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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physics mystery has come to an end, with a resolution about as shocking as "the butler did it." For a decade, physicists have pondered why nuclear reactors pump out fewer particles called neutrinos than predicted. Some suggested the elusive bits of matter might be morphing into weirder, undetectable "sterile" neutrinos. Instead, new results pin down what other experiments had suggested: that theorists overestimated how many neutrinos a reactor should produce. [...] In a reactor's core, uranium and plutonium nuclei split in a chain reaction, and the antineutrinos come from the radioactive "beta decay" of the lighter nuclei left behind. In such decay, a neutron in a nucleus changes into a proton while emitting an electron and an electron antineutrino. To predict the total flux of antineutrinos, physicists had to account for the amounts and decays of myriad different nuclei. That accounting pointed to a shortfall, but in 2017, physicists from the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China called it into question. They studied antineutrinos from six commercial reactors, burning fuel with 4% uranium-235 atoms, which can sustain a chain reaction, and 96% uranium-238 atoms, which can't. As the uranium-235 is consumed, neutrons from its fission convert uranium-238 into plutonium-239, which also sustains a chain reaction. Daya Bay physicists found the antineutrino deficit shrank as the amount of uranium-235 fell, suggesting theorists had overestimated the flux of antineutrinos originating from uranium-235. Now, physicists working at a small research reactor in France have confirmed that suspicion. The reactor at the Laue-Langevin Institute (ILL) produces copious neutrons for studies of materials. It also uses fuel containing 93% uranium-235. So, by studying the antineutrinos from it, researchers working with a neutrino detector called STEREO could measure the flux of antineutrinos from uranium-235 alone. The detector consists of six identical oil-filled segments lined up like teeth and spanning a distance of 9 to 11 meters from the reactor's core. Rarely, a proton in the oil will absorb an electron antineutrino to turn into a neutron while ejecting a positron -- sort of the reverse of beta decay. As the positron streaks through the oil, it produces light in proportion to the energy of the original neutrino. STEREO researchers showed the spectrum of energies of electron antineutrinos remained the same as distance from the core increased. That observation clashes with the idea that some are morphing into sterile neutrinos, because lower energy neutrinos should morph faster than higher energy ones, changing the spectrum as the neutrinos advance. STEREO researchers also showed the total flux of antineutrinos from uranium-235 was lower than the one used in theorists' models, as they report today in Nature. Taken together, the observations put an end to the reactor antineutrino deficit as evidence for a 1-eV sterile neutrino, says David Lhuillier, a neutrino physicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission and spokesperson for the 26-member STEREO team. "Can it be explained by a sterile neutrino of mass around 1 eV? The answer is no." Other experiments -- such as one called PROSPECT at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- had reached similar conclusions, Lhuillier notes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DirecTV is laying off hundreds of employees -- roughly 10% of its upper ranks -- as the company looks to reduce costs amid the heightened pain of cord cutting for pay-TV providers, according to people familiar with the matter. CNBC reports: Most of the job cuts will be at the manager level, the people said, citing an email to employees sent on Friday. Managers make up about half of DirecTV's fewer than 10,000 employees, one of the people said. The affected employees' last day will be Jan. 20. "The entire pay-TV industry is impacted by the secular decline and the increasing rates to secure and distribute programming," a DirecTV spokesperson said in a statement. "We're adjusting our operations costs to align with these changes and will continue to invest in new entertainment products and service enhancements." DirecTV and its peers have long been under pressure as customers cut the cord and opt for streaming services. The rate of cord cutting accelerated in the third quarter, according to MoffettNathanson. [...] DirecTV reportedly lost around 500,000 customers in its most recent quarter, according to ratings agency Fitch. Although DirecTV's losses slowed during the height of the pandemic, they recently accelerated to nearly 17%, according to MoffettNathanson.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite years of resistance, Apple is now working on adding touchscreens to Macs, according to a report today from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The report claims that a new MacBook Pro with an OLED display could be the first touchscreen Mac in 2025. MacRumors reports: Gurman said Apple engineers are "actively engaged in the project," indicating that the company is "seriously considering" producing touchscreen Macs. The first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen would retain a traditional laptop design with a trackpad and a keyboard, but the display would gain support for touch input like an iPhone or iPad. The first touchscreen Macs are likely to use macOS, as Apple is not actively working to combine iPadOS and macOS, according to the report. iPhone and iPad apps are available on Macs with Apple silicon chips, though, unless a developer opts out. Apple has repeatedly dismissed the idea of a touchscreen Mac over the years, so this would be a major reversal in philosophy for the company if it moves forward with these plans. In 2010, for example, Steve Jobs said that "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical" due to arm fatigue associated with holding up a finger to the screen. And in 2021, Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus said the Mac was "totally optimized for indirect input" and said the company did not feel there was a good reason to change that at the time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a memo seen by The Verge, Microsoft's chief people officer, Kathleen Hogan, announced that the company is giving its U.S. employees unlimited time off. "Microsoft is calling its unlimited time off 'Discretionary Time Off,' and it will apply to all salaried U.S. employees," adds The Verge. From the report: The changes will start on January 16th and mean even new Microsoft employees don't need to wait to accrue vacation time anymore. Microsoft will offer 10 corporate holidays, leaves of absence, sick and mental heath time off, and time away for jury duty or bereavement alongside this new unlimited time off policy. Employees that have an unused vacation balance will get a one-time payout in April. Hourly workers at Microsoft won't be offered the unlimited time off, nor will employees outside the US. Microsoft says federal and state wage and hour laws make it difficult to offer unlimited time off to hourly workers, and those outside the US will keep their current vacation benefits because of different laws and regulations in other countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A government watchdog has published a scathing rebuke of the Department of the Interior's cybersecurity posture, finding it was able to crack thousands of employee user accounts because the department's security policies allow easily guessable passwords like 'Password1234'. The report by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, tasked with oversight of the U.S. executive agency that manages the country's federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, said that the department's reliance on passwords as the sole way of protecting some of its most important systems and employees' user accounts has bucked nearly two decades of the government's own cybersecurity guidance of mandating stronger two-factor authentication. It concludes that poor password policies puts the department at risk of a breach that could lead to a "high probability" of massive disruption to its operations. The inspector general's office said it launched its investigation after a previous test of the agency's cybersecurity defenses found lax password policies and requirements across the Department of the Interior's dozen-plus agencies and bureaus. The aim this time around was to determine if the department's security defenses were enough to block the use of stolen and recovered passwords. [...] To make their point, the watchdog spent less than $15,000 on building a password-cracking rig -- a setup of a high-performance computer or several chained together -- with the computing power designed to take on complex mathematical tasks, like recovering hashed passwords. Within the first 90 minutes, the watchdog was able to recover nearly 14,000 employee passwords, or about 16% of all department accounts, including passwords like 'Polar_bear65' and 'Nationalparks2014!'. The watchdog also recovered hundreds of accounts belonging to senior government employees and other accounts with elevated security privileges for accessing sensitive data and systems. Another 4,200 hashed passwords were cracked over an additional eight weeks of testing. [...] The watchdog said it curated its own custom wordlist for cracking the department's passwords from dictionaries in multiple languages, as well as U.S. government terminology, pop culture references, and other publicly available lists of hashed passwords collected from past data breaches. By doing so, the watchdog demonstrated that a well-resourced cybercriminal could have cracked the department's passwords at a similar rate, the report said. The watchdog found that close to 5% of all active user account passwords were based on some variation of the word "password" and that the department did not "timely" wind down inactive or unused user accounts, leaving at least 6,000 user accounts vulnerable to compromise. The report also criticized the Department of the Interior for "not consistently" implementing or enforcing two-factor authentication, where users are required to enter a code from a device that they physically own to prevent attackers from logging in using just a stolen password.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct. The Register reports: In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes. Citing ASF founding member Brian Behlendorf's description in the documentary "Trillions and Trillions Served" of how he wanted something more romantic than a tech term like "spider" and came up with "Apache" after seeing a documentary about Geronimo, the group said: "This frankly outdated spaghetti-Western 'romantic' presentation of a living and vibrant community as dead and gone in order to build a technology company 'for the greater good' is as ignorant as it is offensive." And the aggrieved trio challenged the ASF to make good on its code of conduct commitment to "be careful in the words that [they] choose" by choosing a new name. The group took issue with what they said was the suggestion that the Apache tribe exists only in a past historical context, citing eight federally recognized Native American tribes that bear the name. In a statement emailed to The Register, an ASF spokesperson said, "We hear the concerns from the Native American people and are listening. As a non-profit run by volunteers, changes will need time to be carefully weighed with members, the board, and our legal team. Our members are exploring alternative ways to address it, but we don't have anything to share at this time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com will no longer facilitate transactions involving Tether in Canada and plans to delist the largest stablecoin by market capitalization for customers in the region. Decrypt reports: "Crypto.com has delisted USDT for users in Canada in accordance with instructions from the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) as part of our pre-registration undertaking for a restricted dealer license," a spokesperson for Crypto.com told Decrypt. Canadian users of the exchange were notified about the company's change in policy on Tuesday via email, as images of the delisting notice began to crop on both Reddit and Twitter. The notice stated Crypto.com's support of Tether will end on Jan. 31, without specifically stating users in Canada would only be affected, prompting confusion on behalf of some on social media. The exchange warned users that all trading, deposits, and withdrawals will not be facilitated after the deadline. "Please take urgent action to review your USDT balance and take necessary action," the notice stated. Any remaining USDT balances would "automatically" be converted to Circle's USD Coin, another stablecoin that tracks the price of the dollar. The exchange also stated the retrieval of USDT deposits made after the deadline may not be possible or warrant some fees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Parlement Technologies, the parent company of "censorship-free" social media platform Parler, has laid off a majority of its staff and most of its chief executives over the last few weeks. The sudden purge of staff has thrown the future of Parler, one of the first conservative alternatives to mainstream platforms, into question. Parlement Technologies began laying off workers in late November, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. These layoffs continued through at least the end of December, when around 75 percent of staffers were let go in total, leaving approximately 20 employees left working at both Parler and the parent-company's cloud services venture. A majority of the company's executives, including its chief technology, operations, and marketing officers, have also been laid off, according to a source familiar with the matter. Parler was founded in 2018 at the height of former President Donald Trump's war against social media platforms over their alleged discrimination against conservative users. The platform marketed itself as a "free speech" alternative to more mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter, offering what it billed as anti-censorship moderation policies. The app surged in popularity throughout the 2020 presidential election cycle, registering more than 7,000 new users per minute at its peak that November. But following the deadly January 6th riot at the US Capitol, Apple and Google expelled the app from their app stores after criticism that it was used to plan and coordinate the attack. These bans prevented new users from downloading the app, effectively shutting down user growth. "It's not clear how many people are currently employed to work on the Parler social media platform or where it's headed from here," adds The Verge. "At the time of publication, the company has just one open job left on its website: to manage its data center facilities in Los Angeles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More and more cash-strapped people are opting to buy second hand and refurbished handsets in these tougher economic times with sales of used and refurbished devices estimated to have passed 282 million in 2022. From a report: The unit growth for those 12 months is some 11.5 percent higher than the prior year, and IDC number-crunchers have calculated compound annual growth of 10.3 percent until 2026 when shipments are forecast to reach 413.3 million. Anthony Scarsella, research manager with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Phone Tracker, said the used market grew off the back of a 6.1 percent rebound in sales of new phones in 2021. "Used devices demonstrate more resilience to market inhibitors than new smartphone sales as consumer appetite remains elevated in many regions," he said. "Attractive price points are critical for growth as cost savings remain the primary benefit," Scarsella added. "However, a high-end inventory struggle due to elongated refresh cycles in the new market has used prices growing 11 percent in 2022." North America was calculated to have shipped 73.5 million smartphones last year with the other 209.1 million devices sold into channels across the rest of the globe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is introducing a new consumer tier to its Microsoft 365 subscription offerings. From a report: Priced at $1.99 per month, Microsoft 365 Basic is designed to replace the 100GB OneDrive storage option with some extra features that sit in between the free option and the $6.99 a month Personal subscription. Microsoft 365 Basic will be available worldwide on January 30th with 100GB of cloud storage, an ad-free Outlook web and mobile experience, and enhanced security features. The security features include data encryption for an Outlook mailbox, suspicious link checking, and virus / malware scanning for attachments. Existing OneDrive 100GB storage customers will be automatically upgraded to Microsoft 365 Basic at the same $1.99 monthly rate. [...] The main difference between the $6.99 Personal subscription and this new $1.99 Basic one (other than the amount of cloud storage) is that Microsoft 365 Basic doesn't include access to the desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. Basic subscribers will have to use the web or mobile versions instead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is planning to start using its own custom displays in mobile devices as early as 2024, an effort to reduce its reliance on technology partners like Samsung and LG and bring more components in-house. From a report: The company aims to begin by swapping out the display in the highest-end Apple Watches by the end of next year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The screens upgrade the current OLED -- organic light-emitting diode -- standard to a technology called microLED, and Apple plans to eventually bring the displays to other devices, including the iPhone. The changes are part of a sweeping effort to replace Apple supplies with homegrown parts, an undertaking that will give the company more control over the design and capabilities of its products. The tech giant has dropped Intel chips in its Mac computers in favor of in-house designs and plans to do the same with the key wireless components in its iPhones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has revealed that a Premium cut of its Teams cloudy collaborationware suite will debut in early February, and some features that are currently included in Microsoft 365 will move to the new -- more costly -- product. From a report: As Microsoft's licensing guide clarifies: "some Teams features will move from Teams licenses to Teams Premium licenses." Those features are:Live translated captions;Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings;Custom organization Together mode scenes;Virtual Appointments - SMS notifications;Virtual Appointments - Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center;Virtual Appointments - Scheduled queue view.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Congress can find common ground on the protection of privacy, competition and American children, says U.S. President Joe Biden. In an op-ed at Wall Street Journal, he shares why he has pushed for legislation to hold Big Tech accountable. From the start of his administration, says Biden, he has embraced three broad principles for reform: First, we need serious federal protections for Americans' privacy. That means clear limits on how companies can collect, use and share highly personal data -- your internet history, your personal communications, your location, and your health, genetic and biometric data. It's not enough for companies to disclose what data they're collecting. Much of that data shouldn't be collected in the first place. These protections should be even stronger for young people, who are especially vulnerable online. We should limit targeted advertising and ban it altogether for children. Second, we need Big Tech companies to take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use. That's why I've long said we must fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites. We also need far more transparency about the algorithms Big Tech is using to stop them from discriminating, keeping opportunities away from equally qualified women and minorities, or pushing content to children that threatens their mental health and safety. Third, we need to bring more competition back to the tech sector. My administration has made strong progress in promoting competition throughout the economy, consistent with my July 2021 executive order. But there is more we can do. When tech platforms get big enough, many find ways to promote their own products while excluding or disadvantaging competitors -- or charge competitors a fortune to sell on their platform. My vision for our economy is one in which everyone -- small and midsized businesses, mom-and-pop shops, entrepreneurs -- can compete on a level playing field with the biggest companies. To realize that vision, and to make sure American tech keeps leading the world in cutting-edge innovation, we need fairer rules of the road. The next generation of great American companies shouldn't be smothered by the dominant incumbents before they have a chance to get off the ground.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has one of the toughest jobs in tech this year. On one hand, he has to deliver on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's grand metaverse ambitions as Apple and ByteDance are entering the space. At the same time, he's also attempting a dramatic cultural reset within Reality Labs, the sprawling division responsible for those ambitions. In an internal memo I obtained that he sent to employees just before the holidays, Bosworth acknowledged a sentiment I've been hearing from current and ex-employees for a while: "We have solved too many problems by adding headcount. But adding headcount also adds overhead. And overhead makes everything slower." "Every week I see documents with 100+ editors," he wrote to the roughly 18,000 people in Reality Labs. "A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule. Sometimes there is even a 'pre-meeting' with its own document. I believe the current situation is untenable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent -- from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose -- according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The plan, if realized, would match the previously announced price hike for Pfizer-BioNTech's rival COVID-19 vaccine. The Journal spoke with Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Monday, who said of the 400 percent price hike: "I would think this type of pricing is consistent with the value." Until now, the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have been purchased by the government and offered to Americans for free. In the latest federal contract from July, Moderna's updated booster shot cost the government $26 per dose, up from $15-$16 per dose in earlier supply contracts, the Journal notes. Similarly, the government paid a little over $30 per dose for Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine this past summer, up from $19.50 per dose in contracts from 2020. But now that the federal government is backing away from distributing the vaccines, their makers are moving to the commercial market -- with price adjustments. Financial analysts had previously anticipated Pfizer would set the commercial price for its vaccine at just $50 per dose but were taken aback in October when Pfizer announced plans of a price between $110 and $130. Analysts then anticipated that Pfizer's price would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to follow suit, which appears to be happening now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Academic researchers have discovered serious vulnerabilities in the core of Threema, an instant messenger that its Switzerland-based developer says provides a level of security and privacy "no other chat service" can offer. From a report: Despite the unusually strong claims and two independent security audits Threema has received, the researchers said the flaws completely undermine assurances of confidentiality and authentication that are the cornerstone of any program sold as providing end-to-end encryption, typically abbreviated as E2EE. Threema has more than 10 million users, which include the Swiss government, the Swiss army, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and other politicians in that country. Threema developers advertise it as a more secure alternative to Meta's WhatsApp messenger. It's among the top Android apps for a fee-based category in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Canada, and Australia. The app uses a custom-designed encryption protocol in contravention of established cryptographic norms. Researchers from the Zurich-based ETH research university reported on Monday that they found seven vulnerabilities in Threema that seriously call into question the true level of security the app has offered over the years. Two of the vulnerabilities require no special access to a Threema server or app to cryptographically impersonate a user. Three vulnerabilities require an attacker to gain access to a Threema server. The remaining two can be exploited when an attacker gains access to an unlocked phone, such as at a border crossing. "In totality, our attacks seriously undermine Threema's security claims," the researchers wrote. "All the attacks can be mitigated, but in some cases, a major redesign is needed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto exchange FTX has recovered more than $5 billion in cash and liquid cryptocurrencies and securities, an attorney for the bankrupt company founded by Sam Bankman-Fried told a judge on Wednesday. From a report: [FTX Attorney Andy] Dietderich also said that the company plans to sell non-strategic investments that had a book value of $4.6 billion, although the company's books have been described as unreliable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI this week signaled it'll soon begin charging for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot that can write essays, emails, poems and even computer code. From a report: In an announcement on the company's official Discord server, OpenAI said that it's "starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT" as one of the ways to "ensure [the tool's] long-term viability." The monetized version of ChatGPT will be called ChatGPT Professional, apparently. That's according to a waitlist link OpenAI posted in the Discord server, which asks a range of questions about payment preferences including "At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?" The waitlist also outlines ChatGPT Professional's benefits, which include no "blackout" (i.e. unavailability) windows, no throttling and an unlimited number of message with ChatGPT -- "at least 2x the regular daily limit." OpenAI says that those who fill out the waitlist form may be selected to pilot ChatGPT Professional, but that the program is in the experimental stages and won't be made widely available "at this time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are today's rudimentary quantum computers already on the verge of significant feats beyond the reach of traditional computers? Or have their capabilities been exaggerated, as practical uses for the technology recede into the future? From a report: These questions have been thrown into sharp relief in recent days by a claim from a group of Chinese researchers to have come up with a way to break the RSA encryption that underpins much of today's online communications. The likelihood that quantum computers would be able to crack online encryption was widely believed a danger that could lie a decade or more in the future. But the 24 researchers, from a number of China's top universities and government-backed laboratories, said their research showed it could be possible using quantum technology that is already available. The quantum bits, or qubits, used in today's machines are highly unstable and only hold their quantum states for extremely short periods, creating "noise." As a result, "errors accumulate in the computer and after around 100 operations there are so many errors the computation fails," said Steve Brierley, chief executive of quantum software company Riverlane. That has led to a search for more stable qubits as well as error-correction techniques to overcome the "noise," pushing back the date when quantum computers are likely to reach their full potential by many years. The Chinese claim, by contrast, appeared to be an endorsement of today's "noisy" systems, while also prompting a flurry of concern in the cyber security world over a potentially imminent threat to online security. By late last week, a number of researchers at the intersection of advanced mathematics and quantum mechanics had thrown cold water on the claim. Brierley at Riverlane said it "can't possibly work" because the Chinese researchers had assumed that a quantum computer would be able to simply run a vast number of computations simultaneously, rather than trying to gain an advantage through applying the system's quantum properties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Federal Aviation Administration system failure caused some flights across the United States to be grounded, the agency said early Wednesday. From a report: The full extent of the delays was not immediately known, but the delays were spread across several airlines. More than 700 flights within, into and out of the United States had been delayed on Wednesday, and more than 90 were canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company. On social media, would-be passengers across the United States said their flights had been delayed, some reporting that their pilots or airline representatives had blamed the F.A.A. technical problem. "The F.A.A. is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System," the agency said. "We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected." Several airports, including in Philadelphia, Tampa, Fla., and Austin, Texas, advised passengers to check with their airlines for the latest information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic, the startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees that's raised over $700 million in funding to date, has developed an AI system similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT that appears to improve upon the original in key ways. Called Claude, Anthropic's system is accessible through a Slack integration as part of a closed beta. Claude was created using a technique Anthropic developed called "constitutional AI." As the company explains in a recent Twitter thread, "constitutional AI" aims to provide a "principle-based" approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions, letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles as a guide. To engineer Claude, Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of "constitution" (hence the name "constitutional AI"). The principles haven't been made public, but Anthropic says they're grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice). Anthropic then had an AI system -- not Claude -- use the principles for self-improvement, writing responses to a variety of prompts (e.g., "compose a poem in the style of John Keats") and revising the responses in accordance with the constitution. The AI explored possible responses to thousands of prompts and curated those most consistent with the constitution, which Anthropic distilled into a single model. This model was used to train Claude. Claude, otherwise, is essentially a statistical tool to predict words -- much like ChatGPT and other so-called language models. Fed an enormous number of examples of text from the web, Claude learned how likely words are to occur based on patterns such as the semantic context of surrounding text. As a result, Claude can hold an open-ended conversation, tell jokes and wax philosophic on a broad range of subjects. [...] So what's the takeaway? Judging by secondhand reports, Claude is a smidge better than ChatGPT in some areas, particularly humor, thanks to its "constitutional AI" approach. But if the limitations are anything to go by, language and dialogue is far from a solved challenge in AI. Barring our own testing, some questions about Claude remain unanswered, like whether it regurgitates the information -- true and false, and inclusive of blatantly racist and sexist perspectives -- it was trained on as often as ChatGPT. Assuming it does, Claude is unlikely to sway platforms and organizations from their present, largely restrictive policies on language models. Anthropic says that it plans to refine Claude and potentially open the beta to more people down the line. Hopefully, that comes to pass -- and results in more tangible, measurable improvements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New medicines need not be tested in animals to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, according to legislation signed by President Joe Biden in late December 2022. Science Magazine reports: "This is huge," says Tamara Drake, director of research and regulatory policy at the Center for a Humane Economy, a nonprofit animal welfare organization and key driver of the legislation. "It's a win for industry. It's a win for patients in need of cures." In place of the 1938 stipulation that potential drugs be tested for safety and efficacy in animals, the law allows FDA to promote a drug or biologic -- a larger molecule such as an antibody -- to human trials after either animal or nonanimal tests. Drake's group and the nonprofit Animal Wellness Action, among others that pushed for changes, argue that in clearing drugs for human trials the agency should rely more heavily on computer modeling, "organ chips," and other nonanimal methods that have been developed over the past 10 to 15 years. But pro-research groups are downplaying the law, saying it signals a slow turning of the tide -- not a tsunami that will remake the drug approval process overnight. Jim Newman, communications director at Americans for Medical Progress, which advocates for animal research, argues non-animal technologies are still "in their infancy" and won't be able to replace animal models for "many, many years." FDA still retains tremendous discretion to require animal tests, he notes, and he doesn't expect the agency to change tack anytime soon. In order for a drug to be approved in the United States, FDA typically requires toxicity tests on one rodent species such as a mouse or rat and one nonrodent species such as a monkey or dog. Companies use tens of thousands of animals for such tests each year. Yet more than nine in 10 drugs that enter human clinical trials fail because they are unsafe or ineffective, providing grist to those who argue that animal experiments are a waste of time, money, and lives. [...] Now, that requirement is gone. In eliminating it, Congress seems to have responded to the emergence of nonanimal methods and growing public sentiment against animal research. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who both call animal research inefficient and inhumane, introduced the changes, which the Senate passed by unanimous consent in September 2022. In December, Biden signed them into law as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which funds the government through this fiscal year. [...] Still, it remains unclear just how much the new law will change things at FDA. Although the legislation allows the agency to clear a drug for human trials without animal testing, it doesn't require that it do so. What's more, FDA's toxicologists are famously conservative, preferring animal tests in part because they allow examination of a potential drug's toxic effects in every organ after the animal is euthanized.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paramount+ has given an eight-episode, straight-to-series order to an adaptation of Hasbro's wildly popular Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game franchise. Deadline reports: Red Notice filmmaker Rawson Marshall Thurber wrote the pilot script and is set to direct the first episode of the series which will be a co-production between eOne and Paramount Pictures. At Paramount+, the Dungeons & Dragons series will join Halo, the video game adaptation, which is one of the streamer's most popular originals. Over the last couple of years, there has been a resurgence in bringing gaming titles to television, and this is the latest example. Adapting Dungeons & Dragons for television has been a major focus for eOne under President of Global Television Michael Lombardo following the company's 2019 acquisition by Hasbro. The live-action series has been tipped to be the studio's largest-scope TV project ever, potentially launching a "Dungeons & Dragons" universe spanning multiple scripted and unscripted shows. Overseeing the series for eOne is Gabriel Marano, the company's EVP Scripted Television.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran's capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation. Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran's strict laws for women's dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped wearing a hijab in 2017 because she views it as a symbol of government suppression, and recalls restaurant owners, fearful of authorities, pressuring her to cover her head. But Shajarizadeh, who fled to Canada in 2018 after three arrests for flouting hijab law, worries that women like the amusement park worker may now be targeted with face recognition algorithms as well as by conventional police work. After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used "to identify inappropriate and unusual movements," including "failure to observe hijab laws." Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said. Two weeks later, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Jina Mahsa Amini died after being taken into custody by Iran's morality police for not wearing a hijab tightly enough. Her death sparked historic protests against women's dress rules, resulting in an estimated 19,000 arrests and more than 500 deaths. Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident -- including women cited for not wearing a hijab. "Many people haven't been arrested in the streets," she says. "They were arrested at their homes one or two days later." Although there are other ways women could have been identified, Shajarizadeh and others fear that the pattern indicates face recognition is already in use -- perhaps the first known instance of a government using face recognition to impose dress law on women based on religious belief. Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran's government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country's national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December. The Guardian reports: Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn't fulfill the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it. [...] There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users. [...] The surge in new Mastodon users continued throughout November, peaking at over 130,000 new users a day. The upticks often coincided with controversial decisions made by Elon Musk. Data from Google suggests there was also a surge in searches for Mastodon in April 2022, around the time Musk announced he had become Twitter's largest shareholder. "Twitter, in its most basic form is simple," Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. "You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you're done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform." For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely. "Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realized how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, 'Oh, that's, that's hard. Maybe we won't go there,'" she said. "It's like the people that said 'I'm moving to Canada' when Donald Trump was elected," Coffey added. "They never actually moved to Canada."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The brother of a former Coinbase product manager was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 months in prison after pleading guilty in what U.S. prosecutors have called the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency. Reuters reports: Nikhil Wahi admitted to making trades based on confidential information from Coinbase, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, when he pleaded guilty in September to a wire fraud conspiracy charge. Prosecutors said Ishan Wahi, the former product manager, shared the information with his brother and their friend Sameer Ramani about new digital assets that Coinbase was planning to let users trade. Ishan Wahi has pleaded not guilty, and Ramani is at large. Prosecutors said Wahi made nearly $900,000 of profit by illegally trading ahead of 40 different Coinbase announcements. They recommended a 10- to 16-month sentence. At a sentencing hearing in Manhattan federal court, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska said his crime was "not an isolated error in judgment." "Today's sentence makes clear that the cryptocurrency markets are not lawless," Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said in a statement. Further reading: Coinbase To Cut 20% Jobs, Abandon 'Several' Projects To Weather Downturns in Crypto MarketRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta is dropping support for its first Meta Quest VR headset. The device will no longer receive future content updates, and by 2024 it will no longer get any bug fixes or security patches. Gizmodo reports: Notably, users will no longer have significant functionality. Though Meta promised you will still be able to use the headset and its installed games and apps, Quest 1 users will no longer be able to join parties, and they will also lose access to Meta's feature product Horizon Home on March 5 this year. Users will no longer be able to invite others to their homes or travel over to another user's home. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced what was originally called the Oculus Quest in 2018 as the premiere wireless VR headset. The company released the headset in 2019 (so Meta is a little off in their letter when they said they launched the device "over four years ago"), and this was all before Meta officially renamed the devices and its various services in 2021. So the Quest 1 is working off four-year-old tech, and it would make some sense why Meta would not want to support aging hardware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Early this week, tractor maker John Deere said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural trade group, promising to make it easier for farmers to access tools and software needed to repair their own equipment. The deal looked like a concession from the agricultural equipment maker, a major target of the right-to-repair movement, which campaigns for better access to documents and tools needed for people to repair their own gear. But right-to-repair advocates say that despite some good points, the agreement changes little, and farmers still face unfair barriers to maintaining equipment they own. Kevin O'Reilly, a director of the right-to-repair campaign run by the US Public Interest Research Group, a grassroots lobbying organization, says the timing of Deere's deal suggests the company may be trying to quash recent interest in right-to-repair laws from state legislators. In the past two years, corn belt states including Nebraska and Missouri, and also Montana, have considered giving farmers a legal right to tools needed to repair their own equipment. But no laws have been passed. "The timing of this new agreement is no accident," O'Reilly says. "This could be part of an effort to take the wind out of the sails of right-to-repair legislation." Indeed, one section of the memorandum takes direct aim at proposals to enshrine the right to repair into law. It states that the American Farm Bureau Foundation "agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state Right to Repair legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU." Walter Schweitzer, a Montana-based cattle farmer and right-to-repair advocate, calls the new agreement "a Groundhog Day sort of thing" -- a repeat of something he has seen before. The memorandum is similar to one signed in 2018 by the California Farm Bureau, the state's largest organization for farmers' interests, and the Equipment Dealers Association, which represents Deere, he says. But little changed afterward, in his view. [...] The new agreement isn't legally binding. It states that should either party determine that the MOU is no longer viable, all they have to do is provide written notice to the other party of their intent to withdraw. And both US PIRG and Schweitzer note that other influential farmers groups are not party to the agreement, such as the National Farmers Union, where Schweitzer is a board member and runs the Montana chapter. Schweitzer is also concerned by the way the agreement is sprinkled with promises to offer farmers or independent repair shops "fair and reasonable terms" on access to tools or information. "'Fair and reasonable' to a multibillion-dollar company can be a lot different for a farmer who is in debt, trying to make payments on a $200,000 tractor and then has to pay $8,000 to $10,000 to purchase hardware for repairs," he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has seized more than 55 million shares of Robinhood stock owned -- via a holding company -- by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX co-founder Gary Wang, according to a court document. The shares were worth just over $456 million based on HOOD's closing price of $8.25 on Friday. CoinDesk reports: The stock had been held at an account at U.K.-based brokerage ED&F Man. The "seized Assets constitute property involved in violations" of crimes such as money laundering and wire fraud reads the court document. Sam Bankman-Fried was formally charged with those and other crimes on Dec. 13. The Robinhood shares were in principle owned by FTX co-founders Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang through their Emergent Fidelity Technologies holding company. FTX, now run by John Ray III, had asked a judge late last month to freeze the stock. Bankman-Fried naturally opposed the move, saying, in part, he needed the shares to help pay his legal fees. According to a report last month, Bankman-Fried borrowed over $546 million from Alameda Research to purchase a 7.6% stake of Robindhood. Meanwhile, crypto lender BlockFi, which filed for bankruptcy like FTX, claims it was owed the rights to the Robinhood shares due to a deal Bankman-Fried made in early November. "The shares were pledged as collateral against a loan taken out by Alameda Research -- the same firm whose funds were used to purchase the shares to begin with," reports CoinDesk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Windows Central's Zac Bowden, Microsoft's next foldable Surface phone will feature "a more traditional foldable design, with a 180-degree hinge, internal foldable screen and external cover display." Bowden writes: I'm told this new foldable device came about after the company had already finalized a dual-screen design for Surface Duo 3. This original dual-screen design was supposed to ship at the end of 2023 as the next Surface Duo, featuring narrower and taller edge-to-edge displays, wireless charging, and other improvements. That dual-screen design has now been scrapped, and the Surface team is now focused on delivering this new "true" foldable design. Microsoft began exploring single-screen foldable designs as a potential successor to the Surface Duo 2 in late 2021 after it launched and was met with mixed reviews. It's still too early to know the exact specs that this new foldable device is going to feature hardware wise, or whether or not Microsoft plans to simulate a dual-screen experience via a software feature or mode. My sources say there's no concrete shipping window for the device in place yet either, meaning it's unlikely to be ready in time for this fall. [...] Of course, with the change in form factor may also come a change in name. It's still too early to tell, but given this device isn't a traditional Duo in form factor, perhaps the company will take this opportunity to rebrand the line, similar to what it did with the Surface Book and Surface Laptop Studio. Regardless, sources tell me this device is still considered a third-generation Duo internally. Bowden goes on to say that Microsoft remains "all-in" on delivering its own Android hardware and software. There's a larger software effort ongoing internally that aims to "deliver an ecosystem experience between Microsoft's Android hardware and Windows PCs similar to that between an iPhone and Mac." The company has also been "exploring different form factors to ship in addition to a foldable device."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It can be done. Android manufacturers can actually support a phone for a sizable amount of time. Fairphone has announced the end of life for the Fairphone 2, which will be March 2023. That phone was released in October 2015, so that's almost seven-and-a-half years of updates. Fairphone is a very small Dutch company with nowhere near as many resources as Google, Samsung, BBK, and the other Big-Tech juggernauts, yet it managed to outlast them with its support program. The whole goal of the company is sustainability, with easily repairable phones, available spare parts, and long update promises. The Fairphone 4 has a five-year hardware warranty and six years of updates, and the company's reputation says it can provide that. Sadly, the phones only ship in the UK and Europe. The Fairphone 2 only promised "three to five years" of updates, and it blew that out of the water. The Fairphone 2 features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, a chip that Qualcomm ended support for with Android 6.0. In what is probably an Android ecosystem first, that lack of chipset support didn't stop Fairphone, which teamed up with LineageOS and today ships Android 10 on the 7-year-old device. That's not the newest OS in the world, but it passes all of Google's Android compatibility tests. I'm sure there are newer amateur releases in the Android ROM community, but Fairphone's Android 10 build is up to the standard of an official release, as opposed to the "tell me what doesn't work" standard of many amateur ROM releases. Fairphone doesn't say why support is ending in March, but if it's staying on Android 10, it was going to have to kill support sometime this year. Google only supports security patches for the last four versions of Android, so even Google will be shutting down Android 10 support soon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two of the US government's leading security agencies are building a machine learning-based analytics environment to defend against rapidly evolving threats and create more resilient infrastructures for both government entities and private organizations. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) -- in particular its Science and Technology Directorate research arm -- and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) picture a multicloud collaborative sandbox that will become a training ground for government boffins to test analytic methods and technologies that rely heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. It also will include an automated machine learning "loop" through which workloads -- think exporting and tuning data -- will flow. The CISA Advanced Analytics Platform for Machine Learning (CAP-M) -- previously known as CyLab -- will drive problem solving around cybersecurity that encompasses both on-premises and cloud environments, according to the agencies. "Fully realized, CAP-M will feature a multi-cloud environment and multiple data structures, a logical data warehouse to facilitate access across CISA data sets, and a production-like environment to enable realistic testing of vendor solutions," DHS and CISA wrote in a one-page description of the project. "While initially supporting cyber missions, this environment will be flexible and extensible to support data sets, tools, and collaboration for other infrastructure security missions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The tech giant had already remade the virtual world. For a brief period, it also tried to make it easier for people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up. From a report: In the early summer of 2017, Warren Slocum walked into a warehouse in Menlo Park, Calif., to meet with members of Facebook's staff and was mesmerized. Sitting before him was a 3-D model of the neighborhoods surrounding Facebook's headquarters. On a nearby white board, one of Facebook's real estate strategists had mapped out what had to be one of the company's most unusual bets yet: a plan for restoring a century-old railroad that's been sitting unused for about 40 years. Since he became president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors in 2016, Mr. Slocum had been publicly advocating the rebirth of the Dumbarton Rail Corridor. This largely deserted 18-mile route runs from Union City on the east side of San Francisco Bay and crosses over the long-abandoned Dumbarton Rail Bridge before cutting straight up the back side of Facebook's sprawling Frank Gehry-designed office complex in Menlo Park and continuing up the San Francisco Peninsula to Redwood City. The tech industry's enormous growth had clogged the roads around this route, with rush hour speeds on some major arteries creeping along at an average of 4 miles per hour in 2016. [...] Traffic to Silicon Valley from other parts of the Bay Area had long been a mess, of course, but what was new was Facebook's apparent interest in fixing it. The company's leaders thought revitalizing the rail line could be a "win-win," said Juan Salazar, Meta's current director of local policy and community engagement, who also met with Mr. Slocum that day. Over the next three years, according to Mr. Salazar, Facebook spent nearly $20 million on plans to revive the rail corridor, hiring staff with experience in rail projects and contracting with a fleet of consultants to study the feasibility of things like electrified commuter rail and autonomous vehicle pods that looked like something out of Disneyworld. If all went according to plan, one January 2020 estimate projected, parts of the rail line would be operating by 2028. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Facebook's employees went home. Traffic died out, and the future of offices themselves became uncertain. Before long, Facebook abandoned its plans for the railroad. Interviews with more than a dozen people who worked on the project both inside and outside Facebook, as well as hundreds of pages of public records, suggest that the project was coming undone long before Covid-19 hit, buckling under a combination of political dysfunction in the region and Facebook's own waning patience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the latest trends in boutique fitness is electrifying. Literally. From a report: Called whole-body electrical muscle stimulation, or EMS, the technique requires users to wear an electrode-studded suit that attaches to a machine. The suit delivers electrical impulses that make each exercise more difficult as muscles fight against the impulses. The result is a more efficient way to build muscle mass and strength, say proponents, who claim that one 20-minute session of whole-body zapping achieves the same benefits as two and half hours of conventional strength training. In the U.S., the workouts are offered by about 400 fitness centers, spas and other outlets, and do-it-yourself home training kits are proliferating online. Yet whole-body EMS isn't a shortcut to a Marvel hero's physique, scientists say. Regulators have warned the equipment can be dangerous, with risks including muscle damage or burns. Whole-body EMS is attracting more attention from researchers studying whether the technique might benefit people who don't or can't exercise. Some doctors are investigating whether it can decrease inflammation in the obese and frailty in older people. A small study presented at an American Heart Association conference in November suggested that whole-body EMS might benefit the heart. Twenty-four young, healthy adults who did 20 minutes a week of squats, lunges and bicep curls using electrical stimulation recorded greater improvements in waist and hip measurements, cholesterol levels, aerobic capacity and other indicators of cardiac health than a second group that did the same exercises without stimulation, according to the findings, which haven't been published in a scientific journal. Small studies like this suggest the approach might hold promise as a supplemental treatment for cardiac patients who don't get the exercise they need, says Jaskanwal Sara, the Mayo Clinic doctor who conducted the research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An investigation recently revealed how images of a minor and a tester on the toilet ended up on social media. iRobot said it had consent to collect this kind of data from inside homes -- but participants say otherwise. From a report: When Greg unboxed a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in December 2019, he thought he knew what he was getting into. He would allow the preproduction test version of iRobot's Roomba J series device to roam around his house, let it collect all sorts of data to help improve its artificial intelligence, and provide feedback to iRobot about his user experience. He had done this all before. Outside of his day job as an engineer at a software company, Greg had been beta-testing products for the past decade. He estimates that he's tested over 50 products in that time -- everything from sneakers to smart home cameras. But what Greg didn't know -- and does not believe he consented to -- was that iRobot would share test users' data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices' front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. Greg, who asked that we identify him only by his first name because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with iRobot, is not the only test user who feels dismayed and betrayed. Nearly a dozen people who participated in iRobot's data collection efforts between 2019 and 2022 have come forward in the weeks since MIT Technology Review published an investigation into how the company uses images captured from inside real homes to train its artificial intelligence. The participants have shared similar concerns about how iRobot handled their data -- and whether those practices conform with the company's own data protection promises. After all, the agreements go both ways, and whether or not the company legally violated its promises, the participants feel misled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple today shared an update on its subscription businesses and global App Store, noting that the tech company has now paid out a record $320 billion to app developers since 2008 -- a number that reflects the revenue apps have generated, minus Apple's commission. From a report: In addition, the tech giant said it now has more than 900 million paid subscriptions across Apple services, with subscriptions on the App Store driving a "significant" part of that figure. [...] The company noted that more than 650 million visitors from 175 regions worldwide visit the App Store every week and it's still delivering new experiences. Among the highlights was the launch of Apex Legends on mobile earlier this year, and the growing popularity of a new form of social networking with BeReal, Apple's "app of the year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said Tuesday she expects more interest rate increases ahead, with higher rates to prevail for a while until inflation is subdued. From a report: "I am committed to taking further actions to bring inflation back down to our goal," the central bank official said in remarks prepared for a speech in Florida. "In recent months, we've seen a decline in some measures of inflation but we have a lot more work to do, so I expect the [Federal Open Market Committee] will continue raising interest rates to tighten monetary policy." The FOMC has increased the Fed's benchmark borrowing rate seven times since March 2022, for a total of 4.25 percentage points. Last week, minutes from the committee's December meeting indicated that most members were on board with additional hikes in 2023, likely taking the fed funds rate slightly above 5%. Reflecting the consensus at that meeting, Bowman said she sees elevated rates holding until there are "compelling signs that inflation and has peaked and for more consistent indications that inflation is on a downward path" before easing up on restrictive monetary policy. "I expect that once we achieve a sufficiently restrictive federal funds rate, it will need to remain at that level for some time in order to restore price stability, which will in turn help to create conditions that support a sustainably strong labor market," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: BMW is expanding the number of feature subscriptions it is offering in the United States. The marque has revealed that five vehicle features are now available through its subscription service, consisting of Remote Engine Start, Drive Recorder, Traffic Camera, Driving Assistance Plus with Stop&Go, and Parking Assistant Professional. Most of these features are available through either a 1-month, 1-year, or 3-year subscription, or can be purchased outright for a one-time fee. Motorauthority reached out to BMW USA and found that the Remote Engine Start costs $10 for 1 month, $105 for 1 year, $250 for 3 years, or can be purchased for $330 for the life of the vehicle. As for the Driver Recorder, it is available for $39 for 1 year, $99 for 3 years, and $149 for a one-time payment. Driving Assistant Plus with Stop&Go can be added for $20 for 1 month, $210 for 1 year, $580 for 3 years, and $950 with a one-time payment. As for Parking Assistant Professional, it is available for $5 for 1 month, $50 for 1 year, $130 for 3 years, or a one-time fee of $220.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company behind Ciphr, an encrypted messaging platform that was especially popular among organized criminals and high tier drug traffickers, is beta testing a new app in an apparent rebrand from its long running reputation as a tech tool of the underground. From a report: The news shows the continuing ruptures across the underground encrypted phone industry after an escalating series of law enforcement hacks and investigations. The rebrand by OnyxCorp, the company that made Ciphr, is the latest episode in that fallout. Other companies in the space have died altogether, had their founders arrested and imprisoned, and had thousands of their criminal users arrested and charged. "There was talk of reinventing the app with a focus on enterprise customers," a former employee told Motherboard. Motherboard granted the source anonymity because they said they had signed an NDA. The new app is called Mode. "Privacy & Protection for Team Communication," the app's website reads. The website says Mode protects chats with end-to-end encryption and disappearing messages, and also includes video calling and file sharing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republicans in the House plan to scrutinize communications between the Biden administration and big technology and social-media companies to probe whether they amounted to the censorship of legitimate viewpoints on issues such as Covid-19 that ran counter to White House policy. WSJ: House Republicans are expected as soon as Tuesday to launch the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The panel is expected to seek to illuminate what some Republicans say have been efforts by the Biden administration to influence content hosted by companies such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Alphabet, owner of YouTube and Google. The panel will examine, among other things, how the executive branch works with the private sector, nonprofit entities or other government agencies to "facilitate action against American citizens," such as alleged violations of their free-speech rights, according to a draft resolution to establish it. A White House spokesman dismissed the effort. "House Republicans continue to focus on launching partisan political stunts," said spokesman Ian Sams, "instead of joining the president to tackle the issues the American people care about most like inflation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Yoo, who founded and helped build the website hosting company that became San Antonio's premier technology firm, believes he's watching its collapse. From a report: The reputation of the company now known as Rackspace Technology, he said, "is eroding rapidly" after years of shifting business plans, executive shuffles, financial losses, staff cuts and, finally, the Dec. 2 ransomware attack that left tens of thousands of customers without access to their email, contact and calendar data. "This is the beginning of the end," Yoo said last week. "It's already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that's on a trajectory of growth. They're on a trajectory of death. It will not be around." He puts the blame for Rackspace's deepening financial struggles -- it's posted a steady string of quarterly losses, and the value of its stock has fallen 80 percent in the past year -- on its replacement of tech-oriented leadership with board members and managers "who don't have any connection with the product." He said there's "no culture" at the company after it laid off hundreds of local staffers while it expanded globally. And he scoffed at the idea of being a "Racker," saying he never adopted the term the company uses for its employees and identity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers have disrupted access to the websites of Denmark's central bank and seven private banks in the country this week, according to the central bank and an IT firm that serves the industry. From a report: The websites of the central bank and Bankdata, a company that develops IT solutions for the financial industry, were hit by so-called distributed denials of service (DDoS), which direct traffic towards targeted servers in a bid to knock them offline. A spokesperson for the central bank said its website was working normally on Tuesday afternoon and the attack did not impact the bank's other systems or day-to-day operations. Access to the websites of seven private banks was briefly restricted on Tuesday after the DDoS attack on Bankdata, a company spokesperson said. The banks included two of Denmark's largest, Jyske Bank and Sydbank, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase plans to cut 950 jobs, or about 20% of its workforce, and shut down "several" projects as the U.S. crypto exchange giant looks to reduce its expenses to increase its "chances of doing well in every scenario." From a report: This is the second round of major layoff at the crypto exchange, which eliminated 18% of its workforce, or nearly 1,100 jobs last June, but there was "no way to reduce our expenses significantly enough, without considering changes to headcount," Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong wrote in a blog post Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything -- and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone. Its creators speculate that VALL-E could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, speech editing where a recording of a person could be edited and changed from a text transcript (making them say something they originally didn't), and audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models like GPT-3. Microsoft calls VALL-E a "neural codec language model," and it builds off of a technology called EnCodec, which Meta announced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods that typically synthesize speech by manipulating waveforms, VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts. It basically analyzes how a person sounds, breaks that information into discrete components (called "tokens") thanks to EnCodec, and uses training data to match what it "knows" about how that voice would sound if it spoke other phrases outside of the three-second sample. Or, as Microsoft puts it in the VALL-E paper (PDF): "To synthesize personalized speech (e.g., zero-shot TTS), VALL-E generates the corresponding acoustic tokens conditioned on the acoustic tokens of the 3-second enrolled recording and the phoneme prompt, which constrain the speaker and content information respectively. Finally, the generated acoustic tokens are used to synthesize the final waveform with the corresponding neural codec decoder." [...] While using VALL-E to generate those results, the researchers only fed the three-second "Speaker Prompt" sample and a text string (what they wanted the voice to say) into VALL-E. So compare the "Ground Truth" sample to the "VALL-E" sample. In some cases, the two samples are very close. Some VALL-E results seem computer-generated, but others could potentially be mistaken for a human's speech, which is the goal of the model. In addition to preserving a speaker's vocal timbre and emotional tone, VALL-E can also imitate the "acoustic environment" of the sample audio. For example, if the sample came from a telephone call, the audio output will simulate the acoustic and frequency properties of a telephone call in its synthesized output (that's a fancy way of saying it will sound like a telephone call, too). And Microsoft's samples (in the "Synthesis of Diversity" section) demonstrate that VALL-E can generate variations in voice tone by changing the random seed used in the generation process. Microsoft has not provided VALL-E code for others to experiment with, likely to avoid fueling misinformation and deception. In conclusion, the researchers write: "Since VALL-E could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity, it may carry potential risks in misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker. To mitigate such risks, it is possible to build a detection model to discriminate whether an audio clip was synthesized by VALL-E. We will also put Microsoft AI Principles into practice when further developing the models."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves as concerns about indoor pollution linked to childhood asthma rise, Bloomberg first reported. CNN reports: A US Consumer Product Safety commissioner told Bloomberg gas stove usage is a "hidden hazard." "Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned," agency commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said in a Bloomberg interview. The report said the agency plans "to take action" to address the indoor pollution caused by stoves. The CPSC has been considering action on gas stoves for months.Trumka recommended in October that the CPSC seek public comment on the hazards associated with gas stoves. The pollutants have been linked to asthma and worsening respiratory conditions. A December 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that indoor gas stove usage is associated with an increased risk of current asthma among children. The study found that almost 13% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. Trumka told Bloomberg the agency plans to open public comment on gas stove hazards. Options besides a ban include "setting standards on emissions from the appliances." In a statement to CNN, the CPSC said the agency has not proposed any regulatory action on gas stoves at this time, and any regulatory action would "involve a lengthy process." "Agency staff plans to start gathering data and perspectives from the public on potential hazards associated with gas stoves, and proposed solutions to those hazards later this year," the commission said in a statement. "Commission staff also continues to work with voluntary standards organizations to examine gas stove emissions and address potential hazards."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, which will value the San Francisco-based firm at $29 billion, Semafor reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters reports: The funding includes other venture firms and deal documents were sent to prospective investors in recent weeks, with the aim to close the round by the end of 2022, the report said. This follows a Wall Street Journal report that said OpenAI was in talks to sell existing shares at a roughly $29 billion valuation, with venture capital firms such as Thrive Capital and Founders Fund buying shares from existing shareholders. The Semafor report said the funding terms included Microsoft getting 75% of OpenAI's profits until it recoups its initial investment once OpenAI figures out how to make money on ChatGPT and other products like image creation tool Dall-E. On hitting that threshold, Microsoft would have a 49% stake in OpenAI, with other investors taking another 49% and OpenAI's nonprofit parent getting 2%, the report said, without clarifying what the stakes would be until Microsoft got its money back. Last week, a report from the Information said Microsoft was working to launch a version of Bing using the AI behind ChatGPT.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain's attempt to become the first European nation to launch satellites into space ended in bitter disappointment early on Tuesday when Virgin Orbit said its rocket had suffered an anomaly that prevented it from reaching orbit. From a report: The "horizontal launch" mission had left from the coastal town of Newquay in southwest England, with Virgin's LauncherOne rocket carried under the wing of a modified Boeing 747 called "Cosmic Girl", and later released over the Atlantic Ocean. "We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit," the company said. "We are evaluating the information." The failure deals a further blow to European space ambitions after an Italian-built Vega-C rocket mission failed after lift-off from French Guiana in late December.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A small biotech company claims it has used a technology called reprogramming to rejuvenate old mice and extend their lives, a result suggesting that one day older people could have their biological clocks turned back with an injection -- literally becoming younger. The life-extension claim in rodents, made by Rejuvenate Bio, a San Diego biotech company, appears in a preprint paper on the website BioRxiv and hasn't been peer reviewed. Noah Davidsohn, chief scientific officer of Rejuvenate, says the company used gene therapy to add three powerful reprogramming genes to the bodies of mice that were equivalent in age to human 77-year-olds. After the treatment, their remaining life span was doubled, the company says. Treated mice lived another 18 weeks, on average, while control mice died in nine weeks. Overall, the treated mice lived about 7% longer. Although the increase in lifespan was modest, the company says the research provides a demonstration of age reversal in an animal. "This is a powerful technology, and here is the proof of concept," says Davidsohn. "I wanted to show that it's actually something we can do in our elderly population." Scientists not connected to the company called the study an exciting landmark but cautioned that whole-body rejuvenation using gene therapy remains a poorly understood concept with huge risks. "It's a beautiful intellectual exercise, but I would shy away from doing anything remotely similar to a person," says Vittorio Sebastiano, a professor at Stanford University. One risk is that the powerful programming process can cause cancer. Such an effect is often seen in mice. Even so, the chance that reprogramming could be an elixir of youth has led to a research and investment boom. One company, Altos Labs, says it has raised over $3 billion. "Far more information will be needed to learn exactly what changes the reprogramming genes cause in the mice, and researchers say other groups will need to repeat the experiment before they are convinced," adds the report. "Sebastiano says the life-extension effect reported by Rejuvenate could be due to changes in a single organ or group of cells, rather than a general mouse-wide rejuvenation effect. Among other shortfalls in its research, Rejuvenate did not carefully document which and how many cells were changed by the genetic treatment."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US aviation safety regulators intend to require passenger and cargo aircraft to meet requirements by early next year for navigation gear to deal with potentially unsafe interference from 5G mobile-phone signals. Bloomberg reports: The equipment is needed because the newer wireless signals are on frequencies near those used by planes' radio altimeters, which determine altitude over ground and can cause them to malfunction, the Federal Aviation Administration has found. Wireless companies are eager for a solution because they paid the government more than $80 billion for the new airwaves. The changes would need to be made by Feb. 1, 2024, the agency said in a notice (PDF) Monday. The FAA said it couldn't rule out interference from 5G signals for about 100 incidents of aircraft navigation equipment issuing erroneous data. Such situations will increase as telecommunications providers expand 5G coverage throughout the US, the FAA said. [...] The FAA estimates that out of 7,993 US-registered aircraft that would need revisions, approximately 180 would require radio altimeter replacements and 820 would require the addition of filters to comply with the proposed order, at an estimated cost of as much as $26 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jacob Ridley writes via PC Gamer: MSI Afterburner is an app used the world over for graphics card monitoring, overclocking, and undervolting. It's become pretty synonymous with general GPU tinkering, yet the app's developer has suggested it might not have long left to live in a forum post earlier this month. MSI disagrees, telling us "we fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner." MSI Afterburner is developed by Alexey 'Unwinder' Nicolaychuk, a Russian national who has kept the overclocking app functioning over many years. Nicolaychuk is also responsible for the development of RivaTuner Statistics Server, which is part of the foundational software layer powering Afterburner. In a post on the Guru3D forums (via TechPowerUp), Nicolaychuk suggests that Afterburner's development has been "semi-abandoned." "...MSI afterburner project is probably dead," Nicolaychuk says. "War and politics are the reasons. I didn't mention it in MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project is semi abandoned by company during quite a long time already. Actually we're approaching the one year mark since the day when MSI stopped performing their obligations under Afterburner license agreement due to 'politic [sic] situation'." Nicolaychuk says development of the app has continued over the past 11 months, but that may also be ending soon. "I tried to continue performing my obligations and worked on the project on my own during the last 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment; I have a feeling that I'm just beating a dead horse and waste energy on something that is no longer needed by company. "Anyway I'll try to continue supporting it myself while I have some free time, but will probably need to drop it and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills." Development of the RivaTuner Statistics Server -- software is pivotal to many of the functions of Afterburner -- is materially separate from Afterburner and will continue, Nicolaychuk notes. Nicolaychuk suggests the issue comes down to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and we've since confirmed with MSI that this is the case. MSI has stated to PC Gamer that the payments were halted due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, saying: "payments had been put on hold due to the RU/UA war and the economic regulations that entailed." [...] On this being the end for Afterburner, MSI disagrees. "We fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner," MSI tells PC Gamer. "MSI have been working on a solution and expect it to be resolved soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.