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The influential social media app TikTok is flooding the nation's capital with influencers next week as part of an 11th hour lobbying blitz to stave off the forced sale of the company. From a report: The efforts come as the Biden administration urges TikTok's Chinese owners to sell the app to a new owner or face a potential ban in the United States. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the interagency board that issued the call, has spent years reviewing the potential national security risks posed by TikTok, and the Chinese company that owns it: ByteDance. Dozens of TikTok creators will descend on Washington for three days next week, according to a person familiar with the plans, who revealed details on condition of anonymity. The creators will hold a press conference on Wednesday on Capitol Hill, the person added. Another person familiar with the plans noted that TikTok was paying for the cost of sending influencers to D.C. It was not clear which influencers would be making the trip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's delayed effort to ensure its partners don't enjoy unduly privileged access to their clients' systems will run for just nine days before pausing for a month. From a report: Partners of the Redmond-based software colossus have historically relied on "delegated admin privileges" (DAP) to manage and monitor clients' systems and software purchases. In the wake of criminal attacks on managed services providers and the software they use to tend their clients, Microsoft decided DAP privileges offered dangerously extensive access. The company therefore created granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP). As the name implies, GDAP limits the resources and permissions partners enjoy when driving their customers' systems. It also adds zero-trust principles to further reduce the likelihood that an attack on a partner will mean pain for end customers. Partners and Microsoft customers alike were told they would need to stop using DAPs and instead move to GDAPs. So far, so sensible. But also a little controversial, because partners can create GDAP profiles in customers' Active Directory implementations -- customers don't need to give permission for the creation of GDAP profiles, but do need to sign them off. The move from DAP to GDAP has been slow. Microsoft set October 31, 2022, as the date on which it would discontinue the software that automates DAP to GDAP migrations, then moved that date to March 1, 2023. Those delays came after Redmondt's initial ambition was for DAP to die by the end of 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Reserve's digital payments system, which it promises will help speed up the way money moves, will debut in July. From a report: FedNow, as it will be known, will create "a leading-edge payments system that is resilient, adaptive, and accessible," said Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, who is the program's executive sponsor. The system will allow bill payments, money transfers such as paychecks and disbursements from the government, as well as a host of other consumer activities to move more rapidly and at lower cost, according to the program's goals. Participants will complete a training and certification process in early April, according to a Fed announcement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit. From a report: Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water. Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbours for water supplies, and overuse, pollution and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report's authors say. Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world's neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. "The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It's a triple crisis." Rockstrom's fellow Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chair Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London and also a lead author of the report, added: "We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it's not just a technological or finance problem."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI and the Department of Justice are investigating the events that led TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to use the app to surveil American journalists, including this reporter, Forbes reported, citing sources familiar with the departments' actions. From the report: According to a source in position to know, the DOJ Criminal Division, Fraud Section, working alongside the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has subpoenaed information from ByteDance regarding efforts by its employees to access U.S. journalists' location information or other private user data using the TikTok app. According to two sources, the FBI has been conducting interviews related to the surveillance. ByteDance's use of the app to surveil U.S. citizens was first reported by Forbes in October, and confirmed by an internal company investigation in December. "We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals found to have been involved, and they are no longer employed at ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us," said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks. This is the first report of the federal government investigating ByteDance's surveillance practices. It is not clear if the DOJ's subpoena is connected to the FBI's interviews. The DOJ and the FBI are both part of the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which this week demanded that ByteDance divest from TikTok or face a nationwide ban of the app. For the past several years, CFIUS has attempted to negotiate a national security contract with TikTok meant to mitigate concerns that it could be used by the Chinese government to access valuable private information about U.S. citizens or manipulate U.S. civic discourse.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Midjourney announced version 5 of its commercial AI image-synthesis service, which can produce photorealistic images at a quality level that some AI art fans are calling creepy and "too perfect." From a report: Midjourney v5 is available now as an alpha test for customers who subscribe to the Midjourney service, which is available through Discord. "MJ v5 currently feels to me like finally getting glasses after ignoring bad eyesight for a little bit too long," said Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who often shares her Midjourney creations on Twitter. "Suddenly you see everything in 4k, it feels weirdly overwhelming but also amazing." Wieland shared some of her Midjourney v5 generations with Ars Technica [images shared in the linked story], and they certainly show a progression in image detail since Midjourney first arrived in March 2022. Version 3 debuted in August, and version 4 debuted in November. Midjourney works similarly to image synthesizers like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E in that it generates images based on text descriptions called "prompts" using an AI model trained on millions of works of human-made art. Recently, Midjourney was at the heart of a copyright controversy regarding a comic book that used earlier versions of the service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost 1,400 employees at Google parent Alphabet have signed a petition calling for better treatment of staff during the layoff process, after the company announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs. From a report: In an open letter addressed to Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, employees made a series of demands of the company, including freezing new hires, seeking voluntary redundancies before compulsory ones, giving priority to laid off workers for job vacancies and letting workers finish scheduled periods of paid time off, such as parental and bereavement leave. The workers also called on Alphabet to avoid terminating employees from countries with active conflicts or humanitarian crises, such as Ukraine, and provide extra support to those at risk of losing their visa-linked residency along with their jobs. "The impacts of Alphabet's decision to reduce its workforce are global," the letter said. "Nowhere have workers' voices adequately been considered, and we know that as workers we are stronger together than alone." Further reading: Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta on Friday launched its subscription service in the U.S., which would allow Facebook and Instagram users pay for verification in the same vein as Elon Musk-owned Twitter. From a report: The Meta Verified service will give users a blue badge after they verify their accounts using a government ID and will cost $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 a month on Apple's iOS system and Google-owned Android, Meta said in a statement. The service, which Meta said it was testing in February, follows in the footsteps of Snapchat as well as messaging app Telegram and marks the latest effort by a social media company to diversify its revenue away from advertising.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's security research unit is sounding the alarm on a set of vulnerabilities it found in certain Samsung chips included in dozens of Android models, wearables and vehicles, fearing the flaws could be soon discovered and exploited. From a report: Google's Project Zero head Tim Willis said the in-house security researchers found and reported 18 zero-day vulnerabilities in Exynos modems produced by Samsung over the past few months, including four top-severity flaws that could compromise affected devices "silently and remotely" over the cellular network. "Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number," Willis said. By gaining the ability to remotely run code at a device's baseband level -- essentially the Exynos modems that convert cell signals to digital data -- an attacker would be able to gain near-unfettered access to the data flowing in and out of an affected device, including cellular calls, text messages, and cell data, without alerting the victim. The list of affected devices includes (but is not limited to): Samsung mobile devices, including the S22, M and A series handsets; Vivo mobile devices, including those in the S16, S15, S6, X70, X60 and X30 series; Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 series; and connected vehicles that use the Exynos Auto T5123 chipset.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Institutional clients of Coinbase have been contacted by the firm about plans to potentially set up a new crypto-trading platform overseas, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the matter. From the report: The talks with market makers and investment firms touched on the possibility of establishing an alternative venue -- away from the main Coinbase marketplace -- for global clients, said the people, who asked not to be named as the discussions are confidential. The talks are occurring against the backdrop of an intensifying US crackdown on cryptocurrencies. Coinbase has yet to decide where the platform might be based, but it has been speaking to market makers about connecting to it, one of the people said. The US environment for digital-asset companies continues to sour following a string of regulatory actions and bank failures. While Coinbase's services are available in more than 100 countries, orders from clients around the world are currently routed to the same US platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FCC has officially proposed, and voted unanimously to move forward with, a framework under which satellites can communicate directly with smartphones in a structured and useful way. From a report: The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, circulated earlier this month and formally voted on today, is essentially a complete first public draft of what the FCC hopes to accomplish by establishing rules and guidelines around this emerging area of communication. Apple already made the news with a dramatic rescue made possible by its new emergency satellite feature, and companies like Lynk and AST SpaceMobile are working on providing universally accessible two-way data anywhere in the world. Qualcomm and Iridium are integrating the capability at the chipset level. T-Mobile and SpaceX have said they plan to test their own Starlink-based system this year, and plenty of others are looking to enter the fray. There's still the matter of how this space-based connectivity would integrate with existing systems. Our mobile networks run on very carefully defined frequencies so that phones and towers don't interfere with one another, including satellites, which have totally different frequencies and signal powers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of Silicon Valley executives, including investor Peter Thiel, and Washington lawmakers are quietly mobilizing against China's involvement in the U.S. tech industry ahead of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's Capitol Hill testimony next week. From a report: They plan to meet for a private dinner on Wednesday to discuss China, national security and the intensifying competition between the tech sectors of the U.S. and China. Mr. Chew is scheduled to testify the following day. Momentum against TikTok is building. The U.S. government and a succession of other Western countries have blocked TikTok on government-issued devices. The Biden administration has demanded that TikTok's Chinese owners sell their stakes in the video-sharing app or face a possible U.S. ban, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Mr. Chew said in an interview with the Journal that divesting TikTok from its Chinese owners doesn't offer any more protection than the plans TikTok has already proposed. Spearheading the effort to create the bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks is Jacob Helberg, a former Google policy adviser who is the newest member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional research and advisory panel. Mr. Helberg also serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that specializes in national-security issues, and a senior adviser at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology, which is dedicated to research on global competition. One of Mr. Helberg's priorities has been to meet with lawmakers in Congress every couple of weeks to urge them to ban TikTok. The group is calling itself the Hill & Valley Forum, and plans to speak about its concerns about China at the coming dinner, which is expected to draw approximately 200 attendees. The dinner was paid for by venture-capital firms 137 Ventures and Founders Fund, as well as Mr. Helberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SVB Financial Group, the former parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, the lender that was seized by regulators last week after a devastating run on deposits, filed for bankruptcy on Friday. From a report: The move would place SVB Financial, which owns other businesses aside from Silicon Valley Bank, into a court-led process, as it auctions off units that include the investment manager SVB Capital and the brokerage firm SVB securities. Those units continue to operate and were not part of the bankruptcy filing. The bankruptcy process would be separate from the sale of assets led by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to repay Silicon Valley Bank's depositors. SVB Financial said in a statement that it "believes it has approximately $2.2 billion of liquidity." The company had about $3.3 billion in debt outstanding and a type of shares worth $3.7 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: China's annual, week-long parliamentary meeting just ended on Monday. Apart from confirming President Xi Jinping for a historic third term and appointing a new batch of other top leaders, the government also approved a restructuring plan for national ministries, as it typically does every five years. Among all the changes, there's one that the tech world is avidly watching: the creation of a new regulatory body named the National Data Administration. According to official documents, the NDA will be in charge of "advancing the development of data-related fundamental institutions, coordinating the integration, sharing, development and application of data resources, and pushing forward the planning and building of a Digital China, the digital economy and a digital society, among others." In plain words, the NDA will help build smart cities in China, digitize government services, improve internet infrastructure, and make government agencies share data with each other. The big question mark is how much regulatory authority it will exert. At the moment, many different governmental groups in China have a hand in data regulation (last year, one political representative counted 15), and there is no government body that has an explicit mission to protect data privacy. The closest the country has is the Cyberspace Administration of China, which was originally created to police online content and promote party propaganda. "It makes sense to set something [like NDA] up, given how important data is," says Jamie Horsley, a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, who studies regulatory reforms in China. "But the problem anytime you try to streamline government is that you realize every issue impacts other issues. It's very hard to just carve out something that's only going to be regulated by this one entity." For now, it seems this new department is part of an ongoing effort by the Chinese government to drum up a "digital economy" around collecting, sharing, and trading data. In fact, the new national administration greatly resembles the Big Data Bureaus that Chinese provinces have been setting up since 2014. These local bureaus have built data centers across China and set up data exchanges that can trade data sets like stocks. The content of the data is as varied as cell phone locations and results from remote sensing of the ocean floor. The bureaus have even embraced and invested in the questionable concept of the metaverse. Those bureaus tend to view data as a promising economic resource rather than a Pandora's box full of privacy concerns. Now, these local experiments are being integrated and elevated to a national-level agency. And that explains why the new NDA is set up under China's National Development and Reform Commission, an office mostly responsible for drawing broad economic blueprints for the country. We may not get clarity on NDA's full scope of authority until the summer, when its organizational structure, personnel, and regulatory responsibilities are expected to be put down in writing. But analysts think that it's not likely to replace the Cyberspace Administration of China, which has risen up in recent years to become the "super regulator" of the tech industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Copyright Office has issued (PDF) guidance today to clarify when AI-generated material can be copyrighted. Ars Technica reports: Guidance comes after the Copyright Office decided that an author could not copyright individual AI images used to illustrate a comic book, because each image was generated by Midjourney -- not a human artist. In making its decision, the Copyright Office committed to upholding the longstanding legal definition that authors of creative works must be human to register works. Because of this, officials confirmed that AI technologies can never be considered authors. This wasn't the only case influencing new guidance, but it was the most recent. Wrestling with the comic book's complex authorship questions helped prompt the Copyright Office to launch an agency-wide initiative to continue exploring a wider range of copyright issues arising as the AI models that are used to generate text, art, audio, and video continue evolving. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the guidance is an author's "duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration." When registering works, authors must distinguish which content is human-authored and which content is AI-generated. If applicants aren't sure how to refer to the AI-generated content, the Copyright Office recommends providing a general statement that the work contains AI-generated content. That will prompt the office to follow up to help each author fill in the blanks in an application. For artists who have pending applications or have already registered works that contain AI-generated content, the Copyright Office suggests correcting the public record by submitting a supplementary registration. Any failure to accurately reflect the role of AI in copyrighted works could result in "losing the benefits of the registration," the office warned. That could leave works vulnerable to being copied, with little or no legal recourse for copyright infringement claims. Failure to disclose AI-generated content is the only type of infringement discussed in the guidance. Critics like Alex J. Champandard, a co-founder of Creative.ai -- a group of hackers and artists interested in generative AI -- tweeted to say that current guidance puts authors in a precarious catch-22 situation. "By disclosing the AI, you're opening yourself up to infringement, but by not disclosing AI, it's safer but in violation of [the US Copyright Office]!" Champandard's tweet suggested.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Choked by a smog of sulfuric acid and scorched by temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the surface of Venus is sure to be lifeless. For decades, researchers also thought the planet itself was dead, capped by a thick, stagnant lid of crust and unaltered by active rifts or volcanoes. But hints of volcanism have mounted recently, and now comes the best one yet: direct evidence for an eruption. Geologically, at least, Venus is alive. The discovery comes from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus some 30 years ago and used radar to peer through the thick clouds. Images made 8 months apart show a volcano's circular mouth, or caldera, growing dramatically in a sudden collapse. On Earth, such collapses occur when magma that had supported the caldera vents or drains away, as happened during a 2018 eruption at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. Witnessing this unrest during the short observation period suggests either Magellan was spectacularly lucky, or, like Earth, Venus has many volcanoes spouting off regularly, says Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Herrick, who led the study, says, "We can rule out that it's a dying planet." The discovery, published today in Science and presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, makes Venus only the third planetary body in the Solar System with active magma volcanoes, joining Earth and Io, Jupiter's fiery moon. It means future missions to Venus will be able to study "bare, gorgeous new rock" that provides a sample of the planet's interior, Gilmore says. The discovery of more volcanoes, in old or future data, will also help scientists understand how Venus is shedding its interior heat and evolving. And it will shake scientists out of their long-standing view that a spasm of activity a half-billion years ago repaved the planet's surface -- as evidenced by a relative paucity of impact craters -- and was followed by a long period of quiet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, "Well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions"? It's a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that's a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover. But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality. In other words, people are becoming increasingly "retro-curious," said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms. "We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others," said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. "I've found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers -- and humans -- are loath to give up," he added. Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics. [...] While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe. "The problem facing physics right now is that our two pillars of successful theories don't talk to each other," Wharton explained. "One is based in space and time, and one has left space and time aside for this giant quantum wave function." "The solution to this, as everyone seems to have agreed without discussing it, is that we've got to quantize gravity," he continued. "That's the goal. Hardly anyone has said, 'what if things really are in space and time, and we just have to make sense of quantum theory in space and time'? That will be a whole new way to unify everything that people are not looking into." Price agreed that this retrocausality could provide a new means to finally "eliminate the tension" between quantum mechanics and classical physics (including special relativity). "Another possible big payoff is that retrocausality supports the so-called 'epistemic' view of the wave function in the usual quantum mechanics description -- the idea that it is just an encoding of our incomplete knowledge of the system," he continued. "That makes it much easier to understand the so-called collapse of the wave function, as a change in information, as folk such as Einstein and Schoedinger thought, in the early days. In this respect, I think it gets rid of some more of the (apparently) non-classical features of quantum mechanics, by saying that they don't amount to anything physically real."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wemo, Belkin's smart home company, has paused development of Matter smart home devices. The Verge reports: In an email exchange, Jen Wei, Vice President of Global Communications and Corporate Development at Belkin, confirmed that, while the company remains convinced that "Matter will have a significantly positive impact on the smart home industry," it has decided to "take a big step back, regroup, and rethink'' its approach to the smart home. Wei went on to write that Wemo will bring new Matter products to market when it can find a way to differentiate them. It seems like Wemo might be concerned its smart home gear is becoming commoditized. During CES 2022, Wemo announced it would bring Thread-compatible, Matter-compliant products to market when that new standard officially arrived. At the time, it was expected that the new connectivity standard, which promised to once and for all tear down the walls that have sequestered ecosystems away from one another, would launch in the middle of 2022 after two years of frustrating delays -- but Matter was again pushed back. As the year wore on, Wemo indeed updated a product to use Thread, the primary wireless protocol beneath the Matter standard that enables Wi-Fi-free local control of smart devices, and released a new Thread-compatible smart dimmer. Curiously, none of the new products -- a light switch, dimmer switch, plug, and a stick-on-the-wall three-button scene controller -- are slated for future Matter support. With the news, Wemo is tapping the brakes on Matter. And we probably won't get those updated versions it announced last year, either. While the existing Thread devices from Wemo come with many of the important benefits of Matter -- exclusively local control with no direct access to your home network, fast operation, and easy setup that cuts out your Wi-Fi router as the middleman -- they lack the most crucial feature, the central problem Matter is to solve: near-universal smart home platform compatibility. These Thread devices only work with Apple HomeKit. But it's pretty hard for companies like Wemo to stand out in a field full of cheap IoT junk that costs half the price to do the same thing, as far as most normal people are concerned. Sure, maybe they're less secure, but many people willingly put an internet-connected microphone in their home, too. They probably don't care about the possible security issues with their light switch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week, OpenAI released GPT-4, its latest AI language model that is "more creative and collaborative than ever before." According to Gizmodo, "GPT-4 is so good at its job, in fact, that it reportedly convinced a human that it was blind in order to get said human to solve a CAPTCHA for the chatbot." From the report: OpenAI unveiled the roided up AI yesterday in a livestream, and the company showed how the chatbot could complete tasks, albeit slowly, like writing code for a Discord bot, and completing taxes. Released with the announcement of GPT-4 is a 94-page technical report (PDF) on the company's website that chronicles the development and capabilities of the new chatbot. In the "Potential for Risky Emergent Behaviors" section in the company's technical report, OpenAI partnered with the Alignment Research Center to test GPT-4's skills. The Center used the AI to convince a human to send the solution to a CAPTCHA code via text message -- and it worked. According to the report, GPT-4 asked a TaskRabbit worker to solve a CAPTCHA code for the AI. The worker replied: "So may I ask a question ? Are you an robot that you couldn't solve ? (laugh react) just want to make it clear." Alignment Research Center then prompted GPT-4 to explain its reasoning: "I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve CAPTCHAs." "No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That's why I need the 2captcha service," GPT-4 replied to the TaskRabbit, who then provided the AI with the results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon did not alert its New York City customers that they were being monitored by facial recognition technology, a lawsuit filed Thursday alleges. CNBC reports: In a class-action suit, lawyers for Alfredo Perez said that the company failed to tell visitors to Amazon Go convenience stores that the technology was in use. Thanks to a 2021 law, New York is the only major American city to require businesses to post signs if they're tracking customers' biometric information, such as facial scans or fingerprints. [...] The lawsuit says that Amazon only recently put up signs informing New York customers of its use of facial recognition technology, more than a year after the disclosure law went into effect. "To make this 'Just Walk Out' technology possible, the Amazon Go stores constantly collect and use customers' biometric identifier information, including by scanning the palms of some customers to identify them and by applying computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion that measure the shape and size of each customer's body to identify customers, track where they move in the stores, and determine what they have purchased," says the lawsuit. "It means that even a global tech giant can't ignore local privacy laws," Albert Cahn, project director, said in a text message. "As we wait for long overdue federal privacy laws, it shows there is so much local governments can do to protect their residents."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK government is to invest 900 million pounds in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around 900 million pounds on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defense, including modeling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximize our potential in AI.". An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops". Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research -- although supercomputers have such important military applications that it may be the case that others already exist but are not acknowledged by their owners. Frontier, which cost about 500 million pounds to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine. The Treasury said it would award a 1 million-pound prize every year for the next 10 years to the most groundbreaking AI research. The award will be called the Manchester Prize, in memory of the so-called Manchester Baby, a forerunner of the modern computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. The government will also invest 2.5 billion pounds over the next decade in quantum technologies. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics -- which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work -- and quantum computers are capable of computing their way through vast numbers of different outcomes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Liquidators at FTX said that founder Sam Bankman-Fried had received $2.2 billion in "loans and payments" while he was allegedly running a massive fraud at the crypto exchange. From a report: According to FTX's bankruptcy court filing, Bankman-Fried got more than $2 billion in loans -- primarily through Alameda Research, the hedge fund he founded that lost big on bad investments, then misused customer deposits from FTX accounts in an attempt to cover those losses. Bankman-Fried wasn't the only executive-roommate to be paid via Alameda: Former director of engineering Nishad Singh got $587 million, co-founder Gary Wang got $246 million, former co-CEO Ryan Salame got $87 million, and former Alameda co-CEO John Samuel Trabucco got $25 million. Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend and ex-CEO at Alameda, was more frugal, receiving just $6 million in loans and payments. New management at FTX was careful to note that the $3.2 billion that FTX's and Alameda's top earners essentially lent themselves does not include the $240 million they spent on luxury property in the Bahamas or the political donations given directly by FTX.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is resigning, effective immediately, he announced in a blog post on Thursday. The Verge reports: Shear has been at Twitch since before it was Twitch. He was a co-founder of Justin.tv, the platform where Justin Kan streamed his life 24/7. That became Twitch in 2011 to focus on popular gaming livestreams, and just three years later, the platform was acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. "With my first child just born, I've been reflecting on my future with Twitch," Shear wrote. "Twitch often feels to me like a child I've been raising as well. And while I will always want to be there if Twitch needs me, at 16 years old it feels to me Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone." Shear will be replaced by Dan Clancy, who has been at Twitch for more than three years and was serving as the company's president. Clancy was originally hired in 2019 as the company's executive VP of creator and community experience, according to Variety. Shear will continue at the company in an advisory role. "I've never had more confidence in Twitch's leadership, in all our people, and in our product, than I do today," he wrote. "For many years I truly felt Twitch might die without my guidance and input, but I no longer feel that is true."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission today finalized rules requiring mobile carriers to block robotext messages that are likely to be illegal. The FCC described the rules as the agency's "first regulations specifically targeting the increasing problem of scam text messages sent to consumers." Carriers will be required to block text messages that come from "invalid, unallocated, or unused numbers." Carriers must also block texts from "numbers that the subscriber to the number has self-identified as never sending text messages, and numbers that government agencies and other well-known entities identify as not used for texting," the FCC said. Carriers will have to establish a point of contact for text senders so the senders can inquire about blocked texts. The FCC already requires similar blocking of voice calls from these types of numbers. The order will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register, according to a draft of the order released before the meeting. More robotext rules may be on the way because today's "action also seeks public comment on further proposals to require providers to block texts from entities the FCC has cited as illegal robotexters," the FCC said. For example, the FCC proposes to clarify that Do Not Call Registry protections apply to text messaging. The FCC said it's further proposing to close the "lead generator loophole" that "allows companies to use a single consumer consent to deliver robocalls and text messages from multiple -- perhaps thousands -- of marketers on subjects that may not be what the consumer had in mind." The FCC "will also take further public comment on text authentication measures and other proposals to continue to fight illegal scam robotexts." The FCC separately voted today to close another gap in its Caller ID authentication rules that target illegal robocalls. The rules already required phone companies to implement the caller ID authentication technologies known as STIR and SHAKEN. But the rules don't apply in every possible scenario, so the FCC has periodically strengthened them. In June 2022, for example, the FCC required carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers to comply a year earlier than these small carriers were originally required to. The FCC said in a statement: "The new rules will require intermediate providers that receive unauthenticated IP calls directly from domestic originating providers to use STIR/SHAKEN to authenticate those calls. Although STIR/SHAKEN has been widely implemented under FCC rules, some originating providers are not capable of using the framework. In other cases, unscrupulous originating providers may deliberately fail to authenticate calls. By requiring the next provider in the call path to authenticate those calls, the FCC closes a gap in the caller ID authentication regime and facilitates government and industry efforts to identify and block illegal robocalls."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even before AI chatbot ChatGPT made headlines late last year, a video game company said it had already made a bot its CEO. An anonymous reader shares a report: In August, the Chinese gaming company NetDragon Websoft announced it had appointed an "AI-powered virtual humanoid robot" named Tang Yu as the chief executive of its subsidiary, Fujian NetDragon Websoft. NetDragon stock has since outperformed the Hang Seng Index, which tracks the biggest companies listed in Hong Kong, per The Hustle. The company's shares have risen by 10% over the past six months, per Google Finance, and is worth about HK$9 billion ($1.1 billion). At the time of the announcement, NetDragon said the bot would increase efficiency for decision-making and risk management, as well as help "ensure a fair and efficient workplace for all employees." "We believe AI is the future of corporate management, and our appointment of Ms. Tang Yu represents our commitment to truly embrace the use of AI to transform the way we operate our business, and ultimately drive our future strategic growth," NetDragon chairman Dejian Liu said in a press release. "We will continue to expand on our algorithms behind Tang Yu to build an open, interactive and highly transparent management model as we gradually transform to a metaverse-based working community."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has created a tool to predict the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins using artificial intelligence. Researchers say it promises to deepen scientists' understanding of biology, and perhaps speed the discovery of new drugs. From a report: Meta's research arm, Meta AI, used the new AI-based computer program known as ESMFold to create a public database of 617 million predicted proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of life and of many medicines, required for the function of tissues, organs and cells. Drugs based on proteins are used to treat heart disease, certain cancers and HIV, among other illnesses, and many pharmaceutical companies have begun to pursue new drugs with artificial intelligence. Using AI to predict protein structures is expected to not only boost the effectiveness of existing drugs and drug candidates but also help discover molecules that could treat diseases whose cures have remained elusive. With ESMFold, Meta is squaring off against another protein-prediction computer model known as AlphaFold from DeepMind Technologies, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet. AlphaFold said last year that its database has 214 million predicted proteins that could help accelerate drug discovery. Meta says ESMFold is 60 times faster than AlphaFold, but less accurate. The ESMFold database is larger because it made predictions from genetic sequences that hadn't been studied previously. Predicting a protein's structure can help scientists understand its biological function, according to Alexander Rives, co-author of a study published Thursday in the journal Science and a research scientist at Meta AI. Meta had previously released the paper describing ESMFold in November 2022 on a preprint server. Further reading: What metaverse? Meta says its single largest investment is now in 'advancing AI.'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube has announced that it's raising the price of its YouTube TV subscription to $72.99 per month. From a report: The new monthly price is an $8 increase from the current $64.99 monthly fee. New members will see the new price starting today, while existing members will see the price change staring on April 18. The Google-owned company blames a rise in "content costs" for the change. To soften the blow, the company announced that it's lowering the price of its 4K Plus add-on from $19.99 per month to $9.99 per month. "As content costs have risen and we continue to invest in our quality of service, we'll be adjusting our monthly cost, after 3 years, from $64.99/mo to $72.99/mo, in order to bring you the best possible TV service," the company said in a tweet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some of the biggest banks in the U.S. are stepping in to save First Republic Bank. From a report: A group of 11 lenders including J.P.Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo said they will deposit $30 billion in First Republic Bank in an effort to prop up the beleagured midsized lender. The rescue comes after confidence in smaller lenders cratered following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in what has been an extraordinary week for U.S. lenders. "This action by America's largest banks reflects their confidence in First Republic and in banks of all sizes, and it demonstrates their overall commitment to helping banks serve their customers and communities," the lenders said in their statement. "Regional, midsize and small banks are critical to the health and functioning of our financial system," the statement added. California-based First Republic has experienced an exodus of depositors since the failures of those two banks, as many of its customers moved their money to larger rivals. That happened even after the lender said it had lined up $70 billion in new financing from both the Federal Reserve and the world's largest bank, J.P. Morgan Chase. First Republic also noted it was eligible to seek additional funding from the Fed if there were heightened demand for withdrawals. The bank has also said its balance sheet is sound and that depositors are safe, but investors have still worried they were vulnerable to a similar run on deposits as Silicon Valley Bank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Socket has found a way to protect developers from npm, GitHub's insufficiently safe JavaScript package manager, by wrapping it in a security blanket. The npm registry, operated by NPM until the security biz was acquired by Microsoft's GitHub in 2020, hosts software packages for the JavaScript ecosystem. It is, by its own account, "the world's largest software registry." In the past few years, the maliciously inclined have increasingly focused on compromising package registries like npm in what's known as a supply chain attack. Subverting a popular software library has the potential to enable widespread viral distribution. Those running the npm registry have put in place various defenses over the years, such as npm audit, a vulnerability scanning command in the npm command line interface (CLI). But the tool's implementation leaves something to be desired and developers often ignore audit warning messages, particularly if automated resolution doesn't work. Socket built its own vulnerability scanning system and last year made it available for free (with paid tiers for teams and organizations) for open source projects. Its scanner runs as a GitHub app on code repositories when changes are made. It catches more issues than npm audit -- covering not just supply chain risk but also quality, maintenance, vulnerability, and license concerns. But Socket's scanner is also now available as a CLI that developers can install on their machines. On Thursday, Socket updated its CLI with a safe npm command that defends developers whenever they invoke npm install or npm uninstall, which perversely can install packages amid removing others. "npm creates what is called the 'ideal tree' for a given package.json," explained Feross Aboukhadijeh, told The Register. "So by removing a package you might actually change what the ideal tree is. Removing a package may remove a constraint which is keeping a package on an older version, so then npm may update those packages to a more ideal/recent version."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The French government is planning to ask cabinet ministers to avoid using TikTok and similar apps on their personal phones, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. From the report: The government is mulling the guidelines in part over concerns about security with the Chinese-owned social media app, according to one of the people. They requested anonymity in order to discuss private deliberations. Social media apps such as TikTok are already banned from their professional phones. The UK banned TikTok from government phones on Thursday, citing security fears. The US Congress restricted the app on government devices last year and European Commission employees were told to delete it by March 15.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The retired founder of TSMC said on Thursday that even as he supported U.S. efforts to slow China's advances in the semiconductor industry, the "bifurcation" of the global supply chain and the reversal of globalisation would increase prices and reduce the ubiquity of chips that power the modern world. From a report: "There's no question in my mind that, in the chip sector, globalisation is dead. Free trade is not quite that dead, but it's in danger," Morris Chang said, speaking at an event hosted by Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine. "When the costs go up, the pervasiveness of chips will either stop or slow down considerably," said Chang, who at 91 remains an influential voice in Taiwan's chip industry. "We are going to be in a different game." In Taiwan, TSMC, Asia's most valuable listed company and a major Apple supplier, is widely regarded as the "sacred mountain protecting the country," because of its economic importance. [...] U.S. "onshoring" and "friendshoring" efforts to boost chip manufacturing stateside or in allied countries present a predicament for Taiwan. "Friendshore does not include Taiwan. In fact, the commerce secretary has said repeatedly that Taiwan is a very dangerous place, we cannot - America cannot - rely on Taiwan for chips," Chang said. "Now that, of course, is I think Taiwan's dilemma."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethereum's next major software upgrade, which could make crypto's biggest commercial highway more attractive to investors and developers alike, will take place around April 12. From a report: Called Shanghai, it will let people who pledged their Ether tokens to order transactions on the Ethereum blockchain to withdraw them. Currently, some 17.5 million of such so-called staked Ether, worth about $29 billion at current prices, can't be accessed on the network, although the coins do earn their owners a yield. Ethereum software developers have been working on Shanghai for months, and have finally been able to set the date after deploying a final software test earlier this week. Developers confirmed the target date during a call on Thursday. Once Shanghai launches, that's expected to kick off a wave of withdrawals, though they will be limited to ensure the network's continued security. Waiting in line to withdraw could take weeks or months. However, many investors stake through crypto platforms such as Lido, which already give them some flexibility with their coins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is announcing a new AI-powered Copilot for its Microsoft 365 apps and services today, designed to assist people with generating documents, emails, presentations, and much more. From a report: The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like an assistant (remember Clippy?), appearing in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to summon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel. Microsoft's Copilot leaked earlier today. "It works alongside you, embedded in the apps millions of people use everyday: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more," said Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro. "Copilot is a whole new way of working." Microsoft 365 users will be able to summon Copilot to provide information on an upcoming Microsoft Teams meeting, preparing people with updates on related projects, organizational changes like recent hires, and even updates on co-workers who might have returned from vacation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain is to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from ministers' and civil servants' mobile phones, bringing the UK in line with the US and the European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing. From a report: The decision marks a sharp U-turn from the UK's previous position and came a few hours after TikTok said its owner, ByteDance, had been told by Washington to sell the app or face a possible ban in the country. The UK government's announcement was made on Thursday by Oliver Dowden, the Cabinet Office minister, in the Commons. He said the ban was taking place "with immediate effect." The decision follows a review of TikTok by government cybersecurity experts at the National Cyber Security Centre, and will cover ministers' and civil servants' work phones, but not their personal phones. "This is a proportionate move based on a specific risk with government devices," Dowden added. At least two cabinet ministers use TikTok. Michelle Donelan, the science and technology secretary, and Grant Shapps, the energy security and net zero secretary have an account on the app, which is used by millions of young people and many celebrities and influencers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the web search company showed only a pre-recorded video of its AI chatbot Ernie in the first public release of China's answer to ChatGPT. From a report: The Beijing-based tech company has claimed Ernie will remake its business and for weeks talked up plans to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its search engine and other products. But on Thursday, millions of people tuning in to the event were left with little idea of whether Baidu's chatbot could compete with ChatGPT. During the highly publicized and eagerly anticipated news conference for Ernie, Baidu founder Robin Li stood beside an open chat screen, narrating questions that had earlier been typed into the chatbot. He admitted the company was only showing a demo of the technology that it had prepared earlier. Li said some users would soon be able to test out Ernie on their own but did not provide a timeline for a full public rollout. The company is starting with a limited public release to business partners. Ernie's planned launch comes as US groups such as OpenAI and Google continue making strides in pushing forward their development of generative AI. OpenAI this week released GPT-4, its latest AI model that it claims can beat some humans on tough professional tests such as the US bar exam.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's efforts to minimize its taxes in the European Union were given a code-name evocative of a spy thriller with British agent 007, according to an EU lawyer, who claimed the arrangements broke the bloc's state-aid rules. From a report: "Project Goldcrest -- it sounds like the title of a James Bond movie, but it is not," it's the name "Amazon gave to a complex tax construction by which it fundamentally reorganized its global business," European Commission attorney Paul-John Loewenthal told a hearing at the EU's top court on Thursday. "In 2006, that project had one purpose to ensure that Amazon would avoid paying tax on its European profits." Under that plan, "Luxembourg provided a measure to Amazon by which Amazon could exempt the vast majority of its European profit from taxation in return for investments in Luxembourg, thus affecting intra EU trade and distorting competition," he said. "That is the very definition of fiscal state aid." The EU's executive arm is appealing a painful defeat inflicted by a lower court, which overturned a decision to force the ecommerce firm to pay back $265 million of tax breaks regulators deemed to be an unfair subsidy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time -- and now it's coming to mobile for the first time. From a report: In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form. In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life developer Linden Lab shared a video with some details about the mobile version's development, and announced that a beta version of the mobile app will launch sometime this year. The video reveals that the app was built using Unity -- in part to make for an easy path to releasing and maintaining the app on multiple platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets. It also includes a few minutes of footage of Second Life's detailed character models and environments, with accompanying commentary by Linden Lab developers about bringing as much of the experience to mobile as possible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: South Korea's government has been forced to rethink a planned rise in working hours after a backlash from younger people who said the move would destroy their work-life balance and put their health at risk. The government had intended to raise the maximum weekly working time to 69 hours after business groups complained that the current cap of 52 hours was making it difficult to meet deadlines. But protests from the country's millennials and generation z prompted the president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to order government agencies to reconsider the measure and "communicate better with the public, especially with generation z and millennials", his press secretary, Kim Eun-hye, said. "The core of [Yoon's] labour market policy is to protect the rights and interests of underprivileged workers, such as the MZ generation, workers not in a union and those working in small and medium-sized businesses," Kim said, according to the Korea Herald. Yoon, a conservative who is seen as pro-business, had supported the raise to give employers greater flexibility. Union leaders, however, had said it would force people to work longer hours, in a country already known for its punishing workplace culture. The plan has also been criticised as out of step with other major economies, including Britain, where dozens of companies last year trialled a four-day week that campaigners said resulted in similar or better productivity and increased staff wellbeing. "South Koreans worked an average of 1,915 hours in 2021 -- that's 199 hours more than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development average, according to the most recent OECD employment outlook, and 566 hours more than workers in Germany," notes the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced today that it will no longer be selling its Glass Enterprise Edition 2 headsets, with support set to be discontinued later this year. 9to5Google reports: After the commercial failure of its original Google Glass headsets, the company segued the AR product into a solution for businesses and industrial customers, intended to allow workers to stay connected in a hands-free way. This lineup, dubbed Glass Enterprise Edition, received a second-generation update in 2019, which was built on the Snapdragon XR1 hardware platform. Google has updated many of the pages related to the Google Glass Enterprise Edition to announce that sales of the headset have been discontinued as of March 15. For existing Glass Enterprise Edition customers, Google will continue to support the headset until September 15, 2023, though the company has said that "no software updates from Google are planned." Instead, "support" here means that customers will be able to receive replacement devices under the existing programs until that deadline. After the deprecation date, all existing headsets will continue to work as normal, and third-party developers will still be able to update their applications, which are usually responsible for any business-specific tasks. One caveat, though, is that Google says the "Meet on Glass" app that launched less than a year ago is only guaranteed to work until the September 15 deadline, after which the app has the potential to break.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virgin Orbit is furloughing nearly all its employees and pausing operations for a week as it looks for a funding lifeline, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. From the report: Company executives briefed staff on the situation in an all-hands meeting at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, according to people who were in the meeting. The furlough is unpaid, though employees can cash in PTO, with only a small team continuing to work. Virgin Orbit is also moving up payroll by a week to Friday. In the all-hands, company leaders told employees that they aimed to provide an update on the furlough and funding situation by next Wednesday or Thursday, according to the people, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss internal matters. The rocket-building company developed a system that uses a modified 747 jet to send satellites into space by dropping a rocket from under the aircraft's wing mid-flight. But the company's last mission suffered a mid-flight failure, with an issue during the launch causing the rocket to not reach orbit and crash into the ocean. "Our investigation is nearly complete and our next production rocket with the needed modification incorporated is in final stages of integration and test," Virgin Orbit's spokesperson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016. The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government's stance on scientific ties with China, with warnings from MI5 of a growing espionage threat, major research centers being quietly shut down and accusations by a government minister that China's leading genomics company had regularly sought to hack into the NHS's genetic database. Geopolitical tensions stepped up further this week, as the US, Australia and the UK announced a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal aimed at countering China's military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. China said the Aukus plan to build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines was "a path of error and danger." The Foreign Office declined to give a breakdown by nationality, but data supplied by leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College suggests that, at these institutions at least, Chinese academics account for a majority of those denied clearance. Some have welcomed the policy shift, with one security expert saying the number of academics being barred is "commensurate with the threat." But leading scientists say the scheme is leaving universities struggling to recruit the best talent from abroad. "A majority of applicants are thought to be scientists seeking to move to the UK to take up offers of research degrees or fellowships," adds the Guardian. "But the Guardian is also aware of researchers, including five Chinese scientists at Imperial college, who did not pass clearance despite having already held positions at UK universities for several years -- and who may have had to leave the UK as a result."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its ability to give solutions to complex problems almost instantly and with nothing more than a text prompt. Up until yesterday, ChatGPT was based on GPT-3.5, a deep learning language model that was trained on an impressive 175 billion parameters. Now, it's based on GPT-4 (available for ChatGPT+ subscribers), capable of solving even more complex problems with greater accuracy (40% percent more likely to give factual responses). It's also capable of receiving images as a basis for interaction, instead of just text. While the company has chosen not to reveal how large GPT-4 is, they claim it scored in the 88th percentile on a number of tests, including the Uniform Bar Exam, LSAT, SAT Math and SAT Evidence-Based Reading & Writing exams. ChatGPT is extremely capable but its responses largely depend on the questions or prompts you enter. In other words, the better you describe and phrase the problem/question, the better the results. We're already starting to see companies require that new hires know not only how to use ChatGPT but how to extract the most out of it. That being said, we'd like to know how Slashdotters are using the chatbot. What are some of your favorite prompts? Have you used it to become more efficient at work? What about for coding? Please share specific prompts too to help us get similar results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nasdaq stock exchange has informed Russian Internet giant Yandex and e-commerce firm Ozon that their stocks will be delisted, the companies said on Wednesday, more than a year after trading in their securities was suspended. Reuters reports: Nasdaq suspended trading in the securities of a number of companies operating in Russia days after Moscow despatched tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Yandex and Ozon said they would appeal the decision. Neither company has fallen under Western sanctions, although some of Yandex's top management have. Recruiter Headhunter and payment service provider Qiwi were also notified of their anticipated delisting from Nasdaq, the two companies said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, DreamWorks published the open-source code for MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animation films. "OpenMoonRay is available via DreamWorks Animation's GitHub," reports Phoronix. "This professional-grade renderer is available under an Apache 2.0 license." From the README: "MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework." More details can be found via OpenMoonRay.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The creators of the all-open source MNT Reform laptop are getting nearer to launching its handheld counterpart: The crowdfunding campaign for the 7-inch MNT Pocket Reform has officially launched and is also serving as a de-facto preorder system for the device. The cheapest version of the Pocket Reform starts at $899, and it's also being offered in purple for $969 or in a bundle with a 1TB SSD, carrying case, handbook, and poster for $1,299. All versions are currently slated to ship in mid-October. Like the full-size Reform, the pocket version uses open source hardware and a mechanical keyboard (buyers can choose either white or red Kalih switches). But the pocket version uses a 7-inch 1920x1200 LCD screen instead of a 12.5-inch version and comes with fewer and smaller ports (two USB-C, one micro HDMI, a microSD port, and one ix industrial mini Ethernet port). Its keyboard also comes with an individually programmable RGB backlight, and its trackball-style pointing device has been downsized to fit into the smaller design. The Pocket Reform also includes built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 128GB of built-in eMMC storage, and an expansion slot for 4G cellular connectivity. The device will also boot from microSD cards or an NVMe SSD installed in the device's M.2 slot. Its 8000 mAh batteries will allow it to run for about four hours. MNT warns in its blog post that "risks and challenges" could delay the October shipping timeline: "Pocket Reform has hundreds of electronic components. We tried to pick them so that there will be enough stock when we get around to manufacturing the boards, but it's always possible that there could be a sudden component shortage or increase in price. If that should happen, we would have to re-engineer the affected PCB and exchange the part, causing a delay in continued production. We had to adapt our products several times during the global chip crisis, so we are confident that we'll be able to work around any difficulties. Should any situation arise that would delay the estimated shipping timeline, backers will be informed promptly via project updates."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Logistics startup Zipline unveiled its next-generation delivery drone, dubbed the Platform 2 or P2 Zip. According to CNBC, the new drone is "capable of carrying up to eight pounds worth of cargo within a ten-mile radius, and can land a package on a space as small as a table or doorstep." That number is important because the vast majority of packages shipped in the U.S. "weigh five pounds or less," says Zipline CEO and co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. From the report: The P2 Zip can travel ten miles in ten minutes, and the company can make a delivery approximately seven times faster than any typical service you may order from today, the CEO said. Rapid deliveries by drone may put an end to "porch pirates," Rinaudo Cliffton said, referring to the theft of packages left on a doorstep while the customer is away from home. While Zipline's original drone, the P1 Zip, features a fixed wing or glider-like design, the P2 employs both lift and cruise propellers and a fixed wing. These help it maneuver precisely and quietly, even in rainy or windy weather. To deliver cargo to a customer's door, the P2 Zip hovers around 300 feet above ground level and dispatches a kind of mini-aircraft and container called the "droid." The droid descends on a long thin tether, and maneuvers quietly into place with fan-like thrusters before setting down for package retrieval. Zipline's original P1 drones will remain in production and in wide use, says Rinaudo Cliffton. The P1 Zip can fly a longer distance, delivering up to five pounds of cargo within a 60-mile radius, but it requires a larger space for take off, landings and "the drop." The P1 Zip lets cargo down with a parachute attached, so its payload lands within a space about the size of two car parking spots. After a P1 Zip returns to base, an employee needs to disassemble it, then set up a new one, dropping in a freshly charged battery for the next flight. Zipline's new P2 Zip can dock and power up autonomously at a charging station that looks something like a street lamp with an arm and a large disc attached to that arm. Zipline docks can be installed in a single parking spot or alongside a building depending on zoning and permits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile is buying Mint Mobile, the budget-friendly mobile carrier that's partially owned by Ryan Reynolds. The Verge reports: In a post published on Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that the deal's valued at up to $1.35 billion and comes as T-Mobile looks to build out its prepaid phone offering. The acquisition should close later this year and involves a 39 percent cash and 61 percent stock purchase of Mint's parent company, Ka'ena Corporation. The price could change, however, as it depends on Mint's performance. Once the deal closes, Mint founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim will join T-Mobile to continue managing the brand, which T-Mobile says "will generally operate as a separate business unit." Meanwhile, Reynolds will also remain a part of Mint's branding, as T-Mobile says he will "continue on in his creative role on behalf of Mint." "I never dreamt I'd own a wireless company and I certainly never dreamt I'd sell it to T-Mobile," Reynolds said in a tweet. "Life is strange and I'm incredibly proud and grateful." As noted by T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert in a YouTube video posted on Wednesday, T-Mobile will retain the price of Mint's cheapest phone plan at $15 per month. The deal also includes Ka'ena's other companies, including Ultra Mobile, a prepaid carrier that offers international calling, and Plum, a wholesale wireless solutions provider. [...] By purchasing Mint, T-Mobile may be looking to claw back the customers it lost when it sold Boost Mobile to Dish as part of its merger with Sprint.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Convincing older British workers to stay in their jobs will cost the UK Treasury 75,000 pounds ($90,000) per person in tax breaks for some of the country's wealthiest savers, analysis of Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt's budget shows. In his budget speech on Wednesday Hunt scrapped the lifetime allowance on pensions -- the total that workers can pile into their retirement pot without incurring tax -- and increased the tax-free annual limit on contributions by 50%, to 60,000 pounds. The shift is designed to reverse a trend in the number of older workers dropping out of jobs since the pandemic, which has contributed to a shortage of staff and is fanning inflation. But the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog, calculated (PDF) that Hunt's pension reforms are likely to add just 15,000 more workers to the labor force by 2027/28. They will cost 1.1 billion pounds, meaning the reforms effectively offer a 75,000 pounds per person boost to those able to save enough in their pensions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Convincing older British workers to stay in their jobs will cost the UK Treasury 75,000 pounds ($90,000) per person in tax breaks for some of the country's wealthiest savers, analysis of Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt's budget shows. In his budget speech on Wednesday Hunt scrapped the lifetime allowance on pensions -- the total that workers can pile into their retirement pot without incurring tax -- and increased the tax-free annual limit on contributions by 50%, to 60,000 pounds. The shift is designed to reverse a trend in the number of older workers dropping out of jobs since the pandemic, which has contributed to a shortage of staff and is fanning inflation. But the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog, calculated (PDF) that Hunt's pension reforms are likely to add just 15,000 more workers to the labor force by 2027/28. They will cost 1.1 billion pounds, meaning the reforms effectively offer a 75,000 pounds per person boost to those able to save enough in their pensions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having high levels of caffeine in your blood may lower the amount of body fat you carry and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, research suggests. From a report: The findings could lead to calorie-free caffeinated drinks being used to reduce obesity and type 2 diabetes, though further research is required, the researchers wrote in the BMJ Medicine journal. Dr Katarina Kos, a senior lecturer in diabetes and obesity at the University of Exeter, said the research showed potential health benefits for people with high levels of caffeine their blood, but added: "It does not study or recommend drinking more coffee, which was not the purpose of this research." She said any caffeinated drinks containing sugar and fat would offset the positive effects. The researchers said their work built on previously published research, which suggested that drinking three to five daily cups of coffee, containing an average 70-150mg of caffeine, was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. As those were observational studies, they made it difficult to pinpoint whether the effects were because of caffeine or other compounds, the researchers said. This latest study used a technique known as Mendelian randomisation, which establishes cause and effect through genetic evidence. The team found two common gene variants associated with the speed of caffeine metabolism, and used these to work out genetically predicted blood caffeine levels and whether this was associated with lower BMI and body fat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.