Pablo Escobar, the name of the late Colombian drug kingpin, can't be registered as a trademark in the European Union after judges said that approving his brother's bid would go against "principles of morality." From a report: The public "associate that name with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting there ... ⌘ Read more
Pablo Escobar, the name of the late Colombian drug kingpin, can't be registered as a trademark in the European Union after judges said that approving his brother's bid would go against "principles of morality." From a report: The public "associate that name with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting there ... ⌘ Read more
At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon's CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities. Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commissio ... ⌘ Read more
404 Media: An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users' messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service's creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone ... ⌘ Read more
Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram messaging app, has accused tech giants Google and Apple of threatening to censor content on smartphones [YouTube link]. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Durov claimed that these companies told Telegram to comply with their guidelines or face removal from their app stores.
"Those two platforms, they could bas ... ⌘ Read more
Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston said he views his employees like customers, and that means giving them what they want -- which isn't in-person work. From a report: "We will support however they want to gather," Houston said in a new interview with The Verge. "But we're finding that these retreats and off-sites and th ... ⌘ Read more
Cloudflare, in a blog post: Key insights from the first quarter of 2024 include:
1\\. 2024 started with a bang. Cloudflare's defense systems automatically mitigated 4.5 million DDoS attacks during the first quarter -- representing a 50% year-over-year (YoY) increase.
2\\. DNS-based DDoS attacks increased by 80% YoY and remain the most prominent attack vector.
3\\. DDoS attacks on Sweden surged by ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: In a Monday post, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan restated his belief that VMware's portfolio was too complex, and too poorly integrated, for the virtualization giant to represent true competition for hyperscale clouds. Broadcom's injection of R&D cash, he insisted, will see VMware's flagship Cloud F ... ⌘ Read more
The SEC has blocked third-party messaging apps and texts from employees' work phones, "bringing its own practices closer to the standards it's enforcing for the industry," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The SEC's decision to block disappearing-messaging apps will help improve record-keeping and address potential security vulnerabilities ... ⌘ Read more
NASA has confirmed that a piece of metal that tore through a Florida home last month was space junk from the International Space Station. NBC News reports: The agency confirmed Monday that the 1.6-pound object was debris from a cargo pallet that had been intentionally released from the space station three years ago. The pallet, packed with aging batte ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company's $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening ... ⌘ Read more
State tax collectors, particularly in New York, have intensified their audit efforts on high earners, leveraging artificial intelligence to compensate for a reduced number of auditors. CNBC reports: In New York, the tax department reported 771,000 audits in 2022 (the latest year available), up 56% from the previous year, according to the state Department o ... ⌘ Read more
Framework, the company known for designing and selling upgradeable, modular laptops, has struggled with providing up-to-date software for its products. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham spoke with CEO Nirav Patel to discuss how the company is working on fixing these issues. Longtime Slashdot reader snikulin shares the report: Driver bundles remain un-updated for years aft ... ⌘ Read more
spatwei shares a report from SC Magazine: Microsoft has discovered a new method to jailbreak large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) tools and shared its ongoing efforts to improve LLM safety and security in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft first revealed the "Crescendo" LLM jailbreak method in a paper published April 2, which des ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some net neutrality proponents are worried that soon-to-be-approved Federal Communications Commission rules will allow harmful fast lanes because the plan doesn't explicitly ban "positive" discrimination. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed rules for Internet ... ⌘ Read more
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's initial set of AI-related features in iOS 18 "will work entirely on device," and won't connect to cloud services. AppleInsider reports: In practice, these AI features would be able to function without an internet connection or any form of cloud-based processing. AppleInsider has r ... ⌘ Read more
Richard Currie reports via The Register: A simple misclick at a London law firm led to a surprise divorce for an unsuspecting couple. An employee at Vardags, self-described specialists in high-net-worth marital breakdowns, opened the wrong file when applying for a divorce in His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) online portal. With a click more poten ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: An owl. A sharky looking bullet. The Hindu deity Ganesh. The Yin and Yang sign. All painstakingly selected and etched onto a microchip that measures about an inch square. Each microscopic silicon doodle was the handiwork of engineers at Qualcomm Incorporated, ... ⌘ Read more
Creating a sexually explicit "deepfake" image is to be made an offence under a new law in the UK, the Ministry of Justice has announced. The Guardian: Under the legislation, anyone who creates such an image without consent will face a criminal record and an unlimited fine. They could also face jail if the image is shared more widely. The cre ... ⌘ Read more
A crypto wallet maker claimed this week that hackers may be targeting people with an iMessage "zero-day" exploit -- but all signs point to an exaggerated threat, if not a downright scam. From a report: Trust Wallet's official X (previously Twitter) account wrote that "we have credible intel regarding a high-risk zero-da ... ⌘ Read more
The United States Senate is poised to vote on legislation this week that, for the next two years at least, could dramatically expand the number of businesses that the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant. From a report: Some of the nation's top legal experts on a controversial US spy program argue that the legisla ... ⌘ Read more
UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million. From a report: That's on top of the amount in advance funding and interest-free loans UnitedHealth provided to support care provid ... ⌘ Read more
Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in -- and who meet Apple's criteria, including app notarization requirements -- will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites. From a report: It's a massive change for a mobile ecosyst ... ⌘ Read more
The Justice Department is preparing to sue Live Nation as soon as next month [non-paywalled link], an antitrust challenge that could spur major changes at the biggest name in concert promotion and ticketing. WSJ: The agency is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Ticketmaster parent in the coming wee ... ⌘ Read more
Robotics firm Boston Dynamics, owned by Hyundai, has retired its humanoid robot Atlas after a decade, despite significant funding pouring into the category. TechCrunch adds: Boston Dynamics has been focused on commercializing technologies for a number of years now. Hyundai's 2021 acquisition of the firm, coupled with the appointment of Rob Playter as its second-ever ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft's Beijing-based research group published a new open source AI model on Tuesday, only to remove it from the internet hours later after the company realized that the model hadn't gone through adequate safety testing. From a report: The team that published the model, which is ... ⌘ Read more
Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the righ ... ⌘ Read more
SonicSpike shares a report: The quest to return rock materials from Mars to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is going to go through a major overhaul. The US space agency says the current mission design can't return the samples before 2040 on the existing fu ... ⌘ Read more
China's Baidu says its AI chatbot "Ernie Bot" has amassed more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain China's most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid increasingly fierce competition. From a report: The number of users has roughly doubled since the company's last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago. Baidu CE ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers -- one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington -- out of $3.5 million. The indictment, filed in US ... ⌘ Read more
YouTube has updated its policies to no longer allow "third-party apps to turn off ads." The Verge reports: This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you'll get to view videos interruption-free. "We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms ... ⌘ Read more
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday declared that Earth is in the midst of a "4th global coral bleaching event" that's been documented over the last 14 months in every major ocean basin, including off Florida in the United States, in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and in the South Pacific. "As the world's oceans cont ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables pe ... ⌘ Read more
T-Mobile employees from around the country are reportedly receiving text messages offering them cash in exchange for swapping SIMs. SIM swapping is when cybercriminals trick a cellular service provider into switching a victim's service to a SIM card that they control, essentially hijacking the victim's ... ⌘ Read more
Meta plans to "temporarily" shut down Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction prohibiting data sharing with Instagram. TechCrunch reports: The Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), known as Rekabet Kurumu, noted on March 18 that its investigations found that Meta was abusing its dominant market position by combining the data of use ... ⌘ Read more
Adobe is using its Firefly machine learning model to bring generative AI video tools to Premiere Pro. "These new Firefly tools -- alongside some proposed third-party integrations with Runway, Pika Labs, and OpenAI's Sora models -- will allow Premiere Pro users to generate video and add or remove objects using text prompts (just like Photoshop's Generative Fill feature) ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File -- an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direc ... ⌘ Read more
Roku has made two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatory for all users following two credential stuffing attacks that compromised approximately 591,000 customer accounts and led to unauthorized purchases in fewer than 400 cases. The Register reports: Credential stuffing and password spraying are both fairly similar types of brute force attacks, bu ... ⌘ Read more
Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format. Due to a patch having been queued last wee ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dropout's Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public. To the uninitiated, it may seem absurd to go to a massive sports arena and watch people play D&D. As one Redd ... ⌘ Read more
The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. Krebs on SecurityL: The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, Rea ... ⌘ Read more
Top takeaways from Stanford's new AI Index Report [PDF]: 1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.
2\\. Industry continues to dominat ... ⌘ Read more
Ubisoft has come under fire from players who claim the company has revoked access to a game they had previously purchased. Users attempting to launch "The Crew" on Ubisoft Connect are met with a message stating, "You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?" The game has also been m ... ⌘ Read more
The UK is starting to draft regulations to govern AI, focusing on the most powerful language models which underpin OpenAI's ChatGPT, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Policy officials at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology are in the early stages of devising legislation to limit potenti ... ⌘ Read more
Abstract of a paper on Nature: Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this wo ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $ ... ⌘ Read more
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, saying that TurboTax "continues to relentlessly upsell" customers while also directing them away from services that would otherwise be free. From a report: As noted in the letter, Warren's staff analyzed TurboTax's services using a ... ⌘ Read more
Sony is getting ready to release a more powerful PS5 console, possibly by the end of this year. After reports of leaked PS5 Pro specifications surfaced recently, The Verge has obtained a full list of specs for the upcoming console. From the report: Sources familiar with Sony's plans tell me that developers are already being asked to ensure their game ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controve ... ⌘ Read more
AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon are quietly trying to weaken a $42.5 billion federal program to improve internet access across the nation, aiming to block strict new rules that would require them to lower their poorest customers' monthly bills in exchange for a share of the federal aid. From a report: In state after state, the telecom firm ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has lost its spot as the world's biggest mobile phone seller after a steep sales drop as South Korean rival Samsung retook the lead in the global market share. From a report: Samsung had been the biggest seller of mobile phones for 12 years until the end of 2023, when sales of Apple's iPhone models overtook ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:
A network of air monitors installed in Northern California has provided scientists with some of the first measurable evidence quantifying how much electric vehicles are shrinking the carbon footprint of a large urban area. Researchers from UC Berk ... ⌘ Read more
A monthslong "Star Wars"-themed festival called Season of the Force is now happening at Disneyland — including John Williams compositions in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land during the park's fireworks. SFGate reports:
Before the show starts, a voice rings through the land. "Black Spire Outpost has a ... ⌘ Read more
Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova.
It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S."
The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, wi ... ⌘ Read more
After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia:
As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer D ... ⌘ Read more
A business columnist at the Los Angeles Times notes Sam Bankman-Fried's judge issued another ruling "that may have a more far-reaching effect on the crypto business.
U.S. Judge Failla "cleared the Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with its lawsuit alleging that the giant crypto broker and exchange Coinbase has been deal ... ⌘ Read more
Movie exhibitors still face "serious risks," the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday:
Attendance was on the decline even before the pandemic shuttered theaters, thanks to changing consumer habits and competition for people's time and money from other entertainment options. The industry has demonstrated ... ⌘ Read more
The Associated Press reports:
As their rivalry intensifies, U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like swarms of bees to overwhelm an enemy. The planners envision a scenario ... ⌘ Read more
In the view of Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios, artificial intelligence will eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media," reports the New York Times:
VandeHei says the only way for media companies to survive is to focus on delivering journalistic expertise, trusted content and in-person human connection. For Axio ... ⌘ Read more
Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Arm are among Canonical's "silicon partners," a program that "ensures maximum Ubuntu compatibility and long-term support with certified hardware," according to Web Pro News.
And now Qualcomm is set to be Canonical's next silicon partner, "giving Qualcomm access to optimized versions of Ubuntu for its processors."
... ⌘ Read more
America's FCC votes on net neutrality April 25th. And the director of Stanford Law School's "Center for Internet and Society" (also a law professor) says mostly there's "much to celebrate" in the draft rules released earlier this month.
Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to ... ⌘ Read more
The PHP programming language has sunk to its lowest position ever on the long-running TIOBE index of programming language popularity. It now ranks #17 — lower than Assembly Language, Ruby, Swift, Scratch, and MATLAB. InfoWorld reports:
When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. ... ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 24.10 [expected this October] and Debian GNU/Linux 13 "Trixie" [expected June-July 2025] "will feature a refined APT command-line interface," reports 9to5Linux:
APT developer and Canonical engineer Julian Andres Klode took to LinkedIn to present the revamped APT interface powered by the upcoming APT 3.0 ... ⌘ Read more
Engadget warns Windows 11 users that Microsoft is "exploring the idea" of putting ads in their Start menu. Sort of...
To be specific, it's looking to place advertisements for apps you can find in the Microsoft Store in the menu's recommended section....
At the moment, Microsoft will only show ads in this version if you're in the US and ... ⌘ Read more
"Federal regulators are investigating a whistleblower's claims about flaws in the assembly of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner," NPR reported this week:
Longtime Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour went public Tuesday with claims that he observed problems with how parts of the plane's fuselage were fastened together. Salehpour wa ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from ScienceAlert:
The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the 'Great Filter.' The Great ... ⌘ Read more
Popular Science reports that early last week, researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory revealed their new "MUSE" stellarator — "a unique fusion reactor that uses off-the-shelf and 3D-printed materials to contain its superheated plasma."
The researchers' announcement ... ⌘ Read more
"An improved charging protocol might help lithium-ion batteries to last much longer," writes Science Daily:
The best commercial lithium-ion batteries...have a service life of up to eight years. Batteries are usually charged with a constant current flow. But is this really the most favorable method? A new study by Prof. Philipp Adelhelm's group a ... ⌘ Read more
DOJ-Collected Information Exposed In Data Breach Affecting 340,000
Information Collected
An anonymous reader shared this report from Security Week:
Economic analysis and litigation support firm Greylock McKinnon Associates, Inc. (GMA) is notifying over 340,000 individuals that their personal and medical information was compro ... ⌘ Read more
Foreign Policy magazine visits a U.S. military training exercise that pitted Lt. Isaac McCurdy and his platoon of infantry troops against machines with camera lenses for eyes and sheet metal for skin:
Driving on eight screeching wheels and carrying enough firepower on their truck beds to fill a small arms depot, a handful of U.S. Army robots stormed through the battlefield of the fictional ci ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer:
Researchers have demonstrated the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors. Spectre V2 is a new variant of the original Spectre attack discovered by a team of researchers at the VUSec grou ... ⌘ Read more
From the Washington Post:
The U.S. government said Thursday that Russian government hackers who recently stole Microsoft corporate emails had obtained passwords and other secret material that might allow them to breach multiple U.S. agencies.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Departme ... ⌘ Read more
"After a year of cracking down with rigid return-to-office mandates, defeated CEOs are now finally accepting that hybrid working is here to stay," reports Fortune:
KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years.
So it's official: Leaders wh ... ⌘ Read more
O'Reilly's "Tech Trends" newsletter included an interesting item this month:
Want your own Klein Bottle? Made by Cliff Stoll, author of the cybersecurity classic The Cuckoo's Egg, who will autograph your bottle for you (and may include other surprises).
First described in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein, a Klein bottle (like a Mobius strip) has a one-side ... ⌘ Read more
This week the new "Find My Device" feature rolled out to Android devices around the world, starting in the U.S. and Canada.
"With a new, crowdsourced network of over a billion Android devices, Find My Device can help you find your misplaced Android devices and everyday items quickly and securely," according to a Google blog post.
ZDNet explains:
Although Goog ... ⌘ Read more
Aboard the deck of a World War II-era aircraft carrier, University of Washington scientists flicked the switch on a glorified snow-making machine," reports the Seattle Times. They describe the scientists "blasting a plume of saline spray off the coast of Alameda, California... trying to perfect a shot of salty particles that would make clouds better at reflecting sunlight back tow ... ⌘ Read more
The Linux Foundation-backed project OpenTofu "has gotten legal pushback from HashiCorp," according to a report — just seven months after forking OpenTofu's code from HashiCorp's IT deployment software Terraform:
On April 3, HashiCorp issued a strongly-worded Cease and Desist letter to OpenTofu, accusing th ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has called on U.S. President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the U.S. automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy." Brown's letter to the president ( ... ⌘ Read more
Under a new agreement between the U.S. and Japan, the first non-American on the Moon as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign will be a Japanese astronaut. SpaceNews reports: At an event in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriy ... ⌘ Read more
Andrew Jones reports via IEEE Spectrum: The European Space Agency will launch a mission late this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. In a press conference last week, the agency announced details of the mission and the technology the orbiters will use to pull off its exquisitely-choreographed maneuvers. ESA ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized. After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community's spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to e ... ⌘ Read more
Calpine's billion-dolllar Nova Power Bank near Los Angeles will be among the largest in the world when it comes online later this year. According to Reuters, the plant is built on the site of a failed gas-fired power plant and "will be able to power about 680,000 homes for up to four hours when charged." From the report: The 680-megawatt lithium-ion batt ... ⌘ Read more
In two recent papers, an international team of scientists describes the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell, which the researchers are calling a nitroplast. Phys.Org reports: The discovery of the organelle involved a bit of luck and decades of work. In 1998, Jonathan Zehr, a UC Santa Cruz distinguished professor of marine sciences, found a sh ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals -- despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private -- frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to resea ... ⌘ Read more
According to Bloomberg, Adobe used images from its competitor Midjourney to train its own artificial intelligence image generator, Firefly -- contradicting the "commercially safe" ethical standards the company promotes. Tom's Guide reports: The startup has never declared the source of its training data but many su ... ⌘ Read more
AmiMoJo writes: Huawei Technologies is building a massive semiconductor equipment research and development center in Shanghai as the Chinese tech titan continues to beef up its chip supply chain to counter a U.S. crackdown. The centre's mission includes building lithography machines, vital equipment for producing cutting-edge chips. To staff the new c ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google says it will start removing links to California news websites in a "short term test for a small percentage of California users." The move is in response to the pending California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), which would require Google to pay a fee for ... ⌘ Read more
China's push to replace foreign technology is now focused on cutting American chip makers out of the country's telecoms systems. From a report: Officials earlier this year directed the nation's largest telecom carriers to phase out foreign processors that are core to their networks by 2027, a move that would hit American ... ⌘ Read more
Tom's Hardware: Intel is discontinuing its boxed overclockable Core i5, i7, and i9 Raptor Lake CPUs. Every K-series chip in the lineup will be discontinued on May 24th, 2024, after which vendors will no longer be able to purchase them. Intel's product change document states that the last product discontinuance order date and non-cancelable/non-returnable cut-off points will ... ⌘ Read more
OpenTable's restaurant pages still feature a lot of reviews left by anonymous diners at the moment, but that will not be the case starting next month. From a report: The online restaurant reservation service is changing its policy around reviews so that they're not as anonymous -- and it's even applying the new rule retroactively. As BleepingCo ... ⌘ Read more
Adobe has begun to procure videos to build its AI text-to-video generator, trying to catch up to competitors after OpenAI demonstrated a similar technology. From a report: The software company is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and ang ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent headlines have made clear: If AI is doing an impressively good job at a human task, there's a good chance that the task is actually being done by a human. When George Carlin's estate sued the creators of a podcast who said they used AI to create a standup routine in the late comedian's style, the podcaste ... ⌘ Read more
Apple on Friday lost a bid to throw out a mass lawsuit valued at just under $1 billion, brought in London on behalf of more than 1,500 app developers over its App Store fees. Reuters: The case, worth up to 785 million pounds ($979 million) and one of several faced by the U.S. tech giant in the United Kingdom, alleges Apple charged third-party developers u ... ⌘ Read more
Discord has shut down the Discord servers for the Nintendo Switch emulators Suyu and Sudachi and has completely disabled their lead developers' accounts. The Verge: Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th. "Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Di ... ⌘ Read more
Datacenter power issues in Ireland may be coming to a head amid reports from customers that Amazon is restricting resources users can spin up in that nation, even directing them to other AWS regions across Europe instead. From a report: Energy consumed by datacenters is a growing concern, especially in places such as Ireland where there are ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: The story of warehouse robotics is a story of attempting to keep up with Amazon. It's been more than a decade since the online giant revolutionized its delivery services through its Kiva Systems acquisition. As Walmart works to remain competitive, it's taking a more piecemeal approach to automation, throu ... ⌘ Read more
Epic Games, the maker of the popular "Fortnite" video game, has urged a U.S. judge to compel Google to open up its Play Store to more competition following a jury verdict that found the tech giant had abused its power over Android app distribution.
In a court filing on Thursday [PDF], Epic proposed requiring Google to allow the distribution of c ... ⌘ Read more
HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant. The Register: Lawyers representing the aggrieved were responding in an Illinois court to an earlier HP motion to dismiss a January lawsuit. Among other things, the plaintiffs' filing stated that the printer buyers "never e ... ⌘ Read more
sinij shares a report: Members of Parliament in Canada are expected to vote for up to 15 hours in a row Thursday and Friday on more than 200 Conservative amendments to the government's sustainable jobs bill. The amendments are what's left of nearly 20,000 changes the Conservatives proposed to Bill C-50 last fall at a House of Commons comm ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're -- apparently, one of the few people -- using the VPN service that comes with Google One, we've got bad news for you. In an email you're going to receive from Google if you haven't gotten it yet, it revealed that it's phasing out the perk sometime later this year. The company rolled out Google One's VPN feature back in 2020, but you could only access it then if ... ⌘ Read more
Kyle Wiggers reports via TechCrunch: OpenAI announced today that premium ChatGPT users -- customers paying for ChatGPT Plus, Team or Enterprise -- can now leveraged an updated and enhanced version of GPT-4 Turbo, one of the models that powers the conversational ChatGPT experience. This new model ("gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09") brings with it improvements in writing, math, logical r ... ⌘ Read more