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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: San Francisco startup Based Hardware announced during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week the launch of a new AI wearable, Omi, to boost productivity. The device can be worn as a necklace where Omi's AI assistant can be activated by saying "Hey Omi." The startup also claims Omi can be attached to the side of your head, using medical tape, using a "brain interface" to understand when you're talking to it. The startup's founder, Nik Shevchenko, started marketing this device on Kickstarter as "Friend," but changed the device's name after another San Francisco hardware maker launched his own Friend device and bought the domain name for $1.8 million. Shevchenko, a Thiel fellow with a history of eye-grabbing stunts, is taking a slightly different approach with Omi. Instead of seeing the device as a smartphone replacement or an AI companion, he wants Omi to be a complementary device to your phone that boosts your productivity. The Omi device itself is a small, round orb that looks like it fell out of a pack of Mentos. The consumer version costs $89 and will start shipping in Q2 of 2025. However, you can order a developer version for delivery today for roughly $70. Based Hardware says the Omi device can answer your questions, summarize your conversations, create to-do lists, and help schedule meetings. The device is constantly listening and running your conversations through GPT-4o, and it also can remember the context about each user to offer personalized advice. In an interview with TechCrunch, Shevchenko says he understands that there may be privacy concerns with a device that's always listening. That's why he built Omi on an open source platform where users can see where their data is going, or choose to store it locally. Omi's open source platform also allows developers to build their own applications or use the AI model of their choice. Shevchenko says developers have already created more than 250 apps on Omi's app store. [...] It's unclear if the "brain interface" of Omi actually works, but the startup is tackling a fairly simple use case to start. Shevchenko wants his device to understand whether a user is talking to Omi or not, without using one of its wake words.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft temporarily rolled back its Bing Image Creator upgrade from OpenAI's DALL-E 3 PR16 to the previous PR13 version after users reported degraded image quality, including cartoonish and "lifeless" results. TechCrunch reports: Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it was upgrading the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company's Bing search engine. Microsoft promised that the new model -- the latest version of OpenAI's DALL-E 3 model, code-named PR16 -- would allow users to create images "twice as fast as before" with "higher quality." But it didn't deliver. Complaints quickly flooded X and Reddit. "The DALL-E we used to love is gone forever," said one Redditor. "I'm using ChatGPT now because Bing has become useless for me," wrote another. The blowback was such that Microsoft said it'll restore the previous model to Bing Image Creator until it can address the issues. "We've been able to [reproduce] some of the issues reported, and plan to revert to [DALL-E 3] PR13 until we can fix them," Jordi Ribas, head of search at Microsoft, said in a post on X Tuesday evening. "The deployment process is very slow unfortunately. It started over a week ago and will take 2-3 more weeks to get to 100%."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok has been pushing the platform's sister app, Lemon8, encouraging users to migrate via sponsored posts amid a looming ban. Axios reports: In the last few weeks, Lemon8 has been promoting its app to TikTok users through sponsored TikTok videos. In one sponsored post, TikTok user @miller.dailylife shares a video with a creator saying, "TikTok actually has another backup app. It's called Lemon8 ... and it automatically signs you in with your TikTok so you can still keep the same TikTok name and things like that. And it's supposed to transfer your followers over. ... Once you add Lemon8, it automatically pops up on your TikTok bio, so that people can just click on it. So, just so you guys know, now that they're trying to do this ban, if you want to have somewhere else to go where the government is not 100% controlling what we see, what we consume ... Just go ahead and go on to Lemon8." In November, TikTok began informing users of its sister app, Lemon8, that beginning late that month Lemon8 would be powered by TikTok, and their TikTok usernames would also be used on Lemon8. "Some of your data on TikTok will be used to power services on lemon8," the notice says. "Your Lemon8 profile link will be shown to your TikTok profile publicly by default," it continues. "You can choose not to show it by editing your TikTok profile." Last March, Lemon8 jumped into the U.S. App Store's Top 10 list shortly after it launched in the U.S. It currently ranks as one of the top-ranking free apps on Apple's app store. The report notes that the TikTok ban law also applies to other apps owned by TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance, like Lemon8. "ByteDance could be betting that regulators and app store companies are so focused on TikTok that they won't pay attention to its other apps," says Axios.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BleepingComputer's Sergiu Gatlan reports: "Today, the White House announced the launch of the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, a new cybersecurity safety label for internet-connected consumer devices. The Cyber Trust Mark label, which will appear on smart products sold in the United States later this year, will help American consumers determine whether the devices they want to buy are safe to install in their homes. It's designed for consumer smart devices, such as home security cameras, TVs, internet-connected appliances, fitness trackers, climate control systems, and baby monitors, and it signals that the internet-connected device comes with a set of security features approved by NIST. Vendors will label their products with the Cyber Trust Mark logo if they meet the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity criteria. These criteria include using unique and strong default passwords, software updates, data protection, and incident detection capabilities. Consumers can scan the QR code included next to the Cyber Trust Mark labels for additional security information, such as instructions on changing the default password, steps for securely configuring the device, details on automatic updates (including how to access them if they are not automatic), the product's minimum support period, and a notification if the manufacturer does not offer updates for the device. "Americans are worried about the rise of criminals remotely hacking into home security systems to unlock doors, or malicious attackers tapping into insecure home cameras to illicitly record conversations," the Biden administration said on Tuesday. "The White House launched this bipartisan effort to educate American consumers and give them an easy way to assess the cybersecurity of such products, as well as incentivize companies to produce more cybersecure devise [sic], much as EnergyStar labels did for energy efficiency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa has said Meta's decision to end factchecking on its platforms and remove restrictions on certain topics means "extremely dangerous times" lie ahead for journalism, democracy and social media users. The American-Filipino journalist said Mark Zuckerberg's move to relax content moderation on the Facebook and Instagram platforms would lead to a "world without facts" and that was "a world that's right for a dictator." "Mark Zuckerberg says it's a free speech issue -- that's completely wrong," Ressa told the AFP news service. "Only if you're profit-driven can you claim that; only if you want power and money can you claim that. This is about safety." Ressa, a co-founder of the Rappler news site, won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 in recognition of her "courageous fight for freedom of expression." She faced multiple criminal charges and investigations after publishing stories critical of the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Ressa rejected Zuckerberg's claim that factcheckers had been "too politically biased" and had "destroyed more trust than they've created." "Journalists have a set of standards and ethics," Ressa said. "What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform." The decision meant "extremely dangerous times ahead" for journalism, democracy and social media users, she said. [...] Ressa said she would do everything she could to "ensure information integrity." "This is a pivotal year for journalism survival," she said. "We'll do all we can to make sure that happens."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telegram's Transparency Report reveals a sharp increase in U.S. government data requests, with 900 fulfilled requests affecting 2,253 users. "The news shows a massive spike in the number of data requests fulfilled by Telegram after French authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in August, in part because of the company's unwillingness to provide user data in a child abuse investigation," notes 404 Media. From the report: Between January 1 and September 30, 2024, Telegram fulfilled 14 requests "for IP addresses and/or phone numbers" from the United States, which affected a total of 108 users, according to Telegram's Transparency Reports bot. But for the entire year of 2024, it fulfilled 900 requests from the U.S. affecting a total of 2,253 users, meaning that the number of fulfilled requests skyrocketed between October and December, according to the newly released data. "Fulfilled requests from the United States of America for IP address and/or phone number: 900," Telegram's Transparency Reports bot said when prompted for the latest report by 404 Media. "Affected users: 2253," it added. A month after Durov's arrest in August, Telegram updated its privacy policy to say that the company will provide user data, including IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to valid legal orders. Up until then, the privacy policy only mentioned it would do so when concerning terror cases, and said that such a disclosure had never happened anyway. Even though the data technically covers the entire of 2024, the jump from a total of 108 affected users in October to 2253 as of now, indicates that the vast majority of fulfilled data requests were in the last quarter of 2024, showing a huge increase in the number of law enforcement requests that Telegram completed. You can access the platform's transparency reports here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register's Connor Jones reports: Marc Rogers, DEF CON's head of security, faces tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills following an accident that left him with a broken neck and temporary quadriplegia. The prominent industry figure, whose work has spanned roles at tech companies such as Vodafone and Okta, including ensuring the story lines on Mr Robot and The Real Hustle were factually sound, is recovering in hospital. [...] Rogers said it will be around four to six weeks before he returns to basic independence and is able to travel, but a full recovery will take up to six months. He begins a course of physical therapy today, but his insurance will only cover the first of three required weeks, prompting friends to set up a fundraiser to cover the difference. Rogers has an impressive cyber CV. Beginning life in cybersecurity back in the '80s when he went by the handle Cjunky, he has gone on to assume various high profile roles in the industry. In addition to the decade leading Vodafone UK's cybersecurity and being the VP of cybersecurity strategy at Okta, as already mentioned, Rogers has also worked as head of security at Cloudflare and founded Vectra, among other experiences. Now he heads up security at DEF CON, is a member of the Ransomware Taskforce, and is the co-founder and CTO at AI observability startup nbhd.ai. If you hadn't heard of him from any of these roles, or from his work in the entertainment biz, he's also known for his famous research into Apple's Touch ID sensor, which he was able to compromise on both the iPhone 5S and 6 during his time as principal researcher at Lookout. Other consumer-grade kit to get the Rogers treatment include the short-lived Google Glass devices, also while he was at Lookout, and the Tesla Model S back in 2015. "It's a sad fact that in the US GoFundMe has become the de facto standard for covering insurance shortfalls," Rogers said. "I will be forever grateful to my friends who stood it up for me and those who donated to it so that I can resume making bad guys cry as soon as feasibly possible." The cybersecurity community has rallied together to support Rogers' fundraiser, which has accrued over $83,000 in donations. The goal is $100,000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T, following last year's embarrassing botched update that kicked every device off its wireless network and blocked over 92 million phone calls, is now promising full-day bill credits to mobile customers for future outages that last at least 60 minutes and meet certain other criteria. A similar promise is being made to fiber customers for unplanned outages lasting at least 20 minutes, but only if the customer uses an AT&T-provided gateway. The "AT&T Guarantee" announced today has caveats that can make it possible for a disruption to not be covered. AT&T says the promised mobile bill credits are "for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers." The full-day bill credits do not include a prorated amount for the taxes and fees imposed on a monthly bill. The "bill credit will be calculated using the daily rate customer is charged for wireless service only (excludes taxes, fees, device payments, and any add-on services," AT&T said. If an outage lasts more than 24 hours, a customer will receive another full-day bill credit for each additional day. If only nine or fewer AT&T towers aren't functioning, a customer won't get a credit even if they lose service for an hour. The guarantee kicks in when a "minimum 10 towers [are] out for 60 or more minutes resulting from a single incident," and the customer "was connected to an impacted tower at the time the outage occurs," and "loses service for at least 60 consecutive minutes as a result of the outage." The guarantee "excludes events beyond the control of AT&T, including but not limited to, natural disasters, weather-related events, or outages caused by third parties." AT&T says it will determine "in its sole discretion" whether the disruption is "a qualifying" network outage. "Consumers will automatically receive a bill credit equaling a full day of service and we'll reach out to our small business customers with options to help make it right," AT&T said. When there's an outage, AT&T said it will "notify you via e-mail or SMS to inform you that you've been impacted. Once the interruption has been resolved, we'll contact you with details about your bill credit." If AT&T fails to provide the promised credit for any reason, customers will have to call AT&T or visit an AT&T store. To qualify for the similar fiber-outage promise, "customers must use AT&T-provided gateways," the firm said. There are other caveats that can prevent a home Internet customer from getting a bill credit. AT&T said the fiber-outage promise "excludes events beyond the control of AT&T, including but not limited to, natural disasters, weather-related events, loss of service due to downed or cut cable wires at a customer residence, issues with wiring inside customer residence, and power outages at customer premises. Also excludes outages resulting from planned maintenance." AT&T notes that some residential fiber customers in multi-dwelling units "have an account with AT&T but are not billed by AT&T for Internet service." In the case of outages, these customers would not get bill credits but would be given the option to redeem a reward card that's valued at $5 or more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indonesia will continue to block iPhone 16 sales despite Apple's planned $1 billion AirTag factory investment, as the facility does not meet local content requirements for smartphones, Industry Minister Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita said on Wednesday. Indonesia banned iPhone 16 sales last year after Apple failed to meet rules requiring 35% locally-made components in smartphones sold domestically.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks like Samsung is finally ready to roll out a paid subscription for its AI-powered smartphones, but it might not look like what we were expecting. According to ETNews, Samsung Electronics vice chair Han Jong-hee has confirmed that the company's AI Subscription Club, which launched last December for some of Samsung's home appliances in South Korea, will soon roll out to both Galaxy phones and the upcoming Ballie AI robot. "We will apply the subscription service to Galaxy smartphones starting next month," he says. "Ballie will be introduced first in Korea and the US, and we plan to supply it as a subscription in Korea."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As music sales and streaming revenue reaches a high of $3 billion -- the highest since 2001, not accounting for significant inflation -- the UK video game market, which has grown almost continually for decades, has shrunk by 4.4%. The most significant decline was in boxed video game sales, down 35%. Data from Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA) puts the total worth of the UK video game market in 2024 at $5.7 billion, double the music market and behind TV and movies at $6.2 billion. The numbers show a shift in players' purchasing habits that has been ongoing for years, from physical games to digital downloads and in-game purchases in popular, established games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Boxed games now account for 27.7% of new game sales in the UK, according to ERA data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will begin enforcing storage limits on unlicensed OneDrive accounts from January 27, 2025, ending a loophole that allowed organizations to retain departed employees' data without cost. Data from accounts unlicensed for over 93 days will move to recycle bins for another 93 days before permanent deletion, unless under retention policies. Archived data retrieval will cost $0.60 per gigabyte plus $0.05 monthly per gigabyte. Organizations must either retrieve data, add licenses, or risk losing access, Microsoft has warned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Japanese government published an alert on Wednesday accusing a Chinese hacking group of targeting and breaching dozens of government organizations, companies, and individuals in the country since 2019. From a report: Japan's National Police Agency and the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity attributed the years-long hacking spree to a group called MirrorFace. "The MirrorFace attack campaign is an organized cyber attack suspected to be linked to China, with the primary objective of stealing information related to Japan's national security and advanced technology," the authorities wrote in the alert, according to a machine translation. A longer version of the alert said the targets included Japan's Foreign and Defense ministries, the country's space agency, as well as politicians, journalists, private companies and tech think tanks, according to the Associated Press. In July 2024 Japan's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) wrote in a blog post that MirrorFace's "targets were initially media, political organisations, think tanks and universities, but it has shifted to manufacturers and research institutions since 2023."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry's net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action. JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December. Analysts have said the withdrawals are an attempt to head off "anti-woke" attacks from rightwing US politicians, which are expected to escalate when Trump is sworn in as the country's 47th president in just under a fortnight. Trump's vows to deregulate the energy sector, dismantle environmental rules and "drill, baby, drill," were a big part of his campaign platform and are expected to form a key part of his blueprint for governing the US, the world's biggest oil and gas producer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former MoviePass CEO Theodore Farnsworth has pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges for misleading investors about the movie subscription service's "unlimited plan" and its parent company's capabilities, U.S. prosecutors said. Farnsworth falsely claimed the $9.95 monthly unlimited movie plan was sustainable and that Helios & Matheson Analytics could monetize subscriber data through artificial intelligence, knowing both statements were untrue. He faces up to 20 years in prison for MoviePass-related fraud and five years for a separate conspiracy charge involving Vinco Ventures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's AI chips are advancing faster than Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry's historical performance benchmark, according to chief executive Jensen Huang. "Our systems are progressing way faster than Moore's Law," Huang told TechCrunch. Nvidia's chips have improved thousand-fold over the past decade, outpacing Moore's Law's prediction of doubled transistor density every year, Huang said. He adds: We can build the architecture, the chip, the system, the libraries, and the algorithms all at the same time. If you do that, then you can move faster than Moore's Law, because you can innovate across the entire stack. [...] Moore's Law was so important in the history of computing because it drove down computing costs. The same thing is going to happen with inference where we drive up the performance, and as a result, the cost of inference is going to be less.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang believes "very useful" quantum computers are likely decades away, tempering expectations for the emerging technology. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it's probably on the late side," Huang said during Nvidia's analyst day. "If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it's finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom. News of Akamai's decision to end CDN services in China emerged in a letter it recently published and sent to customers and partners that opens by reminding them the company has a "commitment to providing world-class delivery and security solutions" -- and must therefore inform them that "Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date." Customers are offered a choice: do nothing and then be moved to an Akamai CDN located outside China, or use similar services from Chinese companies Tencent Cloud and Wangsu Science & Technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who get their coffee hit in the morning reap benefits that are not seen in those who have shots later in the day, according to the first major study into the health benefits of the drink at different times. Analysis of the coffee consumption of more than 40,000 adults found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease during a 10-year follow-up period than those who went without. But the benefits to heart health appeared to vanish in people who drank coffee throughout the day, the researchers found, with medical records showing no significant reduction in mortality for all-day drinkers compared with those who avoided coffee. [...] The study suggests that a morning dose of coffee is better for the heart than an evening one, but it does not explain why. One possible explanation is that drinking coffee later in the day can disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This in turn affects sleep, inflammation and blood pressure, all of which can harm heart health. In an accompanying editorial, Prof Thomas Luscher, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London, notes that many all-day drinkers sleep poorly, adding that coffee seems to suppress melatonin, a hormone that is important for inducing sleep in the brain. The effects are driven largely by caffeine, but coffee contains hundreds of other bioactive compounds that affect our physiology. The researchers say some substances in the blood that drive inflammation often peak in the morning and could be countered by anti-inflammatory compounds in a morning coffee. "This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee," they write. "Overall, we must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy," Luscher writes. "Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!" The study has been published in the European Heart Journal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Xiangshan project aims to deliver a high-performance RISC-V processor by 2025. If it succeeds, it could be "enormously significant" for three reasons, writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. It would elevate RISC-V from low-end silicon to datacenter-level capabilities, leverage the open-source Mulan PSL-2.0 license to disrupt proprietary chip models like Arm and Intel, and reduce China's dependence on foreign technology, mitigating the impact of international sanctions on advanced processors. From the report: The prospect of a 2025 debut appeared on Sunday in a post to Chinese social media service Weibo, penned by Yungang Bao of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The academy has created a project called Xiangshan that aims to use the permissively licensed RISC-V ISA to create a high-performance chip, with the Scala source code to the designs openly available. Bao is a leader of the project, and has described the team's ambition to create a company that does for RISC-V what Red Hat did for Linux -- although he said that before Red Hat changed the way it made the source code of RHEL available to the public. The Xiangshan project has previously aspired to six-monthly releases, though it appears its latest design to be taped out was a second-gen chip named Nanhu that emerged in late 2023. That silicon ran at 2GHz and was built on a 14nm process node. The project has since worked on a third-gen design, named Kunminghu, and published the image [here] depicting an overview of its non-trivial micro-architecture.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons are quantum entangled, challenging traditional views of proton structure and revealing a more complex, dynamic system influenced by strong interactions. Space.com reports: Entanglement is the aspect of quantum physics that says two affected particles can instantaneously influence each other's "state" no matter how widely separated they are -- even if they are on opposite sides of the universe. Albert Einstein founded his theories of relativity on the notion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, however, something that should preclude the instantaneous nature of entanglement. As a result, Einstein was so troubled by entanglement he famously described it as "spukhafte Fernwirkung" or "spooky action at a distance." Yet, despite Einstein's skepticism about entanglement, this "spooky" phenomenon has been verified over and over again. Many of those verifications have concerned testing increasing distances over which entanglement can be demonstrated. This new test took the opposite approach, investigating entanglement over a distance of just one quadrillionth of a meter, finding it actually occurs within individual protons. The team found that the sharing of information that defines entanglement occurs across whole groups of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons within a proton. "Before we did this work, no one had looked at entanglement inside of a proton in experimental high-energy collision data," team member and Brookhaven Lab physicist Zhoudunming Tu said in a statement. "For decades, we've had a traditional view of the proton as a collection of quarks and gluons, and we've been focused on understanding so-called single-particle properties, including how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the proton. "Now, with evidence that quarks and gluons are entangled, this picture has changed. We have a much more complicated, dynamic system." The team's research, the culmination of six years of work, refines scientists' understanding of how entanglement influences the structure of protons. The team's research was published in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler's. In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself. "The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words," he said. "But they weren't." The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called "Rabbi Bot," an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A.I. version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer. Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with A.I. in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons. [...] Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously. The report's author draws a parallel to previous generations' initial apprehension -- and eventual embrace -- of transformative technologies like radio, television, and the internet. "For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s," the report says. "Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.'s potential -- and fears of it -- to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The shift from paywalled to open-access scientific publishing is progressing, driven in part by platforms like Sci-Hub -- a website that allows users to upload PDFs of published papers and share them with anyone. While the shadow library website has faced ongoing attempts by publishers to block access, it has another problem: the platform features many outdated or retracted papers that could spread misinformation or flawed findings. Ars Technica reports: Sci-Hub works a bit like a combination of cache and aggregator for published materials. Whenever it gets a request for a paper that's not already in its database, it uses leaked login credentials to go to the website of whatever journal published the paper and obtain a copy. If it already has a copy, however, it will simply serve that up instead. This leaves open the possibility that it will have obtained a copy of a paper prior to its retraction and continue to distribute that copy after the paper has been retracted. To check this, the researchers obtained a list of nearly 17,000 retracted papers and searched for them on Sci-Hub. They then visually examined the documents that were returned. They found that 85 percent of them contained no indication that the paper had been retracted. "The availability of [unlabeled retracted articles] in the field of health sciences is particularly high," they note, "which indicates a significant risk of their unintended use and further citation in future research." While corrections are less severe than retractions, they're likely to suffer a similar problem. And corrections will often involve the technical details of a paper -- the experimental approaches or raw data that will be critical for anyone wanting to replicate or extend previously published results. So, if anything, their impact will be more significant. Ars notes that a system called Crossmark is available to help find the most up-to-date version of a paper, including any corrections or retraction notices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to police, the man killed in the January 1st Las Vegas Cybertruck blast used ChatGPT to plan the explosion. The Hill reports: In a press conference, Tuesday, Las Vegas police released more details of the intentions of 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, who died of a gunshot wound prior to the car exploding. Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said it was concerning that Livelsberger used ChatGPT, a popular artificial intelligence model created by OpenAI, to carry out the explosion. According to police, Livelsberger asked ChatGPT various questions, including where the largest gun stores in Denver were, information about the explosive targets Tannerite and pistols. "We knew that AI was going to change the game at some point or another in really all of our lives and certainly, I think this is the first incidence that I'm aware of on U.S. soil where ChatGPT is utilized to help an individual build a particular device, to learn information all across the country as they're moving forward," McMahill said. "And so, absolutely, it's a concerning moment for us," he continued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At CES 2025 today, Lenovo introduced the Legion Go S handheld gaming console. It marks the first officially licensed handheld that comes pre-loaded with Valve's Arch Linux based SteamOS operating system. Phoronix reports: This first officially licensed SteamOS handheld is making use of the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC with Radeon 700M graphics, an 8-inch 1200p LCD touchscreen with VRR support, up to 32GB of LPDDR5x-6400 memory, up to 1TB of PCIe Gen4 SSD storage, and a 55 Whr battery. Pricing starts at $500 USD with availability beginning in May. Sadly this Lenovo Legion Go handheld running SteamOS is making use of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and not the Ryzen Z2 announced by AMD yesterday with the Zen 5 cores. But at CES Lenovo is showing off the Lenovo Legion Go (8.8", 2) prototype that uses the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go SoC along with an OLED display albeit a Windows gaming device. Additional details are available in Lenovo's press release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Laptop screens can feel cramped. But what if you could magically get more real estate without having to carry around a portable monitor? That's precisely the purpose of Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC -- yes, rollable. It has an OLED display that, with the push of a button, extends the 14-inch screen upward to make for an awkward aspect ratio, but roughly doubles the screen space to 16.7 inches. Two screens are better than one for productivity, but what if one screen could be two but still one? Yes. It plays a fun animation and some music when it does its rolling thing. You can also activate the rolling action with a palm gesture; once it scans your palm, shift it up or down to raise or lower the screen. (Pressing the button on the keyboard is way faster.) You can take advantage of Windows 11 window snapping features to put apps one on top of the other. I stacked two browser windows, but you can put other apps below too. Considering I'm already that guy who brings a spare portable monitor everywhere, this just seems like a more elegant solution that takes up less space in my bag. And of course, anyone can take advantage of the long aspect ratio to get a better look at documents, PDFs, and web pages. Lenovo says it has tested the rolling function 30,000 times, and it has performed without flaws, so you can rest a little easier about reliability, though repairing this machine sounds like it will be a task. The whole laptop doesn't feel significantly different from a normal machine, weighing just 3.7 pounds -- that's 1 pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, walking with your laptop open in your hand might be weird, as it feels a little top heavy. When closed, it's 19.9 mm thin -- the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 15.4 mm, so Lenovo's machine is thicker, but not as thick as a gaming laptop. Lenovo published a concept video on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The OnePlus 13 launched in the North American market today, making it the first flagship smartphone of 2025. As the smartphone market continues to consolidate, it has become increasingly difficult for non-Samsung, Google, and Apple devices to gain significant traction in the competitive U.S. market. Nevertheless, OnePlus has continually released premium flagship-tier devices at relatively modest price points, hoping to pry users away from the Big Tech monoliths. The OnePlus 13 features Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, up to 16GB of RAM, a 6.82" QHD+ OLED display, a triple Hasselblad-branded camera system, a massive 6,000mAh battery, and support for 5G networks across all major carriers in the U.S. and Canada. A full list of specifications can be found here. Based on the early reviews, the OnePlus 13 appears to set the bar high with not a lot of faults to highlight among reviewers. Here are some of our favorite reviews published today: OnePlus 13 review: finally, a flagship that can hang (The Verge)OnePlus 13 review: I'm dumbfounded, I can't find anything wrong with this phone (TechRadar)OnePlus 13 Review: Ship Shape? (Michael Fisher)OnePlus 13 Review: The Bar Has Been Set! (Marques Brownlee)The OnePlus 13 is finally a OnePlus flagship I trust to do it all (Android Authority)OnePlus 13 Review: 2025's First Flagship Finds Success (Forbes)OnePlus 13 review: The complete package (BGR) The OnePlus 13 sets a new bar for smartphone performance (Business Insider) This is not a Slashvertisement. We just like shiny, new tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Nvidia has officially introduced its highly anticipated GeForce 50 Series graphics cards, accompanied by the debut of DLSS 4 technology," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "The lineup includes four premium GPUs: the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are slated for release on January 30, with the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti following in February. TechSpot recount of the Jensen Huang keynote tries to differentiate between dubious performance claims and actual expected raw output": The new RTX 5090 flagship comes packing significantly more hardware over its predecessor. Not only does this GPU use Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture, but it also packs significantly more CUDA cores, greater memory bandwidth, and a higher VRAM capacity. The SM count has increased from 128 with the RTX 4090 to a whopping 170 with the RTX 5090 -- a 33% increase in the core size. The memory subsystem is overhauled, now featuring GDDR7 technology on a massive 512-bit bus. With this GDDR7 memory clocked at 28 Gbps, memory bandwidth reaches 1,792 GB/s -- a near 80% increase over the RTX 4090's bandwidth. It also includes 32GB of VRAM, the most Nvidia has ever provided on a consumer GPU. [...] As for the performance claims... Nvidia has - as usual - used its marketing to obscure actual gaming performance. RTX 50 GPUs support DLSS 4 multi-frame generation, which previous-generation GPUs lack. This means RTX 50 series GPUs can generate double the frames of previous-gen models in DLSS-supported games, making them appear up to twice as "fast" as RTX 40 series GPUs. But in reality, while FPS numbers will increase with DLSS 4, latency and gameplay feel may not improve as dramatically. [...] The claim that the RTX 5070 matches the RTX 4090 in performance seems dubious. Perhaps it could match in frame rate with DLSS 4, but certainly not in raw, non-DLSS performance. Based on Nvidia's charts, the RTX 5070 seems 20-30% faster than the RTX 4070 at 1440p. This would place the RTX 5070 slightly ahead of the RTX 4070 Super for about $50 less, or alternatively, 20-30% faster than the RTX 4070 for the same price. These GeForce 50 series wasn't the only announcement Nvidia made at CES 2025. The chipmaker unveiled a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer, capable of running sophisticated AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. It also announced plans to introduce AI-powered autonomous characters in video games this year, starting with a virtual teammate in the battle royale game PUBG.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters." One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter. The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants. The Justice Department filed an amended complaint (PDF) today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said. "The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said. The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said: "For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to 'price fixing laws,' the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, 'Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much.'" The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. Further reading: Are We Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thailand has banned plastic waste imports over concerns about toxic pollution, as experts warn that failure to agree a global treaty to cut plastic waste will harm human health. From a report: A law banning imports of plastic waste came into force this month in Thailand, after years of campaigning by activists. Thailand is one of several south-east Asian countries that has historically been paid to receive plastic waste from developed nations. The country became a leading destination for exports of plastic waste from Europe, the US, the UK and Japan in 2018 after China, the world's biggest market for household waste, imposed a ban. Japan is one of the biggest exporters of waste plastic to Thailand, with about 50m kg exported in 2023. Thai customs officials said more than 1.1m tonnes of plastic scraps were imported between 2018 and 2021. Imports of plastic were often mismanaged in Thailand, with many factories burning the waste rather than recycling it, leading to damage to human health and the environment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers claim to have compromised Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel which has sold masses of smartphone location data to the U.S. government. 404 Media: The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples' precise movements, and they are threatening to publish the data publicly. The news is a crystalizing moment for the location data industry. For years, companies have harvested location information from smartphones, either through ordinary apps or the advertising ecosystem, and then built products based on that data or sold it to others. In many cases, those customers include the U.S. government, with arms of the military, DHS, the IRS, and FBI using it for various purposes. But collecting that data presents an attractive target to hackers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony-owned anime streaming service Crunchyroll plans to launch a manga reading app in 2025, its second attempt at entering the digital manga market after shuttering a similar service in 2023. The new app, Crunchyroll Manga, will be available initially in the United States and Canada in English, as a premium add-on for subscribers. The move comes amid broader changes at Crunchyroll, including its recent decision to put popular anime series "One Piece" behind a paywall and Sony's pending merger with publisher Kadokawa.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese venture capitalists are hounding failed founders [non-paywalled source], pursuing personal assets and adding the individuals to a national debtor blacklist when they fail to pay up, in moves that are throwing the country's startup funding ecosystem into crisis. The hard-nosed tactics by risk capital providers have been facilitated by clauses known as redemption rights, included in nearly all the financing deals struck during China's boom times. "My investors verbally promised they wouldn't enforce them, that they had never enforced them before -- and in '17 and '18 that was true -- no one was enforcing them," said Neuroo Education founder Wang Ronghui, who now owes investors millions of dollars after her childcare chain stumbled during the pandemic. While they are relatively rare in US venture investing, more than 80% of venture and private equity deals in China contain redemption provisions, according to Shanghai-based law firm Lifeng Partners estimates. They typically require companies, and often their founders as well, to buy back investors' shares plus interest if certain targets such as an initial public offering timeline, valuation goals or revenue metrics are not met.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion dollars in a deal that would value it at $60 billion, making it the latest artificial-intelligence startup to seize upon investor euphoria for the technology. WSJ: The funding round is being led by the venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, people familiar with the matter said. The $60 billion valuation includes the money Anthropic plans to raise in the round. The deal would make Anthropic the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights. It was valued last year at $18 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures. There has been a dealmaking frenzy among AI companies since OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in an October round that nearly doubled its value to $157 billion. Two other startups, Elon Musk's xAI and Perplexity, subsequently raised money at substantially increased valuations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mark Zuckerberg built up Facebook's content-policing efforts in the wake of Donald Trump's first presidential election. Now the Meta Platforms CEO is reversing course as he embraces a second Trump presidency. Meta is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerberg said in a video Tuesday, a move he described as an attempt to restore free expression on its platforms. "We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in the video. He said Meta is getting rid of fact-checkers and, starting in the U.S., replacing them with a so-called Community Notes system similar to that on Elon Musk's X platform in which users flag posts they think need more context. While Meta will continue to target illegal behavior, Zuckerberg wrote in a separate post on Threads, it will stop enforcing content rules about immigration and gender that are "out of touch with mainstream discourse." Zuckerberg's plan is likely to reshape the experience of billions of people who use Meta's platforms. It steers sharply away from efforts started years ago in response to complaints from users, advertisers and politicians that abusive and deceptive content had run amok on Meta's suite of apps. The effort to rein in such speech sparked its own backlash from people -- especially on the political right -- who said it often strayed into censorship.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A widely used DNA sequencer lacks crucial firmware security protections, potentially exposing genetic research facilities to cyberattacks, security researchers said on Tuesday. The Illumina iSeq 100, deployed at 23andMe and thousands of laboratories worldwide, runs on outdated BIOS firmware from 2018 that doesn't enforce Secure Boot protection against malware infections, ArsTechnica reported today, citing researchers from Eclypsium. The device's manufacturer, IEI Integration Corp, supplies motherboards to numerous medical equipment makers, suggesting similar vulnerabilities could affect other devices, Eclypsium said. Illumina said the issues were "not high-risk" and would notify customers if mitigations were needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Complaints and ridicule have been mounting about mistakes by the iPhone maker's hyped feature, and its flaws risk a serious setback. Bloomberg: If you've seen any of Apple's marketing lately, you'll know the latest iPhone is billed as the first "built for Apple Intelligence." The "for" in that sentence is doing a great deal of work. It couldn't be "with" because Apple's AI features weren't ready when the device came out, and some are still yet to be released. The first were added to devices in iOS version 18.1, which came out in October. These AI bells and whistles require users to physically opt in, and Apple has deemed the product in "beta" despite marketing it as the main reason to buy its latest device. "Hello, Apple Intelligence" is the message greeting visitors to Apple.com today. If you go into a store, it's what the sales representatives push most excitedly. But just like the Maps fiasco, Apple's AI isn't ready for the real world. Complaints and ridicule have been mounting. In December, a BBC notification was rewritten by Apple Intelligence to state falsely that Luigi Mangione, who has been charged in the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had turned a gun on himself. Last week, a summary crowned a darts champion before the match had started. Later the same evening, an alert falsely stated that Rafael Nadal had come out as gay. It's not just the BBC that's experiencing this issue. A New York Times headline was rewritten to suggest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested. "Nikki Glaser killed at Golden Globes," read another false summary. The mistakes have prompted the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders to call for Apple to "act responsibly" and remove the feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia will begin selling a personal AI supercomputer in May that can run sophisticated AI models with up to 200 billion parameters, the chipmaker has announced. The $3,000 Project Digits system is powered by the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip and can operate from a standard power outlet. The device delivers 1 petaflop of AI performance and includes 128GB of memory and up to 4TB of storage. Two units can be linked to handle models with 405 billion parameters. "AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. The system runs on Linux-based Nvidia DGX OS and supports PyTorch, Python, and Jupyter notebooks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has unveiled plans to introduce AI-powered autonomous characters in video games this year, starting with a virtual teammate in the battle royale game PUBG, the chip maker said at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The technology, called ACE, enables in-game characters to communicate, make decisions and interact with players using small language models. The AI companions will also feature in Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile PC Version in March 2025 and other upcoming titles including inZOI and MIR5, Nvidia said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Getty Images and Shutterstock have agreed to combine in a deal that creates a $3.7 billion visual content company. From a report: The deal underscores the soaring demand for images and related content from content creators and platforms. Getty CEO Craig Peters will remain chief executive of the combined business, which will trade under the GETY ticker symbol.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft plans to invest $3 billion to expand its artificial intelligence and cloud Azure services in India, turning to the world's most populous nation to fuel its revenue growth engine. From a report: The firm, which has been operating in India for more than two decades, will also train an additional 10 million people in the country with AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Bengaluru Tuesday. "The investments in infrastructure and skilling we are announcing today reaffirm our commitment to making India AI-first, and will help ensure people and organizations across the country benefit broadly," said Nadella. "The diffusion rate of AI in India is exciting." India is a key overseas market for American tech giants that have poured tens of billions of dollars in building and scaling their operations in the South Asian market over the past two decades as they work to court businesses serving hundreds of millions of users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta's AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user's feed. One Redditor posted over the weekend that they were scrolling through Instagram and were presented an AI-generated slideshow of themselves standing in front of "an endless maze of mirrors," for example. "Used Meta AI to edit a selfie, now Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me," the person posted. The user was shown a slideshow of AI-generated images in which an AI version of himself is standing in front of an endless "mirror maze." "Imagined for you: Mirror maze," the "location of the post reads." "Imagine yourself reflecting on life in an endless maze of mirrors where you're the main focus," the caption of the AI images say. The Reddit user told 404 Media that at one point he had uploaded selfies of himself into Instagram's "Imagine" feature, which is Meta's AI image generation feature. People on Reddit initially did not even believe that these were real, with people posting things like "it's a fake story," and "I doubt that this is true," "this is a straight up lie lol," and "why would they do this?" The Redditor has repeatedly had to explain that, yes, this did happen. "I don't really have a reason to fake this, I posted screenshots on another thread," he said. 404 Media sent the link to the Reddit post directly to Meta who confirmed that it is real, but not an "ad." "Once you access that feature and upload a selfie to edit, you'll start seeing these ads pop up with auto-generated images with your likeness," the Redditor told 404 Media. A Meta spokesperson told 404 Media that the images are not "ads," but are a new feature that Meta announced in September and has begun testing live. Meta AI has an "Imagine Yourself" feature in which you upload several selfies and take photos of yourself from different angles. You can then ask the AI to do things like "imagine me as an astronaut." Once this feature is enabled, Meta's AI will in some cases begin to automatically generate images of you in random scenarios that it thinks are aligned with your interests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's aging elevators are facing significant repair delays and rising costs, creating accessibility challenges and leaving vulnerable populations stranded. Experts argue that implementing federal standards and modernizing systems could address these issues. However, fixing the nation's approximately one million elevators is "becoming a heavy lift," reports Axios. From the report: America's aging elevators are time-consuming and costly to fix. The workforce of technicians who know how to fix them is aging. And buildings with elevators in need of repair often need to wait ages for replacement parts due to arcane supply-chain issues. [...] Elevator parts shortages appear to stem largely from two issues: Parts suppliers often prioritize their biggest customers, which in this case happens to be builders in China, where the vast majority of the world's new elevators are installed, according to [Stephen Smith, executive director of the Center for Building in North America]. And parts are often no longer available for aging -- and often obsolete -- elevators, meaning they often have to be custom made. "In some cases, the entire elevator system may need to be modernized or replaced, leading to substantial costs and potential disruptions to building operations," an advisory called The Elevator Consultants reports. A patchwork of state regulations and union rules make it laborious for building owners and contractors to comply with current standards, according to Smith. who said the U.S. would benefit from federal elevator standards. "The feds have not involved themselves in regulations of the construction industry since Reagan took an axe to it in the 1980s," Smith said. The good news is that "about 80 percent of reliability issues can be solved by replacing the doors," Joseph Bera, at VP at Schindler Elevators, tells commercial real estate publication Propmodo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Before NASA Administrator Bill Nelson retires in a couple of weeks, he has one final message for the next administration: Don't give up on the agency's Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon. In an interview with Ars Technica's Eric Berger, Nelson discussed his time in office, the major decisions he made, and his concerns for the space agency's future under the Trump administration. Here's an excerpt from the interview: Ars: I wanted to start with the state of Artemis. You all had an event a few weeks ago where you talked about Artemis II and Artemis III delays. And you know, both those missions have slipped a couple of years now since you've been administrator. So I'm just wondering, do you know how confident we should be in the current timeline? Bill Nelson: Well, I am very confident because this most recent [delay] was occasioned by virtue of the heat shield, and it has been unanimous after all of the testing that they understand what happened to Orion's heat shield. The chunks came off in an irregular pattern from the Artemis I heat shield. With the change in the re-entry profile, they are unanimous in their recommendation that we can go with the Artemis II heat shield as it is. And I must say that of the major decisions that I've made, that was an easy one for me because it was unanimous. When I say it was unanimous, it was unanimous in the IRT, the independent review team, headed by Paul Hill. It wasn't to begin with, but after all the extensive testing, everybody was on board. It was unanimous in the deputy's committee. It was unanimous in the agency committee, and that brought it to me then in the Executive Council, and it was unanimous there. So I'm very confident that you're going to see Artemis II fly on or around April of 2026, and then if the SpaceX lander is ready, and that, of course, is a big if -- but they have met all of their milestones, and we'll see what happens on this next test... If they are ready, I think it is very probable that we will see the lunar landing in the summer of 2027. Ars: Do you think it's appropriate for the next administration to review the Artemis Program? Bill Nelson: Are you implying that Artemis should be canceled? Ars: No. I don't think Artemis will be canceled in the main. But I do think they're going to take a look at the way the missions are done at the architecture. I know NASA just went through that process with Orion's heat shield. Bill Nelson: Well, I think questioning what you're doing clearly is always an issue that ought to be on the table. But do I think that they are going to cancel, as some of the chatter out there suggests, and replace SLS with Starship? The answer is no. Ars: Why? Bill Nelson: Put yourself in the place of President Trump. Do you think President Trump would like to have a conversation with American astronauts on the surface of the Moon during his tenure? Ars: Of course. Bill Nelson: OK, let me ask you another question. Do you think that President Trump would rather have a conversation with American astronauts during his tenure rather than listening to the comments of Chinese astronauts on the Moon during his tenure? My case is closed, your Honor, I submit it to the jury. Further reading: Elon Musk: 'We're Going Straight to Mars. The Moon is a Distraction.'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: John Deere is going all in on autonomous tractors. The company, which first introduced a driverless vehicle in 2022, said self-driving machines will revolutionize the field and address labor shortages. It will soon be selling self-driving dump trucks, more driverless tractors, and a robot lawn mower. "When we talk about autonomy, we mean full autonomy," Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere, said at CES on Monday, according to The Verge. "No one's in the machine." Hindman said the company wants "more of our machines to safely run autonomously in these unique and complex environments that our customers work in every day." John Deere says many farmers in the states currently utilize the first model of its driverless tractor, The Verge reported. "Those tractors are already being used by farmers to prepare the soil for planting in the next year," Hindman said. By 2030, the company is hoping to sell a fully self-driving corn and soybean farming system. Between now and then, John Deere says its articulated dump truck will hit the market. That vehicle can carry more than 92,000 pounds at a time, The Verge reported, and the company says it will improve safety and productivity in sites like quarries. "It's unsupervised, it's capable of making decisions and operating safely on its own," Maya Sripadam, senior product manager of John Deere's subsidiary Blue River Technology, said. John Deere also plans to release driverless tractors that can spray nut orchards with pesticides, growth regulators, and nutrients for the trees. It thinks those vehicles will have a particular benefit to the California nut farming industry, which has faced labor shortages. [...] John Deere hasn't said how much the vehicles will cost. Further reading: Software Fees To Make Up 10% of John Deere's Revenues By 2030Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 65-year-old patient in the United States with underlying medical conditions has died from bird flu. According to NBC News, "health officials considered the case to be the "country's first severe human H5N1 infection." From the report: The Louisiana Department of Health said the patient had been exposed to a combination of a backyard flock and wild birds. "The Department expresses its deepest condolences to the patient's family and friends as they mourn the loss of their loved one," it said in a statement. "Due to patient confidentiality and respect for the family, this will be the final update about the patient." All but one of the [67] human bird flu infections confirmed so far in the U.S. were diagnosed in the last 10 months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases have been relatively mild, with symptoms including pinkeye, coughs or sneezes. The majority of the patients became sick after exposure to infected cattle or poultry. The Louisiana patient was the first case linked to exposure to a backyard flock. [...] The CDC maintains that the immediate risk to public health is low. Public health officials have not found any evidence that the virus has spread person-to-person, which would mark a dire step in bird flu's evolution. "While tragic, a death from H5N1 bird flu in the United States is not unexpected because of the known potential for infection with these viruses to cause severe illness and death," the agency said in a statement on Monday. "There are no concerning virologic changes actively spreading in wild birds, poultry, or cows that would raise the risk to human health," the statement added. However, samples of the virus collected from the Louisiana patient showed signs of mutations that could make it more transmissible to humans, according to the agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google DeepMind is forming a new team to develop AI models capable of simulating the physical world. It's being led by former OpenAI Sora co-lead Tim Brooks and builds on Google's Gemini, Veo, and Genie projects. "DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world," Brooks wrote on X. "I'm hiring for a new team with this mission." TechCrunch reports: According to job listings Brooks linked to in his post, the new modeling team will collaborate with and build on work from Google's Gemini, Veo, and Genie teams to tackle "critical new problems" and scale models "to the highest levels of compute." Gemini is Google's flagship series of AI models for tasks like analyzing images and generating text, while Veo is Google's own video generation model. As for Genie, it's Google's take on a world model -- AI that can simulate games and 3D environments in real time. Google's latest Genie model, previewed in December, can generate a massive variety of playable 3D worlds. "We believe scaling [AI training] on video and multimodal data is on the critical path to artificial general intelligence," reads one of the job descriptions. Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, generally refers to AI that can accomplish any task a human can. "World models will power numerous domains, such as visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment." Per the description, Brooks' new team will look to develop "real-time interactive generation" tools on top of the models they build, and study how to integrate their models with existing multimodal models such as Gemini.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At CES 2025, AMD unveiled the Z2, Z2 Go, and Z2 Extreme chipsets -- all powered by Zen 5 CPU cores and designed for handheld gaming PCs. IGN reports: The AMD Zen 2 Extreme, along with lower-specced cousins the Z2 and Z2 Go, are powered by Zen 5 CPU cores. While the Zen 2 Extreme is using a RDNA 3.5-based GPU, the Z2 and Z2 Go are still using RDNA 3 and RDNA 2, respectively. This creates an entire family of APUs (Advanced Processing Units) for handheld gaming PCs that should hopefully cause the price of handhelds to go down a bit. With the Z2 Extreme, AMD is hoping to dramatically improve battery life, while also delivering console-like gaming performance to devices like the Lenovo Legion Go. By and large, the biggest limiting factor of these handhelds, especially at the high end, is how quickly their batteries drain when playing demanding games away from a wall outlet. The company also introduced the "Fire Range" HX3D processors for gaming laptops, leveraging 3D V-cache technology for enhanced gaming performance and efficiency. "All of these mobile chipsets, from 'Fire Range' HX3D to the AMD Z2 Extreme, will end up in gaming laptops and handhelds over the next few months," adds IGN. AMD published a press release with additional details and specifications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Defense Department said on Monday it has added Chinese tech giants including gaming and social media leader Tencent Holdings and battery maker CATL to a list of firms it says work with China's military. The list also included chip maker Changxin Memory Technologies, Quectel Wireless and drone maker Autel Robotics, according to a document published on Monday. The annually updated list (PDF) of Chinese military companies, formally mandated under U.S. law as the "Section 1260H list," designated 134 companies, according to a notice posted to the Federal Register. U.S.-traded shares of Tencent, which is also the parent of Chinese instant messaging app WeChat, fell 8% in over-the-counter trading. Tencent said in a statement that its inclusion on the list was "clearly a mistake." It added: "We are not a military company or supplier. Unlike sanctions or export controls, this listing has no impact on our business." CATL called the designation a mistake, saying it "is not engaged in any military related activities." A Quectel spokesperson said the company "does not work with the military in any country and will ask the Pentagon to reconsider its designation, which clearly has been made in error." While the designation does not involve immediate bans, it can be a blow to the reputations of affected companies and represents a stark warning to U.S. entities and firms about the risks of conducting business with them. It could also add pressure on the Treasury Department to sanction the companies.Two previously listed companies, drone maker DJI and Lidar-maker Hesai Technologies, both sued the Pentagon last year over their previous designations, but remain on the updated list. The Pentagon also removed six companies it said no longer met the requirements for the designation, including AI firm Beijing Megvii Technology, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited, China State Construction Group Co and China Telecommunications Corporation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toyota's Woven City, a $10 billion "living laboratory" on the site of a former car factory, is set to welcome its first 100 residents in fall 2025. The first residents will be Toyota employees and affiliates, but the city aims to expand to include "external inventors and their families." The Verge reports: Toyota said it completed "phase 1" of the construction, with the official launch planned for 2025. "Woven City is more than just a place to live, work, and play," Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said during today's press conference at CES. "Woven City is a place where people can invent and develop all kinds of new products and ideas. It's a living laboratory where the residents are willing participants, giving inventors the opportunity to freely test their ideas in a secure, real-life setting." [...] In fall 2025, Toyota said it will welcome the first 100 residents to Woven City, all of whom will be employees of Toyota or its subsidiary, Woven by Toyota. The community will gradually expand to include "external inventors and their families" who will be invited to relocate to the new city. In total, the first phase of the city will eventually house 360 residents, Toyota says. Toyota dubs these first residents "Weavers," adding that they are people who "share a passion for the 'expansion of mobility' and a commitment to building a more flourishing society. Through their participation in co-creation activities, Weavers will contribute to realizing the full potential of Woven City." That said, the first "inventors" confirmed for Woven City are mostly in the food services business, including a vending machine company and a startup that wants to explore "the potential value of coffee through futuristic cafe experiences." Toyoda mentioned several other ideas during his press conference, including high-powered motorized wheelchairs for people with disabilities who want to experience the thrill of racing. He also pitched the idea of a personal drone that follows joggers for added security, and "pet robots" for elderly people. The Woven City site, which is located at the base of Mount Fuji, includes buildings that are designed by famed Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. The goal, through phase 2 and subsequent phases, is to build enough housing and facilities for up to 2,000 people to live year-around, with utilities powered by the company's hydrogen fuel cell technology. The site is private for now, though Toyota says it plans on inviting the general public to see it in 2026. The name "Woven City" is a reference to weaving together three different types of streets or pathways, each for a specific type of user. One street would be for faster vehicles only. The second would be a mix of lower-speed personal mobility vehicles, like bikes and scooters, as well as pedestrians. And the third would be a park-like promenade for pedestrians only. Japan first announced the "prototype city of the future" at CES 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.