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Samsung Electronics said Wednesday it expects to invest 300 trillion won ($230 billion) over the next 20 years as part of an ambitious South Korean national project to build the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing base near the capital, Seoul. From a report: The chip-making "mega cluster," which will be established in Gyeonggi Province by 2042, will be anchored by five new semiconductor plants built by Samsung. It will aim to attract 150 other companies producing materials and components or designing high-tech chips, according to South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. Samsung's new plants will be located near its existing domestic factories and will produce both computer memory chips used for storing data and higher-margin logic chips designed to perform a broader range of functions, the company said. A giant in the global memory business, Samsung is trying to expand its presence in advanced chips, anticipating that demand will soar in coming years with the adoption of new technologies such as 5G wireless networks, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The top U.S. markets regulator on Wednesday proposed a suite of new policies designed to harden the financial system against hacking, data theft and systems failure. From a report: With some dissents from Republican members, the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) five members voted at a public meeting to propose rules on protecting consumer financial data, preventing hacking at stock exchanges and broker-dealers and buttressing the resiliency of market infrastructure, part of a continuing concern with modernizing regulations to match advancing technological threats. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler also opened the meeting with a nod to unfolding market turmoil, making veiled reference to the failure of U.S. lender Silicon Valley Bank and fears for the viability of Credit Suisse by restating his agency's pledge to support market resiliency. The three rule proposals together govern how broker-dealers address hacking incidents and protect consumer data, and how stock exchanges, transaction clearing houses and others deemed critical to national economic security gird themselves against system failure and cyber-intrusion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft warned an infamous hacking group that is tied to Russia's military intelligence agency GRU could be gearing up for more ransomware attacks both inside and outside of Ukraine. From a report: Microsoft calls the group Iridium, but it is perhaps best known as Sandworm. It has been accused of attacks on Ukraine's electric power grid and government agencies, the 2018 Winter Olympics and businesses across the globe. Now, it appears to be preparing for a renewed destructive campaign, the software company said in a threat intelligence report on Wednesday. Russian hackers have been accused of bombarding Ukrainian institutions with "wiper malware" and DDoS attacks, a campaign that began even before President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to invade more than a year ago. However, Ukraine's defenses have largely fended off a major cyberwar with the help of foreign tech companies including Microsoft. The ransomware attack on Polish and Ukrainian transport services in October, attributed to Sandworm, may have been "a trial balloon" for further attacks, the report said. Microsoft warned it was a potential precursor to further Russian hacks beyond Ukrainian soil.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Large swaths of California's tech hub Silicon Valley remained without electricity after the latest atmospheric river brought heavy rain and high winds that toppled power lines. From a report: Almost one-third of the homes and businesses in Santa Clara County -- home to tech giants including Apple Inc. and Alphabet's Google -- were without power as of Wednesday morning, according to PowerOutage.us. More than 180,000 customers in the San Francisco Bay Area were blacked out as of 10 a.m. local time. PG&E, the utility that serves most customers in the region, said the storm was stronger than forecast and resulted in hundreds of trees or limbs striking power equipment and disrupting electricity service. The utility has sent additional crews into the hardest-hit areas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn is expanding its suite of artificial intelligence features, this time adding tools that will generate content for user profiles and job descriptions. From a report: One tool announced today will scan user profiles for skills and experiences and spit out suggested copy or summaries to add to other profile sections. The company says it still recommends users review and edit what the tool has generated "to ensure it is accurate and aligns with your tone and experience." LinkedIn will begin testing the tool starting today and expand access to all LinkedIn Premium subscribers over the course of the next few months. Another employment tool promises to make writing job descriptions "faster and easier" and "streamline" the hiring process. Employers will provide information about the role, including title and company name, and LinkedIn's tool will generate a description that the hiring manager can then edit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Dutch court hearing a class action lawsuit on Wednesday found that a European subsidiary of Meta, Facebook Ireland, improperly used personal data of Dutch citizens between 2010 and 2020, saying the company had "violated the law." From a report: "Personal information was processed for the purposes of advertising when in this case that is not allowed," a summary of the Amsterdam court ruling said. "Personal information was given to third parties without Facebook users being informed and without there being a legal basis to do so." The decision was directed at Facebook Ireland because it is the part of the company that oversees the processing of Dutch user data. The case has not yet progressed to the phase where any damages could be claimed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech giants Google, Amazon and Apple are likely to get a reprieve in Congress this year from efforts to rein in some of the companies' most controversial and allegedly anti-competitive business practices -- even though the legislation has typically enjoyed broad bipartisan support. From a report: The new Republican leadership in the U.S. House doesn't appear to have the appetite to impose tougher antitrust rules on the tech giants to ensure they don't abuse their dominant position in the market to block smaller rivals, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the former the top Republican on the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust issues, said in an interview. The GOP also doesn't want to give the Biden administration more power and resources, House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told CNBC in a separate interview. "I don't think Speaker McCarthy, Chairman Jordan or Chairman Massie are advocates for the antitrust, pro-competition solution to the Big Tech problem," Buck said, referring to Jordan, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Thomas Massie, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. Although Buck was next in line to chair the panel as ranking Republican in the previous Congress, Jordan, R-Ohio, selected Massie, R-Ky., to lead the subcommittee this Congress instead. Buck, who has been a vocal critic of the tech giants for years, says tighter antitrust regulations would help create a fairer marketplace for smaller tech firms competing against Amazon, Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies, which have been accused of using their platforms to promote their own proprietary products or services above competitors. When asked whether his campaign to rein in the tech giants through antitrust and his co-sponsoring of bills with Democrats may be what cost him the chairmanship of the antitrust panel, Buck said, "Nobody ever said that to me but I think it's a fair conclusion to draw."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: Switzerland's central bank says it will backstop Credit Suisse if necessary, according to an update from CNN. Battered shares of Credit Suisse lost more than one-quarter of their value Wednesday, hitting a record low after its biggest shareholder -- the Saudi National Bank -- told news outlets that it would not inject more money into the Swiss bank beset by problems long before the failure of two U.S. lenders. From a report: The turmoil prompted an automatic pause in trading of Credit Suisse's shares on the Swiss market and sent shares of other European banks plunging by as much as double digits. That fanned new fears about the health of financial institutions following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the United States in recent days. Credit Suisse stock dropped more than 27%, to about 1.6 Swiss francs ($1.73), in mid-afternoon trading on the SIX stock exchange Wednesday. That's down more than 85% from February 2021. The shares have suffered a long, sustained decline: In 2007, they were trading at more than 80 francs each. With concerns about the possibility of more hidden trouble in the banking system, investors were quick to sell bank stocks on bad news. Other European banks took a battering as concerns spread about the sector: France's Societe Generale SA dropped 12%, France's BNP Paribas fell more than 10%, Germany's Deutsche Bank was down 8% and Britain's Barclays Bank was down nearly 8%. Shares in the two French banks also were briefly suspended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla called on entrepreneurs to create trustworthy AI applications as it announced a "Responsible AI" challenge Tuesday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. From a report: At a festival where companies could not be more eager to share their plans, half-baked and otherwise, for the explosive field of generative AI, Mozilla offered an opportunity to do so with a little more foresight. "If anything, the last few months have shown that AI is no longer our future. It's our present," Imo Udom, senior vice president of Innovations Ecosystems at Mozilla, who announced the initiative on stage during a panel discussion with Axios, said. "We believe in AI's power, commercial opportunity, and potential to solve challenging problems," Udom said. "While decades of effort have gone into reaching this point with AI, the time has come to establish the future we want with AI." Applications for the challenge will open on March 30 and winners are eligible for $50,000 prizes and a $25,000 top prize, along with mentorship and resources for "responsible AI" projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Americans lost more than $10 billion to online scammers last year, new government data show, the highest level since the Federal Bureau of Investigation began tracking losses in 2000. From a report: The FBI said its Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, recorded more than 800,000 complaints in 2022, or more than 2,000 complaints a day. So-called phishing expeditions represented the largest number of scams with more than 300,000 complaints, the FBI said in a report. Phishing usually involves the use of unsolicited email, text messages and phone calls, purportedly from a legitimate company, requesting personal or financial information. "Today's cyber landscape has provided ample opportunities for criminals and adversaries to target U.S. networks, attack our critical infrastructure, hold our money and data for ransom, facilitate large-scale fraud schemes, and threaten our national security," FBI Executive Assistant Director Timothy Langan said. The total losses to online scammers rose to $10.3 billion last year from $6.9 billion in 2021. However, the overall number of complaints recorded by IC3 fell slightly from 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As businesses grapple with how artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will affect working practices, one Japanese fintech firm is making it compulsory for new recruits to use the technology and even testing them on it. From a report: With concerns growing about its ability to make jobs obsolete and data protection, Tokyo-based LayerX, is bucking the trend, with a recent job ad for new graduates making it mandatory for recruits to be tested on their use of the chatbot made by OpenAI, and another called Notion AI. The startup, which focuses on promoting digitizing business transactions, is confident it's on the right side of a growing divide over the use of the technology. Many Wall Street banks have restricted its use, while schools in places like New York City have banned it. Major Japanese firms have done likewise, with Softbank Group Corp, and banks including Mizuho Financial Group and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group clamping down in recent months. "We recognize that ChatGPT is not perfect," said Takaya Ishiguro, chief human resources officer at LayerX, in an interview. "However, it is also dangerous to be too afraid to utilize new technology." Recruits are asked during their entry assessments to give prompts to ChatGPT. Assessors review whether they initiate the process well, rather than the actual answers. Candidates are also asked to conduct research to identify the limitations of the technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. Both are alleged to be part of a larger criminal organization that specializes in using fake emergency data requests from compromised police and government email accounts to publicly threaten and extort their victims. Prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York today unsealed criminal complaints against Sagar Steven Singh -- also known as "Weep" -- a 19-year-old from Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and Nicholas Ceraolo, 25, of Queens, NY, who allegedly also went by the handles "Convict" and "Ominus." The Justice Department says Singh and Ceraolo belong to a group of cybercriminals known to its members as "ViLE," who specialize in obtaining personal information about third-party victims, which they then use to harass, threaten or extort the victims, a practice known as "doxing." [...] The government alleges that on May 7, 2022, Singh used stolen credentials to log into a U.S. federal government portal without authorization. The complaint doesn't specify which agency portal was hacked, but it does state that the portal included access to law enforcement databases that track narcotics seizures in the United States. [On May 12, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news.] Prosecutors say they tied Singh to the government portal hack because he connected to it from an Internet address that he'd previously used to access a social media account registered in his name. When they raided Singh's residence on Sept. 8, 2022 and seized his devices, investigators with Homeland Security found a cellular phone and laptop that allegedly "contained extensive evidence of access to the Portal." If convicted, Ceraolo faces up to 20 years' imprisonment for conspiracy to commit wire fraud; both Ceraolo and Singh face five years' imprisonment for conspiracy to commit computer intrusions. A copy of the complaint against Ceraolo and Singh is here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Platformer, Microsoft's recent layoffs included its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization. "The move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product design at a time when the company is leading the charge to make AI tools available to the mainstream, current and former employees said." From the report: Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, which is tasked with creating rules and principles to govern the company's AI initiatives. The company says its overall investment in responsibility work is increasing despite the recent layoffs. But employees said the ethics and society team played a critical role in ensuring that the company's responsible AI principles are actually reflected in the design of the products that ship. "People would look at the principles coming out of the office of responsible AI and say, 'I don't know how this applies,'" one former employee says. "Our job was to show them and to create rules in areas where there were none." In recent years, the team designed a role-playing game called Judgment Call that helped designers envision potential harms that could result from AI and discuss them during product development. It was part of a larger "responsible innovation toolkit" that the team posted publicly. More recently, the team has been working to identify risks posed by Microsoft's adoption of OpenAI's technology throughout its suite of products. The ethics and society team was at its largest in 2020, when it had roughly 30 employees including engineers, designers, and philosophers. In October, the team was cut to roughly seven people as part of a reorganization. "Microsoft is committed to developing AI products and experiences safely and responsibly, and does so by investing in people, processes, and partnerships that prioritize this," the company said in a statement. "Over the past six years we have increased the number of people across our product teams and within the Office of Responsible AI who, along with all of us at Microsoft, are accountable for ensuring we put our AI principles into practice. [...] We appreciate the trailblazing work the ethics and society team did to help us on our ongoing responsible AI journey."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon.com plans to launch its first internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, the company said Tuesday, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally. Reuters reports: Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. "We'll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024," Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington. The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to reach that goal. With plans to pump more than $10 billion into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space. Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit. In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon detailed its new terminals with photos and pricing. Standard Customer Terminal: "Project Kuiper's standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick. It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each." "Most Affordable" Terminal: "A 7-inch square design will be Project Kuiper's smallest and most affordable customer terminal. Weighing just 1 pound and offering speeds up to 100 Mbps, its portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even more customers around the world. This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT)." "Most Capable" Antenna Model: "Project Kuiper's largest, most capable model is designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth. The device measures 19 inches by 30 inches, and will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, the federal government's Joint Office of Energy and Transportation opened up applications for a $2.5 billion program to expand electric vehicle charging infrastructure in underserved communities. The Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program was authorized along with the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. For starters, the Joint Office is making $700 million available for EV chargers -- but also other alternative fuels including hydrogen and natural gas. The CFI program actually encompasses two discrete $1.25 billion grant programs. The first is for community charging and fueling grants in both urban and rural areas, particularly in underserved and disadvantaged communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods as well as neighborhoods with a low ratio of private parking. The other half of the money is for the alternative fuel corridor grants, which will fund the deployment of EV chargers and other alternative fuel infrastructure along designated alternative fuel corridors. "It's critical that we build a national charging network that provides EV drivers with the right type of charging in the right location -- whether that's high-powered charging on highway corridors and in urban hubs or Level 2 charging where EV drivers or riders live, work, and play," said Joint Office Executive Director Gabe Klein. "By working with cities and communities through the CFI Program to get this mix right, we can ensure that everyone has convenient and affordable access to riding and driving electric."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After debating the term in a recent Slashdot subthread, longtime reader Tablizer wants to pose the question to a larger audience: what exactly are 'microservices'? Over the past few years I've asked many colleagues what "microservices" are, and get a gazillion different answers. "Independent deploy-ability" has been an issue as old as the IBM hills. Don't make anything "too big" nor "too small"; be it functions, files, apps, name-spaces, tables, databases, etc. Overly large X's didn't need special terms, such as "monofunction". We'd just call it "poorly partitioned/sized/factored". (Picking the right size requires skill and experience, both in technology and the domain.) Dynamic languages are usually "independently deployable" at the file level, so what is a PHP "monolith", for example? Puzzles like this are abound when trying to use the Socratic method to tease out specific-ness. Socrates would quit and become a goat herder, as such discussions often turn sour and personal. Here's a recent Slashdot subthread debating the term.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, Binance said it would suspend withdrawals and deposits for anybody using UK currency. The news came after the world's largest crypto exchange's banking partner in the UK, Paysafe, said it was abandoning crypto, at least as far as Binance was concerned. Gizmodo reports: In a statement to Gizmodo, a Paysafe spokesperson said that it was "too challenging" to offer its embedded wallet cryptocurrency services to UK customers because of the regulatory atmosphere in the UK. Paysafe is based in London, and said this decision was "taken in an abundance of caution." Paysafe did not clarify whether it was abandoning crypto altogether, or just in its partnership with Binance. Paysafe called its UK portion of its crypto business "small" but clarified it was still working with Binance elsewhere in Europe and in Latin America. Binance suspended withdrawals and deposits for any new customers using British pounds late on Monday, and according to Bloomberg the crypto exchange plans to suspend all GBP transactions for all customers starting May 22. The company is reportedly working to find "an alternative solution" to again allow customers to trade GBP for crypto.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's TikTok is considering separating from parent ByteDance to help address U.S. concerns about national security risks, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters reports: A divestiture, which could result in a sale or initial public offering, is considered a last resort and will be pursued only if the company's existing proposal with U.S. national security officials does not get approved, Bloomberg reported. The short-form video app is undergoing a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and it agreed last year to implement a number of measures under the plan, nicknamed "Project Texas", in an attempt to placate hostile lawmakers. CFIUS has stalled in its process, leaving TikTok unsure of whether its plans will be sufficient to continue operating in the country, according to the report. Members of CFIUS from the Justice Department have been unwilling to accept TikTok's proposal, it added. CFIUS, a powerful national security body, had in 2020 unanimously recommended that ByteDance divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed on to China's government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The High Court of Justice has issued a permanent injunction to stop a man filing copyright complaints against a rival's YouTube channels. As part of a fraudulent campaign against "the music mafia," the singer used copyright strikes and YouTube's repeat infringer policy to have a music publisher's channels suspended. The background to the dispute is nothing short of extraordinary. [...] The background to the dispute is an extraordinary maze of claims, counterclaims, and bitterness spread out over several years, during which documents were forensically examined and fingerprints subjected to professional scrutiny.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitLab shares plunged as much as 38% in extended trading after the provider of source code management software gave full-year revenue guidance that fell short of expectations. CNBC reports: Here's how the company did: Earnings: Loss of 3 cents per share, adjusted, vs. loss of 14 cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.Revenue: $122.9 million, vs. $119.6 million as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.Revenue increased 58% year over year in the quarter that ended Jan. 31, according to a statement. GitLab called for a fiscal first-quarter adjusted loss of 14 cents to 15 cents per share on $117 million to $118 million in revenue. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv had expected an adjusted loss of 16 cents per share and revenue of $126.2 million. For the 2024 fiscal year, the company sees an adjusted loss of 24 cents to 29 cents per share and $529 million to $533 million in revenue. That works out to 25% growth at the middle of the range. The consensus among analysts polled by Refinitiv was an adjusted loss of 54 cents per share and $586.4 million in revenue. During the quarter Gitlab said that in April its premium service tier will go up to $29 per month from $19.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has signed a 10-year deal to bring its Xbox PC games to little-known Ukraine-based streaming platform Boosteroid. The move is being positioned in part to "mak[e] even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make Call of Duty available on far more devices than before," as Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement. "If the only argument is that Microsoft is going to withhold Call of Duty from other platforms, and we've now entered into contracts that are going to bring this to many more devices and many more platforms, that is a pretty hard case to make to a court," Smith told The Wall Street Journal. Started in 2017, Boosteroid boasts 4 million streaming customers using servers based in nine European countries and six US states. Those customers pay 7.50 euro per month to stream games from those servers to any smartphone, Windows/Mac/Linux-based PC, or Android TV device. Boosteroid currently links to users' accounts on other PC-based platforms -- including Steam, the Epic Games Store, Blizzard's Battle.net, EA's Origin, the Rockstar Game Launcher, and Wargaming -- and lets them play games from those services without having to install them on a local gaming PC. With this new deal, that access will expand to include games available through Microsoft's Xbox app on the PC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, today launched something of a rival to the viral sensation ChatGPT. From a report: Called Claude, Anthropic's AI -- a chatbot -- can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about particular topics. In these ways, it's similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. But Anthropic makes the case that Claude is "much less likely to produce harmful outputs," "easier to converse with" and "more steerable." Organizations can request access. Pricing has yet to be detailed. "We think that Claude is the right tool for a wide variety of customers and use cases," an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. "We've been investing in our infrastructure for serving models for several months and are confident we can meet customer demand." Following a closed beta late last year, Anthropic has been quietly testing Claude with launch partners, including Robin AI, AssemblyAI, Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo. Two versions are available as of this morning via an API, Claude and a faster, less costly derivative called Claude Instant. In combination with ChatGPT, Claude powers DuckDuckGo's recently launched DuckAssist tool, which directly answers straightforward search queries for users. Quora offers access to Claude through its experimental AI chat app, Poe. And on Notion, Claude is a part of the technical backend for Notion AI, an AI writing assistant integrated with the Notion workspace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit is currently experiencing a big outage affecting its websites and apps, according to the company's status page. The Verge reports: "We've identified an internal systems issue and are working to determine a fix," the company wrote at 12:56PM ET on its status page. The preceding message, from nearly 40 minutes before, notes that Reddit is "is currently offline." The problem appears to be widespread, with about 50,000 people reporting issues on Downdetector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cybercriminal gangs now releasing stolen photos of cancer patients, student records. From a report: In February, attackers from the Russia-based BlackCat ransomware group hit a physician practice in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, that's part of the Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN). At the time, LVHN said that the attack "involved" a patient photo system related to radiation oncology treatment. The health care group said that BlackCat had issued a ransom demand, "but LVHN refused to pay this criminal enterprise." After a couple of weeks, BlackCat threatened to publish data stolen from the system. "Our blog is followed by a lot of world media, the case will be widely publicized and will cause significant damage to your business," BlackCat wrote on their dark-web extortion site. "Your time is running out. We are ready to unleash our full power on you!" The attackers then released three screenshots of cancer patients receiving radiation treatment and seven documents that included patient information. The medical photos are graphic and intimate, depicting patients' naked breasts in various angles and positions. And while hospitals and health care facilities have long been a favorite target of ransomware gangs, researchers say the situation at LVHN may indicate a shift in attackers' desperation and willingness to go to ruthless extremes as ransomware targets increasingly refuse to pay. "As fewer victims pay the ransom, ransomware actors are getting more aggressive in their extortion techniques," says Allan Liska, an analyst for the security firm Recorded Future who specializes in ransomware. "I think we'll see more of that. It follows closely patterns in kidnapping cases, where when victims' families refused to pay, the kidnappers might send an ear or other body part of the victim." Researchers say that another example of these brutal escalations came on Tuesday when the emerging ransomware gang Medusa published sample data stolen from Minneapolis Public Schools in a February attack that came with a $1 million ransom demand. The leaked screenshots include scans of handwritten notes that describe allegations of a sexual assault and the names of a male student and two female students involved in the incident.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed the first federal limits on harmful "forever chemicals" in drinking water, a long-awaited protection the agency said will save thousands of lives and prevent serious illnesses, including cancer. From a report: The plan would limit toxic PFAS chemicals to the lowest level that tests can detect. PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, are a group of compounds that are widespread, dangerous and expensive to remove from water. They don't degrade in the environment and are linked to a broad range of health issues, including low birthweight and kidney cancer. "The science is clear that long-term exposure to PFAS is linked to significant health risks," Radhika Fox, assistant EPA administrator for water, said in an interview. Fox called the federal proposal a "transformational change" for improving the safety of drinking water in the United States. The agency estimates the rule could reduce PFAS exposure for nearly 100 million Americans, decreasing rates of cancer, heart attacks and birth complications. The chemicals had been used since the 1940s in consumer products and industry, including in nonstick pans, food packaging and firefighting foam. Their use is now mostly phased out in the U.S., but some still remain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook parent company Meta, which emerged as an outspoken advocate of remote work during the pandemic, is encouraging employees to come back to the office. Some early analysis "suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement Tuesday. Zuckerberg cautioned that the data requires further study, but encouraged employees to "find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person" in the meantime. In 2021, Facebook established a policy that allowed all employees to work remotely even after the pandemic if their jobs could be done outside of an office. Several big tech companies including Amazon, Apple and Twitter have been trying to get workers to return to the office.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Google Pixel Fold could be available as soon as the second week in June, according to WinFuture's Roland Quandt. The reliable leaker tweeted on Tuesday that the phone will come with 256GB base storage and that you'll be able to get it in either a black / dark gray color or white. The foldable has been rumored for a long time, and there have been whispers that it would be announced sometime in the next few months. However, a January report from The Elec threw some cold water on that idea, saying that the screen wasn't even set to go into production until July or August.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Credit Suisse acknowledged "material weakness" in its financial reporting Tuesday as it scrapped bonuses for top executives in the wake of the bank's worst annual performance since the global financial crisis. From a report: The embattled Swiss lender also said chairman Axel Lehmann had proposed to "voluntarily waive" a share award worth 1.5 million Swiss francs ($1.6 million) for the 2022-2023 financial year, given the firm's "poor financial performance." Credit Suisse (CSGKF) said in its annual report that it had found "the group's internal control over financial reporting was not effective" because it failed to adequately identify potential risks to financial statements. The revelations come just days after the bank delayed the publication of the annual report after an eleventh-hour query from the US Securities and Exchange Commission over cash flow statements for 2019 and 2020. The board concluded that the "material weakness could result in misstatements of account balances or disclosures that would result in a material misstatement to the annual financial statements of Credit Suisse," the annual report said. Credit Suisse is urgently developing a "remediation plan" to strengthen controls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After months of rumors and speculation, OpenAI has announced GPT-4: the latest in its line of AI language models that power applications like ChatGPT and the new Bing. From a report: The company claims the model is "more creative and collaborative than ever before," and "can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities." OpenAI says it's already partnered with a number of companies to integrate GPT-4 into their products, including Duolingo, Stripe, and Khan Academy. The new model will also be available on ChatGPT Plus and as an API. In a research blog post, OpenAI said the distinction between GPT-4 and its predecessor GPT-3.5 is "subtle" in casual conversation (GPT-3.5 is the model that powers ChatGPT), but that the differences between the systems are clear when faced with more complex tasks. The company says these improvements can be seen on GPT-4's performance on a number of tests and benchmarks, including the Uniform Bar Exam, LSAT, SAT Math and SAT Evidence-Based Reading & Writing exams. In the exams mentioned GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile and above, with a full list of exams and scores seen here. Speculation about GPT-4 and its capabilities have been rife over the past year, with many suggesting it would be a huge leap over previous systems. "People are begging to be disappointed and they will be," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview in January. "The hype is just like... We don't have an actual AGI and that's sort of what's expected of us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India plans to force smartphone makers to allow removal of pre-installed apps and mandate screening of major operating system updates under proposed new security rules, according to two people and a government document seen by Reuters. From a report: The new rules, details of which have not been previously reported, could extend launch timelines in the world's No.2 smartphone market and lead to losses in business from pre-installed apps for players including Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Apple. India's IT ministry is considering these new rules amid concerns about spying and abuse of user data, said a senior government official, one of the two people, declining to be named as the information is not yet public. "Pre-installed apps can be a weak security point and we want to ensure no foreign nations, including China, are exploiting it. It's a matter of national security," the official added. India has ramped up scrutiny of Chinese businesses since a 2020 border clash between the neighbours, banning more than 300 Chinese apps, including TikTok. It has also intensified scrutiny of investments by Chinese firms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced a raft of new artificial intelligence-powered features for customers of its cloud-computing business, as the technology giant jostles for dominance in the burgeoning field with rivals such as Microsoft and startup OpenAI. From a report: As Silicon Valley buzzes about so-called generative AI -- software that can create images, text and video based on user prompts -- Google Cloud offered a glimpse of what it's doing to keep up in the race. In a demonstration, the company showed how cloud customers will be able to use its AI tools to create presentations and sales-training documents, take notes during meetings and draft emails to colleagues. The company also made some of its underlying AI models available to developers so they can build their own applications using Google's technology. Alphabet-owned Google also said Tuesday it had signed up a flurry of AI startups as customers for its cloud service, including Midjourney, which offers an image-generation system, and AI21, which specializes in technology known as large language models. Google is offering young AI-focused businesses $250,000 in free use of its cloud -- which provides computing horsepower and storage -- for the first year, which the company said is 2 1/2 times what it typically offers. "We believe in having a broad, vibrant partner ecosystem for AI," Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, said in an interview.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Underlying US consumer prices rose in February by the most in five months, an acceleration that leaves the Federal Reserve in a tough position as it tries to thwart still-rapid inflation without adding to the turmoil in the banking sector. From a report: The consumer price index, excluding food and energy, increased 0.5% last month and 5.5% from a year earlier, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data out Tuesday. Economists see the gauge -- known as the core CPI -- as a better indicator of underlying inflation than the headline measure. The overall CPI climbed 0.4% in February and 6% from a year earlier. The median estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a 0.4% monthly advance in the overall and core CPI measures. The figures reaffirm that the Fed's quest to tame inflation will be a bumpy one as the economy has largely proven resilient to a year's worth of interest-rate hikes so far. The challenge for the Fed now is how to prioritize inflation that is still far too high with growing financial stability risks in the unraveling of Silicon Valley Bank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Silicon Valley Bank failed just 14 days after KPMG gave the lender a clean bill of health. Signature Bank went down 11 days after the accounting firm signed off on its audit. From a report: What KPMG knew about the two banks' financial situation and what it missed will likely be the subject of regulatory scrutiny and lawsuits. KPMG signed the audit report for Silicon Valley Bank's parent, SVB Financial Group on Feb. 24. Regulators seized the bank on March 10 after a surge of withdrawals threatened to leave it short of cash. "Common sense tells you that an auditor issuing a clean report, a clean bill of health, on the 16th-largest bank in the United States that within two weeks fails without any warning, is trouble for the auditor," said Lynn Turner, who was chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1998 to 2001. Two crucial facts for determining whether KPMG missed the banks' problems are when the bank runs began in earnest and when the bank's management and KPMG's auditors became aware of the crisis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people, withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it has not filled and cancel some projects, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent. From a report: The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes to become more efficient this year. Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off -- or plans to lay-off -- roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year. Facebook's parent firm said it expects the latest "restructuring" efforts to start in April, and the process to impact business groups in May. Zuckerberg said that the company will also cancel "lower priority projects," adding that it "underestimated the indirect costs" associated with these initiatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, a software developer named Georgi Gerganov created a tool called "llama.cpp" that can run Meta's new GPT-3-class AI large language model, LLaMA, locally on a Mac laptop. Soon thereafter, people worked out how to run LLaMA on Windows as well. Then someone showed it running on a Pixel 6 phone, and next came a Raspberry Pi (albeit running very slowly). If this keeps up, we may be looking at a pocket-sized ChatGPT competitor before we know it. [...] Typically, running GPT-3 requires several datacenter-class A100 GPUs (also, the weights for GPT-3 are not public), but LLaMA made waves because it could run on a single beefy consumer GPU. And now, with optimizations that reduce the model size using a technique called quantization, LLaMA can run on an M1 Mac or a lesser Nvidia consumer GPU. After obtaining the LLaMA weights ourselves, we followed [independent AI researcher Simon Willison's] instructions and got the 7B parameter version running on an M1 Macbook Air, and it runs at a reasonable rate of speed. You call it as a script on the command line with a prompt, and LLaMA does its best to complete it in a reasonable way. There's still the question of how much the quantization affects the quality of the output. In our tests, LLaMA 7B trimmed down to 4-bit quantization was very impressive for running on a MacBook Air -- but still not on par with what you might expect from ChatGPT. It's entirely possible that better prompting techniques might generate better results. Also, optimizations and fine-tunings come quickly when everyone has their hands on the code and the weights -- even though LLaMA is still saddled with some fairly restrictive terms of use. The release of Alpaca today by Stanford proves that fine tuning (additional training with a specific goal in mind) can improve performance, and it's still early days after LLaMA's release. A step-by-step instruction guide for running LLaMA on a Mac can be found here (Warning: it's fairly technical).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emily Willingham writes via Scientific American: In 2016 a computer named AlphaGo made headlines for defeating then world champion Lee Sedol at the ancient, popular strategy game Go. The "superhuman" artificial intelligence, developed by Google DeepMind, lost only one of the five rounds to Sedol, generating comparisons to Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess loss to IBM's Deep Blue. Go, which involves players facing off by moving black and white pieces called stones with the goal of occupying territory on the game board, had been viewed as a more intractable challenge to a machine opponent than chess. Much agonizing about the threat of AI to human ingenuity and livelihood followed AlphaGo's victory, not unlike what's happening right now with ChatGPT and its kin. In a 2016 news conference after the loss, though, a subdued Sedol offered a comment with a kernel of positivity. "Its style was different, and it was such an unusual experience that it took time for me to adjust," he said. "AlphaGo made me realize that I must study Go more." At the time European Go champion Fan Hui, who'd also lost a private round of five games to AlphaGo months earlier, told Wired that the matches made him see the game "completely differently." This improved his play so much that his world ranking "skyrocketed," according to Wired. Formally tracking the messy process of human decision-making can be tough. But a decades-long record of professional Go player moves gave researchers a way to assess the human strategic response to an AI provocation. A new study now confirms that Fan Hui's improvements after facing the AlphaGo challenge weren't just a singular fluke. In 2017, after that humbling AI win in 2016, human Go players gained access to data detailing the moves made by the AI system and, in a very humanlike way, developed new strategies that led to better-quality decisions in their game play. A confirmation of the changes in human game play appear in findings published on March 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The team found that before AI beat human Go champions, the level of human decision quality stayed pretty uniform for 66 years. After that fateful 2016-2017 period, decision quality scores began to climb. Humans were making better game play choices -- maybe not enough to consistently beat superhuman AIs but still better. Novelty scores also shot up after 2016-2017 from humans introducing new moves into games earlier during the game play sequence. And in their assessment of the link between novel moves and better-quality decisions, [the researchers] found that before AlphaGo succeeded against human players, humans' novel moves contributed less to good-quality decisions, on average, than nonnovel moves. After these landmark AI wins, the novel moves humans introduced into games contributed more on average than already known moves to better decision quality scores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last summer, Elon Musk and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert announced "Coverage Above and Beyond," a joint initiative that aimed to bring Starlink satellite coverage compatible T-Mobile devices. Now, SpaceX is getting ready to begin testing its satellite-to-cellular service. Engadget reports: During a panel at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition 2023, SpaceX VP of Starlink enterprise sales Jonathan Hofeller said the company had plans to "start getting into testing" its satellite-to-cell service this year. "We're going to learn a lot by doing -- not necessarily by overanalyzing -- and getting out there, working with the telcos." Hofeller didn't specifically say which Telco SpaceX was working with, but the timeline certainly lines up with Musk's original vision for the T-Mobile partnership. [...] Either way, the panel seemed optimistic about the future of sat-to-cell technology. Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller said that satellite cellular service has the potential to be the "biggest category in satellite," and Iridium CEO Matt Desch sees cellular satellite service as just the beginning. "Satellite should connect everything everywhere," he said at the event, imagining the technology connecting to computers, vehicles and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A US court has ruled (PDF) that "gig" economy giants including Uber and Lyft can continue treating their workers as independent contractors in the state of California. The BBC reports: The California appeals court found that a labor measure, known as Proposition 22, was largely constitutional. Labour groups and some workers had opposed the measure, saying it robbed them of rights like sick leave. The firms say the proposition protects other benefits such as flexibility. The latest ruling overturns a decision made by a lower court in California in 2021, which found that Proposition 22 affected lawmakers' powers to set standards at the workplace. The state of California and a group representing Uber, Lyft and other firms appealed against the decision. On Monday, a three-judge panel at the appeals court ruled that workers could be treated as independent contractors. However it removed a clause, which put restrictions on collective bargaining by workers, from Proposition 22.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT News: Health insurance companies have rejected medical claims for as long as they've been around. But a STAT investigation found artificial intelligence is now driving their denials to new heights in Medicare Advantage, the taxpayer-funded alternative to traditional Medicare that covers more than 31 million people. Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient's treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations. Older people who spent their lives paying into Medicare, and are now facing amputation, fast-spreading cancers, and other devastating diagnoses, are left to either pay for their care themselves or get by without it. If they disagree, they can file an appeal, and spend months trying to recover their costs, even if they don't recover from their illnesses. The algorithms sit at the beginning of the process, promising to deliver personalized care and better outcomes. But patient advocates said in many cases they do the exact opposite -- spitting out recommendations that fail to adjust for a patient's individual circumstances and conflict with basic rules on what Medicare plans must cover. "While the firms say [the algorithm] is suggestive, it ends up being a hard-and-fast rule that the plan or the care management firms really try to follow," said David Lipschutz, associate director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit group that has reviewed such denials for more than two years in its work with Medicare patients. "There's no deviation from it, no accounting for changes in condition, no accounting for situations in which a person could use more care." STAT's investigation revealed these tools are becoming increasingly influential in decisions about patient care and coverage. The investigation is based on a review of hundreds of pages of federal records, court filings, and confidential corporate documents, as well as interviews with physicians, insurance executives, policy experts, lawyers, patient advocates, and family members of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. It found that, for all of AI's power to crunch data, insurers with huge financial interests are leveraging it to help make life-altering decisions with little independent oversight. AI models used by physicians to detect diseases such as cancer, or suggest the most effective treatment, are evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. But tools used by insurers in deciding whether those treatments should be paid for are not subjected to the same scrutiny, even though they also influence the care of the nation's sickest patients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of psychologists, two from Northwestern University and the third from the University of Oregon, has found via online testing that IQ scores in the U.S. may be dropping for the first time in nearly a century. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the researchers studied the results of online IQ tests taken by adults participating in the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project over a 12-year period. They found that IQ scores have dropped for all age groups, regardless of gender. They also found that the steepest declines were among young people. They also noted that while a few skills, such as spatial reasoning, were better than previous generations, other skills, such as problem solving, numerical series assessments and verbal reasoning, had all grown worse. The researchers did not conduct any research to try to explain the drop, but suggest it might be linked to changes in the education system. They also did not address the controversial issue of the accuracy of IQ test scores in general as a means of measuring a person's intelligence. The paper has been published in the journal Intelligence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Justice Department is probing last year's collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin, raising the possibility of criminal charges being filed against the stablecoin's creator, Do Kwon, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter. CoinDesk reports: The FBI and the Southern District of New York have interviewed former employees of Terraform Labs, the company behind TerraUSD, and sought to interview others, according to the Journal. Manhattan federal prosecutors are also examining chat-group discussions among prominent trading firms Jump Trading Group, Jane Street Group and failed FTX affiliate Alameda Research involving a potential bailout of TerraUSD, according to a separate report from Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter. Such a bailout never took place, but the investigation is seeking to determine whether the firms were involved in possible market manipulation. TerraUSD and its sister token, Luna, both eventually collapsed, setting off a series of high-profile failures of prominent crypto firms, including hedge fund Three Arrows capital, Voyager Digital and FTX. The Department of Justice previously alleged that an unnamed crypto firm -- believed to be Jump -- had bailed out TerraUSD once before, in an indictment against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. In February, the SEC filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Kwon and Terraform Labs, accusing them of misleading investors about TerraUSD's risks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta's head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel posted on Twitter that the company will sunset its NFT and digital collectibles features on Instagram and Facebook. TechCrunch reports: This short-lived product only began testing with select Instagram creators last May, plus some Facebook users in June. By July, Meta expanded NFT support on Instagram for creators in 100 countries. Less than a year later, Meta is moving on from NFTs. "We're winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses," Kasriel wrote in a Twitter thread. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that it is shifting its investments away from NFTs toward products like Meta Pay, as well as features that enable creators to earn money directly on Meta platforms, like its tipping feature called gifts. The company also said it is testing ways for creators to earn ad revenue on Reels. "Let me be clear: creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize remains a priority, and we're going to focus on areas where we can make impact at scale, such as messaging and monetization opps for Reels," Kasriel wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In January, a month before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was released in theaters, a link to a leaked script was posted on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit. Last Friday, a Marvel Studios affiliate filed DMCA subpoena applications to compel Reddit and Google to expose the leakers. One named user account is shared among the subreddit's moderator team. Court documents indicate the plan is to force Reddit to expose them all. [...] When information about the script/subtitle file was posted on Reddit mid-January, leak-loving Marvel fans were both excited and impressed. "Yeah this is some next level leak" and "This legit might be the biggest leak in this subs history" set the tone, but the fun didn't last. A moderator of the subreddit commented that since the information was receiving copyright notices, any "future sharing of the material will result in a ban." The thread is still live today and there's no doubt that Marvel is aware of it. The DMCA subpoena application specifically mentions the thread alongside an email from Reddit's legal team, which had previously agreed to take the infringing content down. In common with the takedown notice sent to Google, the allegedly infringing content may have been deleted before Reddit could remove it. There's no mention of a copyright complaint, instead the post notes, "Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it." At this point concern shifts to the rest of the thread, which talks about the document hosted by Google and how the mod team "took the google doc down" to ensure that existing links to the file would no longer lead to it. As a result, Marvel now wants Reddit to hand over "All Identifying Information for the user 'u/MSSmods'," which throws another unpredictable element into the mix. The DMCA subpoena applications can be found here (G1/G2, R1/R2)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discord updated their privacy policy to quietly drop their promise to alert users "in advance" if the company ever started storing contents of video calls, voice calls, or channels. Naturally, this alarmed some users who wondered if the company plans to start retaining call recordings. According to a Discord spokesperson, the answer is no. Ars Technica reports: "There has not been a change in Discord's position on how we store or record the contents of video or voice channels," a Discord spokesperson told Ars. "We recognize that when we recently issued adjusted language in our privacy policy, we inadvertently caused confusion among our users. To be clear, nothing has changed and we have reinserted the language back into our privacy policy, along with some additional clarifying information." Before users began complaining, the policy was going to be updated to say that Discord would be collecting information on "any content that you upload to the service. For example, you may write messages or posts (including drafts), send voice messages, create custom emojis, create short recordings of GoLive activity, or upload and share files through the services. This also includes your profile information and the information you provide when you create servers." As users raised concerns on Reddit, Discord staffers seemed to rush to assuage fears, saying, "We understand that the wording of the new privacy policy is broad and can be misunderstood" and promising, "We are going to fix this." Since then, Discord added back in the missing language, word for word: "We generally do not store the contents of video or voice calls or channels. If we were to change that in the future (for example, to facilitate content moderation), we would disclose that to you in advance." A Reddit user identifying as a Discord staffer told Redditors that Discord won't "regularly" collect this type of content. That doesn't mean it will never happen though. "In response to user outrage, the policy's new updated language now also specifies that Discord may collect some of this type of content in the future," adds Ars. "We may build features that help users engage with voice and video content, like create or send short recordings," Discord's new policy states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vivaldi is a browser founded by Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and launched in 2016 with a heavy focus on privacy and customizations. As someone who has worked on the internet since 1992, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially when it comes to advertising. XDA spoke with Tetzchner at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us." From the report: For the unfamiliar, Android's Privacy Sandbox can track users by creating an offline profile on them and show relevant advertisements based on that. It's a multi-year initiative to introduce more private advertising solutions to end-users and is made possible thanks to the Topics API and FLEDGE. Its goal is to prioritize user privacy by default but still maintain the mobile ecosystem dependent on advertising to support free and ad-supported apps. This is an exclusive-to-Android solution that uses a standalone SDK, separate from the rest of the application code, with the aim of eventually replacing Ad ID. However, Tetzchner doesn't see a difference between standard tracking and companies using the Topics API. "For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it's a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you... No, no, no, that's wrong. That's just wrong," he tells me. It's not quite where the data goes that seems to bother him the most, but what that data can be used to achieve. He mentions how this data can be used to influence how people vote, a la Cambridge Analytica. Whether that data is on your device or not is irrelevant; political advertisements will still appear regardless. "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored. The idea that you are collecting data to provide ads... I can understand having access to a lot of data to provide a service, but that's not the same as profiling your users." [...] Tetzchner is deeply disheartened with the state of it. In fact, he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following you." He points out that paywalls have become commonplace across the internet when that wasn't the case 15 years ago. "How is it then that we needed the change that actually created that situation?" he asks. He argues that advertisements are less profitable as a whole thanks to widespread tracking. Advertisers previously paid more because they knew exactly where their advertisements were going. Now with algorithms and Google Ads, not everything is high quality, even if those algorithms try to scan pages for quality content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Biden administration on Monday gave the green light to a sprawling oil drilling project in Alaska, opening the nation's largest expanse of untouched land to energy production. The multibillion-dollar project will be located inside the National Petroleum Reserve, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and could produce nearly 600 million barrels of crude oil over the next 30 years, according to the Interior Department. The department noted in announcing the approval that it reduced the scope of the plan, called the Willow Project, by denying two of the five drill sites proposed by ConocoPhillips, Alaska's largest crude oil producer. The department estimated that the project could produce nearly a quarter of a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The project had received forceful pushback from environmentalists, who pointed to its potential climate and environmental effects. The Native American community closest to the site has also opposed (PDF) the project, though others have supported it. The oil industry and Alaskan lawmakers had urged the president to approve the project for its energy production potential and its ability to create jobs. [...] But Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the harm the project will cause "may not ever be able to be undone. This is the equivalent of putting dozens and dozens of coal-fired power plants back online. It makes it almost impossible to understand how the administration will ever meet its promises to reduce emissions from public lands." A source familiar with the decision said that the Biden administration had little choice, faced with the prospect of legal action and costly fines. Administration lawyers determined that the courts would not have allowed Biden to reject the project outright, as ConocoPhillips has long held leases on land in the petroleum reserve and could have levied fines on the government, the source added. The Interior Department announced Monday that ConocoPhillips would relinquish rights to about 68,000 acres of its existing leases in the petroleum reserve, most of which are close to the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, a major habitat for caribou and other wildlife that Native communities rely on. On Sunday, the Biden administration declared about 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean as indefinitely off-limits for future oil and gas leasing. The Interior Department said it is also considering additional protections for more than 13 million acres within the reserve that have significant natural or historical value.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dish Network must pay $469 million for infringing two patents held by parental-control technology maker ClearPlay related to filtering material from streaming video, a jury in U.S. federal court in Utah has decided. From a report: The jury in Salt Lake City reached its decision on Friday in ClearPlay's lawsuit against Dish, finding that Dish's AutoHop feature for skipping commercials on its Hopper set-top boxes is covered by ClearPlay's patents. While jurors found that Dish's technology violated ClearPlay's patent rights, they rejected ClearPlay's contention that Dish copied its technology intentionally. A Dish spokesperson said on Monday that the company was disappointed in the jury's decision and will contest the verdict, potentially through an appeal. Representatives for ClearPlay did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Saturday that it would end availability of news content for Canadians on its platforms if the country's Online News Act passes in its current form. From a report: The "Online News Act," or House of Commons bill C-18, introduced in April last year laid out rules to force platforms like Meta and Alphabet's Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content. "A legislative framework that compels us to pay for links or content that we do not post, and which are not the reason the vast majority of people use our platforms, is neither sustainable nor workable," a Meta spokesperson said as reason to suspend news access in the country. Meta's move comes after Google last month started testing limited news censorship as a potential response to the bill. Canada's news media industry has asked the government for more regulation of tech companies to allow the industry to recoup financial losses it has suffered in the years as tech giants like Google and Meta steadily gain greater market share of advertising. We've watched this movie before.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

All toilet paper from across the globe checked for toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" contained the compounds, and the waste flushed down toilets and sent to sewage treatment plants probably creates a significant source of water pollution, new research has found. From a report: Once in the wastewater plant, the chemicals can be packed in sewage sludge that is eventually spread on cropland as fertilizer, or spilt into waterways. "Toilet paper should be considered as a potentially major source of PFAS entering wastewater treatment systems," the study's authors wrote. PFAS are a class of about 14,000 chemicals typically used to make thousands of consumer products resist water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down, and they are linked to cancer, fetal complications, liver disease, kidney disease, autoimmune disorders and other serious health issues. The study checked 21 major toilet paper brands in North America, western Europe, Africa, Central America and South America, but it did not name the brands. The peer-reviewed University of Florida report did not consider the health implications of people wiping with contaminated toilet paper. PFAS can be dermally absorbed, but no research on how it may enter the body during the wiping process exists. However, that exposure is "definitely worth investigating," said David Andrews, senior scientist with the Environmental Working group, a public health non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent set of sweeping US laws have already kicked off a boom in proposals for new mining operations, minerals processing facilities, and battery plants, laying the foundation for domestic supply chains that could support rapid growth in electric vehicles and other clean technologies. From a report: That's by design. A stipulation in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), enacted last year, restricts EV tax credits to vehicles with batteries that contain a significant portion of minerals extracted or refined within the US, or from countries that have free-trade agreements with it. Manufacturing the batteries that power these vehicles requires significant amounts of finished materials such as cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese, and nickel. Today these often come from other nations, particularly China. Billions of dollars of investments in battery materials have been announced in North America since the IRA passed, according to BloombergNEF. The "domestic content requirements" helped spark or accelerate those plans, observers say. But it's still not clear which nations will qualify for providing the processed materials, and some allies have accused the US of providing unfair advantages to its own industries. Some experts also worry that the requirements, which become stricter over time, are so stringent they could have the unintended effect of actually slowing the shift to cleaner technologies. After all, it takes years to get new mines and plants running under the best of circumstances, and the permitting process for major projects in the US is notoriously slow. Adding to the potential delays, some communities are already pushing back on certain proposals, citing environmental impacts, indigenous land concerns, and other issues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.