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An anonymous reader shares a report: Burnout, quiet quitting, strikes -- the news (and likely your schedule) is filled with markers that workers are overwhelmed and too much is expected of them. There's little regulation in the United States to prevent employers from forcing workers to be at their desks or on call at all hours, but that might soon change. California State Assemblyman Matt Haney has introduced AB 2751, a "right to disconnect" proposition, The San Francisco Standard reports. The bill is in its early stages but, if passed, would make every California employer lay out exactly what a person's hours are and ensure they aren't required to respond to work-related communications while off the clock. Time periods in which a salaried employee might have to work longer hours would need to be laid out in their contract. Exceptions would exist for emergencies. The Department of Labor would monitor adherence and fine companies a minimum of $100 for wrongdoing -- whether that's forcing employees to be on Zoom, their inbox, answering texts or monitoring Slack when they're not getting paid to do so. "I do think it's fitting that California, which has created many of these technologies, is also the state that introduces how we make it sustainable and update our protections for the times we live in and the world we've created," Haney told The Standard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House plans to renew a push in April to convince Congress to extend an internet subsidy program used by 23 million American households just weeks before it runs out of money, officials said. From a report: In October, the White House asked for $6 billion to extend the program through December 2024, but Congress has not funded it, potentially putting millions of households at risk of losing their internet service. Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel told lawmakers in a letter that April is the last month participants will get the full subsidy, with partial subsidies in May. Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher to use toward internet service. "We have come too far to allow this successful effort to promote internet access for all to end," Rosenworcel said on Tuesday. "Despite the breadth of this support and the urgent need to continue this program to ensure millions of households nationwide do not lose essential internet access, no additional funding has yet been appropriated."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with "Just Walk Out" technology. The company's senior vice president of grocery stores says they're moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with. From a report: Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. Instead, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen are embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out, whose impressive technology was truly ahead of its time. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren't Amazon members.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 200 musical artists -- including Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Smokey Robinson -- have penned an open letter to AI developers, tech firms and digital platforms to "cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists." From a report: Unlike other advocacy efforts from creators around AI, this letter specifically addresses tech firms about the concerns of musical artists, such as replicating artist's voices, using their work to train AI models without compensation and diluting royalty pools that are paid out to artists. Jen Jacobsen, executive director at The Artist Rights Alliance (ARA), the trade group representing the artists signing the letter, told Axios, "We're not thinking about legislation here." "We're kind of calling on our technology and digital partners to work with us to make this a responsible marketplace, and to keep the quality of the music sound, and not to replace human artists." The letter, penned by dozens of well-known musicians within ARA, specifically calls on tech firms and AI developers to stop the "predatory use of AI to steal professional artists' voices and likenesses, violate creators' rights, and destroy the music ecosystem." Signatories include Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Nicki Minaj, Camila Cabello, Kacey Musgraves, Jon Batiste, Ja Rule, Jason Isbell, Pearl Jam, Sam Smith and dozens more spanning every musical genre.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said. "In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AWS has expanded its free credits program for startups to cover the costs of using major AI models. From a report: In a move to attract startup customers, Amazon now allows its cloud credits to cover the use of models from other providers including Anthropic, Meta, Mistral AI, and Cohere. "This is another gift that we're making back to the startup ecosystem, in exchange for what we hope is startups continue to choose AWS as their first stop," said Howard Wright, vice president and global head of startups at AWS. [...] As part of the deal, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Trainium and Inferentia chips to build and train its models. Wright said Amazon's free credit will contribute to revenue of Anthropic, one of the most popular models on Bedrock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. From a report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an "embodied AI character" that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services. The Xbox AI chatbot is connected to Microsoft's support documents for the Xbox network and ecosystem, and can respond to questions and even process game refunds from Microsoft's support website. "This agent can help you with your Xbox support questions," reads a description of the Xbox chatbot internally at Microsoft. Microsoft expanded the testing pool for its Xbox chatbot more broadly in recent days, suggesting that this prototype "Xbox Support Virtual Agent" may one day handle support queries for all Xbox customers. Microsoft confirmed the existence of its chatbot to The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: In the average American house, any download rate above roughly 242 Mbs is considered a solidly speedy broadband internet connection. That's pretty decent, but across the Atlantic, researchers at UK's Aston University recently managed to coax about 1.2 million times that rate using a single fiber optic cable -- a new record for specific wavelength bands. As spotted earlier today by Gizmodo, the international team achieved a data transfer rate of 301 terabits, or 301,000,000 megabits per second by accessing new wavelength bands normally unreachable in existing optical fibers -- the tiny, hollow glass strands that carry data through beams of light. According to Aston University's recent profile, you can think of these different wavelength bands as different colors of light shooting through a (largely) standard cable. Commercially available fiber cabling utilizes what are known as C- and L-bands to transmit data. By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands. "Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider," Ian Phillips, the optical processor's creator, said in a statement. "Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way." But in terms of new tech, the processor was basically it for the team's experiment. "Broadly speaking, data was sent via an optical fiber like a home or office internet connection," Phillips added. What's particularly impressive and promising about the team's achievement is that they didn't need new, high-tech fiber optic lines to reach such blindingly fast speeds. Most existing optical cables have always technically been capable of reaching E- and S-bands, but lacked the equipment infrastructure to do so. With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As political pressure mounts, TikTok says it's committed to fostering educational content on its app. "The company announced on Tuesday that it's expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The STEM feed will begin to automatically appear alongside the "For You" and "Following" feeds for users under the age of 18. Users above the age of 18 can enable the STEM feed via the app's "content preferences" settings. The feed includes English-speaking content with auto-translate subtitles. TikTok says that since launching the feed in the U.S. last year, 33% of users have the STEM feed enabled and a third of teens go to the STEM feed every week. The app has seen a 24% growth in STEM-related content in the U.S. since the feed launched. Over the past three years, almost 15 million STEM-related videos have been published on the app globally. The company is expanding its partnerships with Common Sense Networks and Poynter to assess all of the content appearing on the STEM feed. Common Sense Networks will examine the content to ensure it's appropriate for the STEM feed, while Poynter will assess the reliability of the information. Content that doesn't pass both of these checkpoints will not be eligible for the STEM feed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nearly two-pound piece of trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida. Alejandro Otero said it "tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida," reports Ars Technica. "Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there." From the report: A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time -- 2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC) -- that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida. This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry. Otero's likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson. Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object "as soon as possible to determine its origin," Finch told Ars. "More information will be available once the analysis is complete." [...] In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from "the responsible agencies" to resolve the cost of damages to his home. If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. "It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused." This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan's space agency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: India's hydroelectricity output fell at the steepest pace in at least 38 years during the year ended March 31, a Reuters analysis of government data showed, as erratic rainfall forced further dependence on coal-fired power amid higher demand. The 16.3% drop in generation from the country's biggest clean energy source coincided with the share of renewables in power generation sliding for the first time since Prime Minister Narendra Modi made commitments to boost solar and wind capacity at the United Nations climate talks at Paris in 2015. Renewables accounted for 11.7% of India's power output in the year that ended in March, down from 11.8% a year earlier, a Reuters analysis of daily load despatch data from the federal grid regulator Grid-India showed. India is the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the government often points to lower per-capita emissions compared to developed nations to defend rising coal use. A five-year low in reservoir levels means hydro output will likely remain low during the hottest months of April-June, experts say, potentially boosting dependence on coal during a period of high demand before the monsoon starts in June. [...] Globally, hydropower output fell for only the fourth time since 2000 due to lower rainfall and warmer temperature brought about by the El Nino weather pattern, according to energy think tank Ember. Hydro output in India, the sixth-biggest hydropower producer, fell nearly seven times faster than the global average, Ember data showed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Analytics platform Databricks has launched an open source foundational large language model, hoping enterprises will opt to use its tools to jump on the LLM bandwagon. The biz, founded around Apache Spark, published a slew of benchmarks claiming its general-purpose LLM -- dubbed DBRX -- beat open source rivals on language understanding, programming, and math. The developer also claimed it beat OpenAI's proprietary GPT-3.5 across the same measures. DBRX was developed by Mosaic AI, which Databricks acquired for $1.3 billion, and trained on Nvidia DGX Cloud. Databricks claims it optimized DBRX for efficiency with what it calls a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture a" where multiple expert networks or learners divide up a problem. Databricks explained that the model possesses 132 billion parameters, but only 36 billion are active on any one input. Joel Minnick, Databricks marketing vice president, told The Register: "That is a big reason why the model is able to run as efficiently as it does, but also runs blazingly fast. In practical terms, if you use any kind of major chatbots that are out there today, you're probably used to waiting and watching the answer get generated. With DBRX it is near instantaneous." But the performance of the model itself is not the point for Databricks. The biz is, after all, making DBRX available for free on GitHub and Hugging Face. Databricks is hoping customers use the model as the basis for their own LLMs. If that happens it might improve customer chatbots or internal question answering, while also showing how DBRX was built using Databricks's proprietary tools. Databricks put together the dataset from which DBRX was developed using Apache Spark and Databricks notebooks for data processing, Unity Catalog for data management and governance, and MLflow for experiment tracking.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telegram is enhancing its platform for businesses with the introduction of Telegram Business, offering specialized features like customizable start pages, business hours, and chat management tools, while also initiating an ad-revenue sharing model for public channels with at least 1,000 subscribers. "As a whole, the features could introduce competition into a market where Meta's apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have a hold on business communication," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The features arrived just a couple of weeks after Telegram founder Pavel Durov told the Financial Times in an interview that he expected the app, which now has over 900 million users, to become profitable by 2025. Telegram Business is clearly part of that push, leading up to a future IPO, as it's an offering that requires users to subscribe to the paid Premium version to access. Telegram Premium is a bundle of upgraded features that cost $4.99 per month on iOS and Android and is also available as a three-month, six-month or one-year plan. Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code. For instance, businesses can choose to display their hours of operation and location on a map, and greet customers with a customized start page for empty chats where they can choose the text and sticker users see before beginning a conversation. Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer "quick replies," which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files. Businesses can also set their own custom greeting messages for customers who engage with the company for the first time, and they can specify a period after which the greeting would be shown again. They can manage their availability using away messages while the business is closed or the owner is on vacation. Plus, the businesses can categorize their chats using colored labels based on what chat folders they're in, like delivery, claim, orders, VIP, feedback, or any others that make sense for them. In addition, businesses can create links to chat that will instantly open a Telegram chat with a request to take an action like tracking an order or reserving a table, among other things. Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf. The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting this week, Discord will show ads on the site from video game companies, some of which will offer users gifts for carrying out in-game tasks. According to the Wall Street Journal, Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings. From a report: The sources said Discord aims to hire more than a dozen ad sales people. WSJ said the addition of ads marks a pivot for Discord, whose CEO Jason Citron has repeatedly said the company would not rely on advertisers the way platforms like Facebook and Instagram do.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth has a long-running fever that shows little signs of easing. The planet has set high temperature records in each of the last nine months, and March is poised to become the 10th. From a report: Multiple locations around the world observed unprecedented heat on the month's final weekend, as if to put an exclamation mark on this exceptional run of warmth. The weekend heat was most widespread in Europe, where many countries set national high temperature records for March. But it was also unusually warm in Asia, parts of Central America and West Africa. Human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is fueling this warmth, with an assist from the El NiAo climate pattern. It felt more like summer than early spring in Eastern Europe over the weekend, with temperatures soaring into the 70s and 80s, about 20 to 35 degrees above normal. Eight countries set national records for March warmth. Further reading: India Predicts Searing Heat in Threat to Lives, Power Supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++. Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language. Bergstrom said that while Dropbox in 2016 and Figma in 2018 offered early accounts of rewriting code in memory-safe Rust - and doubts about productivity and the language have subsided - concerns have lingered about its reliability and security. "Even six months ago, this was a really tough conversation," he said. "I would go and I would talk to people and they would say, 'Wait, wait you have an `unsafe` keyword. That means we should all write C++ until the heat death of the Universe.'" But there's been a shift in awareness across the software development ecosystem, Bergstrom argued, about the challenges of using non-memory safe languages. Such messaging is now coming from government authorities in the US and other nations who understand the role software plays in critical infrastructure. The reason is that the majority of security vulnerabilities in large codebases can be traced to memory security bugs. And since Rust code can largely if not totally avoid such problems when properly implemented, memory safety now looks a lot like a national security issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The management-consulting giant McKinsey is dangling career-coaching services and nine months' worth of pay to staffers keen on leaving the firm, the British newspaper The Times reported on Saturday. The Times reported that managers for McKinsey's UK offices could spend up to nine months searching for a job instead of working on client projects. Besides continuing to receive their salary, managers would have access to McKinsey's resources and career-coaching services, per The Times. But staffers would still have to leave McKinsey even if their job hunt proved unsuccessful. The offer has been extended to managers working at McKinsey's US offices, though the pay duration could be different, The Times said, citing people familiar with the situation. A spokesperson for McKinsey did not confirm the specifics of The Times' reporting but told the outlet that the company's mission was to help staffers "grow into leaders, whether they stay at McKinsey or continue their careers elsewhere." "These actions are part of our ongoing effort to ensure our performance management and development approach is as effective as possible, and to do so in a caring and supportive way," the spokesperson continued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a new way to combat the impersonation scams that it says cost people $1.1 billion last year alone. Effective today, the agency's rule "prohibits the impersonation of government, businesses, and their officials or agents in interstate commerce." The rule also lets the FTC directly file federal court complaints to force scammers to return money stolen by business or government impersonation. From a report: Impersonation scams are wide-ranging -- creators are on the lookout for fake podcast invites that turn into letting scammers take over their Facebook pages via a hidden "datasets" URL, while Verge reporters have been impersonated by criminals trying to steal cryptocurrency via fake Calendly meeting links. Linus Media Group was victimized by a thief who pretended to be a potential sponsor and managed to take over three of the company's YouTube channels. Some scams can also be very intricate, as in The Cut financial columnist Charlotte Cowles' story of how she lost a shoebox holding $50,000 to an elaborate scam involving a fake Amazon business account, the FTC, and the CIA. (See also: gift card scams.) The agency is also taking public comment until April 30th on changes to the rule that would allow it to also target impersonation of individuals, such as through the use of video deepfakes or AI voice cloning. That would let it take action against, say, scams involving impersonations of Elon Musk on X or celebrities in YouTube ads. Others have used AI for more sinister fraud, such as voice clones of loved ones claiming to be kidnapped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police, written by Dhruv Bhutani: As someone who is an early adopter of all things smart and has invested a significant amount of money in building a fancy smart home, it saddens me to say that I feel cheated by the thousands of dollars I've spent on smart devices. And it's not a one-off. Amazon's recent move to block off local ADB connections on Fire TV devices is the latest example in a long line of grievances. A brand busy wrestling away control from the consumer after they've bought the product, the software update gimps a feature that has been present on the hardware ever since it launched back in 2014. ADB-based commands let users take deep control of the hardware, and in the case of the Fire TV hardware, it can drastically improve the user experience. [...] A few years ago, I decided to invest in the NVIDIA Shield. The premium streamer was marketed as a utopia for streaming online and offline sources with the ability to plug in hard drives, connect to NAS drives, and more. At launch, it did precisely that while presenting a beautiful, clean interface that was a joy to interact with. However, subsequent updates have converted what was otherwise a clean and elegant solution to an ad-infested overlay that I zoom past to jump into my streaming app of choice. This problem isn't restricted to just the Shield. Even my Google TV running Chromecast has a home screen that's more of an advertising space for Google than an easy way to get to my content. But why stop at streaming boxes? Google's Nest Hubs are equal victims of feature deterioration. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Nest Hubs and outfitted them in most of my rooms and washrooms. However, Google's consistent degradation of the user experience means I use these speakers for little more than casting music from the Spotify app. The voice recognition barely works on the best of days, and when it does, the answers tend to be wildly inconsistent. It wasn't always the case. In fact, at launch, Google's Nest speakers were some of the best smart home interfaces you could buy. You'd imagine that the experience would only improve from there. That's decidedly not the case. I had high hopes that the Fuchsia update would fix the broken command detection, but that's also not the case. And good luck to you if you decided to invest in Google Assistant-compatible displays. Google's announcement that it would no longer issue software or security updates to third-party displays like the excellent Lenovo Smart Display, right after killing the built-in web browser, is pretty wild. It boggles my mind that a company can get away with such behavior. Now imagine the plight of Nest Secure owners. A home security system isn't something one expects to switch out for many many years. And yet, Google decided to kill the Nest Secure home monitoring solution merely three years after launching the product range. While I made an initial investment in the Nest ecosystem, I've since switched over to a completely local solution that is entirely under my control, stores data locally, and won't be going out of action because of bad decision-making by another company. "It's clear to me that smart home devices, as they stand, are proving to be very poor investments for consumers," Bhutani writes in closing. "Suffice it to say that I've paused any future investments in smart devices, and I'll be taking a long and hard look at a company's treatment of its current portfolio before splurging out more cash. I'd recommend you do the same."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zac Hall reports via 9to5Mac: In a newly published research paper (PDF), Apple's AI gurus describe a system in which Siri can do much more than try to recognize what's in an image. The best part? It thinks one of its models for doing this benchmarks better than ChatGPT 4.0. In the paper (ReALM: Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), Apple describes something that could give a large language model-enhanced voice assistant a usefulness boost. ReALM takes into account both what's on your screen and what tasks are active. [...] If it works well, that sounds like a recipe for a smarter and more useful Siri. Apple also sounds confident in its ability to complete such a task with impressive speed. Benchmarking is compared against OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4.0: "As another baseline, we run the GPT-3.5 (Brown et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022) and GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023) variants of ChatGPT, as available on January 24, 2024, with in-context learning. As in our setup, we aim to get both variants to predict a list of entities from a set that is available. In the case of GPT-3.5, which only accepts text, our input consists of the prompt alone; however, in the case of GPT-4, which also has the ability to contextualize on images, we provide the system with a screenshot for the task of on-screen reference resolution, which we find helps substantially improve performance." So how does Apple's model do? "We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it." Substantially outperforming it, you say? The paper concludes in part as follows: "We show that ReaLM outperforms previous ap- proaches, and performs roughly as well as the state- of-the-art LLM today, GPT-4, despite consisting of far fewer parameters, even for onscreen references despite being purely in the textual domain. It also outperforms GPT-4 for domain-specific user utterances, thus making ReaLM an ideal choice for a practical reference resolution system that can exist on-device without compromising on performance."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Today, more than two decades have passed and most of the files shared on The Pirate Bay in the early years are no longer available. BitTorrent requires at least one person to share a full file copy, which is hard to keep up for decades. Surprisingly, however, several torrents have managed to stand the test of time and remain available today. A few days ago the site's longest surviving torrent turned 20 years old. While a few candidates have shown up over the years, we believe that an episode of "High Chaparral" has the honor of being the oldest Pirate Bay torrent that's still active today. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and several people continue to share it today. The screenshot [here] only lists one seeder but according to information passed on by OpenTrackr.org, there are four seeders with a full copy. This is quite a remarkable achievement, especially since people complained about a lack of seeders shortly after it was uploaded. Over the years, the "High Chaparral" torrent achieved cult status among a small group of people who likely keep sharing it, simply because it's the oldest surviving torrent. This became evident in the Pirate Bay comment section several years ago, when TPB still had comments. Record or not, other old torrents on The Pirate Bay also continue to thrive. On March 31, 2004, someone uploaded a pirated copy of the documentary "Revolution OS" to the site which is alive and kicking today. While these torrents are quite old, they're not the oldest active torrents available on the Internet. That honor goes to "The Fanimatrix", which was created in September 2003 and, after being previously resurrected, continues to be available today with more than 100 people seeding. Ten years ago, we were surprised to see that any of the mentioned torrents were still active. By now, however, we wouldn't be shocked to see these torrents survive for decades. Whether The Pirate Bay will still be around then is another question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a filing with the SEC, OpenAI has removed CEO Sam Altman's ownership and control of the company's venture capital fund that backs AI startups. Reuters reports: The change, documented in the March 29 filing, came after Altman's ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund raised eyebrows for its unusual structure--while being marketed similar to a corporate venture arm, the fund was raised by Altman from outside limited partners and he made investment decisions. OpenAI has said Altman does not have financial interest in the fund despite the ownership. Axios first reported on the ownership change on Monday. In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said the fund's initial general partner (GP) structure was a temporary arrangement, and "this change provides further clarity." The OpenAI Startup Fund is investing $175 million raised from OpenAI partners such as Microsoft, although OpenAI itself is not an investor. Control of the fund has been moved over to Ian Hathaway, a partner at the fund since 2021, according to the filing. Altman will no longer be a general partner at the fund. OpenAI said Hathaway has overseen the fund's accelerator program and led investments in such companies as Harvey, Cursor and Ambience Healthcare.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven't bothered making an account. From a report: It won't be quite the same experience, however -- and of course all your chats will still go into their training data unless you opt out. Starting today in a few markets and gradually rolling out to the rest of the world, visiting chat.openai.com will no longer ask you to log in -- though you still can if you want to. Instead, you'll be dropped right into conversation with ChatGPT, which will use the same model as logged-in users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Chinese scientist who was imprisoned for his role in creating the world's first genetically edited babies says he has returned to his laboratory to work on the treatment of Alzheimer's and other genetic diseases. From a report: In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, He Jiankui said he had resumed research on human embryo genome editing, despite the controversy over the ethics of artificially rewriting genes, which some critics predicted would lead to demand for "designer babies." "We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both domestic and international rules," He told the Mainichi Shimbun, adding that he had no plans to produce more genome-edited babies. Previously, He had used a tool known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite DNA in embryos. In 2019 a court in China sentenced He to three years in prison for violating medical regulations after he claimed the previous year that he had created genetically modified twin sisters, Lulu and Nana, before birth. His experiments sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific world. He was widely condemned for having gone ahead with the risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified procedure with inadequate consent from the families involved. The court found that He had forged documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for his research. He said he had used a gene-editing procedure known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite the DNA in the sisters' embryos -- modifications he claimed would make the children immune to HIV. He has continued to defend his work, despite widespread criticism, saying he was "proud" of having created Lulu and Nana. A third girl was born in 2019 as a result of similar experiments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI search engine Perplexity, which claims to be a Google competitor and recently snagged a $73.6 million Series B funding from investors like Jeff Bezos, is going to start selling ads, the company told ADWEEK. Perplexity uses AI to answer users' questions, based on web sources. It incorporates videos and images in the response and even data from partners like Yelp. Perplexity also links sources in the response while suggesting related questions users might want to ask. These related questions, which account for 40% of Perplexity's queries, are where the company will start introducing native ads, by letting brands influence these questions, said company chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko. When a user delves deeper into a topic, the AI search engine might offer organic and brand-sponsored questions. Perplexity will launch this in the upcoming quarters, but Shevelenko declined to disclose more specifics. While Perplexity touts on its site that search should be "free from the influence of advertising-driven models," advertising was always in the cards for the company. "Advertising was always part of how we're going to build a great business," said Shevelenko.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The surge of money flooding into AI has resulted in some crypto-like hype that is obscuring the incredible scientific progress in the field, according to Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. From a report: The chief executive of Google's AI research division told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars being poured into generative AI start-ups and products "brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever." "Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal," he added. "In a way, AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped. We're talking about all sorts of things that are just not real." The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 sparked an investor frenzy as start-ups raced to develop and deploy generative AI and attract venture capital funding. VC groups invested $42.5bn in 2,500 AI start-up equity rounds last year, according to market analysts CB Insights. Public market investors have also rushed into the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia, that are spearheading the AI revolution. Their rise has helped to propel global stock markets to their strongest first-quarter performance in five years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google plans to destroy a trove of data that reflects millions of users' web-browsing histories, part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked millions of users without their knowledge. WSJ: The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private "Incognito" browsing option. The lawsuit alleged that Google's marketing and privacy disclosures didn't properly inform users of the kinds of data being collected, including details about which websites they viewed. The settlement details, filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, set out the actions the company will take to change its practices around private browsing. According to the court filing, Google has agreed to destroy billions of data points that the lawsuit alleges it improperly collected, to update disclosures about what it collects in private browsing and give users the option to disable third-party cookies in that setting. The agreement doesn't include damages for individual users. But the settlement will allow individuals to file claims. Already the plaintiff attorneys have filed 50 in California state court. Attorney David Boies, who represents the consumers in the lawsuit, said the settlement requires Google to delete and remediate "in unprecedented scope and scale" the data it improperly collected. "This settlement is an historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies," Boies said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies racing to develop more powerful artificial intelligence are rapidly nearing a new problem: The internet might be too small for their plans (non-paywalled link). From a report: Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies. Some executives and researchers say the industry's need for high-quality text data could outstrip supply within two years, potentially slowing AI's development. AI companies are hunting for untapped information sources, and rethinking how they train these systems. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has discussed training its next model, GPT-5, on transcriptions of public YouTube videos, people familiar with the matter said. Companies also are experimenting with using AI-generated, or synthetic, data as training material -- an approach many researchers say could actually cause crippling malfunctions. These efforts are often secret, because executives think solutions could be a competitive advantage. Data is among several essential AI resources in short supply. The chips needed to run what are called large-language models behind ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and other AI bots also are scarce. And industry leaders worry about a dearth of data centers and the electricity needed to power them. AI language models are built using text vacuumed up from the internet, including scientific research, news articles and Wikipedia entries. That material is broken into tokens -- words and parts of words that the models use to learn how to formulate humanlike expressions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack. From a report: The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year. The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017. Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued. Slack, owned by Salesforce, termed the move "illegal" alleging that Microsoft forced installation of Teams to customers through its market-dominant productivity suite and hid the true cost of the chat and video service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As you're reading this, you're more likely than not already inside 'The Matrix'," according to a headline on the front page of CNN.com this weekend. It linked to an opinion piece by Rizwan Virk, founder of MIT's startup incubator/accelerator program. He's now a doctoral researcher at Arizona State University, where his profile identifies him as an "entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist, computer scientist and bestselling author." Virk's 2019 book was titled "The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game."In the decades since [The Matrix was released], this idea, now called the simulation hypothesis, has come to be taken more seriously by technologists, scientists and philosophers. The main reason for this shift is the stunning improvements in computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) and AI. Taking into account three developments just this year from Apple, Neuralink and OpenAI, I can now confidently state that as you are reading this article, you are more likely than not already inside a computer simulation. This is because the closer our technology gets to being able to build a fully interactive simulation like the Matrix, the more likely it is that someone has already built such a world, and we are simply inside their video game world... In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom imagined a "technologically mature" civilization could easily create a simulated world. The logic, then, is that if any civilization ever reaches this point, it would create not just one but a very large number of simulations (perhaps billions), each with billions of AI characters, simply by firing up more servers. With simulated worlds far outnumbering the "real" world, the likelihood that we are in a simulation would be significantly higher than not. It was this logic that prompted Elon Musk to state, a few years ago, that the chances that we are not in a simulation (i.e. that we are in base reality) was "one in billions." It's a theory that is difficult to prove - but difficult to disprove as well. Remember, the simulations would be so good that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a physical and a simulated world. Either the signals are being beamed directly into your brain, or we are simply AI characters inside the simulation... Recent developments in Silicon Valley show that we could get to the simulation point very soon. Just this year, Apple released its Vision Pro headset - a mixed-reality (including augmented and virtual reality) device that, if you believe initial reviews (ranging from mildly positive to ecstatic), heralds the beginning of a new era of spatial computing - or the merging of digital and physical worlds... we can see a direct line to being able to render a realistic fictional world around us... Just last month, OpenAI released Sora AI, which can now generate highly realistic videos that are pretty damn difficult to distinguish from real human videos. The fact that AI can so easily fool humans visually as well as through text (and according to some, has already passed the well-known Turing Test) shows that we are not far from fully immersive worlds populated with simulated AI characters that seem (and perhaps even think they are) conscious. Already, millions of humans are chatting with AI characters, and millions of dollars are pouring into making AI characters more realistic. Some of us may be players of the game, who have forgotten that we allowed the signal to be beamed into our brain, while others, like Neo or Morpheus or Trinity in "The Matrix," may have been plugged in at birth... The fact that we are approaching the simulation point so soon in our future means that the likelihood that we are already inside someone else's advanced simulation goes up exponentially. Like Neo, we would be unable to tell the difference between a simulated and a physical world. Perhaps the most appropriate response to that is another of Reeves' most famous lines from that now-classic sci-fi film: Woah. The author notes that the idea of being trapped inside a video game already "had been articulated by one of the Wachowskis' heroes, science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who stated, all the way back in 1977, 'We are living in a computer programmed reality.'"A few years ago, I interviewed Dick's wife Tessa and asked her what he would have thought of "The Matrix." She said his first reaction would have been that he loved it; however, his second reaction would most likely have been to call his agent to see if he could sue the filmmakers for stealing his ideas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona..." reads the official text of House Bill #2,477. "PLUTO IS THE OFFICIAL STATE PLANET." An anonymous reader shared this report from Capital Media Services:The governor signed legislation Friday designating Pluto as Arizona's "official state planet." It joins a list of other items the state has declared to be "official,'' ranging from turquoise as the state gemstone and copper as the state metal to the Sonorasaurus as the state dinosaur. "I am proud of Arizona's pioneering work in space discovery," governor Hobbs said. What makes Pluto unique and ripe for claim by Arizona is that it is the only planet actually discovered in the United States, and the discovery was made in Flagstaff. Rep. Justin Wilmeth, a Phoenix Republican and self-described "history nerd,'' said that needed to be commemorated, starting with the legacy of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. In 1930, Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. "The whole story of Clyde is just amazing, just sitting there under the telescope'' looking for planets by taking photos over a period of time, said Wilmeth. "It was two different glass planes that had one little spec of light moving in a different direction,'' showing it wasn't just another star - and all by observation and not computers. "To me, that's something that's just mind boggling." "The International Astronomical Union voted years ago to strip Pluto of its official status as a planet," the article points out, noting that its official definition specifies that planets "clear the neighboring region of other objects." (While Pluto "has such a small gravitational pull, it has not attracted and absorbed other space rocks in its orbit".) So in 2006 Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, according to a NASA web page. "Pluto is about 1/6 the width of Earth," and has a radius of 715 miles or 1,151 kilometers. "If Earth was the size of a nickel, Pluto would be about as big as a popcorn kernel." Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam called Arizona's new legislation "How to advertise you are ignorant. Scientists said something we don't like, so we'll make a law!"They can call it their "State Planet" all they want, but people who actually know about the skies will be mocking them for it. While there is nostalgia for the old classification, and the new one isn't perfect... it's certainly more meaningful when trying to divide up the objects of a planetary system for study. Reached for a comment by Capital Media Services, Representative Wilmeth said "It might matter to some that are going to get picky or persnickety about stuff... There's several generations of Americans ... who believe that Pluto's a planet - or at least that's what we were taught. I'm never going to think differently. That's just my personal opinion." (The news site adds that "What is important, Wilmeth said, is remembering the history and promoting it.") Five senators in Arizona's state legislatur did vote against the measure - though not all of them did so for scientific reasons, Senator Anthony Kern explained to Capital Media Services. "I did not want to discriminate against those who wanted Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or everyone's favorite, Uranus."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Sail to a continent as mysterious as outer-space itself," the new web site urges. "William Shatner saw Earth from the highest view," writes Scripps News Service. "Now he's heading to the bottom of it - and inviting you to join him."The 93-year-old is setting sail for Antarctica on Dec. 19, which will mark just over three years since the "Star Trek" actor returned from a trip to space in real life, not just as Captain James T. Kirk. Fellow space traveler NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will join Shatner on the 10-day Space2Sea expedition, and 260 others can too - if they pay for their $37,500 ticket. The cheapest suite - priced at $35,500 - along with the top three most expensive ones - reaching $91,500 - are already sold out. Presented by Future of Space, the trip aboard the new "ultra-luxury" vessel is said to be full of "awe-inspiring experiences," including "intimate encounters" with penguins, visits to remote historical locations and evenings full of stories from "esteemed guests," like Shatner. Travelers can also kayak the waters or go down deep under the ice in submersibles, both for additional charges... Shatner said he experienced something called the "overview effect" while viewing the Earth from space. The overview effect, coined by space philosopher and author Frank White, refers to a shift in how astronauts think about our life on the planet, described by White as "the feeling that the Earth itself is a whole system, and we're just a part of it." It's also realizing through experience that there are no borders or boundaries on Earth. It's often marked by feelings of increased appreciation of the planet's beauty. Shatner's invitation to "fellow explorers" for the Space2Sea expedition seem to echo this phenomenon, with the actor saying he didn't expect to be "captivated by the fragile, blue curve of our planet" when flying on Blue Origin's rocket.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Described as a "non profit volunteer search team" on its official site, Sunshine State Sonar "found more than 350 cars in canals, ponds and waterways across Florida" in just the last two years, according to the Tampa Bay Times. It's owned by two half brothers - "weekend fishermen turned amateur underwater detectives."[T]he true-crime junkies dive into cold cases, searching for the disappeared. Sometimes, they choose the cases themselves, following threads online. Other times, law enforcement asks for their help. They have discovered remains of 11 missing people inside cars, giving answers to relatives who had spent years agonizing. One family, who thought their mom had left them, learned that she had driven off the road. Relatives of a missing teacher suspected his girlfriend - then found out he had been submerged in a canal for three years. And the son of a young mother who thought she had been murdered was relieved when her death proved a watery accident... "It all started with YouTube," [Mike] Sullivan says. "I kinda got obsessed." A couple of years ago, he got into bingeing Adventures with Purpose, videos of a volunteer dive team in Oregon that searches for missing people. "Florida has so much water!" he told his wife. "I really need to do this...." He didn't know how to scuba dive. He'd never longed to float through crystal water or over schools of colorful fish. But he got certified so he could swim through muddy channels and search waterlogged crime scenes. He bought a shallow-draft boat and outboard motor, rigged it with the latest fish-finding technology: a Lowrance SideScan sonar, a DownScan imaging device and a Garmin LiveScope. The machines send sound waves pulsing through the water, then record them as they bounce back to create a blurry image on a monitor - like a sonogram... The equipment cost Sullivan $21,000. It took him a year to be able to interpret the images, to tell a rock from a Volkswagen. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hectar for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After taking a look at Floorp Browser, I was left wondering whether there was a Chromium-based web browser that was as good, or even better than Chrome," writes a "First Look" reviewer at It's Foss News. "That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'."[Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were: Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5 So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system). Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more. Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article. "Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last Monday shares of Reddit's stock soared 30%, reports CNBC - and then another 8.8% on Tuesday. But the moves happened "even after New Street Research issued a neutral rating on the company" - and by the end of the week, CNBC was reporting that "Reddit shares are plummeting..."Shares closed at $49.32, ending the week below their closing price on Reddit's first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange [on March 21st, when they closed at $50.44 ]... Stock markets are closed on Good Friday. Reddit shares began their downward spiral on Wednesday, when they sank about 11% to $57.75 at market close. That day, Hedgeye Risk Management described Reddit's stock as "grossly overvalued" in a report cited by Bloomberg News, adding the company was on the firm's "short bench." The article notes Reddit's CEO sold 500,000 shares in the company - nearly 40% of his holdings - which Ben Silverman, vice president of research at Verity, told CNBC was expected - while Reddit's COO sold another 514,000 shares. "There's always a bit of a disconnect," Silverman said in the interview, because bringing a company public "is not just to generate liquidity for the company itself so that it can expand and grow. In these situations, it often allows insiders to cash out to generate liquidity. "And that's something investors have to consider here. If the prospects are so bright, why are insiders selling?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Subscribers of both Disney+ and Hulu can now access Hulu content through the Disney+ app," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as the Burbank media and entertainment giant launched its one-app integration of the two streaming services Wednesday..."The move is part of Disney's plan to increase viewer engagement and reduce churn on Disney+, which has 111.3 million subscribers globally. Disney has lost billions on its direct-to-consumer business as it tries to compete with Netflix, but the company has told investors that its streaming segment will begin to turn a profit by the end of fiscal 2024. Streaming losses have been a key component of a nasty activist shareholder campaign ahead of next week's annual meeting. Disney+ has typically served up family-friendly content and major brands such as Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, whereas Hulu's offering has been the streaming home of more adult-oriented programming. Disney executives described the combined app experience as the most extensive technical advancement to the Disney+ streaming platform since it launched in November 2019... The price of the bundle plan starts at $9.99 with ads... Upgrading to the bundle of Hulu on Disney+ will start at $2 more per month, Disney said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a department of America's federal Health agency, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for public health rules, including prescription medicines. And the FDA "has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19," they confirmed to CNN this week. "The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19." But there was also a lawsuit. In "one of its more popular pandemic-era social media campaigns," the agency tweeted out "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it." The post attracted nearly 106,000 likes - and over 46,000 reposts, and was followed by another post on Instagram. "Stop it with the #ivermectin. It's not authorized for treating #COVID." Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that the posts triggered a "groundless" lawsuit:It was those latter two lines that exercised three physicians who had been prescribing ivermectin for patients. They sued the FDA in 2022, asserting that its advisory illegally interfered with the practice of medicine - specifically with their ability to continue prescribing the drug. A federal judge in Texas threw out their case, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals - the source of a series of chuckleheaded antigovernment rulings in recent years - reinstated it last year, returning it to the original judge for reconsideration. Now the FDA has settled the case by agreeing to delete the horse post and two similar posts from its accounts on the social media platforms X, LinkedIn and Facebook. The agency also agreed to retire a consumer advisory titled "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19." In defending its decision, the FDA said it "has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old." That sounds reasonable enough, but it's a major blunder. It leaves on the books the 5th Circuit's adverse ruling, in which a panel of three judges found that the FDA's advisory crossed the line from informing consumers, which they said is all right, to recommending that consumers take some action, which they said is not all right... That's a misinterpretation of the law and the FDA's actions, according to Dorit Rubinstein Reiss of UC College of the Law in San Francisco. "The FDA will seek to make recommendations against the misuse of products in the future, and having that decision on the books will be used to litigate against it," she observed after the settlement. "A survey by Boston University and the University of Michigan estimated that Medicare and private insurers had wasted $130 million on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID in 2021 alone."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New documents from a class action against Meta "reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years," reports the Observer. "One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too."Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data. In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs' attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo's software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat. According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed "Ghostbusters" - in reference to the Snapchat logo - where they developed "kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains," allowing them "to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage." The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track "detailed in-app activity" by "parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo's program...." The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. "The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook's then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat," the document alleged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Godzilla x Kong "stomped all over expectations," writes Deadline, "with an $80M opening, the second best start of the year so far, $2.5M behind the $82.5M opening of Legendary's other big pic this spring, Dune: Part Two... "EntTelligence reports that GxK is expected to pull in more than 5.5M admissions this weekend, the most attended opening weekend for any movie year-to-date." No one saw this coming... International delivered $114M for a great $194M global start. The Adam Wingard directed movie, not including preview night, commanded 56% of all foot traffic and 89% of all premium format admissions. Imax and PLF drove 38% of the gross with 3D responsible for 19%... Beamed Warner Bros Domestic Distribution Boss Jeff Goldstein, "This is a huge, fun Easter movie for the whole family...." For a fifthquel to bounce back the franchise, GxK being the second best start in the Legendary Monsterverse after Godzilla's $93.1M ten years ago, is pretty remarkable. The article speculates that the first installments (of both the Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong franchise) underperformed because of their mid-pandemic release dates, with their sequels earning more in 2024. The pure theatricality of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire "clearly underscores the value of the IP on the big screen, and moviegoers' preference to see such monster mashing in no other place but a theater." (Deadline calls the movie "a really fun creature feature with a lot of heart; heck, it's even better than Jurassic World: Dominion. Seriously.") It also earned "the fifth best Easter weekend opening ever," the article points out, coming in behind Batman v. Superman ($181M), Super Mario Bros Movie ($166.4M), Furious 7 ($161.2M) and The Fate of the Furious ($107.3M), according to the article. Their headline? "They Have Risen: 'Godzilla x Kong' Conquers Easter Box Office..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google is testing the ability to automatically archive and delete inactive tabs in Chrome on Android," writes Windows Report:The experimental feature, called Tab Declutter, aims to simplify tab management by automating the process... After a set period of inactivity, Chrome will automatically archive inactive tabs. You will no longer see the archived tabs but you will be able to retrieve them if needed. As for deleting the tabs, you can set Chrome to remove them after a longer period of inactivity. This feature will free up memory and improve the browser's performance. Obviously, you will have control over the archival threshold and the period of time after which the browser takes action... obviously, you will have control over the archival threshold and the period of time after which the browser takes actionRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"What a time we live in," writes Phoronix, "where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support..."Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho has sent out the latest patches working on Allocation APIs for the Rust Linux kernel code and also in leveraging those proposed APIs [as] a means of allowing in-place module initialization for Rust kernel modules. Wedson Almeida Filho has been a longtime Rust for Linux contributor going back to his Google engineering days and at Microsoft the past two years has shown no signs of slowing down on the Rust for Linux activities... The Rust for Linux kernel effort remains a very vibrant effort with a wide variety of organizations contributing, even Microsoft engineers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Personal data from 73 million AT&T customers has leaked onto the dark web, reports CNN - both current and former customers. AT&T has launched an investigation into the source of the data leak... In a news release Saturday morning, the telecommunications giant said the data was "released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago," and contains information such as account holders' Social Security numbers. ["The information varied by customer and account," AT&T said in a statement, " but may have included full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode."] "It is not yet known whether the data ... originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company added. "Currently, AT&T does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in exfiltration of the data set." The data seems to have been from 2019 or earlier. The leak does not appear to contain financial information or specifics about call history, according to AT&T. The company said the leak shows approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders were affected. CNN says the first reports of the leak came two weeks ago from a social media account claiming "the largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers. Reached for a comment by CNN, AT&T had said at the time that "We have no indications of a compromise of our systems." AT&T's web site now includes a special page with an FAQ - and the tagline that announces "We take cybersecurity very seriously..." "It has come to our attention that a number of AT&T passcodes have been compromised..." The page points out that AT&T has already reset the passcodes of "all 7.6 million impacted customers." It's only further down in the FAQ that they acknowledge that the breach "appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders."Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation... We encourage customers to remain vigilant by monitoring account activity and credit reports. You can set up free fraud alerts from nationwide credit bureaus - Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can also request and review your free credit report at any time via Freecreditreport.com... We will reach out by mail or email to individuals with compromised sensitive personal information and offering complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services... If your information was impacted, you will be receiving an email or letter from us explaining the incident, what information was compromised, and what we are doing for you in response.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A CNN opinion piece looks at "the moaning about manual transmission's demise," noting that "it's not just Europeans (literally) clinging on. In the U.S., there's apparently a young (also predominantly male) demographic that is embracing manual driving - championing it as retro, much like Gen Z's affinity to typewriters and vintage cameras. "They feel there's something authentic about it: a connection between driver and vehicle that automatization cuts out." But CNN's writer argues the case against stick shifts...[Automatic vehicles] chalk up better mileage and drive faster than their stick-shift counterparts. The explanation: automatics select the right gear for the vehicle, usually the highest gear possible. The average manual driver is not always so proficient. In getting the gear right, automatics consume less fuel, save money and emit fewer emissions. These are among the reasons why it's ever harder to buy a new manual-transmission model of any kind in many countries. In the US, less than 1% of new models have stick shifts (compared to 35% in 1980), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It's really only sports cars, off-road truck SUVs and a handful of small pickups that still have clutches.... While all gasoline-run cars and trucks are climate killers with stick shifts being the slightly worse of two evils, combustion-engine automatics themselves are on their way out. They are tooling along the highway side-by-side with their stick-and-clutch counterparts toward the junkyard of history. Electric vehicles have gear systems, too: a single speed transmission that transmits energy from the motor to the wheels. But because only one gear exists, there is no switching of gears, neither automatically nor manually... Road transportation accounts for 15% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World Data, as well as being a huge contributor to the air pollution that claims around nine million deaths a year from respiratory and lung diseases. Transportation noise, though less deadly, also contributes to stress and sleep disorders. Thankfully, there's a convenient way to circumvent these blights: electric vehicles... But for those aficionados who really can't go without a clutch and gear shifter, Toyota is planning a realistic-feeling fake manual transmission for some EV models. It serves no purpose whatsoever - save to comfort bruised egos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the outlawing of sports betting in America. But the Wall Street Journal reports that since then all the major professional sports bodies "now realize just how much they have to lose as the new era unfolds.""All it takes is for a reasonable fan to go, 'Am I just watching theater, or is this actually sport?' for the credibility of a sport to start crumbling,'" said Declan Hill, an expert on match fixing at the University of New Haven. Since the prohibition on sports gambling was lifted, leagues that had once viewed betting as an existential threat to their integrity scrambled to partner with gambling companies and brought them into the tent.... The NBA itself also announced a new feature designed to mesh the betting experience with live action: Fans watching games on League Pass, the flagship streaming platform, would be able to opt in to view betting odds on the app's interface and click through to place wagers... Cleveland Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said that gambling had "gone too far... I personally have had my own instances with some of the sports gamblers," he added, "where they got my telephone number, were sending me crazy messages about where I live, and my kids and all that stuff." NBA spokesman Mike Bass said that instances of reported harassment related to sports betting are investigated. Then, just days after Haliburton and Bickerstaff's complaints, the NBA found itself grappling with a new case... The league is investigating suspicious activity around [Toronto Raptors forward Jontay] Porter, after app users placed sizable wagers that his totals for points, rebounds and assists in a pair of games would all come in under the lines set by oddsmakers. When Porter's numbers fell below those marks and the bets paid out, it raised a red flag signaling possible irregularities.... The NCAA has turned to state legislatures to impose regulations that would take single players out of gamblers' crosshairs. The group is lobbying to ban player-specific proposition bets that aren't directly related to the final score of the game - the exact kind of wagers at the center of the Porter situation in the NBA After noticing "the gambling-related negativity taking over his social-media feeds," pro basketball player Tyrese Haliburton gave the Journal his own assessment of how it's affecting the fan base. "To half the world, I'm just helping them make money on DraftKings." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

404 Media claims to have identified "the fundamental flaw with the age verification bills and laws" that have already passed in eight state legislatures (with two more taking effect in July): "the delusional, unfounded belief that putting hurdles between people and pornography is going to actually prevent them from viewing porn." They argue that age verification laws "drag us back to the dark ages of the internet." Slashdot reader samleecole shared this excerpt:What will happen, and is already happening, is that people - including minors - will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex. Meanwhile, performers and companies that are trying to do the right thing will suffer.... The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what's actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors." The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet. Yet new legislation is advancing in Kentucky and Nebraska, while the state of Kansas just passed a law which even requires age-verification for viewing "acts of homosexuality," according to a report:Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000. This means that the state can "require age verification to access LGBTQ content," according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who said on Threads that "Kansas residents may soon need their state IDs" to access material that simply "depicts LGBTQ people." One newspaper opinion piece argues there's an easier solution: don't buy your children a smartphone:Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law.Not only do age verification laws reduce parental freedom, but they also create myriad privacy risks. Requiring platforms to collect government IDs and face scans opens the door to potential exploitation by hackers and enemy governments. The very information intended to protect children could end up in the wrong hands, compromising the privacy and security of millions of users... Ultimately, age verification laws are a misguided attempt to address the complex issue of underage social media use. Instead of placing undue burdens on users and limiting parental liberty, lawmakers should look for alternative strategies that respect privacy rights while promoting online safety. This week a trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced plans to petition America's Supreme Court to intervene.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix:NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years. Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9. "A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did." Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Today's most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress..." writes the Wall Street Journal. Instead the lobbying sector "now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you."[Lobbyists] teamed up with PR gurus, social-media experts, political pollsters, data analysts and grassroots organizers to foment seemingly organic public outcries designed to pressure lawmakers and compel them to take actions that would benefit the lobbyists' corporate clients... By the middle of 2011, an army of lobbyists working for the pillars of the corporate lobbying establishment - the major movie studios, the music industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - were executing a nearly $100 million campaign to win approval for the internet bill [the PROTECT IP Act, or "PIPA"]. They pressured scores of lawmakers to co-sponsor the legislation. At one point, 99 of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate appeared ready to support it - an astounding number, given that most bills have just a handful of co-sponsors before they are called up for a vote. When lobbyists for Google and its allies went to Capitol Hill, they made little headway. Against such well-financed and influential opponents, the futility of the traditional lobbying approach became clear. If tech companies were going to turn back the anti-piracy bills, they would need to find another way. It was around this time that one of Google's Washington strategists suggested an alternative strategy. "Let's rally our users," Adam Kovacevich, then 34 and a senior member of Google's Washington office, told colleagues. Kovacevich turned Google's opposition to the anti-piracy legislation into a coast-to-coast political influence effort with all the bells and whistles of a presidential campaign. The goal: to whip up enough opposition to the legislation among ordinary Americans that Congress would be forced to abandon the effort... The campaign slogan they settled on - "Don't Kill the Internet" - exaggerated the likely impact of the bill, but it succeeded in stirring apprehension among web users. The coup de grace came on Jan. 18, 2012, when Google and its allies pulled off the mother of all outside influence campaigns. When users logged on to the web that day, they discovered, to their great frustration, that many of the sites they'd come to rely on - Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist - were either blacked out or displayed text outlining the detrimental impacts of the proposed legislation. For its part, Google inserted a black censorship bar over its multicolored logo and posted a tool that enabled users to contact their elected representatives. "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" a message on Google's home page read. With some 115,000 websites taking part, the protest achieved a staggering reach. Tens of millions of people visited Wikipedia's blacked-out website, 4.5 million users signed a Google petition opposing the legislation, and more than 2.4 million people took to Twitter to express their views on the bills. "We must stop [these bills] to keep the web open & free," the reality TV star Kim Kardashian wrote in a tweet to her 10 million followers... Within two days, the legislation was dead... Over the following decade, outside influence tactics would become the cornerstone of Washington's lobbying industry - and they remain so today. "The 2012 effort is considered the most successful consumer mobilization in the history of internet policy," writes the Washington Post - agreeing that it's since spawned more app-based, crowdsourced lobbying campaigns. Sites like Airbnb "have also repeatedly asked their users to oppose city government restrictions on the apps." Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig work companies also blitzed the apps' users with scenarios of higher prices or suspended service unless people voted for a 2020 California ballot measure on contract workers. Voters approved it." The Wall Street Journal also details how lobbyists successfully killed higher taxes for tobacco products, the oil-and-gas industry, and even on private-equity investors - and note similar tactics were used against a bill targeting TikTok. "Some say the campaign backfired. Lawmakers complained that the effort showed how the Chinese government could co-opt internet users to do their bidding in the U.S., and the House of Representatives voted to ban the app if its owners did not agree to sell it. "TikTok's lobbyists said they were pleased with the effort. They persuaded 65 members of the House to vote in favor of the company and are confident that the Senate will block the effort." The Journal's article was adapted from an upcoming book titled "The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government." But the Washington Post argues the phenomenon raises two questions. "How much do you want technology companies to turn you into their lobbyists? And what's in it for you?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Linux Foundation subsidiary has developed a free and open-source 3D game engine distributed under the Apache license. And last week the Open 3D Foundation announced "a big step forward, showcasing the power of open-source technologies in giving gamers around the globe unforgettable gaming experiences." "We are proud to unveil MadWorld as the first mobile title powered by O3DE," said Joe Bryant, Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation, "demonstrating the large potential of open-source technologies in game development." And then this week Los Angeles Business Journal reported that El Segundo-based gaming studio Carbonated Inc. "has raised $11 million of series A funding to finance the development and release of its debut game title... Prior to its most recent round, Carbonated closed an $8.5 million seed funding round in 2020, which also included participation from Andreessen and Bitkraft."Since its founding [in 2015], the company has been focusing on research and development for its upcoming first title, called "MadWorld." The third-person, multiplayer shooter game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment features. Players of the game will battle for land control in a dystopian setting. Using a combination of open-source mapping tools and Carbonated's proprietary custom operations technology, called Carbyne, the game's world is designed around real-life cities and locations. Players are initially dropped into the game's version of their own real-time location. The game allows players to optionally engage using blockchain technology with a digital asset-ownership layer powered by a blockchain network called XPLA. Earlier this month Madworld "opened up for Early Access registration," reports the egamers web site, arguing that the game "is set to redefine the gaming landscape and will make its public debut later this year."After a catastrophic event named "The Collapse," MadWorld takes place in a desolate Earth where players engage in a battle for survival, highlighting the game's unique setting and immersive experience. The game's world is intricately designed with 250,000 land plots mapped out on a hexagonal grid, each presenting unique resources and strategic benefits. This innovative approach to game design enhances the gameplay experience and introduces a new layer of strategy and competition. MadWorld's gameplay is centered around integrating Web3 technologies, which allows for the ownership, enhancement, and trading of tokenized representations of real-world locations. This feature encourages players to create clans and work together or compete for essential resources that are spread across the vast game world. Clans can acquire these resources by paying tributes to NFT landowners using "Rounds," the in-game currency. This mechanism not only fosters a sense of community and teamwork but also creates unique economic opportunities within the game by blending traditional gaming elements with the emerging field of digital assets. "With its use of O3DE, Carbonated can enhance the game's visual fidelity, performance, and scalability," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement, "in order to deliver a fast-paced adventure on mobile platforms."O3DE is an open-source game engine developed by a collaborative community of industry experts. It includes state-of-the-art rendering capabilities, dynamic lighting, and realistic physics simulation. These features have enabled Carbonated to build realistic dystopian environments and create action-packed gameplay in MadWorld. According to its official site, MadWorld "is set to be released to the public sometime in 2024 and is currently being tested on iOS and Android operating systems." Carbonated's CEO Travis Boatman made this prediction to the site Decrypt. "We think mobile is where the breakout will happen for Web3."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week every U.S. agency was ordered to appoint a "chief AI officer". But that wasn't the only AI policy announced. According to CNN, "By the end of the year, travelers should be able to refuse facial recognition scans at airport security screenings without fear it could delay or jeopardize their travel plans."That's just one of the concrete safeguards governing artificial intelligence that the Biden administration says it's rolling out across the U.S. government, in a key first step toward preventing government abuse of AI. The move could also indirectly regulate the AI industry using the government's own substantial purchasing power... The mandates aim to cover situations ranging from screenings by the Transportation Security Administration to decisions by other agencies affecting Americans' health care, employment and housing. Under the requirements taking effect on December 1, agencies using AI tools will have to verify they do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people. In addition, each agency will have to publish online a complete list of the AI systems it uses and their reasons for using them, along with a risk assessment of those systems... [B]ecause the government is such a large purchaser of commercial technology, its policies around procurement and use of AI are expected to have a powerful influence on the private sector. CNN notes that Vice President Harris told reporters that the administration intends for the policies to serve as a global model. "Meanwhile, the European Union this month gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law, once again leapfrogging the United States on regulating a critical and disruptive technology." CNN adds that last year, "the White House announced voluntary commitments by leading AI companies to subject their models to outside safety testing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Several big businesses have published source code that incorporates a software package previously hallucinated by generative AI," the Register reported Thursday "Not only that but someone, having spotted this reoccurring hallucination, had turned that made-up dependency into a real one, which was subsequently downloaded and installed thousands of times by developers as a result of the AI's bad advice, we've learned." If the package was laced with actual malware, rather than being a benign test, the results could have been disastrous. According to Bar Lanyado, security researcher at Lasso Security, one of the businesses fooled by AI into incorporating the package is Alibaba, which at the time of writing still includes a pip command to download the Python package huggingface-cli in its GraphTranslator installation instructions. There is a legit huggingface-cli, installed using pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]". But the huggingface-cli distributed via the Python Package Index (PyPI) and required by Alibaba's GraphTranslator - installed using pip install huggingface-cli - is fake, imagined by AI and turned real by Lanyado as an experiment. He created huggingface-cli in December after seeing it repeatedly hallucinated by generative AI; by February this year, Alibaba was referring to it in GraphTranslator's README instructions rather than the real Hugging Face CLI tool... huggingface-cli received more than 15,000 authentic downloads in the three months it has been available... "In addition, we conducted a search on GitHub to determine whether this package was utilized within other companies' repositories," Lanyado said in the write-up for his experiment. "Our findings revealed that several large companies either use or recommend this package in their repositories...." Lanyado also said that there was a Hugging Face-owned project that incorporated the fake huggingface-cli, but that was removed after he alerted the biz. "With GPT-4, 24.2 percent of question responses produced hallucinated packages, of which 19.6 percent were repetitive, according to Lanyado..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schneidafunk for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.