros in Q4 2021). Operating loss of 231 million euros for Q4 was better than its projection of -300 million euros. "We ended 2022 with strong Q4 performance as nearly all of our [key performance indicators] surpassed guidance," Spotify said in its quarterly shareholder deck. The company said revenue growth, excluding the impact of changes in foreign currency exchange rates, was ahead of expectations. Meanwhile, Spotify's ad-supported revenue in Q4 grew 14% year over year, to 449 million euros, led by podcasting gains in the mid-30% range. The company's gross margin for the quarter was 25.3%, slightly above guidance "primarily as a result of lower-than-expected spend on new podcast content investments" as well as "broad-based music favorability." Spotify last week cut 6% of its headcount, laying off about 600 employees. On the earnings call Tuesday, CEO Daniel Ek admitted that he had "overinvested" in Spotify's business, requiring the company to cut jobs. "I still believe it was the right call to invest, and I would do it again," the CEO said. "But things change, and the macro-environment has changed significantly in the last year. And in hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

segaboy81 writes: Internal reports of Intel cutting pay across the board are flooding the internet. It's now confirmed that CEO Pat Gelsinger will take a 25% cut, while everyone else takes a 5% to 15% hit. What's worse is it looks like they will remain cash-flow negative throughout 2023 despite all this. Intel's December earnings were revealed last week, showing significant declines in the company's sales, profit, gross margin, and outlook, both for the quarter and the full year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it's received $150 million in new funding to support its "de-extinction" activities. The dodo was already part of Colossal's plans by September 2022, but now the company has announced it with all the pomp, circumstance, and seed funding that suggests it will actually go after that goal. The $150 million, the company's second round of funding, was led by several venture capital firms, including United States Innovative Technology Fund and In-Q-Tel, a VC firm funded by the CIA that first put money into the company in September. Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal's total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company's first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal's total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company's first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Colossal's stated goal is not to simply bring these creatures back for vibes; its contention is that reintroducing the species to their respective habitats would help restore a certain amount of normalcy to those environments. Mammoths died out about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, off the northeastern coast of Russia. The dodo, a species of flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, was gone by 1681. The last known thylacine died at a zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of all three species -- the mammoth's in 2015, the dodo's in 2016, and the thylacine's in 2018. The latter species were driven to extinction by humankind; humans hunted the dodo, introduced predators and pests to its environment, and contributed to its habitat loss. Humans may have played a role in mammoth extinction as well, but the dodo and the thylacine are classic examples of our ability to wipe out species at extraordinary speed. [...] If the company's work pans out -- and that's a big if -- proxy species of those extinct animals will be brought to bear. That's because the genetically engineered animals produced by Colossal would not be a bonafide mammoth, dodo, or thylacine. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission published a report (PDF) denoting ground rules for creating proxy species. "Proxy is used here to mean a substitute that would represent in some sense (e.g. phenotypically, behaviorally, ecologically) another entity -- the extinct form," the commission stated, adding that "Proxy is preferred to facsimile, which implies creation of an exact copy." De-extinction is something of a misnomer, as this process, if successful, will yield science's best analogue for an extinct creature, not the creature itself as it existed in the past. De-extinction methods generally rely on using a living creature's genetics in the resurrection process. That means any 21st-century mammoth will have at least some modern elephant DNA imbued in it, and any nascent thylacine would be produced from the genome and egg of a related species.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Organizations using Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint will now be able to isolate Linux devices from their networks to stop miscreants from remotely connecting to them. The Register reports: The device isolation capability is in public preview and mirrors what the product already does for Windows systems. "Some attack scenarios may require you to isolate a device from the network," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. "This action can help prevent the attacker from controlling the compromised device and performing further activities such as data exfiltration and lateral movement. Just like in Windows devices, this device isolation feature." Intruders won't be able to connect to the device or run operations like assuming unauthorized control of the system or stealing sensitive data, Microsoft claims. According to the vendor, when the device is isolated, it is limited in the processes and web destinations that are allowed. That means if they're behind a full VPN tunnel, they won't be able to reach Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint cloud services. Microsoft recommends that enterprises use a split-tunneling VPN for cloud-based traffic for both Defender for Endpoint and Defender Antivirus. Once the situation that caused the isolation is cleared up, organizations will be able to reconnect the device to the network. Isolating the system is done via APIs. Users can get to the device page of the Linux systems through the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, where they will see an "Isolate Device" tab in the upper right among other response actions. Microsoft has outlined the APIs for both isolating the device and releasing it from lock down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations." Ars Technica reports: The PlayStation 5 maker now expects to sell just 1 million PSVR2 units by the end of March, down from sales expectations of 2 million units in that period, as reported last October. Sony expects to sell about 1.5 million more headsets in the following fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, according to the report. The scaled-back sales expectations would put the PSVR2 slightly ahead of the pace set by the original PSVR headset, which sold just under a million units in its first four months and 2 million units in just over a year. But that kind of sales pace looks less impressive today, when a headset like the Meta Quest 2 can sell a reported 2.8 million units in its first quarter, on its way to total sales of over 15 million, according to market analysis firm IDC. The Quest 2 has a few key advantages in the competition with Sony's upcoming headset, including an asking price that's $150 less, even after a recent price hike. The self-contained Quest 2 also doesn't need to be tethered to any external hardware, contrasting with the PSVR2's reliance on a hookup to a $499 PlayStation 5. Despite the Quest 2's success at its relatively low price, though, the VR industry at large seems to be moving toward the higher end of the pricing spectrum these days. Meta's Quest Pro launched last October at a bafflingly high $1,499, though a one-week sale has slashed that price by $400 for the moment. And next month's standalone Vive XR Elite will cost $1,099.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal unveiled plans Tuesday to cut 2,000 employees, becoming the latest U.S. company to reduce its headcount, just hours after software company HubSpot announced it would lay off 500 positions in an effort to reduce costs as the company struggles from a "perfect storm" of inflation, tight customer budgets and "volatile foreign exchange." Forbes reports: In a statement on Tuesday, online payment company PayPal announced it would cut 7% of its global workforce (2,000 full-time positions) amid a "competitive landscape" and a "challenging macro-economic environment," CEO Dan Schulman said. HubSpot, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software company, said it would cut 7% of its workforce by the end of the first quarter of 2023 in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as part of a restructuring plan, with CEO Yamini Rangan telling staff it follows a "downward trend" after the company "bloomed" in the Covid-19 pandemic, with HubSpot facing a "faster deceleration than we expected." Yesterday, Philips said it would cut 3,000 jobs worldwide in 2023 and 6,000 total by 2025 after announcing $1.7 billion in losses for 2022. Spotify, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a slew of other tech companies announced layoffs in recent days/weeks as well. Further reading: PagerDuty CEO Quotes MLK Jr. In Worst Layoff Email EverRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: ChatGPT creator OpenAI today released a free web-based tool designed to help educators and others figure out if a particular chunk of text was written by a human or a machine. OpenAI cautions the tool is imperfect and performance varies based on how similar the text being analyzed is to the types of writing OpenAI's tool was trained on. "It has both false positives and false negatives," OpenAI head of alignment Jan Leike told Axios, cautioning the new tool should not be relied on alone to determine authorship of a document. Users copy a chunk of text into a box and the system will rate how likely the text is to have been generated by an AI system. It offers a five-point scale of results: Very unlikely to have been AI-generated, unlikely, unclear, possible or likely. It works best on text samples greater than 1,000 words and in English, with performance significantly worse in other languages. And it doesn't work to distinguish computer code written by humans vs. AI. That said, OpenAI says the new tool is significantly better than a previous one it had released.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Celsius Network misled its investors -- and on occasion used new customer funds to pay for other customers' withdrawals, the usual definition of a Ponzi scheme, an independent examiner (PDF) for the U.S. bankruptcy court in New York said in a Tuesday filing. CoinDesk reports: In September, Shoba Pillay was asked by the court to offer an outside view of goings-on at the crypto lender, has now published an account of the firm's operations in the runup to bankruptcy being declared in July. "In every key respect -- from how Celsius described its contract with its customers to the risks it took with their crypto assets -- how Celsius ran its business differed significantly from what Celsius told its customers," Pillay wrote, after interviewing staffers, including former Chief Executive Officer Alex Mashinsky, as well as customers of and vendors to the company. [...] Despite repeatedly saying he was not selling CEL, and despite employees internally saying the token's true value was zero, Mashinsky sold 25 million tokens to the value of at least $68.7 million between 2018 and bankruptcy, Pillay said. Co-founders Nuke Goldstein and S. Daniel Leon are cited as making CEL sales valued at $2.8 million and $9.74 million respectively. Pillay said Mashinsky's claims to the media and on social media to "always have 200% collateral" were "far off the mark," with 14% of Celsius' institutional loans wholly unsecured in December 2020. That figure rose to nearly 36% by mid-2021 -- and even then some of the collateral was in unstable assets such as FTX's FTT token, Pillay said. "What Celsius and Mr. Mashinsky never did was correct the record after the fact for the thousands of live audience members who heard these misstatements or for those who watched the recorded videos on YouTube before they were edited," Pillay said. Pillay also uncovered "significant tax compliance deficiencies" in the company, saying that its mining arm may owe over $23.1 million in use taxes, and has reserved $3.7 million in liability in U.K. value-added tax.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Welsh branch of McDonald's has started playing classical music and rationing wi-fi in a bid to deter anti-social behavior. The BBC reports: The fast-food restaurant has taken action after incidents at its Wrexham branch and elsewhere in the city which led to police issuing dispersal orders. North Wales Police said a group of 20 to 30 youngsters had caused "upset" but progress had been made recently. McDonald's said it was committed to being a good neighbor in the area. [...] McDonald's said: "We are aware of anti-social behavior affecting the wider area, and have introduced a number of measures in our Wrexham restaurant to support the police in tackling this issue. These include playing classical music from 17:00 GMT and turning off the wi-fi at certain points in the evening."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Four pixelated cartoon characters talk to each other about coffee, Amazon deliveries, and veganism as they stand apart in a decorated NYC apartment. There is one woman and three men who seem to be the animated versions of Seinfeld's main characters, Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer. But unlike Seinfeld, these characters are set in a modern-era NYC, and their voices and bodies look and sound robotic. That's because "Nothing, Forever" is a live-streaming show that's almost entirely generated by algorithms. It's been streaming non-stop on Twitch since December 14. [...] Skyler Hartle, the co-creator of "Nothing, Forever," told Motherboard that the show was created as a parody to Seinfeld. "The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project," Hartle said. "But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years." Hartle and his co-creator, Brian Habersberger, used a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services to build the show. Hartle told Motherboard that the dialogue is powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 language model and that there is very little human moderation of the stream, outside of GPT-3's built-in moderation filters. "Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you'll hear, everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music," one of the creators wrote in a Reddit comment. [...] Hartle also said that unlike most television shows, "Nothing, Forever" is able to change based on people's feedback that is received through the Twitch stream chat. "The show can effectively change and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience. One of the major factors that we're thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own," he said. "As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you're gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don't just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars," Hartle said. "Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that's truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's cell network provider Google Fi has confirmed a data breach, likely related to the recent security incident at T-Mobile, which allowed hackers to steal millions of customers' information. From a report: In an email sent to customers on Monday, obtained by TechCrunch, Google said that the primary network provider for Google Fi recently informed the company that there had been suspicious activity relating to a third party support system containing a "limited amount" of Google Fi customer data. The timing of the notice -- and the fact that Google Fi uses a combination of T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular for network connectivity -- suggests the breach is linked to the most recent T-Mobile hack. This breach, disclosed on January 19, allowed intruders access to a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers, including billing addresses, dates of birth and T-Mobile account details. The incident marked the eighth time T-Mobile has been hacked since 2018. In the case of the Google Fi's breach, Google says the hackers accessed limited customer information, including phone numbers, account status, SIM card serial numbers, and information related to details about customers' mobile service plan, such as whether they have selected unlimited SMS or international roaming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shipments of personal computers and mobile phones are expected to fall for the second straight year in 2023, with phone shipments slumping to a decade low, IT research firm Gartner said on Tuesday. From a report: Mobile phone shipments are projected to fall 4% to 1.34 billion units in 2023, down from 1.40 billion units in 2022, Gartner said. They totaled 1.43 billion in 2021. That was close to the 2009 shipments level when Blackberry and Nokia phones were the market leaders as Apple tried to dent their dominance. The mobile phone market peaked in 2015 when shipments touched 1.9 billion units. The pandemic led to a fundamental change where people working from home didn't feel the need to change phones frequently, Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said in an interview.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration on Tuesday moved to protect one of the world's most valuable wild salmon fisheries, at Bristol Bay in Alaska, by effectively blocking the development of a gold and copper mine there. From a report: The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final determination under the Clean Water Act that bans the disposal of mine waste in part of the bay's watershed, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. Streams in the watershed are crucial breeding grounds for salmon, but the area also contains deposits of precious-metal ores thought to be worth several hundred billion dollars. A two-decades old proposal to mine those ores, called the Pebble project, has been supported by some Alaskan lawmakers and Native groups for the economic benefits it would bring, but opposed by others, including tribes around the bay and environmentalists who say it would do irreparable harm to the salmon population. Alannah Hurley, executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, which has long opposed the mine, said the decision "was a real moment of justice for us." She said the tribes had long been told that "we just need to fall in line" and that the mine was inevitable. "Thank goodness our tribal leaders did not accept that," Ms. Hurley said. "We'll be celebrating this decision for decades to come."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hot Hardware reports: When it comes to mechanical hard disk drive (HDDs), you'd be very hard pressed to find any data on failure rates reported by any of the major players, such as Western Digital, Seagate, and the rest. Fortunately for us stat nerds and anyone else who is curious, the folks at cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently issue reliability reports that give insight into the how often various models and capacities give up the ghost. At a glance, Backblaze's latest report highlights that bigger capacity drives -- 12TB, 14TB, and 16TB -- fail less often than smaller capacity models. A closer examination, however, reveals that it's not so cut and dry. [...] In a nutshell, Backblaze noted an overall rise in the annual failure rates (AFRs) for 2022. The cumulative AFR of all drives deployed rose to 1.37 percent, up from 1.01 percent in 2021. By the end of 2022, Backblaze had 236,608 HDDs in service, including 231,309 data drives and 4,299 boot drives. Its latest report focuses on the data drives. [...] Bigger drives are more reliable than smaller drives, case close, right? Not so fast. There's an important caveat to this data -- while the smaller drives failed more often last year, they are also older, as can be seen in the graph above. "The aging of our fleet of hard drives does appear to be the most logical reason for the increased AFR in 2022. We could dig in further, but that is probably moot at this point. You see, we spent 2022 building out our presence in two new data centers, the Nautilus facility in Stockton, California and the CoreSite facility in Reston, Virginia. In 2023, our focus is expected to be on replacing our older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives," Backblaze says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care. From a report: The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately. "An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system -- for states, for hospitals and doctors' offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans," the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India defended its use of fossil fuels citing energy security priorities, even as the country vowed to remain committed to decarbonization. Bloomberg News: The country, one of the world's largest producers of coal, has often countered demands to curb use of the dirtiest fossil fuel, arguing it is key to its energy security and economic development. The war in Ukraine saw energy rise to the fore of the agenda for developed nations, many of which revived use of coal after supplies of Russian oil and natural gas shrank. "The behaviour of European nations in 2022, eminently understandable, demonstrates the return of energy security as a prime requirement for countries," according to India's Economic Survey, tabled in parliament Tuesday. "Therefore, it stands to reason that it would be no different for developing economies too." Developing economies are being asked to shoulder the burden of a global transition to green fuels, despite their lower contribution to accumulated emissions compared with developed nations that prospered on the back of "unrestricted use of fossil fuels," the Economic Survey said. The document, presented a day before the annual budget, is an account of the government's performance and ambitions for various sectors of the economy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Wide Web Consortium: The World Wide Web Consortium began the year 2023 by forming a new public-interest non-profit organization. The new entity preserves our member-driven approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization also preserves the core process and mission of the Consortium to shepherd the web, by developing open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community. Our Director, Tim Berners-Lee, noted: "Today, I am proud of the profound impact W3C has had, its many achievements accomplished with our Members and the public, and I look forward to the continued empowering enhancements W3C enables as it launches its own public-interest non-profit organization, building on 28 years of experience." Our vision for the future is a web that is truly a force for good. A World Wide Web that is truly international and more inclusive, more respectful of its users. A web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate. A web that works for everyone, because of everyone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back. From a report: The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps. Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends. Artifact -- the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence -- is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS. The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok's For You page tunes its algorithm over time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Logitech, perhaps known best for its personal computer accessories like the webcam I have used for nearly every workday for three years, is revealing an ambitious new prototype on Tuesday: an elaborately designed video chat booth it calls "Project Ghost" that's designed to be a better space to have virtual conversations. I understand if that description might make you think of Google's Project Starline, another conceptual video chat booth. When Logitech first told me about Project Ghost, that's where my mind went. And the core idea is similar: you'll be able to sit in a booth and talk to a lifelike projection of another person who is in another place in a way that approximates an in-person conversation. But unlike Project Starline, which relies on an elaborate array of sensors and cameras to create a hologram-like projection, Project Ghost uses videoconferencing technology Logitech already sells, pulls a trick like what you might know from a teleprompter to create the projection, and packs that all into a booth designed by office furniture maker Steelcase to create a potentially more comfortable experience for conversations. No word on the pricing, but apparently it won't be less than $2,000 for sure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub said unknown intruders gained unauthorized access to some of its code repositories and stole code-signing certificates for two of its desktop applications: Desktop and Atom. From a report: Code-signing certificates place a cryptographic stamp on code to verify it was developed by the listed organization, which in this case is GitHub. If decrypted, the certificates could allow an attacker to sign unofficial versions of the apps that had been maliciously tampered with and pass them off as legitimate updates from GitHub. Current versions of Desktop and Atom are unaffected by the credential theft. "A set of encrypted code signing certificates were exfiltrated; however, the certificates were password-protected and we have no evidence of malicious use," the company wrote in an advisory. "As a preventative measure, we will revoke the exposed certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications." The revocations, which will be effective on Thursday, will cause certain versions of the apps to stop working.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United States Marines outsmarted artificially intelligent (AI) security cameras by hiding in a cardboard box and standing behind trees. From a report: Former Pentagon policy analyst Paul Scharre has recalled the story in his upcoming book Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. In the book, Scharre recounts how the U.S. Army was testing AI monitoring systems and decided to use the Marines to help build the algorithms that the security cameras would use. They then attempted to put the AI system to the test and see if the squad of Marines could find new ways to avoid detection and evade the cameras. To train the AI, the security cameras, which were developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Squad X program, required data in the form of a squad of Marines spending six days walking around in front of them. After six days spent training the algorithm, the Marines decided to put the AI security cameras to the test. "If any Marines could get all the way in and touch this robot without being detected, they would win. I wanted to see, game on, what would happen," DARPA deputy director Phil Root tells Scharre in the book. Within a single day, the Marines had worked out the best way to sneak around an AI monitoring system and avoid detection by the cameras. Root says: "Eight Marines -- not a single one got detected." According to Scharre's book, a pair of marines "somersaulted for 300 meters" to approach the sensor and "never got detected" by the camera.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? From a report: Efforts to find independent reviews of Amazon-exclusive products rarely turn up high-quality content; many sites just summarize Amazon reviews in an effort to collect search traffic from Google and eventually affiliate commissions from Amazon itself. You read a little feedback to quell your doubts or ease your mind, then eventually, or quickly, you pluck a spatula out of the cascade. There's a good chance, however, that it won't actually be sold by Amazon but rather by a third-party seller that has spent months or years and many thousands of dollars hustling for search placement on the platform -- its "store," to use Amazon's term, is where you will have technically bought this spatula. There's an even better chance you won't notice this before you order it. In any case, it'll be at your door in a couple of days. The system worked. But what system? In your short journey, you interacted with a few. There was the '90s-retro e-commerce interface, which conceals a marketplace of literally millions of sellers, each scrapping for relevance, using Amazon as a sales channel for their own semi-independent businesses. It subjected you to the multibillion-dollar advertising network planted between Amazon users and the things they browse and buy. It was shipped to you through a sprawling, submerged logistics empire with nearly a million employees and contractors in the United States alone. You were guided almost entirely by an idiosyncratic and unreliable reputation system, initially designed to review books, that has used years of feedback from hundreds of millions of customers to help construct an alternative universe of sometimes large but often fleeting brands that have little identity or relevance outside of the platform. You found what you were looking for, sort of, through a process that didn't feel much like shopping at all. This is all normal in that Amazon is so dominant that it sets norms. But its essential weirdness -- its drift from anything resembling shopping or informed consumption -- is becoming harder for Amazon's one-click magic trick to hide. Interacting with Amazon, for most of its customers, broadly produces the desired, expected, and generally unrivaled result: They order all sorts of things; the prices are usually reasonable, and they don't have to think about shipping costs; the things they order show up pretty quickly; returns are no big deal. But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon's customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and "low-quality" items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it's slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe -- hear me out -- everything is going according to plan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A bug in a new centralized system that Meta created for users to manage their logins for Facebook and Instagram could have allowed malicious hackers to switch off an account's two-factor protections just by knowing their phone number. Gtm Manoz, a security researcher from Nepal, realized that Meta did not set up a limit of attempts when a user entered the two-factor code used to log into their accounts on the new Meta Accounts Center, which helps users link all their Meta accounts, such as Facebook and Instagram. With a victim's phone number, an attacker would go to the centralized accounts center, enter the phone number of the victim, link that number to their own Facebook account, and then brute force the two-factor SMS code. This was the key step, because there was no upper limit to the amount of attempts someone could make. Once the attacker got the code right, the victim's phone number became linked to the attacker's Facebook account. A successful attack would still result in Meta sending a message to the victim, saying their two-factor was disabled as their phone number got linked to someone else's account. Manoz found the bug in the Meta Accounts Center last year, and reported it to the company in mid-September. Meta fixed the bug a few days later, and paid Manoz $27,200 for reporting the bug. Meta spokesperson Gabby Curtis told TechCrunch that at the time of the bug the login system was still at the stage of a small public test. Curtis also said that Meta's investigation after the bug was reported found that there was no evidence of exploitation in the wild, and that Meta saw no spike in usage of that particular feature, which would signal the fact that no one was abusing it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has confirmed that its live-action take on One Piece will be streaming in 2023. The Verge reports: That's about all we know so far; Netflix didn't give a specific date, though the company did show off a new poster for its adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's long-running pirate manga / anime. The adaptation was first announced back in 2020 and will be led by showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda. The main cast includes the likes of Inaki Godoy as Luffy (who you can see the back of in the new poster), Mackenyu as Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero Gibson as Usopp, and Taz Skylar as Sanji. The Verge notes that One Piece "follows some less-than-impressive live-action anime adaptations from Netflix, including a Death Note film and a Cowboy Bebop series that was canceled after one season."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: More than four months have passed since the launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket ended in failure. No humans were onboard the vehicle because it was conducting a suborbital scientific research mission, but the failure has grounded the New Shepard fleet ever since. The rocket's single main engine failed about one minute into the flight, at an altitude of around 9 km, as it was throttling back up after passing through the period of maximum dynamic pressure. At that point a large fire erupted in the BE-3 engine, and the New Shepard capsule's solid rocket motor-powered escape system fired as intended, pulling the capsule away from the exploding rocket. The capsule experienced high G-forces during this return but appeared to make a safe landing. Three days after this accident with the New Shepard-23 mission, the bipartisan leadership of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics sent a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration, calling for a thorough investigation. In an interview with Ars later that month, the chair of the subcommittee, US Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), urged Blue Origin to be transparent. "I'm heavily in favor of transparency, and I'm hoping that the FAA comes through pretty quickly with this," Beyer said. "I would strongly encourage Blue Origin to be as transparent as possible, because that builds trust. It doesn't have to be overnight, but it would be nice to keep people updated on the progress they're making." The company has not heeded this advice. An application filed with the FCC last week suggests Blue Origin might target a launch for its next New Shepard flight between April 1 and June 1. However, a spokesperson downplayed that speculation, saying it is not tied to a specific launch. "As a matter of course, we submit rolling FCC license requests to ensure we have continuous coverage for launches," the spokesperson said. It's also unclear whether this next launch will be an uncrewed or a crewed mission. Slashdot reader schwit1 adds: "For the time being, the New Space Race is pretty much Elon vs the World."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It was only a matter of time before the wave of artificial intelligence-generated voice startups became a play thing of internet trolls. On Monday, ElevenLabs, founded by ex-Google and Palantir staffers, said it had found an "increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases" during its recently launched beta. ElevenLabs didn't point to any particular instances of abuse, but Motherboard found 4chan members appear to have used the product to generate voices that sound like Joe Rogan, Ben Sharpio, and Emma Watson to spew racist and other sorts of material. ElevenLabs said it is exploring more safeguards around its technology. The clips uploaded to 4chan on Sunday are focused on celebrities. But given the high quality of the generated voices, and the apparent ease at which people created them, they highlight the looming risk of deepfake audio clips. In much the same way deepfake video started as a method for people to create non-consensual pornography of specific people before branching onto other use cases, the trajectory of deepfake audio is only just beginning. [...] The clips run the gamut from harmless, to violent, to transphobic, to homophobic, to racist. One 4chan post that included a wide spread of the clips also contained a link to the beta from ElevenLabs, suggesting ElevenLabs' software may have been used to create the voices. On its website ElevenLabs offers both "speech synthesis" and "voice cloning." For the latter, ElevenLabs says it can generate a clone of someone's voice from a clean sample recording, over one minute in length. Users can quickly sign up to the service and start generating voices. ElevenLabs also offers "professional cloning," which it says can reproduce any accent. Target use cases include voicing newsletters, books, and videos, the company's website adds. [...] On Monday, shortly after the clips circulated on 4chan, ElevenLabs wrote on Twitter that "Crazy weekend -- thank you to everyone for trying out our Beta platform. While we see our tech being overwhelmingly applied to positive use, we also see an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases." ElevenLabs added that while it can trace back any generated audio to a specific user, it was exploring more safeguards. These include requiring payment information or "full ID identification" in order to perform voice cloning, or manually verifying every voice cloning request.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The development team behind the open-source password management software KeePass is disputing what is described as a newly found vulnerability that allows attackers to stealthily export the entire database in plain text. BleepingComputer reports: KeePass is a very popular open-source password manager that allows you to manage your passwords using a locally stored database, rather than a cloud-hosted one, such as LastPass or Bitwarden. To secure these local databases, users can encrypt them using a master password so that malware or a threat actor can't just steal the database and automatically gain access to the passwords stored within it. The new vulnerability is now tracked as CVE-2023-24055, and it enables threat actors with write access to a target's system to alter the KeePass XML configuration file and inject a malicious trigger that would export the database, including all usernames and passwords in cleartext. The next time the target launches KeePass and enters the master password to open and decrypt the database, the export rule will be triggered, and the contents of the database will be saved to a file the attackers can later exfiltrate to a system under their control. However, this export process launches in the background without the user being notified or KeePass requesting the master password to be entered as confirmation before exporting, allowing the threat actor to quietly gain access to all of the stored passwords. [...] While the CERT teams of Netherlands and Belgium have also issued security advisories regarding CVE-2023-24055, the KeePass development team is arguing that this shouldn't be classified as a vulnerability given that attackers with write access to a target's device can also obtain the information contained within the KeePass database through other means. In fact, a "Security Issues" page on the KeePass Help Center has been describing the "Write Access to Configuration File" issue since at least April 2019 as "not really a security vulnerability of KeePass." If the user has installed KeePass as a regular program and the attackers have write access, they can also "perform various kinds of attacks." Threat actors can also replace the KeePass executable with malware if the user runs the portable version. "In both cases, having write access to the KeePass configuration file typically implies that an attacker can actually perform much more powerful attacks than modifying the configuration file (and these attacks in the end can also affect KeePass, independent of a configuration file protection)," the KeePass developers explain. "These attacks can only be prevented by keeping the environment secure (by using an anti-virus software, a firewall, not opening unknown e-mail attachments, etc.). KeePass cannot magically run securely in an insecure environment." If the KeePass devs don't release a version of the app that addresses this issue, BleepingComputer notes "you could still secure your database by logging in as a system admin and creating an enforced configuration file." "This type of config file takes precedence over settings described in global and local configuration files, including new triggers added by malicious actors, thus mitigating the CVE-2023-24055 issue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Children experienced learning deficits during the Covid pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year's worth of knowledge and skills, according to a new global analysis, and had not recovered from those losses more than two years later. The New York Times reports: Learning delays and regressions were most severe in developing countries and among students from low-income backgrounds, researchers said, worsening existing disparities and threatening to follow children into higher education and the work force. The analysis, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior and drawing on data from 15 countries, provided the most comprehensive account to date of the academic hardships wrought by the pandemic. The findings suggest that the challenges of remote learning -- coupled with other stressors that plagued children and families throughout the pandemic -- were not rectified when school doors reopened. "In order to recover what was lost, we have to be doing more than just getting back to normal," said Bastian Betthauser, a researcher at the Center for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po in Paris, who was a co-author on the review. He urged officials worldwide to provide intensive summer programs and tutoring initiatives that target poorer students who fell furthest behind. Thomas Kane, the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, who has studied school interruptions in the United States, reviewed the global analysis. Without immediate and aggressive intervention, he said, "learning loss will be the longest-lasting and most inequitable legacy of the pandemic." [...] Because children have a finite capacity to absorb new material, Mr. Betthauser said, teachers cannot simply move faster or extend school hours, and traditional interventions like private tutoring rarely target the most disadvantaged groups. Without creative solutions, he said, the labor market ought to "brace for serious downstream effects." Children who were in school during the pandemic could lose about $70,000 in earnings over their lifetimes if the deficits aren't recovered, according to Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In some states, pandemic-era students could ultimately earn almost 10 percent less than those who were educated just before the pandemic. The societal losses, he said, could amount to $28 trillion over the rest of the century.Read more of this story at Slashdot.