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Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: YouTuber Trevor Jacob has pled guilty to felony federal obstruction of an investigation for removing and destroying wreckage of his airplane that he intentionally crashed in November 2021 for online YouTube views. Maximum sentence is 20 years. On November 24, 2021 Jacob was flying solo from Lompoc City Airport to Mammoth Lakes, California. He reported to the FAA that he had engine trouble and had to abandon the plane using a parachute. After the FAA launched an active investigation, Jacob lied about not knowing the location of wreckage for the next several weeks despite his video footage that he found the wreckage shortly after landing on the ground. On December 10, 2021 Jacob and a friend lifted the wreckage away from the national forest crash site using a helicopter. Jacob transported the wreckage back to Lompoc City Airport with a truck. He then cut up and disposed of the wreckage over then next several days using the airport's trash bins. On December 23,2021 Jacob posted a YouTube video titled, "I Crashed My Airplane" which showed his account of engine trouble and the crash. Keen viewers were immediately skeptical of Jacob's account of a flight "emergency" noting he had multiple cameras recording the event including a selfie stick and that Jacob was wearing a parachute before the engine trouble occurred. Pilots commented how Jacob failed to follow basic procedures like attempting to restart the plane or contacting air traffic control with a mayday before ditching the plane. Largely based on the his YouTube video, the FAA revoked his pilot's license in April 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: SpaceX confirmed Wednesday it signed a contract to launch the world's first commercial space station. The company also will perform manned space flights shortly after launching the station into orbit "no later than August 2025," SpaceX said in a statement. The Haven-1 space station is being built by Vast, a private aerospace company based in Long Beach, Calif. Its "mission is to contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space -- a future in which the human population and our resources expand far beyond our current imagination." Vast is solely funded by its billionaire founder and CEO Jed McCaleb. SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 rocket to carry the Haven-1 station into orbit. Manned crews will then use the company's Dragon reusable spacecraft to get to the space station, docking for up to 30 days while in orbit. Vast plans for the initial module to become part of a larger 100-meter-long multi-module spinning space station with artificial gravity. SpaceX confirmed it also will provide crew training, as well as spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises. SpaceX also will conduct mission simulations, as part of the agreement with Vast. Crew selection is underway, the company said Wednesday, and will be announced at a future date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power industry, one of the biggest steps so far in its effort to decarbonize the economy to fight climate change. The proposal would limit how much carbon dioxide power plants, which are the source of more than a quarter of U.S. emissions, can chuff into the atmosphere, putting the industry on a years-long course to install billions of dollars of new equipment or shut down. Environmental groups and scientists have long argued that such steps are crucial to curb global warming, but fossil fuel-producing states argue that they represent government overreach and threaten to destabilize the electric grid. The proposal sets standards that would push power companies to install carbon capture equipment (CCS) that can siphon the CO2 from a plant's smokestack before it reaches the atmosphere, or use super-low-emissions hydrogen as a fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the plan would cut carbon emissions from coal plants and new gas plants by 617 million tons between 2028 and 2042, the equivalent of reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles. "Today we're proposing new technology standards that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power plants, protecting health and protecting our planet," EPA Administrator Michael Regan told students at the University of Maryland on their last day of school on Thursday. Regan said that the agency has wielded the power of the federal Clean Air Act to craft the new power plant rules, along with a suite of other measures aimed at tackling vehicle emissions, as well as potent greenhouse gases methane and HFCs, that would reduce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions between 2022 and 2055. The proposal, more than 18 months in the making, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but can regulate plants by setting technology-based standards applied on-site.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines. Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: "The ultimate trigger here is power. It's just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity." Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure's DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part. In his view: "Hard drive technology is 67 years old. We need to herald this technology that went from five megabytes the size of this room to where we are today. And even the latest HAMR technology, putting a laser on the top of the head in order to heat up the platters, is pretty remarkable ... But we're at the end of that era." HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. There's a VAST vs Infinidat angle to it as well, with the former also stating disk drive IO limitations would cripple the use of larger disk drives in petabyte-scale data stores, with Infidat blasting back that it "must be joking." Gartner has had a look in too, claiming that enterprise SSDs will hit 35 percent of HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026 - though that would make Rosemarin's 2028 cutoff unlikely. Pure recently stated SSDs would kill HDDs in a crossover event that would happen "soon." Rosemarin, meanwhile, continued his argument: "Our CEO in many recent events has quoted that 3 percent of the world's power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk. So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it's all becoming evident that hard drives go away." Are high electricity prices set to continue? "I think the UK's power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here's the thing ... when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down ... I've been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it'll take us several years to get there. We're already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one -- we've already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can't come here, we don't have enough power for you. The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you're a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Google I/O on Wednesday, Google said that all Gmail users in the U.S. will soon be able to discover if their email address has been found on the dark web. The dark web report security feature will roll out over the coming weeks, and will be expanded to select international markets. BleepingComputer reports: Once enabled, it will allow Gmail users to scan the dark web for their email addresses and take action to protect their data based on guidance provided by Google. For instance, they'll be advised to turn on two-step authentication to protect their Google accounts from hijacking attempts. Google will also regularly notify Gmail users to check if their email has been linked to any data breaches that ended up on underground cybercrime forums. "Dark web report started rolling out in March 2023 to members across all Google One plans in the United States, providing a simple way to get notified when their personal information was discovered on the dark web. "Google One's dark web report helps you scan the dark web for your personal info -- like your name, address, email, phone number and Social Security number -- and will notify you if it's found," said Google One Director of Product Management Esteban Kozak in March when the feature was first announced. The company says all the personal info added to the profile can be deleted from the monitoring profile or by removing the profile in the dark web report settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang, writing for New Yorker: So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey -- a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100 -- and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to "turbocharge" sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America. A former McKinsey employee has described the company as "capital's willing executioners": if you want something done but don't want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don't want to be blamed for doing what's necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it's just doing what âoethe algorithmâ says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"My friend Ben Carlson pointed out that Apple's current market capitalization of about $2.7 trillion this week exceeds the entire market capitalization of the United Kingdom, the third biggest stock market in the world," writes CNBC's Bob Pisani. From the report: Dimensional's Matrix Book is an annual review of global returns that highlight the power of compound investing. It's a fascinating document: you can look up the compounded growth rate of the S&P 500 for every year going back to 1926. Buried on page 74 is a chapter on "World Equity Market Capitalization," listing the market capitalization of most of the world, country by country. No surprise, the U.S. is the global leader in stock market value. The $40 trillion in stock market wealth in the U.S. is almost 60% of the value of all the equities in the world. Here's where it gets fun. [...] Not only is Apple bigger than all 595 companies that list in the United Kingdom, it's bigger than all the companies in France (235 companies), and India (1,242 companies). Apple is twice the size of Germany's entire stock market, with 255 companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Google I/O on Wednesday, VP of Engineering at Android David Burke new customization features coming to Android 14 later this year. Engadget reports: The tools build on the Material You design system Google introduced in 2021 by allowing users to create a custom wallpaper by picking a few of their favorite emojis. One of the new tools allows you to add up to 14 emojis to a single wallpaper. You can then pick a pattern and a color to bring everything together. Once the wallpaper is on your home screen, the characters will react when you tap on them. If you want something more sentimental, there's a separate option to create "Cinematic" wallpapers. The feature uses on-device neural networks to animate your favorite photos. Once the photo is on your home screen, tilting your device will cause it to move, giving the image more depth and life than it would have had you not used the new feature. Burke said both cinematic and emoji wallpapers would arrive on Pixel devices next month. Come the fall, Google will also introduce a built-in AI image generator within Android's customization menu. You can use the tool to create wallpapers you can't find online. It comes with pre-populated prompts you can tweak to make the process of guiding the AI easier. Once you add an AI wallpaper to your home screen, Android's Material You system will automatically color-match all the user interface elements, including any app icons, so they don't clash with one another. Android 14 will further augment those tools with the addition of new clocks and shortcuts you can add to your lock screen. And if colors aren't your thing, Google also plans to add a new monochromatic theme for those who prefer a more understated look. At I/O, Burke also previewed Magic Compose, a Messages feature that will use Google's generative AI technology to write texts for you. The tool comes with multiple style settings you can use to give your messages a different flair. Google plans to beta test Magic Compose this summer. Separately, Google said after the keynote that Android 14 will add support for Ultra HDR, allowing for photos that feature more vivid colors and detailed shadows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a collaborative investigation between Motherboard, lavialibera, and IrpiMedia: Mafioso Bartolo Bruzzaniti needed everyone to do their job just right. First, the Colombian suppliers would hide a massive amount of cocaine inside bananas at the port city of Turbo, Colombia. That shipping container would then be transported across the ocean to Catania, in Sicily, Italy. A corrupt port worker on the mafia's payroll would wave the shipment through and had advised the group how to package the drugs. This was so the cocaine could remain undetected even if the worker was forced to scan the shipment. Another group of on-the-ground mafiosos would then unload the cocaine outside of the port. In March 2021, Bruzzaniti, an alleged member of the infamous 'Ndrangheta mafia group and who says Milan belongs to him "by right," asked his brother Antonio to go fetch something else crucial to the traffickers' success. "Go right now," Bruzzaniti wrote in a text message later produced in court records. "It's needed urgently." Investigators know what Bruzzaniti said because European authorities had penetrated an encrypted phone network called Sky and harvested around a billion of the users' messages. These phones are the technological backbone of organized crime around the world. The thing Antonio needed to urgently fetch was a phone from a different encrypted phone network, one that the authorities appear to have not compromised and which the mafia have been using as part of their operations. To that phone, a contact sent one half of the shipping container's serial number. A reporting collaboration between Motherboard, lavialibera, and IrpiMedia has identified that encrypted phone as being run by a company called No. 1 Business Communication (No. 1 BC). The investigation has found members of the mafia and other organized crime groups turning to No. 1 BC as authorities cracked down on other platforms. The collaboration has identified multiple key players in No. 1 BC's development, sales, and legal structure. "Take the bc1 right away," Bruzzaniti wrote in another text, referring to the No. 1 BC phone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview build is the first to include the memory-safe programming language Rust. Thurrott reports: "If you're on the Win11 Insider ring, you're getting the first taste of Rust in the Windows kernel," Russinovich tweeted last night. It's not clear which Insider channel he is referring to, however. Regardless, that that was quick: Microsoft only went public with its plans to replace parts of the Windows kernel with Rust code in mid-April at its BlueHat IL 2023 security conference in Israel. At that event, Microsoft vice president David Weston said that "we're using Rust on the operating system along with other constructs" as part of an "aggressive and meaningful pursuit of memory safety," a key source of exploits. And it's not just the Windows kernel. Microsoft is bringing Rust to its Pluton security processor as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turkish presidential candidate Muharrem Ince withdrew from the race after an alleged sex tape circulated online. Ince claims it's a deepfake using footage taken from "an Israeli porn site." The Guardian reports: Ince, a two-time presidential candidate who also lost to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2018, pulled his candidacy just days away from Turkey's most consequential election in a generation saying: "I offered Turkey a third option, a third way. We couldn't succeed with this way." The former school headteacher and longtime member of the Republican People's party (CHP) said an alleged sex tape circulating online was a deepfake, using footage taken from "an Israeli porn site." He added: "If I had such images of myself, they were taken secretly in the past. But I do not have such an image, no such sound recording. This is not my private life, it's slander. It's not real." The high-profile deployment of deepfake videos has already hit Turkey's 45-day election cycle, after Erdogan played an alleged deepfake that claimed to show banned Kurdish militants declaring their support for Kilicdaroglu at a pre-election rally last weekend. "What I have seen in these last 45 days, I have not seen in 45 years," said Ince.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An ex-Ubiquiti engineer, Nickolas Sharp, was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday after pleading guilty in a New York court to stealing tens of gigabytes of confidential data, demanding a $1.9 million ransom from his former employer, and then publishing the data publicly when his demands were refused. Sharp had asked for no prison time, telling United States District Judge Katherine Polk Failla that the cyberattack was actually an "unsanctioned security drill" that left Ubiquiti "a safer place for itself and for its clients," Bloomberg reported. In a court document (PDF), Sharp claimed that Ubiquiti CEO Robert Pera had prevented Sharp from "resolving outstanding security issues," and Sharp told the judge that this led to an "idiotic hyperfixation" on fixing those security flaws. However, even if that was Sharp's true motivation, Failla did not accept his justification of his crimes, which include wire fraud, intentionally damaging protected computers, and lying to the FBI. "It was not up to Mr. Sharp to play God in this circumstance," Failla said. US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, argued (PDF) that Sharp was not a "cybersecurity vigilante" but an "inveterate liar and data thief" who was "presenting a contrived deception to the Court that this entire offense was somehow just a misguided security drill." Williams said that Sharp made "dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal decisions" and even implicated innocent co-workers to "divert suspicion." Sharp also had already admitted in pre-sentencing that the cyber attack was planned for "financial gain." Williams said Sharp did it seemingly out of "pure greed" and ego because Sharp "felt mistreated" -- overworked and underpaid -- by the IT company, Williams said. Court documents show that Ubiquiti spent "well over $1.5 million dollars and hundreds of hours of employee and consultant time" trying to remediate what Williams described as Sharp's "breathtaking" theft. But the company lost much more than that when Sharp attempted to conceal his crimes -- posing as a whistleblower, planting false media reports, and contacting US and foreign regulators to investigate Ubiquiti's alleged downplaying of the data breach. Within a single day after Sharp planted false reports, stocks plummeted, causing Ubiquiti to lose over $4 billion in market capitalization value, court documents show. Williams had pushed the court to impose a sentence between eight to 10 years, arguing that anything less would be perceived by the public as a "slap on the wrist." Sharp's six-year term is slightly less than that, but in a press release, Williams described the sentence as imposing "serious penalties" for Sharp's "callous crimes." "He was disgruntled at his employer, planning to leave the company, and wanted to extort millions of dollars and cause damage on his way out," Williams said in his sentencing memo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A ransomware intrusion on hardware manufacturer Micro-Star International, better known as MSI, is stoking concerns of devastating supply chain attacks that could inject malicious updates that have been signed with company signing keys that are trusted by a huge base of end-user devices, a researcher said. From a report: "ââIt's kind of like a doomsday scenario where it's very hard to update the devices simultaneously, and they stay for a while not up to date and will use the old key for authentication," Alex Matrosov, CEO, head of research, and founder of security firm Binarly, said in an interview. "It's very hard to solve, and I don't think MSI has any backup solution to actually block the leaked keys." The intrusion came to light in April when, as first reported by Bleeping Computer, the extortion portal of the Money Message ransomware group listed MSI as a new victim and published screenshots purporting to show folders containing private encryption keys, source code, and other data. A day later, MSI issued a terse advisory saying that it had "suffered a cyberattack on part of its information systems." The advisory urged customers to get updates from the MSI website only. It made no mention of leaked keys. Since then, Matrosov has analyzed data that was released on the Money Message site on the dark web. To his alarm, included in the trove were two private encryption keys. The first is the signing key that digitally signs MSI firmware updates to cryptographically prove that they are legitimate ones from MSI rather than a malicious impostor from a threat actor. This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computer's most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesn't have an automated patching process the way Dell, HP, and many larger hardware makers do. Consequently, MSI doesn't provide the same kind of key revocation capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will hold off on offering salary increases to full-time employees, CEO Satya Nadella told staffers by email Wednesday. From a report: The move aligns with Microsoft's efforts to reduce costs as revenue growth slows and clients reel in spending. In January, the software maker said it would cut 10,000 jobs, or just under 5% of its workforce. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and other tech companies have downsized as well in recent months. Last year, as inflation rippled through the economy, Microsoft nearly doubled the budget for merit increases and boosted stock allocations for certain employees. This year, compensation will look more normal. "We will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, however, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages," Nadella wrote in the email. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Insider reported on the message earlier. Nadella said performance bonuses for Microsoft's top executives will be down considerably from last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain's competition regulator has published an interim order restricting Microsoft and Activision from acquiring an interest in each other without its consent, weeks after it blocked their $69 billion merger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A key form of financing that startups rely on is shrinking, hurting new companies that are already starved for capital. From a report: The volume of venture debt, a type of loan that younger companies line up to help pay the bills, plunged to $3.5 billion in the US in the first quarter, according to PitchBook, the lowest level since 2017. Climbing interest rates have made the funding more expensive for companies, and one of the biggest venture lenders, Silicon Valley Bank, faced a run on the bank that forced government regulators to seize it and sell it. First Citizens BancShares, Silicon Valley Bank's buyer, says its appetite for venture financing hasn't changed. On a conference call on Wednesday, the company's president said First Citizens is better positioned to serve venture-backed companies now. But many of the biggest lenders across the economy are less willing to take risk as economic growth slows. Companies drove venture lending to record levels last year as revenue was under pressure and other forms of financing were drying up. VCs pulled back dramatically on equity investments in the second half of 2022, squeezed by rising interest rates and falling market values across the tech industry. By the first quarter of 2023, venture firms invested $79 billion in startups, less than half the $178 billion a year earlier, according to PitchBook. Raising equity in public markets is harder too: There were just $2.5 billion of initial public offerings in the US in the first quarter, the lowest for the first three months of the year since 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EU lawmakers on Thursday urged the European Commission to continue talks to reinforce a proposed data transfer pact with the United States, saying there were still shortcomings in the agreement. From a report: The move could further delay an accord which is critical for thousands of companies. The EU executive in a draft decision in December said that U.S. safeguards against American intelligence activities were strong enough to address EU data privacy concerns. Such worries had prompted Europe's top court to strike down two previous data transfer pacts, affecting thousands of companies that move Europeans' personal data across the Atlantic for commercial use such as financial services, human resources and e-commerce. "This new proposal contains significant improvements, but unfortunately, we are not there yet," lawmaker Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar said after the assembly voted in a non-binding resolution against the proposed pact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European lawmakers came a step closer to passing new rules regulating artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, following a crunch vote on Thursday where they agreed tougher draft legislation. From a report: The European Union's highly anticipated AI Act looks set to be the world's first comprehensive legislation governing the technology, with new rules around the use of facial recognition, biometric surveillance, and other AI applications. After two years of negotiations, the bill is now expected to move to the next stage of the process, in which lawmakers finalise its details with the European Commission and individual member states. Speaking ahead of the vote by two lawmakers' committees, Dragos Tudorache, one of the parliamentarians (MEPs) charged with drafting the laws, said: "It is a delicate deal. But it is a package that I think gives something to everyone that participated in these negotiations. Our societies expect us to do something determined about artificial intelligence, and the impact it has on their lives. It's enough to turn on the TV ... in the last two or three months, and every day you see how important this is becoming for citizens." Under the proposals, AI tools will be classified according to their perceived level of risk, from low to unacceptable. Governments and companies using these tools will have different obligations, depending on the risk level.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wind turbines have generated more electricity than gas for the first time in the UK. From a report: In the first three months of this year a third of the country's electricity came from wind farms, research from Imperial College London have shown. National Grid has also confirmed that April saw a record period of solar energy generation. By 2035 the UK aims for all of its electricity to have net zero emissions. "There are still many hurdles to reaching a completely fossil fuel-free grid, but wind out-supplying gas for the first time is a genuine milestone event," said Iain Staffell, energy researcher at Imperial College and lead author of the report. The majority of the UK's wind power has come from offshore wind farms. Installing new onshore wind turbines has effectively been banned since 2015 in England.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoftBank Vision Fund lost $32 billion in the financial year ending March as the Japanese investment giant, the most prolific global investor in tech startups, continues to suffer from valuation corrections across its portfolio of private and public tech companies amid a weakening global economy. From a report: The loss surged about 70% from the same period a year prior, when SoftBank had reported $19 billion in losses at the Vision Fund unit. The losses come even as SoftBank has grown very cautious about deploying new capital to startups in recent quarters. Among the losses, the Japanese conglomerate said its Vision Fund 1 made an unrealized loss of $1.6 billion each in SenseTime Group and GoTo and nearly $800 million in DoorDash. The fair value of SoftBank's portfolio was marked down over the quarter by $2.3 billion to $138 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SimilarWeb: Developers increasingly get advice from AI chatbots and GitHub CoPilot rather than Stack Overflow message boards. While traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT has been growing exponentially, Stack Overflow has been experiencing a steady decline -- losing some of its standings as the go-to source developers turn to for answers to coding challenges. Actually, traffic to Stack Overflow's community website has been dropping since the beginning of 2022. That may be in part because of a related development, the introduction of the CoPilot coding assistant from Microsoft's GitHub business. CoPilot is built on top of the same OpenAI large language model as ChatGPT, capable of processing both human language and programming language. A plugin to the widely used Microsoft Visual Studio Code allows developers to have CoPilot write entire functions on their behalf, rather than going to Stack Overflow in search of something to copy and paste. CoPilot now incorporates the latest GPT-4 version of OpenAI's platform. On a year-over-year basis, traffic to Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) has been down by an average of 6% every month since January 2022 and was down 13.9% in March. ChatGPT doesn't have a year-over-year track record, having only launched at the end of November, but its website (chat.openai.com) has become one of the world's hottest digital properties in that short time, bigger than Microsoft's Bing search engine for worldwide traffic. It attracted 1.6 billion visits in March and another 920.7 million in the first half of April. The GitHub website has also been seeing strong growth, with traffic to github.com up 26.4% year-over-year in March to 524 million visits. That doesn't reflect all the usage of CoPilot, which normally takes place within an editor like Visual Studio Code, but it would include people coming to the website to get a subscription to the service. Visits to the GitHub CoPilot free trial signup page more than tripled from February to March, topping 800,000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When the Ethereum blockchain moved away from using a technique for verifying transactions known as proof of work last September, crypto market demand for the specialized processors that performed these calculations disappeared virtually overnight. Companies that used and hosted GPUs, or graphics processing units, saw a key part of their once-booming business vanish against an increasingly difficult backdrop for crypto. But now mining infrastructure companies like Hive Blockchain and Hut 8 Mining are finding opportunities to repurpose their GPU-based equipment for another industry on the precipice of a possible boom: artificial intelligence. From a report: "If you can reapply some of that investment in the GPU mining infrastructure and convert it to new cards and workloads, it makes sense," Hut 8 Chief Executive Officer Jaime Leverton said in an interview. GPUs -- designed to accelerate graphics rendering -- require constant maintenance and physical infrastructure not all users are prepared to provide. As such, Hut 8 and a few other miners have been using the chips to power high-performance computing, or HPC, services for clients across a range of industries. But inroads with the burgeoning and much-hyped AI sector -- which requires huge amounts of computing power -- represent the kind of transformational opportunity miners had been seeking when they originally bought the processors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is launching a new AI-powered coding bot for Android developers. During its I/O event on Wednesday, Google announced that the tool, called Studio Bot, will help developers build apps by generating code, fixing errors, and answering questions about Android. According to Google, the bot is built on Codey, the company's new foundational coding model that stems from its updated PaLM 2 large language model (LLM). Studio Bot supports both the Kotlin and Java programming languages and will live directly in the toolbar on Android Studio. There, developers can get quick answers to their questions or even have the bot debug a portion of their code. While Google notes that developers don't need to share their source code with Google in order to use Studio Bot, the company will receive data on the conversations they have with the tool. Google says the bot is still in "very early days" but that it will continue training it to improve its answers. It's also currently only available to developers in the US for now via the Canary channel, and there's no word on when it will see a global launch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robinhood announced Wednesday that it will soon allow users to engage in 24-hour trading of select exchange-traded funds and stocks. As Fortune notes, this "will make it the first U.S. brokerage to provide overnight weekday trading in individual stocks." From the report: The 24-hour trading service will allow round-the-clock trading in 43 securities between 8 p.m. ET Sunday and 8 p.m. ET Friday, with plans to add more securities at a later time, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev told the Wall Street Journal. The feature will roll out next week in a limited capacity and will be available by June to all users, according to the Journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A personalized cancer vaccine made by BioNTech, the German company that produced the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, has shown promising results against pancreatic cancer. The vaccine, which teaches patients' immune systems to attack their tumors, provoked an immune response in half of the 16 patients treated, and those patients did not experience relapses of their cancer during the study. The New York Times reports: Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients' tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful COVID vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells. Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient's immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech's COVID shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients' cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells. The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people's immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients. [...] But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly -- patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed -- was a promising sign, experts said. In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked. Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests. "It's anecdotal, but it's nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions," said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first demonstrable success -- and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study -- of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. "By that standard, it's a milestone." The study has been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from MIT Technology Review: Today, researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which they say combines the complete DNA of 47 diverse individuals -- Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups -- into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species. The new map, called a "pangenome," has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe. It was published in the journal Nature today. People's genomes are largely alike, but it's the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren't observable in conventional studies. The pangenome relies on a mathematical concept called a graph, which you can imagine as a massive version of connect-the-dots. Each dot is a segment of DNA. To draw a particular person's genome, you start connecting the numbered dots. Each person's DNA can take a slightly different path, skipping some numbers and adding others. One payoff of the new pangenome could be better ways to diagnose rare diseases, although practical applications aren't easy to name. Instead, scientists say it's mainly giving them insight into some of the "dark matter" of the genome that's previously been hard to see, including strange regions of chromosomes that seem to share and exchange genes. For now, most biologists and doctors will stick to the existing "reference genome," the one first produced in draft form in 2001 and gradually improved. It answers most questions researchers are interested in, and all their computer tools work with it. The reason a reference genome is important is that when a new person's genome is sequenced, that sequence is projected onto the reference in order to organize and read the new data. Yet since the current reference is just one possible genome, missing bits that some people have, some information can't be analyzed and is usually ignored. Researchers call this effect "reference bias" or, more simply, the streetlamp problem. You don't see where you don't look. Officials with NIH said they hoped the new update to the genome map would make gene research more "equitable." That's because the more different your genome is from the current reference, the more information about you could be missed. The existing reference is largely the DNA of one African-American man, although it includes segments from several other people as well. "If the genome you want to analyze has sequences that are not in that reference, they will be missed in the analysis," says Deanna Church, a consultant with the business incubator General Inception, who previously held a key role at NIH managing the reference genome. "In reality, the notion that there is a 'human genome' is really the problem," she says. "The current version is the simplest model you can make. It made sense when we started ... But now we need better models."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced the Pixel Tablet after teasing it during last year's Google I/O conference. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tablet is designed from the ground up to be good at what people typically use tablets for: watching video or playing games in the comfort of their own home. It is not, however, making any statements about the future of computing. The looks of the Pixel Tablet are relatively generic. It has an 11-inch, 16:10, 2560 x 1600 pixel LCD display, even bezels all around, and a matte back. It comes in three colors: white, dark green, and light pink, with the dark green model featuring a black bezel. Though it looks like plastic from a distance, the Pixel Tablet has an aluminum frame with a nanotexture coating, not unlike what Google did with the Pixel 5 smartphone. Bundled in the box with the Pixel Tablet is a magnetic speaker dock. This serves multiple purposes and is meant to prevent the dreaded "dead tablet in a drawer" syndrome: it's a place to store the Pixel Tablet when it's not in use; it charges the battery; and it has a louder, fuller speaker better suited for communal listening than the speakers that are built into the tablet. If you're playing music or watching a video on the tablet when you put it on the dock, it will seamlessly transfer the audio to the dock's speaker. Pull the tablet off the dock while something is playing, and it will instantly switch to the tablet's speakers. When mounted on the speaker dock, the Pixel Tablet looks an awful lot like the Nest Hub Max, a $250 smart display that Google released back in 2019. But make no mistake, the Pixel Tablet is an Android tablet and not a smart display -- it runs completely different software and has different capabilities compared to the Nest Hub. That said, when the tablet is docked on the speaker, it can show a slideshow of images from your Google Photos albums just like the Nest Hub. It also has a quick access button to the Google Home app so you can control smart home devices, and it can accept voice commands from a distance for hands-free Google Assistant queries. The lock screen won't show any personal information like notifications -- for that, you'll have to unlock the tablet to access the accounts that are set up on it. The $499 slab is available for preorder starting today, and will begin shipping on June 20th.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi was sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. Decrypt reports: Ishan Wahi, 32, and his associates -- including his brother, Nikhil -- made over $1.5 million from investing in new digital assets just before they were listed by America's biggest crypto exchange. Wahi was able to use his knowledge of incoming assets to buy them and then quickly sell them, to make huge profits. When the San Francisco-based exchange lists new coins and tokens, they quickly shoot up in value, a phenomenon known as "the Coinbase effect." The Indian national tried to flee the country after being quizzed by Coinbase, the Department of Justice said. But he was stopped from boarding a flight to India by American cops. Wahi pleaded guilty in February to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud brought against him by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Wahi, his brother and his friend, Sameer Ramani, were also hit with civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "[Wahi] violated the trust placed in him by his employer" by sharing the secret listings," said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. "Today's sentence should send a strong signal to all participants in the cryptocurrency markets that the laws decidedly do apply to them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company will add Hulu content to its Disney+ streaming app, adding that it will also raise the price of its ad-free streaming service later this year. CNBC reports: CEO Bob Iger said the company would soon begin offering a "one app experience" in the U.S. that incorporates Hulu content into its flagship streaming service, Disney+. Standalone options for all of Disney's platforms, including ESPN+, will remain. "This is a logical progression of our DTC offerings that will provide greater opportunities for advertisers, while giving bundle subscribers access to more robust and streamlined content resulting in greater audience engagement and ultimately leading to a more unified streaming experience," Iger said during Wednesday's earnings call. Iger attributed the move toward a one-app location for both Disney+ and Hulu content to the "advertising potential for the combined platform." While Hulu has long offered an ad-supported option for subscribers, Disney+ launched the cheaper tier last year. Disney will begin to roll out the one-app offering by the end of the calendar year, and Iger said the company would share further details at a later time. In the company's fiscal second quarter earnings, the company reported $21.82 billion in revenue, up 13% from the same period last year and beating estimates. It did, however, shed 4 million Disney+ subscribers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is engaging with Times Internet to explore the acquisition of MX Player, one of the largest on-demand video streaming services in India, according to four sources familiar with the matter, as the American e-commerce group eyes expanding its entertainment ambitions in the key overseas market. The deliberations are remarkable for MX Player, which was acquired by the Indian conglomerate Times Internet for $140 million in 2018. The video app, popular for supporting a wide range of video formats and reliability on low-cost Android smartphones, has expanded to original content in recent years and has amassed more than 300 million users globally. MX Player has gained wide adoption in markets such as India in part by offering its wide video catalog that includes access to live cable TV channels at no charge to consumers. Instead the service makes most of its revenue through ads. MX Player was one of the earliest video apps to expand into short-video format, cashing in on an opportunity created in the aftermath of New Delhi banning TikTok in the country in mid-2020. MX Player eventually merged that business with ShareChat's short-video offering Moj in a deal worth $900 million. [...] MX Player, which offers its premium offerings in many international markets, claims it has over 150 million active users in India. The firm last raised a venture round in 2019, when it received an investment of $110.8 million in a funding round led by Tencent. That round valued MX Player at $500 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The AI takeover of Google Search starts now," writes The Verge's David Pierce. At Google I/O today, the company demoed a new opt-in feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE). The new experience generates AI "snapshots" that appear at the top of the search results page consisting of an AI-generated summary about your query, with links to sources of information and shopping. From the report: To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google's VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. "Why is sourdough bread still so popular?" she writes and hits enter. Google's normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase "Generative AI is experimental." A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says "corroborates" what's in the summary. Google calls this the "AI snapshot." All of it is by Google's large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google's designers call "the bear claw," which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it's key to the way Google's AI implementation is different. "We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?" A few seconds later, Reid clicks back and starts another search. This time, she searches for the best Bluetooth speakers for the beach. Again, standard search results appear almost immediately, and again, AI results are generated a few seconds later. This time, there's a short summary at the top detailing what you should care about in such a speaker: battery life, water resistance, sound quality. Links to three buying guides sit off to the right, and below are shopping links for a half-dozen good options, each with an AI-generated summary next to it. I ask Reid to follow up with the phrase "under $100," and she does so. The snapshot regenerates with new summaries and new picks. "This is the new look of Google's search results page," concludes Pierce. "It's AI-first, it's colorful, and it's nothing like you're used to. It's powered by some of Google's most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media." "In the demos I saw, it's often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you'll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: It's at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it's probably on average better," said Wendy's CIO Kevin Vasconi to the Wall Street Journal. After successful early tests, the fifth biggest fast food chain in the USA will start using AI chatbots to interact with drive-thru customers next month. The company has been working with Google on a number of machine learning and AI tools behind the scenes, and is now extending that partnership to begin deploying a Large Language Model (LLM) generative AI system built on the Vertex AI platform, that's custom-trained to take over from human workers, taking drive-thru orders and talking with customers. Verbal AI tech has advanced in leaps and bounds -- not that you'd know it trying to talk to my Google Home, mind you -- and the two companies have worked together to train up a system called FreshAI. This model understands the entire menu, including the street slang for certain orders, and it's capable of having conversations -- within a set of "guardrails" -- as well as taking custom orders and answering questions. It integrates with the company's point of sale systems and has been trained to follow the rules the company currently gives to its human drive thru window staff. Wendy's will begin with a pilot program at a site in the Columbus, Ohio, area next month, expecting that some customers won't realize they're not talking to a human. From there, the company hopes to expand to include other drive-thru locations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zero interaction with employees during a transaction no longer guarantees freedom from the moral quandary of how much to tip. From a report: Prompts to leave 20% at self-checkout machines at airports, stadiums, cookie shops and cafes across the country are rankling consumers already inundated by the proliferation of tip screens. Business owners say the automated cues can significantly increase gratuities and boost staff pay. But the unmanned prompts are leading more customers to question what, exactly, the tips are for. "They're cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what's the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?" says Ishita Jamar, a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., who has noticed more self-serve tip cues at restaurants she frequents. Tipping researchers and labor advocates say so-called tip creep is a way for employers to put the onus for employee pay onto consumers, rather than raising wages themselves. Companies say tips are an optional thanks for a job well done. Businesses "are taking advantage of an opportunity," says William Michael Lynn, who studies consumer behavior and tip culture as a professor at Cornell University's Nolan School of Hotel Administration. "Who wouldn't want to get extra money at very little cost if you could?" Square, whose technology powers many iPad point-of-sale machines, says tipped transactions were up 17% year-over-year at full-service restaurants and 16% at quick-service restaurants in the fourth quarter of 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many experts believe fusion power remains decades away. Microsoft thinks it could be just around the corner. From a report: In a deal that is believed to be the first commercial agreement for fusion power, the tech giant has agreed to purchase electricity from startup Helion Energy within about five years. Helion, which is backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, committed to start producing electricity through fusion by 2028 and target power generation for Microsoft of at least 50 megawatts after a year or pay financial penalties. The commitment is a bold one given that neither Helion nor anyone else in the world has yet produced electricity from fusion. "We wouldn't enter into this agreement if we were not optimistic that engineering advances are gaining momentum," said Microsoft President Brad Smith. Fusion powers the sun and stars, and has the potential to provide nearly limitless amounts of carbon-free power if someone can harness it on earth. The International Atomic Energy Agency expects electricity from fusion to be produced in the second half of the century. Helion is building a prototype that it says will demonstrate the ability to produce electricity through fusion next year. "The goal is not to make the world's coolest technology demo," Mr. Altman said in an interview. "The goal is to power the world and to do it extremely cheaply." Mr. Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI -- the artificial-intelligence startup behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT -- said having a first customer is critical for keeping Helion grounded in the realities of business, including working with clients, utilities and electric-grid operators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has launched the Pixel 7a for $499, featuring a 6.1-inch OLED display at 90Hz, Tensor G2 chip with 8GB RAM, and 64MP main camera. The Pixel 7a nearly matches the flagship Pixel 7 on specs but starts at a lower price. GSMArena.com reports: Yes, the 7a marks several firsts for the Pixel a series. For starters, its 6.1" OLED display now runs at 90Hz, the same refresh rate as the Pixel 7 (though that one has a slightly larger 6.3" display). The resolution is FHD+ and you get Gorilla Glass 3 protection. Speaking of protection, the phone is rated IP67 for dust and water resistance. It has a metal frame and a plastic back -- Google notes that it used recycled aluminum, glass and plastic to build the phone. For example, the visor is 100% recycled aluminum. Available colors are Charcoal, Sea and Snow. Another major upgrade is the switch to the Tensor G2 chipset, which is now paired with 8GB of LPDDR RAM (up from 6GB on the 6a) and 128GB UFS 3.1 storage. This is the same configuration as the Pixel 7, so the a-phone will be just as fast at the various computational tasks. Also, note that Google is promising 5 years of security updates. Among them is the Super Res Zoom (up to 8x), which is enabled by the new 64MP camera (up from 12MP). The ultra wide camera has a 13MP sensor and a f/2.2 lens that is blessed with Dual Pixel autofocus. The front-facing camera was also bumped up to 13MP with a fixed-focus lens (f/2.2). The rear camera can record 5K video at up to 60fps, the front one tops out at 4K at 30fps. The Pixel 7a supports sub-6GHz and mmWave flavors of 5G, though only models for select regions will have mmWave enabled. This is a dual-SIM device with one physical nano-SIM and one eSIM. The 7a is powered by a 4,385mAh battery that supports up to 18W wired charging and for the first time on an a-phone wireless charging is available too -- also at 18W. Note that the port on the bottom is USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, but the retail box comes only with a USB C-to-C cable with USB 2.0 wiring (and you have to supply your own charger). You can order the Pixel 7a via the Google Store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today officially launched its first foldable smartphone, the Pixel Fold. From a report: The design affords a lot more screen real estate. The internal display is 7.6 inches, with a 6:5 aspect ratio. The resolution is 2208 x 1840 OLED at 380ppi, with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. [...] The bar on the rear of the device houses a three-camera system: a 48-megapixel main, 10.8-megapixel ultrawide and a 10.8-megapixel telephoto with 5x optical Zoom and 20x Super Res Zoom. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is 9.5 megapixels. The real secret sauce in the Pixel Fold experience is, unsurprisingly, the software. Google has, after all, been working on it for at least half a decade. The app continuity when switching between the external and internal screens is quite seamless, allowing you to pick where you left off as you change screen sizes. Naturally, Google has optimized its most popular third-party apps for the big screen experience, including Gmail and YouTube. The system is powered by the same Tensor G2 chip you'll find in the Pixel 7, 7a and Pixel tablet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first UK baby created with DNA from three people has been born after doctors performed a groundbreaking IVF procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases. From a report: The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children. Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor's egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material -- about 37 genes -- from the donor. The process has led to the phrase "three-parent babies," though more than 99.8% of the DNA in the babies comes from the mother and father. Research on MDT, which is also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. The work aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria to have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the "batteries" can affect all of the children a woman has.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTube Premium subscribership grew to a record 80 million users in 2022, and Google responded by announcing it would be investing more into its subscription offerings in 2023. What we didn't realize at the time was how that could mean handicapping its free offerings to get more people to pay for its services. When watching videos yesterday, one Redditor encountered a popup informing them that "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube." The message offered a button to "Allow YouTube ads" in the person's ad blocking software and went on to explain that ads make the service free for billions of users and that YouTube Premium offers an ad-free experience. It even provided a button to easily sign up for a YouTube Premium membership.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google, in a blog post: PaLM 2 is a state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities. Multilinguality: PaLM 2 [PDF] is more heavily trained on multilingual text, spanning more than 100 languages. This has significantly improved its ability to understand, generate and translate nuanced text -- including idioms, poems and riddles -- across a wide variety of languages, a hard problem to solve. PaLM 2 also passes advanced language proficiency exams at the "mastery" level.Reasoning: PaLM 2's wide-ranging dataset includes scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions. As a result, it demonstrates improved capabilities in logic, common sense reasoning, and mathematics.Coding: PaLM 2 was pre-trained on a large quantity of publicly available source code datasets. This means that it excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog. Even as PaLM 2 is more capable, it's also faster and more efficient than previous models -- and it comes in a variety of sizes, which makes it easy to deploy for a wide range of use cases. We'll be making PaLM 2 available in four sizes from smallest to largest: Gecko, Otter, Bison and Unicorn. Gecko is so lightweight that it can work on mobile devices and is fast enough for great interactive applications on-device, even when offline. This versatility means PaLM 2 can be fine-tuned to support entire classes of products in more ways, to help more people. At I/O today, we announced over 25 new products and features powered by PaLM 2. That means that PaLM 2 is bringing the latest in advanced AI capabilities directly into our products and to people -- including consumers, developers, and enterprises of all sizes around the world. Here are some examples: PaLM 2's improved multilingual capabilities are allowing us to expand Bard to new languages, starting today. Plus, it's powering our recently announced coding update.Workspace features to help you write in Gmail and Google Docs, and help you organize in Google Sheets are all tapping into the capabilities of PaLM 2 at a speed that helps people get work done better, and faster.Med-PaLM 2, trained by our health research teams with medical knowledge, can answer questions and summarize insights from a variety of dense medical texts. It achieves state-of-the-art results in medical competency, and was the first large language model to perform at "expert" level on U.S. Medical Licensing Exam-style questions. We're now adding multimodal capabilities to synthesize information like x-rays and mammograms to one day improve patient outcomes. Med-PaLM 2 will open up to a small group of Cloud customers for feedback later this summer to identify safe, helpful use cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is adding a smorgasbord of new features to its AI chatbot Bard, including support for new languages (Japanese and Korean), easier ways to export text to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search, and a dark mode. Most significantly, the company is removing the waitlist for Bard and making the system available in English in 180 countries and territories. From a report: It's also promising future features like AI image generation powered by Adobe and integration with third-party web services like Instacart and OpenTable. Collectively, the news is a shot in the arm for Bard, which was released two months ago for select users in the US and UK. The chatbot -- which Google still stresses is an experiment and not a replacement to its search engine -- has compared poorly to rivals like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's new Bing chatbot. Notably, Bard made a factual error in its first-ever public demo (though this problem is common to all such bots). Now, Google is adding a lot of new features as well as upgrading Bard to use its new PaLM 2 language model. This should improve its general answers and usability. Google says the upgraded Bard is particularly good at tackling coding queries, including debugging and explaining chunks of code in more than 20 languages, so some of today's upgrades are focused on this use case. These include the new dark mode, improved citations for code (which will not only offer sources but also explain the snippets), and a new export button. This can already be used to send code to Google's Colab platform but will now also work with another browser-based IDE, Replit (starting with Python queries).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's latest Photos trick is a feature it's calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. From a report: Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on a bench closer to the middle of the photo, which generates "new" parts of the bench and balloons to the left to fill in the space. In this example, Google again makes the sky more vibrant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man in China's Gansu province has been detained for allegedly using ChatGPT to generate a fake story about a train crash, marking China's first arrest in an AI-related probe as Beijing tightens deepfake technology. From a report: The story, which claimed the crash killed nine construction workers in a city in China's northwestern Gansu, gained more than 15,000 clicks after being published on social media on April 25, Pingliang city's local police bureau reported. China's new rules for deepfake bar service providers and users from using such technology to produce, release and fabricate untrue information. The rules, which took effect from Jan. 10, are designed to curb the use of generative AI technology to alter online content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roughly 4.4 million people will soon receive checks from TurboTax, following a 50-state settlement with parent company Intuit for allegedly steering millions of low-income Americans away from free tax-filing services. From a report: Customers affected by the settlement will receive an email about the settlement and checks will automatically be mailed throughout this month. Most customers will get about $30, with some customers that used TurboTax for three consecutive years getting up to $85. A website has also been set up for more information. "TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." She announced the settlement last year, saying that Intuit "unfairly charged" people and forced the company to stop its "free, free, free" ad campaign because it falsely lured customers with the promise of free tax preparation services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clearview AI, the US startup that's attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people's data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator. From a report: The overdue penalty payment of $5.7M has been issued by the French regulator, the CNIL -- on top of a $22M sanction it slapped the company with last year for breaching regional privacy rules. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out conditions for processing personal data lawfully. Clearview has been found to have breached a number of requirements set out in law -- by France's CNIL and several other regional data protection authorities, including authorities in the UK, Italy and Greece, garnering several tens of millions in total fines to date. Whether Clearview will ever pay any of these fines remains an open question, since the US-based company has not been cooperating with EU regulators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Delaware judge has dismissed a shareholder lawsuit against financial technology company Block over its 2021 acquisition of majority ownership in Tidal, the music streaming service partly owned by rapper Jay-Z. From a report: A pension fund shareholder alleged that Block founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and the company's board of directors breached their fiduciary duties in agreeing to pay roughly $300 million to take control of Tidal as it was failing financially and the target of an ongoing criminal investigation. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick ruled Tuesday that the pension fund had failed to demand that Block's board pursue legal action itself before filing a derivative lawsuit on behalf of the company. Under Delaware law, shareholders must make such a demand or demonstrate that doing so would be futile because a majority of directors were self-interested, lacked independence or faced a substantial likelihood of liability. McCormick noted that the demand requirement is a manifestation of Delaware's business judgment rule, under which courts defer to the decision-making of corporate directors unless there is an indication they acted in bad faith. That deference remains even if a corporate decision turns out to be unwise. "It seemed, by all accounts, a terrible business decision," the judge said of Block's acquisition of Tidal. "Under Delaware law, however, a board comprised of a majority of disinterested and independent directors is free to make a terrible business decision without any meaningful threat of liability, so long as the directors approve the action in good faith."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Mohamed Maslouh, a London-based contractor, was assigned to enter data into Google's internal gHire recruitment system last September, he noticed something surprising. The database contained the profiles of thousands of people in the EU and U.K. whose names, phone numbers, personal email addresses and resumes dated back as far as 2011. Maslouh knew something was amiss, as he had received data-protection training from Randstad, the European human-resources giant that employed him, and was aware of the EU's five-year-old General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which remained part of British law after Brexit. Under the law, companies in the European Union and U.K. may not hang onto anyone's personal data -- that is, information relating to any identifiable living person -- for longer than is strictly necessary, which generally means a maximum retention time measured in weeks or months. Google may now face investigations over potential violations of the GDPR, after Maslouh filed protected whistleblower complaints with the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office in November and with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) -- which has jurisdiction over Google's activities in the EU -- in February.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: While General Motors has announced that it plans to phase out CarPlay in its EVs starting in 2024, Ford has just doubled down on long-term CarPlay compatibility. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ford CEO Jim Farley laid it bare: "In terms of content, we kind of lost that battle 10 years ago," Farley said. "So like get real with it, because you're not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle." Farley's argument is extremely sound. He is contending that since most people bring their smartphones into their cars with them, that people want the infotainment to be an extension of their phones and not another thing to deal with. On another level, embracing CarPlay and Android Auto cost automakers money to license but that cost is amortized over a large production run. The possibility of having a CarPlay-only infotainment is distant and highly unlikely, as automakers do need their own interface for the high-tech gadgets of today's cars. And let's be real: CarPlay is one of the best things to happen to modern cars. It simplifies driving, keeps people less distracted by vastly reducing the learning curve, and is just more convenient. Ford is embracing it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Showtime, announced today that it is laying off some 25% of its staff and shutting down MTV News. NPR reports: In addition to reports of a soft ad market, Paramount Global is doing considerable restructuring. Earlier this year, Showtime merged with MTV Entertainment Studios. In an email to staff obtained by NPR, Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, explained the decision-making behind the cuts. While touting the "incredible track record of hits" such as Yellowstone, South Park, and Yellowjackets, McCarthy wrote, "despite this success in streaming, we continue to feel pressure from broader economic headwinds like many of our peers. To address this, our senior leaders in coordination with HR have been working together over the past few months to determine the optimal organization for the current and future needs of our business." "This is a very sad day for a lot of friends and colleagues," wrote MTV News' Josh Horowitz on Instagram, "Many great people lost their jobs. I was hired by MTV News 17 years ago. I'm so honored to have been a small part of its history. Wishing the best for the best in the business." The news comes on the heels of a disappointing first quarter earnings report for the corporation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has launched a new unit, Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, that will allow the company to license Amazon Originals and other titles to third-party media companies, including streaming services and cable TV. TechCrunch reports: For the first time, titles such as âoeThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," "Coming 2 America," "Goliath," "Hunters," "The Tender Bar," "The Tomorrow War," "The Voyeurs" and "Without Remorse," among others, will be sold to other media outlets following their initial run on Prime Video. While the company has distributed shows before, this new venture will be on a much larger scale. Plus, Amazon Originals are mainly exclusive to Prime Video, making it an enticing sale for companies looking to have popular titles on their platforms. The launch of Amazon MGM Studios Distribution will also allow the company to handle sales of MGM-owned franchises James Bond, Rocky and Creed, as well as "The Handmaid's Tale," "Fargo" and "Vikings." Last year, Amazon acquired MGM for $8.5 billion, giving the company access to more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV series. [...] According to Chris Ottinger, who will lead Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, the unit will offer flexible bundles, reported Deadline, so sellers can create bundled content packages that work for them. This strategy will likely allow the company to stand out from competitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have developed a "language" called Remmyo, which relies on specific facial muscle movements that can occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. People who are capable of lucid dreaming can learn this language during their waking hours and potentially communicate while they are asleep. Ars Technica reports: "You can transfer all important information from lucid dreams using no more than three letters in a word," [sleep expert Michael Raduga], who founded Phase Research Center in 2007 to study sleep, told Ars. "This level of optimization took a lot of time and intellectual resources." Remmyo consists of six sets of facial movements that can be detected by electromyography (EMG) sensors on the face. Slight electrical impulses that reach facial muscles make them capable of movement during sleep paralysis, and these are picked up by sensors and transferred to software that can type, vocalize, and translate Remmyo. Translation depends on which Remmyo letters are used by the sleeper and picked up by the software, which already has information from multiple dictionaries stored in its virtual brain. It can translate Remmyo into another language as it is being "spoken" by the sleeper. "We can digitally vocalize Remmyo or its translation in real time, which helps us to hear speech from lucid dreams," Raduga said. For his initial experiment, Raduga used the sleep laboratory of the Neurological Clinic of Frankfurt University in Germany. His subjects had already learned Remmyo and were also trained to enter a state of lucid dreaming and signal that they were in that lucid state during REM sleep. While they were immersed in lucid dreams, EMG sensors on their faces sent information from electrical impulses to the translation software. The results were uncertain. Based on attempts to translate planned phrases, Remmyo turned out to be anywhere from 13 to 81 percent effective, and in the interview, Raduga said he faced skepticism about the effectiveness of the translation software during the peer review process of his study, which is now published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. He still looks forward to making results more consistent by leveling up translation methods in the future. "The main problem is that it is hard to use only one muscle on your face to say something in Remmyo," said Raduga. "Unintentionally, people strain more than one muscle, and EMG sensors detect it all. Now we use only handwritten algorithms to overcome the problem, but we're going to use machine learning and AI to improve Remmyo decoding."Read more of this story at Slashdot.