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Microsoft seems set to rebrand the AI-powered features in Windows to "Windows Intelligence" even if some of the more controversial elements, such as Recall, are to remain as they are. The Register: Word of Windows Intelligence has circulated for a while, although Microsoft has yet to issue any official confirmation. In October, Tero Alhonen posted what appeared to be options for apps that use AI services. Over the weekend, X user Albacore turned up a placeholder page in a Windows 24H2 build for Windows Intelligence settings. Although Microsoft has made substantial investments in artificial intelligence, AI as part of a brand is a little generic. Apple's approach, to define AI as being "Apple Intelligence," manages to keep the familiar "AI" initialism while ensuring its own brand is kept front and center. With Windows Intelligence, Microsoft is attempting something similar, although "Apple Intelligence" can be handily shortened to "AI". The recently overhauled Copilot and delayed Recall have sparked debate in the Windows community, yet neither seems likely to be rebranded to Windows Intelligence at this stage. However, Windows Intelligence could represent an umbrella for AI technologies on the Microsoft platform and provide users with a quick and easy way of controlling the access AI apps have to user data and how that data is used.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect. "They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions." Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years! I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1. Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power. Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days. When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media. The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software. I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could. I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change. In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial user criticism.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so. Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...] Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new analysis of data from NASA's Voyager 2 mission reveals that the planet Uranus and its five largest moons might harbor subsurface oceans and potential conditions for life. The BBC reports: Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa's Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago. But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like. [...] So, for 40 years we have had an incorrect view of what Uranus and its five largest moons are normally like, according to Dr William Dunn of University College London. "These results suggest that the Uranian system could be much more exciting than previously thought. There could be moons there that could have the conditions that are necessary for life, they might have oceans below the surface that could be teeming with fish!". It has been nearly 40 years since Voyager 2 last flew past the icy world and its moons. Nasa has plans to launch a new mission, the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, to go back for a closer look in 10 years' time. According to Nasa's Dr Jamie Jasinski, whose idea it was to re-examine the Voyager 2 data, the mission will need to take his results into account when designing its instruments and planning the scientific survey. "Some of the instruments for the future spacecraft are very much being designed with ideas from what we learned from Voyager 2 when it flew past the system when it was experiencing an abnormal event. So we need to rethink how exactly we are going to design the instruments on the new mission so that we can best capture the science we need to make discoveries." Nasa's Uranus probe is expected to arrive by 2045, which is when scientists hope to find out whether these far-flung icy moons, once thought of as being dead worlds, might have the possibility of being home to life. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader thephydes writes: The hearing will go ahead on November 13 at 11:30 ET (16:30 GMT). Apparently, it will "further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded," according to a House statement. It's driven by two republicans, Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who say: "Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose. We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue." "Expert witnesses in the hearing will include Luis Elizondo, a decorated former counterintelligence officer who has claimed for years that the U.S. government is hiding knowledge of UAP, including materials recovered from crashed flying saucers," reports Space.com. "The House hearing will also include Tim Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who unidentified submersible objects, arguing that 'these underwater anomalies jeopardize US maritime security.'" "Other speakers at the hearing include journalist Michael Shellenberger, who has also claimed the U.S. government is hiding UFO crash retrieval programs, and former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships Michael Gold, who is a member of NASA's independent UAP study team."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it online, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts announced. Teixeira received the sentence before Judge Indira Talwani in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In March, the national guardsman pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. He was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in April 2023 and has been in federal custody since mid-May 2023. According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed classified documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform mostly used by online gamers. He began sharing the documents in or around 2022. A document he was accused of leaking included information about providing equipment to Ukraine, while another included discussions about a foreign adversary's plot to target American forces abroad, prosecutors said. [...] While the documents were discovered online in March 2023, Teixeira had been sharing them online since January of that year, according to prosecutors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers at the University of Texas have unveiled a new thermal interface material that could revolutionize cooling, outperforming top liquid metal solutions by up to 72% in heat dissipation," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This breakthrough not only improves energy efficiency but also enables higher-density data center setups, cutting cooling costs and energy usage significantly." TechSpot reports: Thanks to a mechanochemically engineered combination of the liquid metal alloy Galinstan and ceramic aluminum nitride, this thermal interface material, or TIM, outperformed the best commercial liquid metal cooling products by a staggering 56-72% in lab tests. It allowed dissipation of up to 2,760 watts of heat from just a 16 square centimeter area. The material pulls this off by bridging the gap between the theoretical heat transfer limits of these materials and what's achieved in real products. Through mechanochemistry, the liquid metal and ceramic ingredients are mixed in an extremely controlled way, creating gradient interfaces that heat can flow across much more easily. Beyond just being better at cooling, the researchers claim that the higher performance reduces the energy needed to run cooling pumps and fans by up to 65%. It also unlocks the ability to cram more heat-generating processors into the same space without overheating issues. [...] As for how you can get your hands on the material: it's yet to make it out of the labs. The UT team has so far only tested it successfully at small scales but is now working on producing larger batches to put through real-world trials with data center partners. The material has been detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music. How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing: - DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro free for personal use, allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Starting this week, the Pro versions and the two products will no longer be available under a paid subscription model. "Effective immediately, both VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation will transition away from the paid subscription model, meaning you can now utilize these tools without any cost. The paid versions of these offerings -- Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro -- are no longer available for purchase," said Broadcom product marketing director Himanshu Singh. "If you're currently under a commercial contract, you can rest easy knowing that your agreement will remain in effect until the end of your term. You will continue to receive the full level of service and enterprise-grade support as per your contract." While the free versions will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support ticketing for troubleshooting. Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and improvements and ensure that updates are rolled out promptly. "We're actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements," Singh added. "Our engineering teams are committed to maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance." You can download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation here (sign-in required).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new update is rolling out that automatically starts Microsoft's Edge browser and prompts users to import their Chrome tabs -- a move that has sparked criticism over its invasive tactics to encourage Edge adoption. The Verge's Tom Warren reports: My colleague Richard Lawler noticed that Edge started automatically on his PC last week at boot and offered up a new prompt to "enhance your browsing experience." The pop-up has a "bring over your data from other browsers regularly" option ticked by default, and encourages people to confirm and continue with a big blue button. If you want to dismiss this prompt there's a tiny white X button that looks similar to the sparkles Microsoft is using in the background of the prompt. If you simply hit confirm and continue then Microsoft Edge will import your Chrome data and continually import your tabs if you have Chrome set as default. The prompt seems to mainly appear on PCs with Chrome installed, suggesting that Microsoft is once again targeting Chrome users. Microsoft confirmed the new "feature" to The Verge. "This is a notification giving people the choice to import data from other browsers," explains Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston. "There is an option to turn it off."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The genetic testing company 23andMe announced it will cut 40% of its workforce, or 200 jobs, and halt the work on therapies it was developing. As the BBC notes, the company is fighting for survival after hackers gained access to personal information of millions of its users, causing the stock to crater by more than 70%. All seven of its independent directors also resigned in September, following a protracted negotiation with founder and Chief Executive Anne Wojcicki over her plan to take the company private. The BBC reports: On Tuesday, the company warned investors of "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue operating, as it reported that revenue had fallen to $44 million between July and September compared to $50 million in the same period last year. Losses fell to $59 million from $75 million. The job cuts are expected to lead to one-off costs of $12 million, including severance pay, for the plan that will result in savings of $35 million. "We are taking these difficult but necessary actions as we restructure 23andMe and focus on the long-term success of our core consumer business and research partnerships," Ms Wojcicki said. The company also said it is considering what to do with the therapies it had in development, including licensing or selling them. 23andMe is a giant of the growing ancestor-tracing industry. It offers genetic testing from DNA, with ancestry breakdown and personalised health insights. Its customers include famous names, from rapper Snoop Dogg to multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett. The company was valued at roughly $3.5 billion when it listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2021 and its share price peaked at $17.65. But they have since tumbled and are currently trading at less than $5.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock is one of the largest vendors of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. The company markets itself as having the goal to fully "eliminate crime" with the use of ALPRs and other connected surveillance cameras, a target experts say is impossible. [...] Flock and automated license plate reader cameras owned by other companies are now in thousands of neighborhoods around the country. Many of these systems talk to each other and plug into other surveillance systems, making it possible to track people all over the country. "It went from me seeing 10 license plate readers to probably seeing 50 or 60 in a few days of driving around," [said Alabama resident and developer Will Freeman]. "I wanted to make a record of these things. I thought, 'Can I make a database of these license plate readers?'" And so he made a map, and called it DeFlock. DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock (PDF) to the posts holding up Huntsville's ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world. [...] When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world. He said so far more than 1,700 cameras have been reported in the United States and more than 5,600 have been reported around the world. He has also begun scraping parts of Flock's website to give people a better idea of where to look to map them. For example, Flock says that Colton, California, a city with just over 50,000 people outside of San Bernardino, has 677 cameras. People who submit cameras to DeFlock have the ability to note the direction that they are pointing in, which can help people understand how these cameras are being positioned and the strategies that companies and police departments are using when deploying them. For example, all of the cameras in downtown Huntsville are pointing away from the downtown core, meaning they are primarily focused on detecting cars that are entering downtown Huntsville from other areas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After setting a record high yesterday, Bitcoin continued its remarkable rally, briefly surging past the $90,000 mark. Since Election Day, the cryptocurrency has gained nearly 30%, adding approximately $20,000 to its value. From a previous report: Bitcoin hit a peak of $90,000 on Coinbase at 12:56 PST on Nov. 12 and is up 11% over the past day, per TradingView data. The cryptocurrency is now just over 11% away from reaching $100,000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs. From a report: The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance execution engines for AI. Neural Magic's software aims to process AI workloads on processors and GPUs at speeds equivalent to specialized AI chips (e.g. TPUs). By running models on off-the-shelf processors, which usually have more available memory, the company's software can realize these performance gains. Big tech companies like AMD and a host of other startups, including NeuReality, Deci, CoCoPie, OctoML and DeepCube, offer some sort of AI optimization software. But Neural Magic is one of the few with a free platform and a collection of open source tools to complement it. Neural Magic had so far managed to raise $50 million in venture capital from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associations, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC and Ridgeline Ventures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal authorities are grappling with the aftermath of an illegal sheep cloning operation that has scattered hundreds of contraband hybrid animals across multiple states, following the sentencing of the scheme's mastermind. Montana rancher Arthur Schubarth received a six-month prison term for cloning a near-threatened Marco Polo argali sheep from tissue illegally imported from Kyrgyzstan. The cloned animal, named Montana Mountain King, was used to inseminate over 100 ewes, creating a network of unauthorized hybrid offspring. Court documents reveal that Schubarth sold these hybrids to big game hunting enthusiasts, with prices reaching $10,000 per animal. While the original cloned sheep is now housed at New York's Rosamond Gifford Zoo, authorities cannot account for most of its descendants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The percentage of workers in the U.S. who say they are using AI at work has remained largely flat over the last three months, according to a new study commissioned by Slack. From a report: If AI's rapid adoption curve slows or flattens, a lot of very rosy assumptions about the technology -- and very high market valuations tied to them -- could change. Slack said its most recent survey found 33% of U.S. workers say they are using AI at work, an increase of just a single percentage point. That represents a significant flattening of the rapid growth noted in prior surveys. Global adoption of AI use at work, meanwhile, rose from 32% to 36%.Between the lines: Slack also found that globally, nearly half of workers (48%) said they were uncomfortable telling their managers they use AI at work. Among the top reasons cited were a fear of being seen as lazy, cheating or incompetent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year. The Verge: The software giant has been moving existing users of these apps over to the new Outlook for Windows app in recent months, and now it has set an end of support date for the Mail, Calendar, and People apps of December 31st. Once the apps reach end of support later this year, Microsoft warns that users who haven't moved to the new Outlook app "will no longer be able to send and receive email using Windows Mail and Calendar." Microsoft has been rolling out the new Outlook for Windows app for years, with it officially reaching the general availability stage in August. The new web-based Outlook is designed to eventually replace the full desktop version of Outlook too, and Microsoft plans to provide enterprise customers a 12-month notice before it starts to move people away from the desktop version of Outlook.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

40% of AI data centers will face operational constraints due to power shortages by 2027 as AI drives unprecedented energy consumption, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday. Data center power requirements for AI-optimized servers are projected to reach 500 terawatt-hours annually by 2027, more than double 2023 levels, as companies rapidly expand facilities to handle large language model training and implementation. The surge in power demand will outpace utility providers' ability to expand capacity, Gartner analyst Bob Johnson said, leading to higher electricity costs that will cascade through the AI industry. Some operators are already seeking direct agreements with power producers to secure guaranteed supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

zoobab writes: The US Senate to set to revive Software Patents with the PERA Bill, with a vote on Thursday, November 14, 2024. A crucial Senate Committee is on the cusp of voting on two bills that would resurrect some of the most egregious software patents and embolden patent trolls. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would dismantle vital safeguards that prohibit software patents on overly broad concepts. If passed, courts would be compelled to approve software patents on mundane activities like mobile food ordering or basic online financial transactions. This would unleash a torrent of vague and overbroad software patents, which would be wielded by patent trolls to extort small businesses and individuals. The EFF is inviting members of the public to contact their Senators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple was notified by the European Union that its geo-blocking practices are potentially in breach of consumer protection rules, adding to the iPhone maker's regulatory issues in the bloc. From a report: Apple's App Store, iTunes Store and other media services unlawfully discriminate against European customers based on their place of residence, according to a European Commission statement on Tuesday. The notification comes as Apple is facing the first-ever fine under the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, for failing to allow app developers to steer users to cheaper deals, Bloomberg News reported last week. That penalty is set to come months after the Cupertino, California-based company was hit with a $1.9 billion fine for similar abuses under the bloc's traditional competition rules. The geo-locating investigation was conducted together with a network of national consumer authorities and found Apple media services only allow users to use payment cards issued in the countries they registered their Apple accounts, according to the statement. The App Store also blocks users from downloading apps offered in other countries, the investigation found.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major retailers are considering embedding radio-emitting threads into clothing as a novel anti-theft measure amid soaring retail crime rates, according to Bloomberg, citing industry sources. The technology, developed by Spanish firm Myruns, uses conductive ink derived from cellulose to create threads five times thinner than human hair that can trigger security alarms. Zara owner Inditex has discussed implementing the system, though the company says it has no plans for in-store testing. Retail theft caused an estimated $73 billion in lost sales in the U.S. in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation, while UK losses doubled to $4.2 billion in 2023. The crisis has prompted retailers to increase security personnel and surveillance systems. The threadlike technology could provide an alternative to traditional metal-based security tags, potentially offering biodegradable and recyclable anti-theft protection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pakistan's Punjab province banned most outdoor activities and ordered shops, markets and malls in some areas to close early from Monday to curb illnesses caused by intense air pollution. From a report: The province has closed educational institutions and public spaces like parks and zoos until Nov. 17 in places including Lahore, the world's most polluted city in terms of air quality, according to Swiss group IQAir's live ratings. The districts of Lahore, Multan, Faisalabad and Gujranwala have seen an unprecedented rise in patients with respiratory diseases, eye and throat irritation, and pink eye disease, the Punjab government said in an order issued late on Sunday. The new restrictions will also remain in force until Nov. 17. "The spread of conjunctivitis/ pink eye disease due to bacterial or viral infection, smoke, dust or chemical exposure is posing a serious and imminent threat to public health," the Punjab government said. While outdoor activities including sports events, exhibitions and festivals, and dining at restaurants have been prohibited, "unavoidable religious rites" are exempt from this direction, the order said.Outlets like pharmacies, oil depots, dairy shops and fruit and vegetable shops have similarly been exempted from the directions to close by 8 p.m. local time. Lahore's air quality remained hazardous on Monday, with an index score of more than 600, according to IQAir, but this was significantly lower than the 1,900 that it touched in places earlier this month. A score of 0-50 is considered good.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qwant, France's privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index. TechCrunch: The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines -- including and especially around generative AI -- as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing's search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google's search results. Rising API costs are one clear motivator for the move to shrink this Big Tech dependency, with Microsoft massively hiking prices for Bing's search APIs last year. Neither Ecosia nor Qwant will stop using Bing or Google altogether. However, they aim to diversify the core tech supporting their services with their own index. It will lower their operational costs, and serve as a technical base to fuel their own product development as GenAI technologies take up a more central role in many consumer-facing digital services. Both search engines have already dabbled in integrating GenAI features. Expect more on this front, although they aren't planning to develop AI model development themselves. They say they will continue to rely on API access to major platforms' large language models (LLMs) to power these additions. The pair is also open to other European firms joining in with their push for more tech stack sovereignty -- at least as fellow customers for the search index, as they plan to license access via an API. Other forms of partnership could be considered too, they told TechCrunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's air force showcased a suite of new armaments this week, including a new stealth fighter and an attack drone, demonstrating its advancing ability to challenge the U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific. From a report: The public debut of the J-35A stealth fighter and other weapons systems at China's premier airshow, which started Tuesday, represent the centerpiece in the Chinese air force's celebrations of its 75th anniversary -- a milestone in Chinese leader Xi Jinping's sweeping campaign to modernize the People's Liberation Army. A single J-35A soared over crowds of spectators in a brief flypast on the opening day of Airshow China in the southern city of Zhuhai, making a steep climb with afterburners before rolling away and streaking out of view, state television footage showed. Other new weapons -- including the "Jiu Tian" reconnaissance and attack drone and the HQ-19 anti-ballistic-missile system -- were also prominent in ground displays at the biennial airshow, as examples of the PLA's growing prowess in aerial warfare and air defense. Much remains unclear about these systems and their capabilities. Even so, Chinese officials and state media say the new armaments reflect the significant advances that Beijing has made in developing its air power and enhancing its ability to defend China's strategic interests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: LG Display, one of the global leaders in display technologies, unveiled a new stretchable display prototype that can expand by up to 50%. This makes it the most stretchable display in the industry, more than doubling the previous record of 20% elongation. [...] The prototype being flexed in [this image] is a 12-inch screen with a 100-pixel-per-inch resolution and full RGB color that expands to 18-inches when pulled. LG Display said that it based the stretchable display on a "special silicon material substrate used in contact lenses" and then improved its properties for better "stretchability and flexibility." It also used a new wiring design structure and a micro-LED light source, allowing users to repeatedly stretch the screen over 10,000 times with no effect on image quality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX plans an ambitious in-orbit refueling test between two Starships in March 2025. "The orbital demonstration is a major step for Starship, and a crucial part of SpaceX's capability of delivering NASA's Artemis mission to the Moon," reports Gizmodo. The plans were unveiled during Spaceflight Now's recent interview (source: YouTube) with Kent Chojnacki, the deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX is under a $53.2 million contract with NASA, signed in 2020, to use Starship tankers for in-orbit propellant transfer. During its third test flight, SpaceX transferred around 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen from Starship's header tank to its main tank while it was in space. The upcoming demonstration, however, requires a lot more of the launch vehicle. Two Starships will launch to low Earth orbit around three to four weeks apart, the spacecraft will meet and dock in orbit, and one will transfer propellant to another. After the demonstration, the two Starships will undock from one another and deorbit. "Once you've done that, you've really cracked open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth's sphere," Chojnacki said during the interview. The in-flight propellant transfer tests are set to conclude in the summer. With in-flight refueling, NASA is aiming to develop technologies to "enable long-term cryogenic fluid management, which is essential for establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon and enabling crewed missions to Mars," the space agency stated when the contract was signed. SpaceX is developing a version of Starship to land humans on the Moon in September 2026 as part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission. To prepare for the Moon mission, SpaceX is expected to launch between eight and 16 propellant tanker Starships into low Earth orbit in rapid succession. Each of the tankers will carry around 100 to 150 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane and will dock with a larger fuel depot. The orbiting depot will then connect with the Human Landing System Starship, filling its massive 1,200-ton fuel tanks. Once refueled, the Starship lander will continue its journey toward the Moon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's oldest satellite, Skynet-1A, mysteriously shifted from its original orbit above East Africa to a new position over the Americas, likely due to a mid-1970s command whose origins remain unknown. "The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?" asks the BBC. From the report: "It's still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours," says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves. "It's now in what we call a 'gravity well' at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis. "Because it's dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it's 'our' satellite we're still responsible for it," he explains. Dr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogues, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behaviour of Britain's oldest spacecraft. It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it's hard to hear the name "Skynet" without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise. But there's no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A trend has emerged among a small group of climate tech founders who start with their eyes fixed on space and soon realize their technology would do a lot more good here on Earth. Halen Mattison and Luke Neise fit the bill. Mattison spent time at SpaceX, while Neise worked at Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory and Varda Space Industries. The pair originally wanted to sell reactors to SpaceX that could turn carbon dioxide into methane for use on Mars. Today, they're building them to replace natural gas that's pumped from underground. Their company, General Galactic, which emerged from stealth in April, has built a pilot system that can produce 2,000 liters of methane per day. Neise, General Galactic's CTO, told TechCrunch that he expects that figure to rise as the company replaces off-the-shelf components with versions designed in-house. "We think that's a big missing piece in the energy mix right now," said Mattison, the startup's CEO. "Being able to own our supply chains, to be able to fully control all of the parameters, to challenge the requirements between components, all of that unlocks some real elegance in the engineering solution." At commercial scale, the company's reactors will be assembled using mass production techniques. It's a contrast to how most petrochemical and energy facilities are built today. General Galactic is focused on producing methane. However, Mattison said the company isn't necessarily looking to displace the fuel from heating and energy. "Those are generally going toward electrification," he said. Instead, it intends to sell its methane to companies that use it as an ingredient or to power a process, like in chemical or plastic manufacturing. The company isn't ruling out transportation entirely either. Mattison hinted that General Galactic is working on other hydrocarbons that could be used for transportation, like jet fuel. "Stay tuned," he said. General Galactic plans to deploy its first modules next year. The startup "hopes its modules will be able to plug into existing infrastructure, speeding its adoption relative to other fuels like hydrogen," notes TechCrunch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses for delivery drivers to improve efficiency by offering turn-by-turn navigation. "Such directions could shave valuable seconds off each delivery by providing left or right directions off elevators and around obstacles such as gates or aggressive dogs," reports Reuters. "With millions of packages delivered daily, seconds add up. The glasses would also free drivers from using handheld Global Positioning System devices, allowing them to carry more packages." From the report: Amazon's delivery glasses, the people warned, could be shelved or delayed indefinitely if they do not work as envisioned, or for financial or other reasons. The sources said they may take years to perfect. "We are continuously innovating to create an even safer and better delivery experience for drivers," an Amazon spokesperson said, when asked about the driver eyeglasses. "We otherwise don't comment on our product roadmap." [...] The delivery glasses in development build on Amazon's Echo Frames smart glasses, which allow users to listen to audio and use voice commands from Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, the people said. Known by the internal code name Amelia, the delivery glasses would rely on a small display on one of the lenses and could take photos of delivered packages as proof for customers, the sources said. Amazon released in September an unrelated chatbot for third-party sellers that is also known as Amelia. But the technology is still in development and Amazon has had trouble making a battery that can last a full eight-hour shift, and still be light enough to wear all day without causing fatigue, the people said. As well, gathering complete data on each house, sidewalk, street, curb and driveway could take years, they said. Delivery drivers visit more than 100 customers per shift, Amazon has said. With increased efficiency, Amazon could ask drivers to ferry more packages and visit more homes. The Seattle company could face other obstacles, including convincing its thousands of drivers to use the eyeglasses, which may be uncomfortable, distracting or unsightly, the people said, not to mention the fact some drivers already wear corrective glasses. However, much of Amazon's delivery force consists of outside companies, meaning Amazon could make wearing the glasses a contractual requirement, the people said. [...] The embedded screen in development is also slated for a future generation of the Echo Frames that could be released as soon as 2026's second quarter, two of the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Android Authority's Rita El Khoury argues that the decline in punctuation use and capitalization in social media writing, especially among younger generations, can largely be attributed to the iPhone keyboard. "By hiding the comma and period behind a symbol switch, the iPhone keyboard encourages the biggest grammar fiends to be lazy and skip punctuation," writes El Khoury. She continues: Pundits will say that it's just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it's one extra tap too many. When you're firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you're doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed. [...] The real problem, at the end of the day, is that iPhones -- not Android phones -- are popular among Gen Z buyers, especially in the US -- a market with a huge online presence and influence. Add that most smartphone users tend to stick to default apps on their phones, so most of them end up with the default iPhone keyboard instead of looking at better (albeit often even slower) alternatives. And it's that same keyboard that's encouraging them to be lazy instead of making it easier to add punctuation. So yes, I blame the iPhone for killing the period and slaughtering the comma, and I think both of those are great offenders in the death of the capital letter. But trends are cyclical, and if the cassette player can make a comeback, so can the comma. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, writing like a five-year-old will be passe, too, and it'll be trendy to use proper grammar again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Customers have formed new habits of regularly pausing subscriptions and returning to them within a year. From a report: As subscription prices rise and streaming-centric home entertainment becomes the norm, families are establishing their own hierarchies of always-on services versus those that come and go with seasons of hit shows or sports. New data from subscription analytics provider Antenna offer a deeper look at the subscription pausing habits customers are developing as services like Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+ become the go-to way of watching TV in many households, instead of cable. The monthly median percentage of premium streaming video subscribers who rejoined the same service they had canceled within the prior year was 34.2% in the first nine months of 2024, up from 29.8% in 2022. The habit of pausing and resuming service means that the industrywide rate of customer defections, which has risen over the past year, is less pronounced than it appears. The average rate of U.S. customer cancellations among premium streaming video services reached 5.2% in August, but after factoring in re-subscribers, the rate of defections was lower at 3.5%. The increasingly ingrained habit underscores the importance of streamers regularly delivering hit shows and films as well as live fare such as sporting events. Streaming services are trying to use a mix of bundles, promotions, well-timed marketing emails and lower-cost ad-supported plans to lure customers back faster or help them feel they are getting enough value to stick around longer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

D-Link confirmed no fix will be issued for the over 60,000 D-Link NAS devices that are vulnerable to a critical command injection flaw (CVE-2024-10914), allowing unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands through unsanitized HTTP requests. The networking company advises users to retire or isolate the affected devices from public internet access. BleepingComputer reports: The flaw impacts multiple models of D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices that are commonly used by small businesses: DNS-320 Version 1.00; DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012; DNS-325 Version 1.01, Version 1.02; and DNS-340L Version 1.08. [...] A search that Netsecfish conducted on the FOFA platform returned 61,147 results at 41,097 unique IP addresses for D-Link devices vulnerable to CVE-2024-10914. In a security bulletin today, D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming and the vendor recommends that users retire vulnerable products. If that is not possible at the moment, users should at least isolate them from the public internet or place them under stricter access conditions. The same researcher discovered in April this year an arbitrary command injection and hardcoded backdoor flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-3273, impacting mostly the same D-Link NAS models as the latest flaw.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Now and Then" by the Beatles has been nominated for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards -- marking the first time a song created with the assistance of AI has earned a Grammy nomination. From a report: When "Now and Then" first came out in late 2023, the disclosure that it was finalized utilizing AI caused an uproar. At the time, many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members -- Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr -- must have used generative AI to deepfake the late John Lennon. That was not actually the case. Instead, the Beatles used a form of AI known as "stem separation" to help them clean up a 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo recorded by Lennon during his lifetime and to make it useable in a finished master recording. With stem separation, the Beatles could isolate Lennon's vocal and get rid of excess noise. Proponents of this form of technology say it has major benefits for remastering and cleaning up older catalogs. Recently, AudioShake, a leading company in this space, struck a partnership with Disney Music Group to help the media giant clean up its older catalog to "unlock new listening and fan engagement experiences" like lyric videos, film/TV licensing opportunities, re-mastering and more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GIMP 3.0, the long-awaited upgrade from the popular open-source image editor, has entered the release candidate phase, signaling that a stable version may be available by the end of this year or early 2025. Tom's Hardware reports: So, what has changed with the debut of GIMP 3? The new interface is still quite recognizable to classic GIMP users but has been considerably smoothed out and is far more scalable to high-resolution displays than it used to be. Several familiar icons have been carefully converted to SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics, enabling supremely high-quality, scalable assets. While PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics, are also known to be high-quality due to their lack of compression, they are still suboptimal compared to SVGs when SVGs are applicable. The work of converting GIMP's tool icons to SVG is still in progress per the original blog post, but it's good that developer Denis Rangelov has already started on the work. Many aspects of the GIMP 3.0 update are almost wholly on the backend for ensuring project and plugin compatibility with past projects made with previous versions of GIMP. To summarize: a public GIMP API is being stabilized to make it easier to port GIMP 2.10-based plugins and scripts to GIMP 3.0. Several bugs related to color accuracy have been fixed to improve color management while still maintaining compatibility with past GIMP projects. You can read the GIMP team's blog post here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With iOS 18.2, Apple will allow you to share the location of a lost AirTag with other people and with more than 15 different airlines. The Verge reports: When using the feature, you can generate a Share Item Location link within the Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Once you share the link with someone, they can click on it to view an interactive map with the location of your lost item. Apple will update the website automatically when the lost item moves, and it will also display a timestamp when it moved last. Apple will turn off the feature once you find your lost item. You can also manually stop sharing the location of an AirTag at any time, or the link will "automatically expire after seven days." [...] As part of the rollout, Apple is partnering with over 15 airlines, including Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and more. All of these airlines will be able to "privately and securely" accept links to lost items, as "access to each link will be limited to a small number of people, and recipients will be required to authenticate in order to view the link through either their Apple Account or partner email address." This feature will be available to airlines in the "coming months." Additionally, SITA, a baggage tracing solution, will also implement Share Item Location into its luggage tracker.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has confirmed that employee data was compromised after a "security event" at a third-party vendor. From a report: In a statement given to TechCrunch on Monday, Amazon spokesperson Adam Montgomery confirmed that employee information had been involved in a data breach. "Amazon and AWS systems remain secure, and we have not experienced a security event. We were notified about a security event at one of our property management vendors that impacted several of its customers including Amazon. The only Amazon information involved was employee work contact information, for example work email addresses, desk phone numbers, and building locations," Montgomery said. Amazon declined to say how many employees were impacted by the breach. It noted that the unnamed third-party vendor doesn't have access to sensitive data such as Social Security numbers or financial information and said the vendor had fixed the security vulnerability responsible for the data breach. The confirmation comes after a threat actor claimed to have published data stolen from Amazon on notorious hacking site BreachForums. The individual claims to have more than 2.8 million lines of data, which they say was stolen during last year's mass-exploitation of MOVEit Transfer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FTX estate has filed a lawsuit against Binance and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, seeking to recover $1.76 billion, alleging a "fraudulent" 2021 share deal that involved funding from FTX's insolvent Alameda Research. The suit also accuses Zhao of misleading social media posts that allegedly spurred customer withdrawals and contributed to FTX's collapse. CNBC reports: In a Sunday filing with a Delaware court, FTX cites a 2021 transaction in which Binance, Zhao and others exited their investment in FTX, selling a 20% stake in the platform and a 18.4% stake in its U.S.-based entity West Realm Shires back to the company. The FTX estate alleges that the share repurchase was funded by FTX's Alameda Research division through a combination of the company's and Binance's exchange tokens, as well as Binance's dollar-pegged stablecoin. "Alameda was insolvent at the time of the share repurchase and could not afford to fund the transaction," the suit claims, labeling the deal agreed with FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried -- who's now serving a 25-year sentence over fraud linked to the downfall of his exchange -- a "constructive fraudulent transfer." Binance denies the allegations, saying in an emailed statement, "The claims are meritless, and we will vigorously defend ourselves."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, Anthropic quietly hired its first dedicated "AI welfare" researcher, Kyle Fish, to explore whether future AI models might deserve moral consideration and protection, reports AI newsletter Transformer. While sentience in AI models is an extremely controversial and contentious topic, the hire could signal a shift toward AI companies examining ethical questions about the consciousness and rights of AI systems. Fish joined Anthropic's alignment science team in September to develop guidelines for how Anthropic and other companies should approach the issue. The news follows a major report co-authored by Fish before he landed his Anthropic role. Titled "Taking AI Welfare Seriously," the paper warns that AI models could soon develop consciousness or agency -- traits that some might consider requirements for moral consideration. But the authors do not say that AI consciousness is a guaranteed future development. "To be clear, our argument in this report is not that AI systems definitely are -- or will be -- conscious, robustly agentic, or otherwise morally significant," the paper reads. "Instead, our argument is that there is substantial uncertainty about these possibilities, and so we need to improve our understanding of AI welfare and our ability to make wise decisions about this issue. Otherwise there is a significant risk that we will mishandle decisions about AI welfare, mistakenly harming AI systems that matter morally and/or mistakenly caring for AI systems that do not." The paper outlines three steps that AI companies or other industry players can take to address these concerns. Companies should acknowledge AI welfare as an "important and difficult issue" while ensuring their AI models reflect this in their outputs. The authors also recommend companies begin evaluating AI systems for signs of consciousness and "robust agency." Finally, they call for the development of policies and procedures to treat AI systems with "an appropriate level of moral concern." The researchers propose that companies could adapt the "marker method" that some researchers use to assess consciousness in animals -- looking for specific indicators that may correlate with consciousness, although these markers are still speculative. The authors emphasize that no single feature would definitively prove consciousness, but they claim that examining multiple indicators may help companies make probabilistic assessments about whether their AI systems might require moral consideration. While the researchers behind "Taking AI Welfare Seriously" worry that companies might create and mistreat conscious AI systems on a massive scale, they also caution that companies could waste resources protecting AI systems that don't actually need moral consideration. "One problem with the concept of AI welfare stems from a simple question: How can we determine if an AI model is truly suffering or is even sentient?" writes Ars' Benj Edwards. "As mentioned above, the authors of the paper take stabs at the definition based on 'markers' proposed by biological researchers, but it's difficult to scientifically quantify a subjective experience." Fish told Transformer: "We don't have clear, settled takes about the core philosophical questions, or any of these practical questions. But I think this could be possibly of great importance down the line, and so we're trying to make some initial progress."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration plans to support a controversial cybercrime treaty at the United Nations this week despite concerns that it could be misused by authoritarian regimes, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing senior government officials. From the report: The agreement would be the first legally binding UN agreement on cybersecurity and could become a global legal framework for countries to cooperate on preventing and investigating cybercriminals. However, critics fear it could be used by authoritarian states to try to pursue dissidents overseas or collect data from political opponents. Still, the officials said there are persuasive reasons to support the treaty. For instance, it would advance the criminalization of child sexual-abuse material and nonconsensual spreading of intimate images, they said. In addition, the wider involvement of member states would make cybercrime and electronic evidence more available to the US, one official said. If all the members sign the agreement, it would update extradition treaties and provide more opportunities to apprehend cybercriminals and have them extradited, the official added. Hundreds of submissions from advocacy groups and other parties criticized US involvement in the agreement. The US plans to strictly enforce human rights and other safeguards in the treaty, the officials said, adding that the Department of Justice would closely scrutinize requests and refuse to provide any assistance that was inconsistent with the agreement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google will require all new mobile chipsets launching with Android 15 to support its Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a significant shift in the operating system's security architecture. The mandate, reports AndroidAuthority that got a hold of Android's latest Vendor Software Requirements document, affects major chipmakers including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung's Exynos division. New processors like the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 must implement AVF support to receive Android certification. AVF, introduced with Android 13, creates isolated environments for security-sensitive operations including code compilation and DRM applications. The framework also enables full operating system virtualization, with Google demonstrating Chrome OS running in a virtual machine on Android devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's head of research Yossi Matias maintains that learning to code remains "as important as ever" despite AI's growing role in software development. While AI tools have reduced coding time for some developers -- and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noting that AI now generates a quarter of all code, Matias stressed that human engineers still review and approve AI-generated code. The Google executive, who also serves as a company VP, acknowledged that junior professionals have faced challenges gaining experience as AI handles entry-level tasks. Google has launched initiatives to support early-career employees through this transition. Matias compared coding literacy to basic mathematics, arguing it provides crucial understanding of technology regardless of career path.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A University of Zagreb virologist treated her own recurring breast cancer by injecting laboratory-grown viruses into her tumor, sparking debate about self-experimentation in medical research. Beata Halassy discovered her stage 3 breast cancer in 2020 at age 49, recurring at the site of a previous mastectomy. Rather than undergo another round of chemotherapy, she developed an experimental treatment using oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). Over two months, Halassy administered measles and vesicular stomatitis viruses directly into the tumor. The treatment caused the tumor to shrink and detach from surrounding tissue before surgical removal. Post-surgery analysis showed immune cell infiltration, suggesting the viruses had triggered an immune response against the cancer. Halassy has been cancer-free for four years. OVT remains unapproved for breast cancer treatment worldwide. Nature adds: Halassy felt a responsibility to publish her findings. But she received more than a dozen rejections from journals -- mainly, she says, because the paper, co-authored with colleagues, involved self-experimentation. "The major concern was always ethical issues," says Halassy. She was particularly determined to persevere after she came across a review highlighting the value of self-experimentation. That journals had concerns doesn't surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to COVID-19 vaccines. The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Yet, he notes, it's also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn't lost. The paper emphasizes that self-medicating with cancer-fighting viruses "should not be the first approach" in the case of a cancer diagnosis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptocurrency backers continue to bid up Bitcoin prices, pushing the digital token to a new high of about $84,000 on Monday. The New York Times: The cryptocurrency has surged since Election Day, on investor hopes that President-elect Donald J. Trump and his appointees would be friendlier to the industry after the Biden administration's aggressive enforcement of securities law that targeted several crypto companies. Cryptocurrencies have become a major component of the so-called Trump trade. Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which got the regulatory green light to trade this year, have been booming over the past week. Crypto-related companies have also jumped in value: Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner, is up 68 percent since Election Day and Coinbase, a crypto exchange, is up 69 percent over the same period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most companies are starting to figure out how AI will change the way they do business. Chegg is trying to avoid becoming its first major victim. WSJ: The online education company was for many years the go-to source for students who wanted help with their homework, or a potential tool for plagiarism. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs. Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly students had a free alternative to the answers Chegg spent years developing with thousands of contractors in India. Instead of "Chegging" the solution, they began canceling their subscriptions and plugging questions into chatbots. Since ChatGPT's launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The year 2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record after an extended streak of exceptionally high monthly global mean temperatures, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has announced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.