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Google enjoys a competitive edge in generative AI due to its trove of data and AI-optimised chips, Microsoft has told EU antitrust regulators, underscoring the rivalry between the two tech giants. From a report: The comments by Microsoft were in response to a consultation launched by the European Commission in January on the level of competition in generative AI. The growing popularity of generative AI, which can generate human-like responses to written prompts and is exemplified by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's chatbot Gemini, has triggered concerns about misinformation and fake news. "Today, only one company - Google - is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everyone else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete," Microsoft said in its report to the Commission. It said Google's self-supply AI semiconductors would give it a competitive advantage for the years to come, while its large sets of proprietary data from Google Search Index and YouTube enabled it to train its large language model Gemini. "YouTube provides an unparalleled set of video content; it hosts an estimated 14 billion videos. Google has access to such content; but other AI developers do not," Microsoft said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a policy shift that could potentially bolster Tesla's plans to enter the South Asian market. From a report: Companies must invest a minimum of $500 million in the country and will have three years to establish local manufacturing for EVs with at least 25% of components sourced domestically, according to a government press release on Friday. Firms meeting these requirements will be allowed to import 8,000 EVs a year at a reduced import duty of 15% on cars costing $35,000 and above. India currently levies a tax of 70% to 100% on imported cars depending on their value. The policy change is likely going to pave the way for Tesla to enter India, as the Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with the government to lower import duties on its electric cars for years. The move also aligns with India's goal to boost the adoption of EVs and reduce its dependence on oil imports, with the country setting a target of achieving 30% electric car sales by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds. From a report: An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said. The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There has been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised. The standard is partly symbolic but can indirectly impact potential FCC regulations. The FCC is required under US law to regularly evaluate whether "advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" and to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment" and promote competition if current deployment is not "reasonable and timely."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have discovered a giant volcano on Mars, as well as a possible sheet of buried glacier ice near the planet's equator. Phys.Org reports: Imaged repeatedly by orbiting spacecraft around Mars since Mariner 9 in 1971 -- but deeply eroded beyond easy recognition, the giant volcano had been hiding in plain sight for decades in one of Mars' most iconic regions, at the boundary between the heavily fractured maze-like Noctis Labyrinthus (Labyrinth of the Night) and the monumental canyons of Valles Marineris (Valleys of Mariner). Provisionally designated "Noctis volcano" pending an official name, the structure is centered at 7 degrees 35' S, 93 degrees 55' W. It reaches +9022 meters (29,600 feet) in elevation and spans 450 kilometers (280 miles) in width. The volcano's gigantic size and complex modification history indicate that it has been active for a very long time. In its southeastern part lies a thin, recent volcanic deposit beneath which glacier ice is likely still present. This combined giant volcano and possible glacier ice discovery is significant, as it points to an exciting new location to study Mars' geologic evolution through time, search for life, and explore with robots and humans in the future. The announcement was made at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. You can read more about it here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sheraz Sadiq reports via Oregon Public Broadcasting: An area that's nearly half the size of New Jersey in southern Oregon was recently named the world's largest dark sky sanctuary by DarkSky International. The nonprofit works to combat light pollution through advocacy and conservation, including a program that has certified more than 200 places around the world to protect the night sky. The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary spans 2.5 million acres of mostly public land in eastern Lake County, and could eventually grow to more than four times that size to include parts of Harney and Malheur Counties. To win certification as a Dark Sky Sanctuary, the applicants had to work with numerous stakeholders to draw the site's boundaries, monitor night sky quality, inventory outdoor lights and replace more than 60 lights on public and private lands. With the inclusion of parts of Harney and Malheur Counties, the sanctuary would surpass 11 million acres, notes KLCC. More than half of the area is under the control of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation. Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping's government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported. The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China's Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters. Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing's tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. "We wanted them chasing ghosts," one of these former officials said. [...] The CIA operation came in response to years of aggressive covert efforts by China aimed at increasing its global influence, the sources said. During his presidency, Trump pushed a tougher response to China than had his predecessors. The CIA's campaign signaled a return to methods that marked Washington's struggle with the former Soviet Union. "The Cold War is back," said Tim Weiner, author of a book on the history of political warfare. Reuters was unable to determine the impact of the secret operations or whether the administration of President Joe Biden has maintained the CIA program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Adding caffeine can enhance the efficiency of fuel cells, reducing the need for platinum in electrodes and significantly reducing the cost of making them, according to researchers in Japan. [...] The study, published in the journal Communications Chemistry, concerns the catalysis process at the cathode of a fuel cell and making this reaction more efficient. Fuel cells work somewhat like batteries. They generate power by converting the chemical energy of a fuel (or electrolyte) and an oxidizing agent into electricity. This is typically hydrogen as a fuel and oxygen as an oxidizer. Unlike batteries with limited lifespans, fuel cells can generate power as long as fuel is supplied. The hydrogen undergoes oxidation at the anode, producing hydrogen ions and electrons. The ions move through the hydrogen electrolyte to the cathode, while the electrons flow through an external circuit, generating electricity. At the cathode, oxygen combines with the hydrogen ions and electrons, resulting in water as a by-product. However, this water impacts the performance of the fuel cell, reacting with the platinum (Pt) to form a layer of platinum hydroxide (PtOH) on the electrode and interfering with the catalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), according to the researchers. To maintain efficient operation, fuel cells require a high Pt loading (greater platinum content), which significantly ups the costs of fuel cells. A quick look online found market prices for platinum of $29.98 per gram, or $932.61 per ounce, at the time of writing. The researchers found that adding caffeine can improve the ORR activity of platinum electrodes 11 fold, making the reaction more efficient. If you are wondering (as we were) how they came to be experimenting with this, the paper explains that modifying electrodes with hydrophobic material is known to be an effective method for enhancing ORR. Caffeine is less toxic than other hydrophobic substances, and it activates the hydrogen evolution and oxidation reactions of Pt nanoparticles and caffeine doped carbons. Got that? Chiba University's work was led by Professor Nagahiro Hoshi at the Department of Applied Chemistry and Biotechnology. He explained that the researchers found a notable improvement in the electrode's ORR activity with an increase in caffeine concentration in the electrolyte. This forms a thin layer on the electrode's surface, effectively preventing the formation of PtOH, but the effect depends on the orientation of the platinum atoms on the electrode's surface. The paper refers to these as Pt(100), Pt(110) and Pt(111), with the latter two showing increased ORR activity, while there was no noticeable effect with Pt(100). The researchers do not explain if this latter effect might be a problem, but instead claim that their discovery has the potential to improve the designs of fuel cells and lead to more widespread adoption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have urged the US Copyright Office to broaden exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Section 1201. Specifically, the two agencies are advocating for the extension of the right to repair to include "commercial and industrial equipment," which includes McDonald's ice cream machines that are notorious for breaking down. The Verge reports: Exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 are issued every three years, as per the Register of Copyrights' recommendation. Prior exemptions have been issued for jailbreaking cellphones and repairing certain parts of video game consoles. The FTC and DOJ are asking the Copyright Office to go a step further, extending the right to repair to "commercial and industrial equipment." The comment (PDF) singles out four distinct categories that would benefit from DMCA exemptions: commercial soft serve machines; proprietary diagnostic kits; programmable logic controllers; and enterprise IT. 'In the Agencies' view, renewing and expanding repair-related exemptions would promote competition in markets for replacement parts, repair, and maintenance services, as well as facilitate competition in markets for repairable products," the comment reads. The inability to do third-party repairs on these products not only limits competition, the agencies say, but also makes repairs more costly and can lead to hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost sales. Certain logic controllers have to be discarded and replaced if they break or if the passwords for them get lost. The average estimated cost of "unplanned manufacturing downtime" was $260,000 per hour, the comment notes, citing research from Public Knowledge and iFixit. As for soft serve machines, breakdowns can lead to $625 in lost sales each day. Business owners can't legally fix them on their own or hire an independent technician to do so, meaning they have to wait around for an authorized technician -- which, the comment says, usually takes around 90 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sixoh1 writes: On the third attempt, SpaceX's Super Heavy booster lofted the Starship vehicle to space on a sub-orbital parabolic trajectory. The test was successful for nearly all of the objectives, including payload delivery functions on Starship that will be used for Starlink deployment and in-space fuel transfers. Unfortunately the booster did not soft-land, and the Starship vehicle was destroyed during re-entry, likely due to unspecified issues with re-starting the Raptor engine and then maintaining attitude control during re-entry. You can watch Starship's third flight test here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: We've been ableto design and 3D-print plastic phone cases and toys at home for a decade now. For almost every other consumer product made in a factory, the robots have taken over the heavy lifting. But fashion is still stuck in the 20th century. Take a typical pair of chinos. Cotton threads are woven on a large loom at a mill somewhere in Asia, then shipped to a dye house, then shipped (usually a great distance) to a garment factory somewhere else in Asia. There, the fabric is laid flat and cut into shapes, with the excess fabric being landfilled, incinerated, or (very rarely) recycled. Underpaid and exploited garment workers hand-sew those pieces of fabric into pants, which are then shipped across the ocean to a fulfillment warehouse or a store near you. This global apparel supply chain is inefficient and emissions-heavy -- an estimated 4 percent of global waste and 2 to 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to fashion production. Brands have to make risky predictions many months in advance about which items will sell, leading them to over order on a massive scale. Now, Walmart is piloting a project with the San Francisco Bay area startup Unspun to test whether it can manufacture the retailer's in-house brand of chinos in the US using a technology called 3D weaving. The experiment is part of a push to nearshore Walmart's supply chain and cut down on emissions and waste associated with textile production. While still very much in the prototype phase -- the two companies are exploring how to use Unspun's technology to supply pants to Walmart's stores -- if successful, this project could upend the way apparel is manufactured on a huge scale. Unspun hopes to eventually deploy 3D weaving micro-factories throughout the United States, so that anyone can order custom and locally made apparel on demand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Refund fraud groups are exploiting lenient refund policies, resulting in significant losses for retailers like Amazon and prompting civil lawsuits and arrests. The scheme has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. CNBC reports: Fraud groups are taking advantage of retailers' lenient return policies, experts told CNBC, which often include unlimited free returns and sometimes even a preference that customers keep the items. It's ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. The figure includes multiple forms of fraud, such as sending back clothing after it's been worn, known as "wardrobing," and returning shoplifted merchandise, the survey said. In December, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Page and 47 other people across the globe with alleged ties to Rekk, accusing them of conspiring to steal millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation. Amazon described these services as "illegitimate 'businesses'" that look to "exploit the refund process for their own financial gain to the detriment of honest consumers and retailers who must bear the brunt of increased costs, decreased inventory, and service disruption that impacts genuine customers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue "head on" through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud. Here's how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount. The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New emails from before the launch of the Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees. "The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are 'no longer justifiable,'" writes Ars Technica's Kyle Orland. "They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings starting years later. From the report: The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017 (PDF), starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's public tweets at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB." Later in the same thread, he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc." Expanding on these public thoughts in a private response to Newell, Sweeney allows that there was "a good case" for Steam's 30 percent platform fee "in the early days." But he also argues that the fee is too high now that Steam's sheer scale has driven down operating costs and made it harder for individual games to get as much marketing or user acquisition value from simply being available on the storefront. Sweeney goes on to spitball some numbers showing how Valve's fees are contributing to the squeeze all but the biggest PC game developers were feeling on their revenues: "If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1,000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter [user acquisition] or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990's." Based on experience with Fortnite and Paragon, Sweeney estimates that the true cost of distribution for PC games that sell for $25 or more in Western markets "is under 7% of gross." That's only slightly lower than the 12 percent take Epic would establish for its own Epic Games Store the next year. The second email chain (PDF) revealed in the lawsuit started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple's total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court. Years before Epic would bring its own case against Apple, Sweeney was somewhat prescient, noting that "Apple also has the resources to litigate and delay any change [to its total App Store control] for years... What we need right now is enough developer, press, and platform momentum to steer Apple towards fully opening up iOS sooner rather than later." To that end, Sweeney attempted to convince Valve that lowering its own platform fees would hurt Apple's position and thereby contribute to the greater good: "A timely move by Valve to improve Steam economics for all developers would make a great difference in all of this, clearly demonstrating that store competition leads to better rates for all developers. Epic would gladly speak in support of such a move anytime!" In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam. He offered some harsh words for Valve while once again begging the company to serve as a positive example in the developing case against Apple: "Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people. We're all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?" After being forwarded the message by Valve's Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic "You mad bro?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu out of existence on March 4th, it wasn't just an attack on the leading way to play Nintendo Switch games without a Switch. It was a warning to anyone building a video game emulator. Seven developers have now stepped away from projects, are shutting them down, or have left the emulation scene entirely. Of those that remain, many are circling the wagons, getting quieter and more careful, trying not to paint targets on their backs. Four developers declined to talk to The Verge, telling me they didn't want to draw attention. One even tried to delete answers to my questions after we'd begun, suddenly scared of attracting press. Not everyone is so afraid. Four other emulator teams tell me they're optimistic Nintendo won't challenge them, that they're on strong legal footing, and that Yuzu may have been an unusually incriminating case. One decade-long veteran tells me everyone's just a bit more worried. But when I point out that Nintendo didn't have to prove a thing in court, they all admit they don't have money for lawyers. They say they'd probably be forced to roll over, like Yuzu, if the Japanese gaming giant came knocking. "I would do what I'd have to do," the most confident of the four tells me. "I would want to fight it... but at the same time, I know we exist because we don't antagonize Nintendo." There's a new meme where Yuzu is the mythical Hydra: cut off one head, and two more take its place. It's partly true in how multiple forks of Yuzu (and 3DS emulator Citra) sprung up shortly after their predecessors died: Suyu, Sudachi, Lemonade, and Lime are a few of the public names. But they're not giving Nintendo the middle finger: they're treating Nintendo's lawsuit like a guidebook about how not to piss off the company. In its legal complaint, Nintendo claimed Yuzu was "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale," giving users "detailed instructions" on how to "get it running with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games," among other things. Okay, no more guides, say the Switch emulator developers who spoke to me. They also say they're stripping out some parts of Yuzu that made it easier to play pirated games. As Ars Technica reported, a forked version called Suyu will require you to bring the firmware, title.keys, and prod.keys from your Switch before you can decrypt and play Nintendo games. Only one of those was technically required before. (Never mind that most people don't have an easily hackable first-gen Switch and would likely download these things off the net.) The developer of another fork tells me he plans to do something similar, making users "fend for yourself" by making sure the code doesn't auto-generate any keys. Most developers I spoke to are also trying to make it clear they aren't profiting at Nintendo's expense. One who initially locked early access builds behind a donation page has stopped doing that, making them publicly available on GitHub instead. The leader of another project tells me nothing will ever be paywalled, and for now, there's "strictly no donation," either. When I ask about the Dolphin Emulator, which faced a minor challenge from Nintendo last year, I'm told it publicly exposes its tiny nonprofit budget for anyone to scrutinize. But I don't know that these steps are enough to prevent Nintendo from throwing around its weight again, particularly when it comes to emulating the Nintendo Switch, its primary moneymaker. Since Yuzu's shut down, a slew of other emulators left the scene. The include (as highlighted by The Verge): - The Citra emulator for Nintendo 3DS is gone- The Pizza Boy emulators for Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color are gone- The Drastic emulator for Nintendo DS is free for now and will be removed- The lead developer of Yuzu and Citra has stepped away from emulation- The lead developer of Strato, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from emulation- Dynarmic, used to speed up various emulators including Yuzu, has abruptly ended development- One contributor on Ryujinx, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from the project- AetherSX2, a PS2 emulator, is finally gone (mostly unrelated; development was suspended a year ago)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two of the biggest manufacturers of locks used in commercial safes have been accused of essentially putting backdoors in at least some of their products in a new letter by Senator Ron Wyden. 404 Media: Wyden is urging the U.S. government to explicitly warn the public about the vulnerabilities, which Wyden says could be exploited by foreign adversaries to steal what U.S. businesses store in safes, such as trade secrets. The little known "manufacturer" or "manager" reset codes could let third parties -- such as spies or criminals -- bypass locks without the owner's consent and are sometimes not disclosed to customers. Wyden's office also found that while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) bans such locks for sensitive and classified U.S. government use in part due to the security vulnerability reset codes pose, the government has deliberately not warned the public about the existence of these backdoors. The specific companies named in Wyden's letter are China-based SECURAM and U.S.-based Sargent and Greenleaf (S&G). Each produces keypad locks which are then implemented into safes by other manufacturers. The full list of locks that contain backdoor codes is unknown, but documentation available online points to multiple SECURAM products which do include them, and S&G confirmed to Wyden's office that some of its own locks also have similar codes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says investigators still do not know who worked on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 door plug involved in a Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines midair emergency and that video footage was overwritten. From a report: NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a letter to senators that investigators sought security camera footage when the door plug was opened and closed in September but were informed the material was overwritten. "The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB's investigation moving forward," Homendy said. "To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft." The NTSB said previously four key bolts were missing from the door plug that blew out on the plane. Last week, Homendy said she spoke to Boeing CEO David Calhoun "and asked for the names of the people who performed the work. He stated he was unable to provide that information and maintained that Boeing has no records of the work being performed." Boeing said it "will continue supporting this investigation in the transparent and proactive fashion we have supported all regulatory inquiries into this accident. We have worked hard to honor the rules about the release of investigative information." A Boeing official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the planemaker standard practice is to overwrite security videos after 30 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France Travail, the government agency responsible for assisting the unemployed, has fallen victim to a massive data breach exposing the personal information of up to 43 million French citizens dating back two decades, the department announced on Wednesday. The incident, which has been reported to the country's data protection watchdog (CNIL), is the latest in a series of high-profile cyber attacks targeting French government institutions and underscores the growing threat to citizens' private data. From a report: The department's statement reveals that names, dates of birth, social security numbers, France Travail identifiers, email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers were exposed. Passwords and banking details aren't affected, at least. That said, CNIL warned that the data stolen during this incident could be linked to stolen data in other breaches and used to build larger banks of information on any given individual. It's not clear whether the database's entire contents were stolen by attackers, but the announcement suggests that at least some of the data was extracted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has eliminated egress fees for customers removing data from its Azure cloud, joining Amazon Web Services and Google in this move. The decision comes as the European Data Act's provisions targeting lock-in terms are set to take effect in 2025. Microsoft adds: Azure already offers the first 100GB/month of egressed data for free to all customers in all Azure regions around the world. If you need to egress more than 100GB/month, please follow these steps to claim your credit. Contact Azure Support for details on how to start the data transfer-out process. Please comply with the instructions to be eligible for the credit. Azure Support will apply the credit when the data transfer process is complete and all Azure subscriptions associated to the account have been canceled. The exemption on data transfer out to the internet fees also aligns with the European Data Act and is accessible to all Azure customers globally and from any Azure region.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Tech-backed nonprofit Code.org on Wednesday fired the latest salvo in its legal battle over $3 million in unpaid licensing fees for the use of Code.org's free [for non-commercial purposes] K-12 computer science curriculum by WhiteHat Jr., the learn-to-code edtech company with a controversial past that was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, another edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm that still touts its ties to Zuckerberg on its Investors page. In a filing in support of a motion for default judgement, Code.org founder and CEO Hadi Partovi wrote: "Whitehat's continued use of Code.org's platform and content without payment following Code.org's termination of the Agreement has caused, and is continuing to cause, irreparable injury to Code.org, because it undermines Code.org's charitable and nonprofit purpose of expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups and because it jeopardizes Code.org's status as an organization described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. As a Section 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization, Code.org may not use its assets to benefit for-profit entities without receiving fair compensation." According to the [proposed] default judgement, "Code.org is awarded the principal amount sued for of $3,000,000, along with attorneys' fees, costs, and expenses in an amount to be determined following Code.org's submission of an application, together with pre-judgment interest of $216,001.16, from May 26, 2023 to March 13, 2024, and any additional pre-judgment interest that may accrue until the date of judgment, calculated at the rate of 9% per annum pursuant to CPLR 5001 and 5004, plus any post-judgment interest at the statutory rate, for a total judgment in the amount of $[TBD]."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is telling workers to close their eyes and dream of being somewhere else while they're standing in a warehouse. From a report: A worker in one of Amazon's fulfillment centers, who we've granted anonymity, sent 404 Media a photo they took of a screen imploring them to try "savoring" the idea of something that makes them happy -- as in, not being at work, surrounded by robots and packages. "Savoring," the screen says, in a black font over a green block of color. "Close your eyes and think about something that makes you happy." Under that text -- which I can't emphasize enough: it looks like something a 6th grader would make in Powerpoint -- there's a bunch of white space, and a stock illustration of a faceless person in an Amazon vest. He's being urged on by an anthropomorphic stack of Amazon packages with wheels and arms. There's also a countdown timer that says "repeat until timer ends." In the image we saw, it said 10 seconds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced a major change to its Safe Browsing feature in Chrome today that will make the service work in real time by checking against a server-side list -- all without sharing your browsing habits with Google. From a report: Previously, Chrome downloaded a list of known sites that harbor malware, unwanted software and phishing scams once or twice per hour. Now, Chrome will move to a system that will send the URLs you are visiting to its servers and check against a rapidly updated list there. The advantage of this is that it doesn't take up to an hour to get an updated list because, as Google notes, the average malicious site doesn't exist for more than 10 minutes. The company claims that this new server-side system can catch up to 25 percent more phishing attacks than using local lists. These local lists have also grown in size, putting more of a strain on low-end machines and low-bandwidth connections. Google is rolling out this new system to desktop and iOS users now, with Android support coming later this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damage to at least three subsea cables off the west coast of Africa is disrupting internet services across the continent. From a report: The West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables -- arteries for telecommunications data -- were all affected on Thursday, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers, according to data from internet analysis firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare. The cause of the cable faults has not yet been determined. Data show a major disruption to connectivity in eight West African countries, with Ivory Coast, Liberia and Benin being the most affected, NetBlocks, an internet watchdog, said in a post on X. Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon are among other countries impacted. Several companies have also reported service disruptions in South Africa. "This is a devastating blow to internet connectivity along the west coast of Africa, which will be operating in a degraded state for weeks to come," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis firm Kentik. The cable faults off the Ivory Coast come less than a month after three telecommunications cables were severed in the Red Sea, highlighting the vulnerability of critical communications infrastructure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Outdoor Voices, an athletic apparel company, is closing all its stores on Sunday, The New York Times reported this week, citing four employees at four different stores. From the report: In an internal Slack message reviewed by The New York Times, some employees were notified on Wednesday that "Outdoor Voices is embarking on a new chapter as we transition to an exclusively online business." Products in stores are going to be discounted 50 percent, according to the Slack message. The news came as a surprise, two of the employees said, adding that they were not offered severance. Outdoor Voices, which lists 16 retail locations on its website, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Founded in 2014 by Ty Haney, the brand became popular for its muted tones and highly Instagrammable aesthetics. Think matching crop tops and leggings in pale shades of earthy tones. Its hashtag and company mantra, #DoingThings, became popular on social media, where brand loyalists would regularly share images of themselves participating in athletic activities like running or hiking or spinning. The company often hosted events, like group exercise classes, and even built an editorial platform called The Recreationalist. Many Outdoor Voices customers weren't just shoppers; they were devotees. The company was a chic athleisure brand perfectly positioned to attract millennials, but it was also selling a lifestyle. A lifestyle that helped the brand raise millions in funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A judge in the UK High Court has declared that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, marking the end of a years-long debate. From a report: "The evidence is overwhelming," said Honourable Mr. Justice James Mellor, delivering a surprise ruling at the close of the trial. "Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Dr. Wright is not the person that operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Dr. Wright is not the person that created the Bitcoin system. Nor is Dr. Wright the author of the Bitcoin software," he said. The ruling brings to a close a six-week trial, in which the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of crypto companies, asked the court to declare that Wright is not Satoshi on the basis that he had allegedly fabricated his evidence and contorted his story repeatedly as new inconsistencies came to light. "After all the evidence in this remarkable trial, it is clear beyond doubt that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto," claimed Jonathan Hough, legal counsel for COPA, as he began his closing submissions on Tuesday. "Wright has lied, and lied, and lied."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beijing has hit out at US legislation to ban TikTok as former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was assembling a consortium to buy the app from its Chinese owner. From a report: Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Thursday that the US had shown a "robber's logic" towards the app (non-paywalled link), which has 170mn users in America. "When you see other people's good things, you must find ways to own them," Wang said. The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the app to a non-Chinese company within six months or be banned from US app stores. It still needs Senate approval and President Joe Biden's signature. Mnuchin said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that he was putting together an investor group to attempt to take over the short-video app. "It's a great business," he said. "It should be owned by a US business. There's no way the Chinese would ever let a US company run something like this in China." He Yadong, spokesperson for the commerce ministry, on Thursday called on Washington to "stop unfairly suppressing foreign companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The polio survivor known as "the man in the iron lung" has died at the age of 78. Paul Alexander contracted polio in 1952 when he was six, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. The disease left him unable to breathe independently, leading doctors to place him in the metal cylinder, where he would spend the rest of his life. He would go on to earn a law degree -- and practice law -- as well as publish a memoir. [...] In 1952, when he became ill, doctors in his hometown of Dallas operated on him, saving his life. But polio meant his body was no longer able to breathe on his own. The answer was to place him in a so-called iron lung - a metal cylinder enclosing his body up to his neck. The lung, which he called his "old iron horse," allowed him to breathe. Bellows sucked air out of the cylinder, forcing his lungs to expand and take in air. When the air was let back in, the same process in reverse made his lungs deflate. After years, Alexander eventually learned to breathe by himself so that he was able to leave the lung for short periods of time. Like most polio survivors placed in iron lungs, he was not expected to survive long. But he lived for decades, long after the invention of the polio vaccine in the 1950s all but eradicated the disease in the Western world. [...] Advances in medicine made iron lungs obsolete by the 1960s, replaced by ventilators. But Alexander kept living in the cylinder because, he said, he was used to it. He was recognized by Guinness World Records as the person who lived the longest in an iron lung.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At this year's SXSW festival, discussions on artificial intelligence's future sparked controversy during screenings of premiers like "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate." Variety reports: The quick-turnaround video editors at SXSW cut a daily sizzle reel highlighting previous panels, premieres and other events, which then runs before festival screenings. On Tuesday, the fourth edition of that daily video focused on the wide variety of keynotes and panelists in town to discuss AI. Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently. Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FAA today awarded a launch license to SpaceX for Starship's third-ever test flight on March 14. "The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency wrote in a post on X this afternoon. Space.com reports: The megarocket has two test flights under its belt so far, which took place in April and November of last year. Starship's two stages failed to separate as planned on the April flight, however, which ended after just four minutes. Things went better in November -- stage separation occurred as planned, for example -- but both stages ended up exploding high in the sky on that mission as well. The FAA wrapped up its investigation into what happened on the November flight late last month. But the agency took some additional time before awarding a license for launch number three today. Thursday's flight will be different, and bolder, than its predecessors. "The third flight test aims to build on what we've learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship's payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage's coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship," SpaceX wrote in a mission description. In addition, Thursday's test launch will aim to bring Starship's upper stage down in the Indian Ocean. The target splashdown zone for the first two test missions, by contrast, was the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Underwater speakers that broadcast the hustle and bustle of thriving coral could bring life back to more damaged and degraded reefs that are in danger of becoming ocean graveyards, researchers say. Scientists working off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean found that coral larvae were up to seven times more likely to settle at a struggling reef where they played recordings of the snaps, groans, grunts and scratches that form the symphony of a healthy ecosystem. "We're hoping this may be something we can combine with other efforts to put the good stuff back on the reef," said Nadeege Aoki at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "You could leave a speaker out for a certain amount of time and it could be attracting not just coral larvae but fish back to the reef." The world has lost half its coral reefs since the 1950s through the devastating impact of global heating, overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and outbreaks of disease. The hefty declines have fueled efforts to protect remaining reefs through approaches that range from replanting with nursery-raised corals to developing resilient strains that can withstand warming waters. Aoki and her colleagues took another tack, building on previous research which showed that coral larvae swim towards reef sounds. They set up underwater speakers at three reefs off St John, the smallest of the US Virgin Islands, and measured how many coral larvae, held in sealed containers of filtered sea water, settled on to pieces of rock-like ceramic in the containers up to 30 meters from the speakers. While the researchers installed speakers at all three sites, they only played sounds from a thriving reef at one: the degraded Salt Pond reef, which was bathed in the marine soundscape for three nights. The other two sites, the degraded Cocoloba and the healthier Tektite reefs were included for comparison. When coral larvae are released into the water column they are carried on the currents, and swim freely, before finding a spot to settle. Once they drop to the ocean floor, they become fixed to the spot and -- if they survive -- mature into adults. Writing in the Royal Society Open Science journal, the researchers describe how, on average, 1.7 times more coral larvae settled at the Salt Pond reef than at the other sites where no reef sounds were played. The settlement rates at Salt Pond dropped with distance from the speaker, suggesting the broadcasts were responsible. While the results are promising, Aoki said more work is afoot to understand whether other coral species respond to reef sounds in the same way, and whether the corals thrive after settling. "You have to be very thoughtful about the application of this technology," Aoki added. "You don't want to encourage them to settle where they will die. It really has to be a multi-pronged effort with steps in place to ensure the survival of these corals and their growth over time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. [...] In a blog post today on Cognition's website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin's chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. [...] According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end -- without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here. "The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier. That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995. His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study from the Institute for the Future of Work, contemporary technology often has a negative impact on workers' quality of life. The think tank surveyed over 6,000 people to learn how four categories of workplace technologies affected their wellbeing. TechSpot reports the findings: The study found that increased exposure to three of the categories tended to worsen workers' mental state and health. The three areas that negatively impact people most are wearable and remote sensing technologies, which covers CCTV cameras and wearable trackers; robotics, consisting of automated machines, self-driving vehicles, and other equipment; and, unsurprisingly, technologies relating to AI and ML, which includes everything from decision management to biometrics. Only one of the categories was found to be beneficial to employees, and it's one that has been around for decades: ICT tech such as laptops, tablets, phones, and real-time messaging tools.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: We are often told that setting the bar high is key to success. After all, if you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you'll land with the stars. But Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wants privileged Gen Z grads to lower their expectations. "People with very high expectations have very low resilience -- and unfortunately, resilience matters in success," Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations." Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe. The university is one of the most selective in the United States -- it ranks third best in the country, according to the QS World University Rankings, and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, not even the best universities in the world can teach you resilience. "I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you," Huang added. [...] For those fortunate enough to never have personally experienced hardship growing up, Huang doesn't have any advice on how to welcome more of it into your life now. But he did have some advice on embracing tough times. "I don't know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said. "Greatness comes from character and character isn't formed out of smart people -- it's formed out of people who suffered."It's why despite Nvidia's success -- the company has a $2 trillion market cap -- Huang would still welcome hardship at his organization."To this day I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee," he added. "I mean that in a happy way because you want to refine the character of your company." Essentially, if you want your workforce to always be on their A game, don't let them rest on their laurels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roman Sterlingov, the founder of a $400 million crypto-mixing service called Bitcoin Fog, has been convicted of money laundering in a United State District Court on Tuesday. Other charges include money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act. CoinTelegraph reports: Sterlingov, however, had argued throughout the trial that he was only a user of the service, and not its operator. His attorney, Tok Ekeland said in a March 12 X post that his team will appeal the verdict. According to evidence presented at the trial, Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog from October 2011 to April 2021, which acted as a money laundering service for "criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement." The service moved over 1.2 million Bitcoin over the decade-long operation -- worth $400 million at the time of the transactions -- with the bulk of cryptocurrency coming from darknet marketplaces tied to narcotics, computer fraud abuse and identity theft, the government said. Bitcoin Fog also served distributors of child sexual abuse material. Evidence used to convict Sterlingov found that the "vast majority" of crypto deposited to his crypto exchange accounts came from "Bitcoin clusters" associated with Bitcoin Fog. "Evidence presented at trial clearly showed that the defendant laundered hundreds of millions of illicit funds from the dark web through Bitcoin Fog in an attempt to conceal the origin of those funds," said Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation Chief Jim Lee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months. Keen readers of El Reg may remember the story breaking toward the end of October 2023 after Akira posted Stanford to its shame site, with the university subsequently issuing a statement simply explaining that it was investigating an incident, avoiding the dreaded R word. Well, surprise, surprise, ransomware was involved, according to a data breach notice sent out to the 27,000 people affected by the attack. Akira targeted the university's Department of Public Safety (DPS) and this week's filing with the Office of the Maine Attorney General indicates that Stanford became aware of the incident on September 27, more than four months after the initial breach took place. According to Monday's filing, the data breach occurred on May 12 2023 but was only discovered on September 27 of last year, raising questions about whether the attacker(s) was inside the network the entire time and why it took so long to spot the intrusion. It's not fully clear what information was compromised, but the draft letters include placeholders for three different variables. However, the filing with Maine's AG suggests names and social security numbers are among the data types to have been stolen. All affected individuals have been offered 24 months of free credit monitoring, including access to a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy and ID theft recovery services. Akira's post dedicated to Stanford on its leak site claims it stole 430 GB worth of data, including personal information and confidential documents. It's all available to download via a torrent file and the fact it remains available for download suggests the research university didn't pay whatever ransom the attackers demanded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...] Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end affirmative action in college admissions, there has been increased scrutiny on legacy admissions -- the practice of giving special considerations to the relatives of alumni. Critics say this practice disproportionately benefits white students from wealthy backgrounds. Much of the discussion and research on legacy admissions focuses on Ivy League and other highly selective schools, but these colleges enroll only a small share of students. How widespread is the practice of legacy admissions? Is it common among public colleges? Brookings: In this report, we document the prevalence of legacy admissions, as reported by colleges, across higher education around the time of the SFFA decision. Legacy admissions were more often used at selective and private institutions, but a substantial minority of public and less selective institutions also considered legacy status in admissions. The use of legacy preferences appears to have been most common in the Northeast and South and least common in the West. There is substantial -- but incomplete -- overlap in the colleges that considered legacy status and those that practiced affirmative action (AA) prior to SFFA. A number of colleges, including some public colleges, said they considered relationships to alumni but not racial identity in admissions. While most state flagships don't consider legacy status in admissions, half have at least one scholarship opportunity that is catered to legacy students. Because the data are available with a lag, we do not know how many colleges have changed their legacy admissions policies in response to the Court's decision on affirmative action, but press reports and our conversations with admissions representatives indicate that some colleges have changed course in the past few years, including at least five state flagships. The effect of legacy preferences on who enrolls at a particular university may not be substantial overall. Many of the colleges that use legacy admissions are not that selective, and the scholarships for relatives of alumni are typically small. Still, even if the number of students directly displaced by legacies who had a leg up is ultimately not that large, the practice sends students the wrong signal about what's important and is contrary to the mission of a public university. In a recent survey, half of first-generation college students said they thought legacy admissions practices may have hurt their chances. Perceptions of an unfair admissions process might also make some students less likely to apply or undermine the perceived legitimacy of higher education, though we did not find research on this topic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, U.S. inventors sent in models with their patent applications -- gizmos that reveal a secret history of unmet needs and relentless innovation. The New Yorker: The ruins of American invention have been recently resurrected in a former textile mill in Wilmington, Delaware. The Henry Clay Mill, now better known as Hagley Museum and Library Visitor Center, is perched on the banks of Brandywine Creek, at the southern edge of a sprawling estate once owned by the du Pont family; just upstream lies the oldest of the dynasty's several stately homes in the region, as well as the remains of the gunpowder works upon which its fortune was built. One morning, Chris Cascio, a curator, welcomed me into the mill, where the space once occupied by cotton-picking and carding machines now houses a curious exhibit: the scavenged remainders of a much larger, long-lost museum. From 1790 to 1880, Cascio explained, the U.S. Patent Office first encouraged and then required an inventor to submit a model along with each application. These models -- thousands of miniature devices, often exquisitely detailed -- were then exhibited in Washington, D.C., in the office's model gallery. Sometimes called the "Temple of Invention," the gallery was a bustling landmark: it regularly attracted up to ten thousand visitors a month and was ranked as "the greatest permanent attraction in the city," according to one newspaper. But by the late nineteenth century it had effectively shut its doors. Hagley's latest exhibit, "Nation of Inventors," is the largest permanent public display of patent models since that time. [...] The U.S. system was also unique in that no other country required a model to accompany a patent application. The reasons why soon became clear. As early as the eighteen-thirties, the collection had outgrown the Patent Office's cramped headquarters at the former Blodgett's Hotel. In 1836, a fire destroyed at least seven thousand models, but, rather than abandon the requirement, the Patent Office doubled down, securing congressional funding to reconstruct the models and laying the foundations for a truly monumental building, with a facade modelled after the Parthenon. The structure, which now houses the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, occupies an entire city block. In the engineer Pierre L'Enfant's master plan for the capital, it was intended to serve as a kind of nondenominational "church of the republic," between the White House on one side and the Capitol on the other.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Games, which makes the popular video game "Fortnite," on Wednesday accused Apple of violating an injunction governing its lucrative App Store, and asked a U.S. judge to hold Apple in contempt and end its "sham" compliance. From a report: A September 2021 injunction by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, let developers provide links and buttons that direct consumers to other means to pay for digital content. In a filing with the California court, Epic alleged that Apple is in "blatant violation" of that injunction, despite the Cupertino, California-based company's assurance in a Jan. 16 court notice that it had "fully complied." Epic said Apple has imposed new rules and a new 27% fee on developers for some purchases, which taken together make the links "commercially unusable." The Cary, North Carolina-based developer also said Apple continues to "categorically prohibit" buttons, and still forbids some apps from telling users they have other purchasing options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo will begin offering a robotaxi service to the public in Los Angeles this week and in Austin by the end of the year, the company's co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said Wednesday at SXSW. From a report: The Alphabet company has been testing and validating its driverless vehicles across about 43 square miles around downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin and Hyde Park neighborhoods. The announcement comes about a week after Waymo started letting its autonomous vehicles traverse Austin without a safety operator behind the wheel, a critical step before the company opens the program up to the public. Opening up a robotaxi service means the public will be able to hail a ride in a driverless car via the Waymo One app. Importantly, Waymo will be able to charge for those rides. Austin will become the fourth city where Waymo operates a commercial driverless service. Waymo also operates a robotaxi service in Phoenix, San Francisco and soon Los Angeles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethereum has successfully completed a major software upgrade that should make using the blockchain network ecosystem cheaper. The update enables transactions that previously cost $1 on linked Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base to be executed for just a cent. The Dencun upgrade, a combination of the "Deneb" and "Cancun" portions of the update, introduces a new data storage system for Ethereum. Currently, most Layer 2 blockchains store data on Ethereum, and because this data is stored permanently on every Ethereum node, storage costs often account for around 90% of Layer 2 expenses. These costs are typically passed on to applications, which in turn charge consumers. With Dencun, Layer 2s can now store data in a new type of repository called blobs, which will be cheaper as the data will only be stored for approximately 18 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You'll soon get to try out OpenAI's buzzy text-to-video generator for yourself. From a report: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati says Sora will be available "this year" and that it "could be a few months." OpenAI first showed off Sora, which is capable of generating hyperrealistic scenes based on a text prompt, in February. The company only made the tool available for visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to start, but that didn't stop some Sora-generated videos from making their way onto platforms like X. In addition to making the tool available to the public, Murati says OpenAI has plans to "eventually" incorporate audio, which has the potential to make the scenes even more realistic. The company also wants to allow users to edit the content in the videos Sora produces, as AI tools don't always create accurate images. "We're trying to figure out how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with," Murati tells the Journal. When pressed on what data OpenAI used to train Sora, Murati didn't get too specific and seemed to dodge the question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Knight, writing for Wired: Goat Simulator 3 is a surreal video game in which players take domesticated ungulates on a series of implausible adventures, sometimes involving jetpacks. That might seem an unlikely venue for the next big leap in artificial intelligence, but Google DeepMind today revealed an AI program capable of learning how to complete tasks in a number of games, including Goat Simulator 3. Most impressively, when the program encounters a game for the first time, it can reliably perform tasks by adapting what it learned from playing other games. The program is called SIMA, for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, and it builds upon recent AI advances that have seen large language models produce remarkably capable chabots like ChatGPT. [...] DeepMind's latest video game project hints at how AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could soon do more than just chat and generate images or video, by taking control of computers and performing complex commands. "The paper is an interesting advance for embodied agents across multiple simulations," says Linxi "Jim" Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who works on AI gameplay and was involved with an early effort to train AI to play by controlling a keyboard and mouse with a 2017 OpenAI project called World of Bits. Fan says the Google DeepMind work reminds him of this project as well as a 2022 effort called VPT that involved agents learning tool use in Minecraft. "SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games," he says. "The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track." [...] For the SIMA project, the Google DeepMind team collaborated with several game studios to collect keyboard and mouse data from humans playing 10 different games with 3D environments, including No Man's Sky, Teardown, Hydroneer, and Satisfactory. DeepMind later added descriptive labels to that data to associate the clicks and taps with the actions users took, for example whether they were a goat looking for its jetpack or a human character digging for gold. The data trove from the human players was then fed into a language model of the kind that powers modern chatbots, which had picked up an ability to process language by digesting a huge database of text. SIMA could then carry out actions in response to typed commands. And finally, humans evaluated SIMA's efforts inside different games, generating data that was used to fine-tune its performance. Further reading: DeepMind's blog post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under 50 worldwide, with the number of early-onset cancer cases predicted to rise by around 30% between 2019 and 2030. Investigators are searching for explanations, considering factors such as obesity, early-cancer screening, gut microbiome, and tumor genomes. Despite increased screening and awareness, mortality from early-onset cancers has risen by nearly 28% between 1990 and 2019 globally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Wednesday that would give TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app used by about 170 million Americans or face a ban. From a report: The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps that could pose security concerns. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not indicated how he plans to proceed. TikTok's fate has become a major issue in Washington. Democratic and Republican lawmakers said their offices had received large volumes of calls from teenaged TikTok users who oppose the legislation, with the volume of complaints at times exceeding the number of calls seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The measure is also the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports.The vote comes just over a week since the bill was proposed following one public hearing with little debate, and after action in Congress had stalled for more than a year. Last month, President Joe Biden's re-election campaign joined TikTok, raising hopes among TikTok officials that legislation was unlikely this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European lawmakers approved the world's most comprehensive legislation yet on AI (non-paywalled link), setting out sweeping rules for developers of AI systems and new restrictions on how the technology can be used. From a report: The European Parliament on Wednesday voted to give final approval to the law after reaching a political agreement last December with European Union member states. The rules, which are set to take effect gradually over several years, ban certain AI uses, introduce new transparency rules and require risk assessments for AI systems that are deemed high-risk. The law comes amid a broader global debate about the future of AI and its potential risks and benefits as the technology is increasingly adopted by companies and consumers. Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for allegedly breaking the company's founding agreement by prioritizing profit over AI's benefits for humanity. Altman has said AI should be developed with great caution and offers immense commercial possibilities. The new legislation applies to AI products in the EU market, regardless of where they were developed. It is backed by fines of up to 7% of a company's worldwide revenue. The AI Act is "the first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI," said Brando Benifei, an EU lawmaker from Italy who helped lead negotiations on the law. The law still needs final approval from EU member states, but that process is expected to be a formality since they already gave the legislation their political endorsement. While the law only applies in the EU it is expected to have a global impact because large AI companies are unlikely to want to forgo access to the bloc, which has a population of about 448 million people. Other jurisdictions could also use the new law as a model for their AI regulations, contributing to a wider ripple effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Rainbow reports via SpaceNews: SpaceX has secured conditional approval to use extremely high-frequency E-band radio waves to improve the capacity of its low Earth orbit Starlink broadband constellation. The Federal Communications Commission said March 8 it is allowing SpaceX to use E-band frequencies between second-generation Starlink satellites and gateways on the ground, alongside already approved spectrum in the Ka and Ku bands. Specifically, SpaceX is now also permitted to communicate between 71 and 76 gigahertz from space to Earth, and 81-86 GHz Earth-to-space, using the up to 7,500 Gen2 satellites SpaceX is allowed to deploy. SpaceX has plans for 30,000 Gen2 satellites, on top of the 4,400 Gen1 satellites already authorized by the FCC. However, the FCC deferred action in December 2022 on whether to allow SpaceX to deploy the other three-quarters of its Gen2 constellation, which includes spacecraft closer to Earth to improve broadband speeds. The regulator also deferred action at the time on SpaceX's plans to use E-band frequencies, citing a need to first establish ground rules for using them in space. In a March 8 regulatory filing, the FCC said it found "SpaceX's proposed operations in the E-band present no new or increased frequency conflicts with other satellite operations." But the order comes with multiple conditions, including potentially forcing SpaceX to modify operations if another satellite operator also seeks to use the radio waves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12P/Pons-Brooks, a Halley-type comet larger than Mount Everest and with a 71.3-year orbit, is expected to become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it makes its closest approach to the sun on April 21. The Guardian reports: While some reports suggest 12P/Pons-Brooks was spotted as far back as the 14th century, it is named after the French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons who discovered it in 1812 and the British-American astronomer William Robert Brooks who observed it on its next orbit in 1883. Thought to have a nucleus about 30km (20 miles) in diameter, it is classed as a cryovolcanic comet, meaning it erupts with dust, gases and ice when pressure builds inside as it is heated. One such outburst last year caused it to brighten a hundredfold and garnered it the sobriquet of "the Devil Comet" after the haze that surrounds it formed a horned shape. While the comet -- and its green tinge -- has already been spotted in the night sky, experts say it is expected to become even brighter in the coming weeks. "The comet is expected to reach a magnitude of 4.5 which means it ought to be visible from a dark location in the UK," said Dr Paul Strom, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. "The comet moves from the constellation of Andromeda to Pisces. As it does so it passes by bright stars which will make it easier to spot on certain dates. In particular, on March 31 12P/Pons-Brooks will be only 0.5 a degree from the bright star called Hamal," he said. But Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said even if the comet did become brighter it could still be difficult to see, adding that basic instruments such as small telescopes would greatly help. "If you have a half-decent pair of binoculars, certainly attempt to look for it with those," said Massey, adding that apps that map the sky were also useful. The best views of the comet are currently to be found in the northern hemisphere. Massey said those who wanted to catch a glimpse should venture out on a clear evening and look low in the west-north-west as twilight came to an end. "You want to avoid haze, you want to avoid moonlight, you want to avoid light pollution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions. For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S. Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services. Though this is lower than the $12 million Google's Vulnerability Reward Program paid to researchers in 2022, the amount is still significant, showcasing a high level of community participation in Google's security efforts. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program's launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the world's most popular and widely used mobile operating system, the program awarded over $3.4 million. Google also increased the maximum reward amount for critical vulnerabilities concerning Android to $15,000, driving increased community reports. During security conferences like ESCAL8 and hardwea.io, Google awarded $70,000 for 20 critical discoveries in Wear OS and Android Automotive OS and another $116,000 for 50 reports concerning issues in Nest, Fitbit, and Wearables. Google's other big software project, the Chrome browser, was the subject of 359 security bug reports that paid out a total of $2.1 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.