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Major tech companies are scaling back workplace perks amid industry-wide layoffs and increased focus on AI development. Google, Meta, and Salesforce have reduced or eliminated benefits ranging from massage services to retreat centers, marking a shift from the lavish "perks culture" that defined Silicon Valley for two decades. Netflix has informally shortened its parental leave, while Meta fired employees for misusing meal vouchers. The industry saw over 264,000 layoffs in 2023, suggesting the end of an era where companies competed for talent with luxury amenitiesRead more of this story at Slashdot.

HDMI Forum will announce new specifications with increased bandwidth capabilities at CES 2025, ahead of anticipated graphics card launches from AMD and NVIDIA. The announcement, scheduled for January 6, is expected to introduce HDMI 2.2 standard alongside a new cable supporting higher resolutions and refresh rates. Current HDMI 2.1 specification maxes out at 48 Gbps bandwidth, allowing 10K resolution at 120 Hz with compression. The upgrade aims to compete with DisplayPort 2.1, which offers up to 80 Gbps bandwidth and is already supported by recent AMD and Intel GPUs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on China told Apple and Google's parent Alphabet to prepare to remove TikTok from U.S. app stores on January 19, following a federal appeals court decision upholding legislation requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest the platform or face a ban.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bad news for anyone out there who still uses Skype: The Microsoft-owned phone and messaging platform has quietly stopped letting users top-up accounts with credit and buy Skype phone numbers. From a report: Instead, Skype is locking into SaaS mode: It's pushing users to take monthly subscriptions for regional and global Skype-to-phone plans, for a set monthly fee, likely impacting millions of people. The most recent figures Microsoft released for Skype last year said it had 36 million daily active users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said his company was able to stop hiring a year ago as it invested in AI that's doing the work of hundreds of staff across the firm. From a report: The buy now, pay later finance provider has seen headcount fall 22% to 3,500 during that time, mostly due to attrition, Siemiatkowski said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York on Thursday. The company now has about 200 people using AI for their core work, he said. Siemiatkowski said that while the total wage bill is shrinking, he's been able to convince employees to get on board with the shift by promising they'll see a chunk of any productivity gains they reap from AI in their paycheck. "People internally at Klarna are just rallying to deploy as much efficiency AI as they can," he said. "We're going to give some of the improvements that the efficiency that AI provides by increasing the pace at which the salaries of our employees increases."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EvenUp, a legal tech startup valued at over $1 billion, has largely relied on human workers rather than AI to process personal injury claims, according to Business Insider, which spoke to multiple employees. The startup, which promised to automate the analysis of medical records and case files to determine accident compensation, saw its valuation surge from $85 million to $1 billion in October. Former staff members reported that supervisors instructed them not to use the AI system due to its unreliability, with some working until 3 a.m. to complete tasks manually. The ex-employees cited numerous AI errors, including missed injuries, fabricated medical conditions, and incorrectly recorded doctor visits. While no errors made it into final products, such mistakes could have reduced victim payouts if not caught by human reviewers, they cautioned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. and China signed a modified science and technology agreement on Friday, narrowing its scope and adding security safeguards to address growing technological rivalry between the world's two largest economies. The updated pact, which extends cooperation for five years, focuses solely on basic research and excludes critical technologies like AI and quantum computing. The State Department said the agreement strengthens intellectual property protections and introduces new provisions for transparency and data sharing. The revision comes amid escalating tech tensions, with Washington restricting advanced chip exports to China and limiting U.S. investments in sensitive technologies that could enhance Chinese military capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Legislation was introduced in the Texas House of Representatives on Thursday to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve, which could serve as a proving ground for the U.S. Treasury. The proposed bill would enable the state to start building a strategic bitcoin reserve by accepting taxes, fees and donations in bitcoin that would be held for a minimum of five years, Republican state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione announced on an X Spaces event Thursday. The Texas bill aims to provide a way to strengthen the state's fiscal stability and establish it as a leader in bitcoin innovation, according to the Satoshi Action Fund, a nonprofit bitcoin advocacy group that worked with Capriglione on the bill. "Probably the biggest enemy of our investments is inflation," Capriglione said. "A strategic bitcoin reserve, investing in bitcoin, would be a win-win for the state." "I just filed the bill ... entitled 'An act relating to the establishment of a bitcoin reserve within the state treasury of Texas and the management of cryptocurrencies by governmental entities,'" he said later. "My goal is to make this bill as big and as broad as possible," Capriglione said. "This initial step is to allow some optionality and flexibility on it, but if I am able to get support from other legislators, we will make it even stronger." It's "unlikely" a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve will be established, "but it helps get animal spirits back into the market," Needham's John Todaro told CNBC. He said it's also "unlikely to drive material price gains, as we do not expect the U.S. government will purchase bitcoin in any meaningful capacity, but it's an item that drives excitement and optimism."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigel Richards, a New Zealand-born Scrabble legend, won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship despite not speaking Spanish. The Guardian reports: The Spanish title wasn't the first time Richards' Scrabble skills had shattered linguistic barriers: in 2015 he made headlines when he won the francophone world championships without being able to speak or understand French. Instead he reportedly memorised the entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks. [...] After nearly three decades of playing Scrabble competitively, Richards is widely viewed as the best player of all time, with some chalking up his skills to his photographic memory and ability to quickly calculate mathematical probabilities. Intensely private and swift to turn down interviews, very little is known about his personal life. His reclusive nature -- along with his decades of Scrabble conquests and coups -- have turned him into a legend of sorts for some.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astro Bot has been crowned winner of Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024 tonight. The category also included Balatro, Black Myth Wukong, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. IGN reports: Astro Bot was one of the biggest winners of the night, taking home a total of four awards in categories including Best Family Game and Best Game Direction. Other notable winners included Metaphor: ReFantazio, which won Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, and Best RPG, and Balatro, which one Best Indie and Best Debut Indie. A full list of the nominees and winners can be viewed here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: It would be a nightmare lab leak: Synthetic bacteria escape the petri dish and unleash a global plague that life on Earth is incapable of defending itself against. That's the concern raised by a group of eminent researchers in a Policy Forum published online today in Science. The commentary's 38 authors, from a broad range of disciplines, argue that governments worldwide should prohibit research and funding aimed at creating so-called mirror-image bacteria whose chemical makeup differs in a fundamental way from that of naturally existing organisms. All of life's primary biomolecules can exist in two mirror-image forms, like a left and right hand. But only one form is found in nature. Proteins are left-handed, for example, and DNA and RNA are right-handed. Synthetic biologists have previously synthesized mirror-image proteins and genetic molecules. And mirror-image amino acids and peptides -- the building blocks of proteins -- have been incorporated into several approved drugs. Because natural enzymes struggle to break down mirror-image biomolecules, these components help the drugs survive longer in the body. [...] The concern, he and others say, is that taking this line of work many steps further could result in fully mirror-image bacteria that could reproduce. Such organisms would likely be able to infect and potentially harm a wide range of microbes, plants, and animals while resisting the molecules that enable predators to kill and digest existing microbes. "They are essentially unassailable to those enzymes," says John Glass, a co-author and synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Animals' immune systems would also struggle to cope with mirror bacteria. They "would be invisible to the immune system until it was too late," says Timothy Hand, a co-author and immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh. The Policy Forum authors acknowledge it will be at least a decade before synthetic biologists will be capable of creating these life forms. Nevertheless, they recommend halting all research aimed at that goal and urge funding agencies not to support it. "It's hard to overstate how severe these risks could be," says Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale University and one of the authors. "If mirror bacteria were to spread through infected animals and plants, much of the planet's many environments could be contaminated. ... Any exposure to contaminated dust or soil could be fatal." Jack Szostak, a co-author and a 2019 Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of Chicago, adds: "The result could be catastrophic irreversible damage, perhaps far worse than any challenge we've previously encountered."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Games has partnered with Telefonica to pre-install its mobile game storefront on millions of Android devices. Engadget reports: As such, those who buy a phone from a Telefonica network such as O2 or Movistar in Spain, the UK, Germany and Spanish-speaking Latin America will immediately have the app, which offers access to Fortnite, Fall Guys and Rocket League Sideswipe. Epic will bring third-party games to the storefront as well, while the partners plan to offer mobile gamers on Telefonica's networks extra perks over the next year or so. Telefonica has more than 392 million customers. As such, this deal could bring Fortnite and Fall Guys to an even bigger audience.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's interim co-CEOs acknowledged that the company may be forced to sell its manufacturing operations if a new chipmaking technology slated for next year does not succeed. Reuters reports: Speaking at a Barclays investment banking conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Michelle Johnston Holthaus and David Zinsner - who were tapped as co-CEOs after the ouster of former CEO Pat Gelsinger last week - were asked if the company's continued combination of manufacturing and design was tied to the success of a new chipmaking technology called 18A due next year. Intel plans to use that technology to bring manufacturing of a flagship PC chip back in-house after being forced to outsource its biggest product to rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. "Pragmatically, do I think it makes sense that they're completely separated and there's no tie?" Holthaus said of the company's product and manufacturing divisions. "I don't think so. But someone will decide that." Zinsner, also chief financial officer, outlined how Intel is already separating the finances and operations of this manufacturing division into a standalone subsidiary. Zinsner said Intel Foundry, as the division is known, is already run separately from Intel's other businesses and is setting up a separate operational board and business process software system. "That's going to happen," Zinsner said. "Does it ever fully separate? That's an open question for another day."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an announcement that stunned New Zealand's research community, the country's center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation's sole funding source for fundamental science, to "research with economic benefits." From a report: Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded. Universities New Zealand, which represents the nation's eight universities, called the planned disinvestment in social science and humanities "astonishing." It was among several academic groups and many scientists calling for the government to reverse the unexpected decision. In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on "core science" that supports economic growth and "a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly half of American teenagers say they are online "constantly," according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The report was based on a survey of 1,391 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted from Sept. 18 to Oct. 10, 2024. The Associated Press reports: As in past years, YouTube was the single most popular platform teenagers used -- 90% said they watched videos on the site, down slightly from 95% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they visit YouTube every day. There was a slight downward trend in several popular apps teens used. For instance, 63% of teens said they used TikTok, down from 67% and Snapchat slipped to 55% from 59%. This small decline could be due to pandemic-era restrictions easing up and kids having more time to see friends in person, but it's not enough to be truly meaningful. X saw the biggest decline among teenage users. Only 17% of teenagers said they use X, down from 23% in 2022, the year Elon Musk bought the platform. Reddit held steady at 14%. About 6% of teenagers said they use Threads, Meta's answer to X that launched in 2023. [...] Meta's messaging service WhatsApp was a rare exception in that it saw the number of teenage users increase, to 23% from 17% in 2022. Pew also asked kids how often they use various online platforms. Small but significant numbers said they are on them aoealmost constantly.a For YouTube, 15% reported constant use, for TikTok, 16% and for Snapchat, 13%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Besides phones and tablets, Android is available on smartwatches, TVs, and even cars. Google today announced Android XR as the next form factor the operating system is coming to. Google is using the catch-all term of extended reality (XR) to describe virtual (VR), mixed (MR), and augmented reality (AR). Android XR is for all device types, including headsets that offer video or optical see-through, screen-less "AI glasses," and AR glasses with displays. Going into Android XR, Google believes it has a proven track record of creating platforms. That is more than just making an operating system for themselves, but also catering to OEM partners, cultivating a developer ecosystem, and managing an app store. [...] Google says Android XR is the first OS built from the ground up with Gemini. Google and Samsung are starting with the headset, which both consider a good starting point. Samsung has a developer kit called Project Moohan (or "infinity" in Korean) that is lightweight, has an external battery, and powered by the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2. Google imagines Android XR headsets as offering an infinite desktop for productivity. In this scenario, you're at a desk with a physical keyboard and mouse. A few partners already have this dev kit and more are being distributed to partners starting this week. Meanwhile, first-party apps like Chrome, YouTube, Google TV, Google Photos, and Google Maps are being optimized for Android XR. However, glasses are the end goal and frames running Android XR are coming for "directions, translations or message summaries without reaching for your phone," though they are paired like any other wearable. The final realization of this vision is in-lens display. However, Google does not think that displays are a must, and this opens the door to display-less glasses that have microphones and cameras for input, while Gemini capably handles output. Google will "soon begin real-world testing of prototype glasses running Android XR with a small group of users." With today's launch, Google is releasing the Android XR SDK Developer Preview and an Android XR Emulator. You can get a glimpse into the world of Android XR via this YouTube video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google unveiled Gemini 2.0 yesterday, almost exactly one year after Google's initial Gemini launch. The new release offers enhanced multimodal capabilities like native image and audio output, real-time tool use, and advanced reasoning to enable agentic experiences, such as acting as a universal assistant or research companion. VentureBeat reports: During a recent press conference, Tulsee Doshi, director of product management for Gemini, outlined the system's enhanced capabilities while demonstrating real-time image generation and multilingual conversations. "Gemini 2.0 brings enhanced performance and new capabilities like native image and multilingual audio generation," Doshi explained. "It also has native intelligent tool use, which means that it can directly access Google products like search or even execute code." The initial release centers on Gemini 2.0 Flash, an experimental version that Google claims operates at twice the speed of its predecessor while surpassing the capabilities of more powerful models. This represents a significant technical achievement, as previous speed improvements typically came at the cost of reduced functionality. Perhaps most significantly, Google introduced three prototype AI agents built on Gemini 2.0's architecture that demonstrate the company's vision for AI's future. Project Astra, an updated universal AI assistant, showcased its ability to maintain complex conversations across multiple languages while accessing Google tools and maintaining contextual memory of previous interactions. [...] For developers and enterprise customers, Google introduced Project Mariner and Jules, two specialized AI agents designed to automate complex technical tasks. Project Mariner, demonstrated as a Chrome extension, achieved an impressive 83.5% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark for real-world web tasks -- a significant improvement over previous attempts at autonomous web navigation. Supporting these advances is Trillium, Google's sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which becomes generally available to cloud customers today. The custom AI accelerator represents a massive investment in computational infrastructure, with Google deploying over 100,000 Trillium chips in a single network fabric.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware, written by Avram Piltch: Microsoft's Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a "Filter sensitive information," setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises. When I entered a credit card number and a random username / password into a Windows Notepad window, Recall captured it, despite the fact that I had text such as "Capital One Visa" right next to the numbers. Similarly, when I filled out a loan application PDF in Microsoft Edge, entering a social security number, name and DOB, Recall captured that. (Note that all info in these screenshots is made up). I also created my own HTML page with a web form that said, explicitly, "enter your credit card number below." The form had fields for Credit card type, number, CVC and expiration date. I thought this might trigger Recall to block it, but the software captured an image of my form filled out, complete with the credit card data. Recall did refuse to capture the credit card fields on the payment pages of Pimoroni and Adafruit. "So, when it came to real-world commerce sites that I visited, Recall got it right," adds Piltch. "However, what my experiment proves is that it's pretty much impossible for Microsoft's AI filter to identify every situation where sensitive information is on screen and avoid capturing it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju made history by defeating China's Ding Liren to become the youngest world chess champion at 18, sealing a dramatic 7.5-6.5 victory in the 14-game match. The Guardian reports: The 18-year-old from Chennai dramatically snatched the decisive victory from a dead-drawn position in the final contest of their best-of-14-games showdown when Ding made one of the worst blunders in the 138-year history of world championship matchplay. The 32-year-old defending champion resigned moments later after a game that lasted 58 moves and just over four hours, sealing Gukesh's 7.5-6.5 win in the three-week match and rendering moot the widely expected prospect of tiebreaker matches on Friday afternoon. In doing so, Gukesh shattered the age record held by Garry Kasparov, who was 22 when he toppled Anatoly Karpov in 1985. Gukesh admitted he didn't initially recognize Ding's rook move (55 Rf2??) as a blunder, saying it took a few seconds to spot that his opponent's bishop was trapped. He could barely conceal his excitement upon the discovery, while a devastated Ding could only bury his head in his hands. "When I realized it, it was probably the best moment of my life," said Gukesh, who brings home the $1.35 million winner's share of the $2.5 million prize fund along with the sport's most prestigious title.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo laid off around 25% of its cybersecurity team -- known as The Paranoids -- over the last year, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: Overall, the company has laid off or lost through attrition 40 to 50 people from a total of 200 employees in the cybersecurity team since the start of 2024, according to multiple current and former Yahoo employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity. (Yahoo is TechCrunch's parent company.) The Paranoids are not the only team affected by the layoffs. Valeri Liborski, who was appointed Yahoo's chief technology officer in September, sent an email this week to employees announcing changes across the broader technology unit, including enterprise productivity and core services. The email to staff, which was obtained by TechCrunch, said: "This was a very difficult decision and one I have not taken lightly." The Paranoids' so-called red team, or offensive security team -- which conducts cyberattack simulations to identify weaknesses in the company's network before external hackers can -- was eliminated entirely this week, and there have been at least three rounds of layoffs impacting the cybersecurity team this year, according to the sources.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Deep in the Canadian Arctic, scientists and entrepreneurs brave sub-zero temperatures, whipping winds and snowstorms to drill holes through the sea ice to pump out the seawater below and freeze it on the surface. The group from the UK start-up Real Ice is in Cambridge Bay, a tiny coastal village in Nunavut, to try to prove they can grow and restore Arctic sea ice. Their ultimate plan is to thicken ice over more than 386,000 square miles of the Arctic -- an area more than twice the size of California -- with the aim of slowing down or even reversing summer ice loss and, in doing so, help to tackle the human-caused climate crisis. It's a bold plan, and one of many controversial geo-engineering proposals to save the planet's vulnerable polar regions that range from installing a giant underwater "curtain" to protect ice sheets, to sprinkling tiny glass beads to reflect away sunlight. Some Arctic scientists and experts have criticized Real Ice's methods as unproven at scale, ecologically risky and a distraction from tackling the root cause of climate change: fossil fuels. But the company says its project is inspired by natural processes and offers a last chance to protect a disappearing ecosystem as the world fails to act swiftly on climate change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's ambitious plan to create in-house components for its devices will include switching to a homegrown chip for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections starting next year, a move that will replace some parts currently provided by Broadcom. From a report: The chip, code-named Proxima, has been in development for several years and is now slated to go into the first products in 2025, according to people familiar with the matter. Like Apple's other in-house chips, Proxima will be produced by partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The transition is separate from Apple's highly anticipated shift from Qualcomm cellular modems -- details of which Bloomberg News reported last week -- but the two parts will eventually work together. Apple's goal is to develop an end-to-end wireless approach that is tightly integrated with its other components and more energy-efficient, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiative hasn't been announced. Representatives for Cupertino, California-based Apple and Palo Alto, California-based Broadcom declined to comment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social media giants confronted a familiar dilemma over user content moderation after murder suspect Luigi Mangione's arrest in the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO on Monday, highlighting the platforms' varied approaches to managing digital footprints of criminal suspects. Meta quickly removed Mangione's Facebook and Instagram accounts under its "dangerous organizations and individuals" policy, while his account on X underwent a brief suspension before being reinstated with a premium subscription. LinkedIn maintained his profile, stating it did not violate platform policies. His Reddit account was suspended in line with the platform's policy on high-profile criminal suspects, while his Goodreads profile fluctuated between public and private status. The New York Times adds: When someone goes from having a private life to getting public attention, online accounts they intended for a small circle of friends or acquaintances are scrutinized by curious strangers -- and journalists. In some cases, these newly public figures or their loved ones can shut down the accounts or make them private. Others, like Mr. Mangione, who has been charged with murder, are cut off from their devices, leaving their digital lives open for the public's consumption. Either way, tech companies have discretion in what happens to the account and its content. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects companies from legal liability for posts made by users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Copilot has gone native for Windows Insiders and commandeered a popular keyboard shortcut in the process. The move from a Progressive Web App (PWA) to a native binary -- although most of it appears to still be a website, just not running as a PWA -- will be welcomed. Microsoft noted that once the app update has been installed, Copilot will appear in the system tray. However, the assistant's quick view feature has been given the Alt+Space keyboard shortcut. This is already used by many other applications, including Microsoft's own PowerToys. PowerToys Run, for example, uses Alt+Space to open a launcher into which users can type in the name of the service they are seeking. Alt+Space is also used to show the context menu of the active window. Therefore, Microsoft's decision to hand the shortcut over to Copilot is unlikely to please keyboard warriors who are used to their shortcuts working in a particular way. The Windows vendor acknowledged that the shortcut was already in use by many apps, saying: "For any apps installed on your PC that might utilize this keyboard shortcut, Windows will register whichever app is launched first on your PC and running in the background as the app that is invoked when using Alt+Space."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: BeReal, the in the moment social media platform, is far from its 2022 heyday, but that hasn't stopped one organization from going after it. Austrian advocacy group Noyb has filed a complaint surrounding the platform's data consent banner practices. The organization claims that the banner disappears if users accept that their personal data can inform advertising practices, but if they click reject then the banner appears daily. Noyb filed its complaint with the French data protection authority (CNIL) as Voodoo, a French company, bought BeReal in June -- the practice in question started in July. "BeReal's daily attempt to pressure its users into accepting the tracking for personalised advertising has a significant impact on user behaviour. Consent given under these circumstances is not freely given, which means it doesn't meet the requirements established in Article 4(11) GDPR," Noyb argued in its complaint. It asked the CNIL to fine BeReal and force it to be compliant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has postponed implementing Microsoft's cloud-based Office suite for its workforce by one year, citing security concerns following a Russian cyber attack on Microsoft's systems. The delay affects a $1 billion, five-year contract signed last year to provide Microsoft 365 to Amazon's 1.5 million employees, making the e-commerce giant one of the largest customers of Microsoft's cloud productivity suite. The decision came after Microsoft revealed that Midnight Blizzard, a Russia-linked hacking group, had breached several employee email accounts, including those of senior executives and cybersecurity staff. Amazon subsequently conducted its own security review and requested enhanced protection measures from Microsoft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: In a move sure to rattle some subscribers, YouTube TV has announced a price increase for its Base Plan. Starting January 13, 2025, the monthly subscription cost will jump from $72.99 to $82.99. The search giant cites the rising costs of content and investments in service quality as the primary reasons for this adjustment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, who stepped down from his leadership post a week ago, is inviting people to join him in prayer and fasting for the struggling chipmaker's employees. "Every Thursday I do a 24 hour prayer and fasting day," Gelsinger wrote on X on Sunday morning. "This week I'd invite you to join me in praying and fasting for the 100K Intel employees as they navigate this difficult period. Intel and its team is of seminal importance to the future of the industry and US."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FlatpanelsHD: LG has discontinued all Blu-ray players, including the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players, with remaining units only available while stocks last. The announcement echoes similar moves from Oppo in 2018 and Samsung in 2019, when both companies exited the optical disc player market. LG has now officially discontinued its Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players, as reflected on LG's online portals and confirmed by multiple sources to FlatpanelsHD.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harvard University announced Thursday it's releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly one million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. From a report: The dataset was created by Harvard's newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright. Around five times the size of the notorious Books3 dataset that was used to train AI models like Meta's Llama, the Institutional Data Initiative's database spans genres, decades, and languages, with classics from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Dante included alongside obscure Czech math textbooks and Welsh pocket dictionaries. Greg Leppert, executive director of the Institutional Data Initiative, says the project is an attempt to "level the playing field" by giving the general public, including small players in the AI industry and individual researchers, access to the sort of highly-refined and curated content repositories that normally only established tech giants have the resources to assemble. "It's gone through rigorous review," he says. Leppert believes the new public domain database could be used in conjunction with other licensed materials to build artificial intelligence models. "I think about it a bit like the way that Linux has become a foundational operating system for so much of the world," he says, noting that companies would still need to use additional training data to differentiate their models from those of their competitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Web Services said in a post earlier this month that developers report spending an average of "just one hour per day" on actual coding. But that doesn't mean these workers twiddle their thumbs the remaining seven hours per day. Instead, developers spend the majority of their time on "tedious, undifferentiated tasks such as learning codebases, writing and reviewing documentation, testing, managing deployments, troubleshooting issues or finding and fixing vulnerabilities," according to Amazon Web Services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Startup Embodied is closing down, and its product, an $800 robot for kids ages 5 to 10, will soon be bricked. From a report: Embodied blamed its closure on a failed "critical funding round." On its website, it explained: "We had secured a lead investor who was prepared to close the round. However, at the last minute, they withdrew, leaving us with no viable options to continue operations. Despite our best efforts to secure alternative funding, we were unable to find a replacement in time to sustain operations." The company didn't provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied's previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don't know who the lead investor mentioned above is. When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a "safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photobucket was sued Wednesday after a recent privacy policy update revealed plans to sell users' photos -- including biometric identifiers like face and iris scans -- to companies training generative AI models. From a report: The proposed class action seeks to stop Photobucket from selling users' data without first obtaining written consent, alleging that Photobucket either intentionally or negligently failed to comply with strict privacy laws in states like Illinois, New York, and California by claiming it can't reliably determine users' geolocation. Two separate classes could be protected by the litigation. The first includes anyone who ever uploaded a photo between 2003 -- when Photobucket was founded -- and May 1, 2024. Another potentially even larger class includes any non-users depicted in photographs uploaded to Photobucket, whose biometric data has also allegedly been sold without consent. Photobucket risks huge fines if a jury agrees with Photobucket users that the photo-storing site unjustly enriched itself by breaching its user contracts and illegally seizing biometric data without consent. As many as 100 million users could be awarded untold punitive damages, as well as up to $5,000 per "willful or reckless violation" of various statutes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Russia has reportedly cut some regions of the country off from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them, according to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets. Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says. The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. People in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps -- even if they used VPNs, according to a local Russian news site. Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda told TechRadar that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some apparently did. It's unclear which ones or how many actually worked, though. Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia, according to Russian news agency Interfax.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Knopp, KPMG US CEO, writing in an op-ed on WSJ: According to a United Nations estimate, 230 languages went extinct between 1950 and 2010. If my profession doesn't act, the language of business -- accounting -- could vanish too. The number of students who took the exam to become certified public accountants in 2022 hit a 17-year low. From 2020 to 2022, bachelor's degrees in accounting dropped 7.8% after steady declines since 2018. While the shortage isn't yet an issue for the country's largest firms, it's beginning to affect our economy and capital markets. In the first half of 2024, nearly 600 U.S.-listed companies reported material weaknesses related to personnel. S&P Global analysts last year warned that many municipalities were at risk of having their credit ratings downgraded or withdrawn due to delayed financial disclosures. Our profession must remove hurdles to learning the accounting language while preserving quality. In October, KPMG became the first large accounting firm to advocate developing alternate paths to CPA licensing. We want pathways that emphasize experience, not academic credits, after college. Most people today must earn 30 credits after their bachelor's degrees -- the so-called 150-hour rule -- work under a licensed CPA for a year, and pass the CPA exam to become licensed. Research by the Center for Audit Quality finds that the 150-hour rule is among the top reasons people don't pursue CPA licensure. A December 2023 study found that the requirement causes a 26% drop in interest among minorities. There is a consensus for change, but we can't waste time. Many state CPA societies are working on legislation to create an alternative path to licensure. State boards of accountancy should replace the extra academic requirement with more on-the-job experience. A person who is licensed in one state should be able to practice in another even if reforms create different licensing requirements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced an experimental AI-powered code agent called "Jules" that can automatically fix coding errors for developers. From a report: Jules was introduced today alongside Gemini 2.0, and uses the updated Google AI model to create multi-step plans to address issues, modify multiple files, and prepare pull requests for Python and Javascript coding tasks in GitHub workflows. Microsoft introduced a similar experience for GitHub Copilot last year that can recognize and explain code, alongside recommending changes and fixing bugs. Jules will compete against Microsoft's offering, and also against tools like Cursor and even Claude and ChatGPT's coding abilities. Google's launch of a coding-focused AI assistant is no surprise -- CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that more than a quarter of all new code at the company is now generated by AI. "Jules handles bug fixes and other time-consuming tasks while you focus on what you actually want to build," Google says in its blog post. "This effort is part of our long-term goal of building AI agents that are helpful in all domains, including coding."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg abruptly left a key WordPress community platform after a federal court ordered his company to restore rival WP Engine's access to WordPress.org and remove a controversial login requirement. The preliminary injunction mandates Automattic eliminate a checkbox that forced users to declare they had no connection to WP Engine before accessing the platform. Mullenweg departed the Post Status Slack forum following the ruling, writing he was "sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor" to WP Engine, according to 404 Media. "It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this," he added. The order gives Automattic 72 hours to comply, including reinstating WP Engine's employee credentials and plugin access. The ruling marks a significant development in an escalating dispute between the WordPress parent company and the web hosting provider.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An international research team has for the first time imaged and controlled a type of magnetic flow called altermagnetism, which physicists say could be used to develop faster and more reliable electronic devices. Financial Times: A groundbreaking experiment at a powerful X-ray microscope in Sweden provides direct proof of the existence of altermagnetism, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. Altermagnetic materials can sustain magnetic activity without themselves being magnetic. The team from the UK's Nottingham university that led the research said the discovery has revolutionary potential for the electronics industry. "Altermagnets have the potential to lead to a thousand-fold increase in the speed of microelectronic components and digital memory, while being more robust and energy-efficient," said senior author Peter Wadley, Royal Society research fellow at Nottingham. Hard disks and other components underpinning the modern computers industry process data in ferromagnetic materials, whose intrinsic magnetism limits their speed and packing density. Using altermagnetic materials will allow current to flow in non-magnetic products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today unveiled Project Mariner, its first AI agent capable of autonomously navigating web browsers, operating through a Chrome extension that controls cursor movements and form-filling to replicate human interactions online. The Gemini-powered prototype, developed by Google's DeepMind division, is initially available to a select group of testers. During demos, the agent performed tasks like creating shopping carts on grocery websites, though with noticeable five-second delays between actions. The system captures browser screenshots and processes them through Gemini in the cloud to generate navigation commands. It operates only in Chrome's active tab, requiring users to observe its actions rather than running in the background. Project Mariner achieved an 83.5% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark for web-based tasks. The agent has built-in limitations, including inability to complete purchases, accept cookies, or agree to terms of service. Google Labs Director Jaclyn Konzelmann described the project as a "fundamentally new UX paradigm shift" that could transform how users interact with websites. The company said it is engaging with web ecosystem stakeholders as development continues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Software has become essential for winning modern wars, a senior Palantir executive told a defense conference in Israel this week. "Modern war cannot be won without software," said Noam Perski, executive vice president at the data analytics company. "Seeing software as a defense system, as a weapon system, and the most malleable weapon system we have, is really important as we build the next generation's capabilities." Speaking at Tel Aviv University's first DefenseTech Summit, Perski said human factors still determine military success.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security researchers have uncovered a new surveillance tool that they say has been used by Chinese law enforcement to collect sensitive information from Android devices in China. From a report: The tool, named "EagleMsgSpy," was discovered by researchers at U.S. cybersecurity firm Lookout. The company said at the Black Hat Europe conference on Wednesday that it had acquired several variants of the spyware, which it says has been operational since "at least 2017." Kristina Balaam, a senior intelligence researcher at Lookout, told TechCrunch the spyware has been used by "many" public security bureaus in mainland China to collect "extensive" information from mobile devices. This includes call logs, contacts, GPS coordinates, bookmarks, and messages from third-party apps including Telegram and WhatsApp. EagleMsgSpy is also capable of initiating screen recordings on smartphones, and can capture audio recordings of the device while in use, according to research Lookout shared with TechCrunch. A manual obtained by Lookout describes the app as a "comprehensive mobile phone judicial monitoring product" that can obtain "real-time mobile phone information of suspects through network control without the suspect's knowledge, monitor all mobile phone activities of criminals and summarize them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rising renewables, low demand and cheaper power imports all helped reduce fossil fuel use in the UK power system to record lows. From a report: For the first full year wind, solar, and hydropower will generate more electricity than all fossil fuels combined. Homegrown UK renewable power will cross a significant threshold in 2024, overtaking fossil fuel generation for the first full year. Wind, solar and hydropower are set to generate a combined 37% of UK electricity in 2024 (103 TWh), compared to 35% from fossil fuels (97 TWh). Just 3 years ago, in 2021, fossil fuels generated 46% of UK electricity, while low-carbon renewables generated 27%. Including biomass, renewables overtook fossil fuels in the UK in 2020, fell below fossil power the following year as biomass production fell, and again overtook in 2023. However, Ember's analysis raises concerns about biomass being categorised as clean power in the UK, given the significant emissions risks and lack of domestic pellet production. Bioenergy, which includes biomass and biogas power, is set to provide 14% of UK electricity in 2024. Fossil generation in 2024 has fallen by two-thirds since 2000, with the long awaited phase-out of coal power, and gas increasingly displaced by cheaper, cleaner power sources. Coal started to decline rapidly from 2012 and since 2020, coal power has made up only 2% of generation in the UK, dropping to zero by October 2024. Gas has seen a gradual decline since 2016. Across 2024 there has been a large decrease in fossil gas power, which provided 30% of electricity in 2024 (85 TWh), down from 34% in 2023 (98 TWh).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI-powered apps have flooded Apple's App Store, with AI-branded tools dominating top rankings across multiple categories, particularly in graphics and design. An investigation by The Verge reveals significant quality concerns among these applications. Turkey-based developer HUBX controls three of the top 10 graphics apps, including DaVinci AI, which offers limited free features while charging up to $30 annually for full access. The app produces low-quality images and forces watermarks on paid users' downloads, The Verge writes. According to Sensor Tower data, four of the top 10 most downloaded iOS graphics apps in the U.S. this year include "AI" in their titles. While established photo editing apps like Photoshop Express saw downloads drop 21%, AI-focused app Photoroom's downloads surged 160% year-over-year. Professional creative apps continue to dominate iPad and paid iPhone categories, suggesting the AI app trend primarily targets casual users seeking free alternatives to paid creative services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The news came by Slack message. Cruise CEO Marc Whitten, who took the top post in June, posted a message Tuesday afternoon in the company's announcements channel along with a link to a press release entitled "GM to refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles." GM, which acquired the self-driving car startup in 2016, would no longer fund the company, ending a mission that hundreds of Cruise engineers had worked on for years. Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruise employees learned a few more details. The self-driving car company would be absorbed into parent company GM and combined with the automaker's own efforts to develop driver assistance features -- and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be safe or cut was, and still is, unclear. That meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, president and chief technology officer Mo Elshenawy, and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, led the all-hands. Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity said they were "surprised" and "blindsided" by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM's plans the same time the media did.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WP Engine just won a preliminary injunction against WordPress.com parent company Automattic. On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins. From a report: The preliminary injunction comes after WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, filed a lawsuit that accused Automattic and its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, of "multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm." It later asked the court to stop Mullenweg from restricting WP Engine's access to WordPress.org. Mullenweg waged a public campaign against WP Engine in September, accusing the service of misusing the WordPress trademark and not contributing enough to the WordPress community. After blocking WP Engine from WordPress.org's servers, Automattic took control of WP Engine's ACF Plugin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google recently asked the U.S. government to break up Microsoft's exclusive agreement to host OpenAI's technology on its cloud servers, according to a person who has been directly involved in the effort. The conversation took place after the Federal Trade Commission, one of the primary federal antitrust enforcement agencies, asked Google about Microsoft's business practices as part of a broader investigation, this person said. Firms that compete with Microsoft in renting out cloud servers, including Google and Amazon, want to host OpenAI's artificial intelligence themselves so their cloud customers don't need to also tap Microsoft servers to get access to the startup's technology, this person said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon expanded Tuesday into online car sales with the launch of Amazon Autos, an e-commerce business that lets customers find, order, and buy new cars, trucks, and SUVs from dealerships. From a report: Amazon is kicking off the new endeavor with Hyundai in 48 U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The launch comes a little more than a year since the e-commerce giant announced plans to start selling vehicles on its website in the second half of 2024. Amazon said it will add more cities and additional auto manufacturers in 2025. Amazon Autos will function, in many ways, like the rest of the broader Amazon e-commerce ecosystem. Shoppers will be able to search for available vehicles from participating dealers by model, trim, color, and features. Notably, customers will also be able to secure financing and e-sign paperwork via the Amazon Autos site. Once the payment is finalized, customers can schedule when to pick up their vehicle from that dealership. When vehicles go on sale at Amazon, the local dealer (for now just Hyundai dealers) will be the seller of record. Amazon Autos will even handle trade ins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly 100 live samples of the deadly Hendra virus have been lost in a biosecurity bungle at a state-run Queensland laboratory. An investigation has been launched after it was revealed 323 virus samples went missing from Virology Laboratory in 2021 in a "major breach" of biosecurity protocol, Health Minister Tim Nicholls announced on Monday. The material, which included samples of Hendra virus, lyssavirus and hantavirus, appears to have gone missing after a freezer storing the samples broke down. Mr Nicholls said the breach was uncovered in August 2023. The lab has been unable to say whether the materials were removed or destroyed. "It's this part of the transfer of those materials that is causing concern," Mr Nicholls said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Software vulnerability submissions generated by AI models have ushered in a "new era of slop security reports for open source" -- and the devs maintaining these projects wish bug hunters would rely less on results produced by machine learning assistants. Seth Larson, security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation, raised the issue in a blog post last week, urging those reporting bugs not to use AI systems for bug hunting. "Recently I've noticed an uptick in extremely low-quality, spammy, and LLM-hallucinated security reports to open source projects," he wrote, pointing to similar findings from the Curl project in January. "These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute." Larson argued that low-quality reports should be treated as if they're malicious. As if to underscore the persistence of these concerns, a Curl project bug report posted on December 8 shows that nearly a year after maintainer Daniel Stenberg raised the issue, he's still confronted by "AI slop" -- and wasting his time arguing with a bug submitter who may be partially or entirely automated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global antibiotic use in livestock varies dramatically across regions, with some Asian countries using up to 80 times more antibiotics per kilogram of meat than European nations, according to new research published by Our World in Data. Thailand leads global antibiotic consumption in livestock, while Norway reports the lowest usage rates. The study found that around 70% of global antibiotics are administered to farm animals rather than humans, raising concerns about antimicrobial resistance. Several European countries have successfully reduced veterinary antibiotic sales by more than half between 2011 and 2022 through stricter regulations, including requiring prescriptions and imposing taxes on sales. The Netherlands saw a 54% decrease in pig farm antibiotic use between 2004 and 2016 without negative impacts on animal welfare or farm economics. Researchers suggest global livestock antibiotic use could fall by two-thirds if consumption were reduced to 50 milligrams per kilogram of meat produced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.