"Modern vehicles have quietly become rolling monuments to terrible user experience, trading intuitive physical controls for flashy but dangerous touchscreen interfaces," argues the site Cars & Horsepower, decrying "an industry-wide plague of poorly designed digital dashboards that demand more attention from drivers than the road itself." The consequences are measurable and severe: studies now show touchscreen vehicles require up to four times longer to perform basic functions than their button-equipped counterparts, creating a distracted driving crisis that automakers refuse to acknowledge. A Swedish car magazine, Vi Bilägare, conducted a study [in 2022] comparing how long it takes drivers to perform basic tasks like adjusting climate controls or changing the radio station using touchscreens versus traditional physical buttons. The results showed that in the worst-performing modern car, it took drivers up to four times longer to complete these tasks compared to an older vehicle with physical controls... Even after allowing drivers time to familiarize themselves with each system, touchscreen-equipped cars consistently required more time and attention, which could translate into increased distraction and reduced safety on the road.... A seminal 2019 study from the University of Utah found drivers using touchscreens exhibited: - 30% longer reaction times to road hazards - Significantly higher cognitive workload (as measured by pupil dilation) - More frequent and longer glances away from the road The reason lies in proprioception — our body's ability to sense its position in space. Physical controls allow for muscle memory development; drivers can locate and manipulate buttons without looking. Touchscreens destroy this capability, forcing visual confirmation for every interaction. Even haptic feedback (those little vibrations mimicking physical buttons) fails to solve the problem, as demonstrated by a 2022 AAA study showing haptic systems offered no safety improvement over standard touchscreens... A study from Drexel University introduced a system called [Distract-R](), which uses cognitive modeling to simulate how drivers interact with in-vehicle interfaces. It found that multi-step touchscreen tasks increase cognitive load, diverting attention from the road more than physical buttons.... Furthermore, a systematic review on driver distraction in the context of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) highlights that even with automation, drivers remain vulnerable to distraction, especially when interacting with complex interfaces... There's also software reliability issues (even before the issue of "feature paywalls"). But some manufacturers are going back, according to the article. "After receiving widespread criticism, Porsche added physical climate controls back to the Taycan's center console. Nissan's latest concepts feature prominent physical buttons for common functions..." And Mazda eliminated touch capability entirely while moving, "forcing use of a physical control knob... The system reduces glance time by 15% compared to touch interfaces while maintaining all modern infotainment functionality." The article recommends consumers prioritize physical controls when vehicle shopping, seeking out models with buttons. But there's also "aftermarket solutions," with companies like Analog Automotive "developing physical control panels that interface with popular infotainment systems, bringing back tactile operation." Another option: voice commands (like on GM's latest systems). "Ultimately, the solution requires consumer pushback against dangerous interface trends.... The road deserves our full attention, not divided focus between driving and debugging a poorly designed tablet on wheels." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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It's not just Amazon's CEO predicting AI will lower their headcount. "Top executives at some of the largest American companies have a warning for their workers: Artificial intelligence is a threat to your job," reports the Washington Post — including IBM, Salesforce, and JPMorgan Chase. But are they really just trying to impress their shareholders? Economists say there aren't yet strong signs that AI is driving widespread layoffs across industries.... CEOs are under pressure to show they are embracing new technology and getting results — incentivizing attention-grabbing predictions that can create additional uncertainty for workers. "It's a message to shareholders and board members as much as it is to employees," Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies the impact of AI, said of the CEO announcements, noting that when one company makes a bold AI statement, others typically follow. "You're projecting that you're out in the future, that you're embracing and adopting this so much that the footprint [of your company] will look different." Some CEOs fear they could be ousted from their job within two years if they don't deliver measurable AI-driven business gains, a Harris Poll survey conducted for software company Dataiku showed. Tech leaders have sounded some of the loudest warnings — in line with their interest in promoting AI's power... IBM, which recently announced job cuts, said it replaced a couple hundred human resource workers with AI "agents" for repetitive tasks such as onboarding and scheduling interviews. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested on Joe Rogan's podcast that the company is building AI that might be able to do what some human workers do by the end of the year.... Marianne Lake, JPMorgan's CEO of consumer and community banking, told an investor meeting last month that AI could help the bank cut headcount in operations and account services by 10 percent. The CEO of BT Group Allison Kirkby suggested that advances in AI would mean deeper cuts at the British telecom company... Despite corporate leaders' warnings, economists don't yet see broad signs that AI is driving humans out of work. "We have little evidence of layoffs so far," said Columbia Business School professor Laura Veldkamp, whose research explores how companies' use of AI affects the economy. "What I'd look for are new entrants with an AI-intensive business model, entering and putting the existing firms out of business." Some researchers suggest there is evidence AI is playing a role in the drop in openings for some specific jobs, like computer programming, where AI tools that generate code have become standard... It is still unclear what benefits companies are reaping from employees' use of AI, said Arvind Karunakaran, a faculty member of Stanford University's Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. "Usage does not necessarily translate into value," he said. "Is it just increasing productivity in terms of people doing the same task quicker or are people now doing more high value tasks as a result?" Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School, said predictions of huge productivity gains from AI remain unproven. "Right now, the technology companies are predicting there will be a 30% productivity gain. We haven't yet experienced that, and it's not clear if that gain would come from cost reduction ... or because humans are more productive." On an earnings call, Salesforce's chief operating and financial officer said AI agents helped them reduce hiring needs — and saved $50 million, according to the article. (And Ethan Mollick, co-director of Wharton School of Business' generative AI Labs, adds that if advanced tools like AI agents can prove their reliability and automate work — that could become a larger disruptor to jobs.) "A wave of disruption is going to happen," he's quoted as saying. But while the debate continues about whether AI will eliminate or create jobs, Mollick still hedges that "the truth is probably somewhere in between."

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ScienceAlert reports: Casino lighting could be nudging gamblers to be more reckless with their money, according to a new study, which found a link between blue-enriched light and riskier gambling behavior. The extra blue light emitted by casino decor and LED screens seems to trigger certain switches in our brains, making us less sensitive to financial losses compared to gains of equal magnitude, researchers from Flinders University and Monash University in Australia found... The researchers think circadian photoreception, which is our non-visual response to light, is playing a part here. The level of blue spectrum light may be activating specific eye cells connected to brain regions in charge of decision-making, emotional regulation, and processing risk versus reward scenarios. "Under conditions where the lighting emitted less blue, people tended to feel a $100 loss much more strongly than a $100 gain — the loss just feels worse," [says the study's lead author, a psychologist at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute]. "But under bright, blue-heavy light such as that seen in casino machines, the $100 loss didn't appear to feel as bad, so people were more willing to take the risk...." That raises some questions around ethics and responsibility, according to the researchers. While encouraging risk taking might be good for the gambling business, it's not good for the patrons spending their cash. One professor involved in the study reached this conclusion. "It is possible that simply dimming the blue in casino lights could help promote safer gambling behaviors." The research has been published in Scientific Reports. Thanks to Slashdot reader alternative_right for sharing the news.

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BlueSky has grown from roughly 10 million users in early November to 36.79 million today — and its last 30 days of traffic looks very level. But instead of calling BlueSky's traffic "level", right-leaning libertarian Megan McArdle argues instead that BlueSky's "decline shows no sign of leveling out" (comparing the stable figures from the last month to a one-time spike seven months ago so they can write "It's now down about 50 percent"). And Wednesday the conservative UK magazine Spectator also ignored the 30-day-leveling to write instead that BlueSky is somehow "sliding down a slope". But TechCrunch thinks the "up or down" conversation is entirely missing the point of "the wider network of apps built on the open protocol that Bluesky's team spearheaded" — and how BlueSky "is only meant to be one example of what's possible within the wider AT Proto ecosystem." If you don't like the tone of the topics trending on Bluesky, you can switch to other apps, change your default feeds, or even build your own social platform using the technology. Already, people are using the protocol that powers Bluesky to build social experiences for specific groups — like Blacksky is doing for the Black online community or like Gander Social is doing for social media users in Canada. There are also feed builders like Graze and those in Surf that let you create custom feeds where you can focus on specific content you care about — like video games or baseball — and exclude others, like politics. Built into Bluesky (and other third-party clients) are tools that let you pick your default feed and add others that interest you from a range of topics. If you want to follow a feed devoted to your favorite TV show or animal, for instance, you can. In other words, Bluesky is meant to be what you make it, and its content can be consumed in whatever format you prefer best. In addition to Bluesky itself, the wider network of apps built on the AT Protocol includes photo- and video-sharing apps, livestreaming tools, communication apps, blogging apps, music apps, movie and TV recommendation apps, and more. Other tools also let you combine feeds from Bluesky with other social networks. Openvibe, for instance, can mix together feeds from social networks like Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. Apps like Surf and Tapestry offer ways to track posts on open social platforms as well as those published with other open protocols like RSS. This lets the apps pull in content from blogs, news sites, YouTube, and podcasts. Even just considering BlueSky itself, three weeks ago Fast Company pointed out that BlueSky "grew from 11 million users to 25 million between late October and mid-December, but has added only about 10 million more since then." So how is a 10-million user increase "dying"? For a social network, being prematurely written off is a rite of passage. It's even a compliment of sorts — a sign that people are paying attention and care... When I chatted with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, I wasn't surprised that she didn't seem fazed by the debate on her platform and saw the parallels with early-days Twitter. "Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated," she told me. "It's a similar thing, because with social sites, it's not straight up all the time. [Growth] comes in waves, and at each stage, there's a new era of communities being established and formed. We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is. It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner-take-all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents...." One other challenge that Bluesky has not yet fully confronted is monetizing itself. Onstage at Web Summit, Graber emphasized that it's working on subscription services, a healthier revenue source than stuffing feeds with ads, though potentially a tougher one to scale up to sustainability. The company announced a $15 million Series A funding round last October. But again, the point isn't BlueSky's increasing user count or its stablizing levels of Daily Unique "Likers" — but its underlying open source protocol: [S]he was at her most passionate when discussing the company's aspiration to decentralize social networking via its open AT Protocol. It powers Bluesky — and variants such as the Pinksky photo-sharing app, which she praised onstage — but could also provide the infrastructure for further-flung social experiences. Maybe even ones catering to folks who have zero interest in participating in the Bluesky community. "The goal is to really get through that this is a Choose Your Own Adventure and Bluesky's just the beginning," she says. "The sky's the limit." Whether she'll fulfill her grandest ambitions, I'm not sure. But I already like this era of social networking better than the one when a handful of winners really did take all.

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"The carbon cost of asking an artificial intelligence model a single text question can be measured in grams of CO2..." writes the Washington Post. And while an individual's impact may be low, what about the collective impact of all users? "A Google search takes about 10 times less energy than a ChatGPT query, according to a 2024 analysis from Goldman Sachs — although that may change as Google makes AI responses a bigger part of search." For now, a determined user can avoid prompting Google's default AI-generated summaries by switching over to the "web" search tab, which is one of the options alongside images and news. Adding "-ai" to the end of a search query also seems to work. Other search engines, including DuckDuckGo, give you the option to turn off AI summaries.... Using AI doesn't just mean going to a chatbot and typing in a question. You're also using AI every time an algorithm organizes your social media feed, recommends a song or filters your spam email... [T]here's not much you can do about it other than using the internet less. It's up to the companies that are integrating AI into every aspect of our digital lives to find ways to do it with less energy and damage to the planet. More points from the article: Two researchers tested the performance of 14 AI language models, and found larger models gave more accurate answers, "but used several times more energy than smaller models." The data centers hosting AI models "can devour more electricity than entire cities." "Keeping those computers cool uses freshwater — about one bottle's worth for every 100 words of text ChatGPT generates."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Over the past three years, companies have invested tens of billions of dollars toward making electric vehicles in the United States, buoyed by tax incentives aimed at helping American businesses compete with China. Now, those companies are facing a strange problem: too much manufacturing capacity, not enough demand. As sales of electric vehicles slow and congressional Republicans take aim at EV tax credits and incentives, the United States is slated to have more battery and EV manufacturing than it needs, according to a report released Wednesday by the Rhodium Group, a research firm. That could leave factories — many of which are already operating or under construction — stranded if car sales continue to slump. "The rug is being pulled out from under these manufacturers," said Hannah Pitt, a director in Rhodium's energy and climate practice... After [America's 2022 climate bill], battery investment in the U.S. skyrocketed. Companies went from investing about $1 billion per quarter in 2022 to $11 billion per quarter in 2024. Most of that battery investment went to red states, including in the South's "Battery Belt," where manufacturers were drawn to inexpensive land and a nonunionized workforce. Now, however, that battery boom is teetering. In the first three months of 2025, companies canceled $6 billion in battery manufacturing — a record. EV sales have slowed... According to the new report, the United States has almost enough battery capacity announced or under development to meet demand all the way to 2030 if EV sales continue to slump. That might sound like a good thing — but if EV sales drop further, it means companies will be left with factories they won't be able to use. At the same time, China has excess battery capacity. The country has enough manufacturing to meet the entire world's demand for batteries — and may be looking to off-load them onto other markets... And if the incentives for using U.S.-made batteries disappear, the nation's manufacturers would be left high and dry.

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It's not dark matter, writes Space.com. But astronomers have discovered "a vast tendril of hot gas linking four galaxy clusters and stretching out for 23 million light-years, 230 times the length of our galaxy. "With 10 times the mass of the Milky Way, this filamentary structure accounts for much of the universe's 'missing matter,' the search for which has baffled scientists for decades...." [I]t is "ordinary matter" made up of atoms, composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons (collectively called baryons) which make up stars, planets, moons, and our bodies. For decades, our best models of the universe have suggested that a third of the baryonic matter that should be out there in the cosmos is missing. This discovery of that missing matter suggests our best models of the universe were right all along. It could also reveal more about the "Cosmic Web," the vast structure along which entire galaxies grew and gathered during the earlier epochs of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe.... The newly observed filament isn't just extraordinary in terms of its mass and size; it also has a temperature of a staggering 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius). That's around 1,800 times hotter than the surface of the sun... The team's research was published on Thursday (June 19) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Models of the cosmos (including the standard model of cosmology) "have long posited the idea that the missing baryonic matter of the universe is locked up in vast filaments of gas stretching between the densest pockets of space..." the article points out. But now thanks to Suzaku, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) satellite, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, "a team of astronomers has for the first time been able to determine the properties of one of these filaments, which links four galactic clusters in the local universe." Team leader Konstantinos Migkas (of the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory) explained the significance of their finding. "For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos — something that's not happened before." "It seems that the simulations were right all along."

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ScienceDaily reports: Researchers from MIT and Scripps have unveiled a promising new HIV vaccine approach that generates a powerful immune response with just one dose. By combining two immune-boosting adjuvants alum and SMNP the vaccine lingers in lymph nodes for nearly a month, encouraging the body to produce a vast array of antibodies. This one-shot strategy could revolutionize how we fight not just HIV, but many infectious diseases. It mimics the natural infection process and opens the door to broadly neutralizing antibody responses, a holy grail in vaccine design. And best of all, it's built on components already known to medicine. Thanks to Slashdot reader alternative_right for sharing the news.

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In April Anthorpic introduced a new AI trick: multiple Claude agents combine for a "Research" feature that can "search across both your internal work context and the web" (as well as Google Workspace "and any integrations...") But a recent Anthropic blog post notes this feature "involves an agent that plans a research process based on user queries, and then uses tools to create parallel agents that search for information simultaneously," which brings challenges "in agent coordination, evaluation, and reliability.... The model must operate autonomously for many turns, making decisions about which directions to pursue based on intermediate findings." Multi-agent systems work mainly because they help spend enough tokens to solve the problem.... This finding validates our architecture that distributes work across agents with separate context windows to add more capacity for parallel reasoning. The latest Claude models act as large efficiency multipliers on token use, as upgrading to Claude Sonnet 4 is a larger performance gain than doubling the token budget on Claude Sonnet 3.7. Multi-agent architectures effectively scale token usage for tasks that exceed the limits of single agents. There is a downside: in practice, these architectures burn through tokens fast. In our data, agents typically use about 4Ã-- more tokens than chat interactions, and multi-agent systems use about 15Ã-- more tokens than chats. For economic viability, multi-agent systems require tasks where the value of the task is high enough to pay for the increased performance. Further, some domains that require all agents to share the same context or involve many dependencies between agents are not a good fit for multi-agent systems today. For instance, most coding tasks involve fewer truly parallelizable tasks than research, and LLM agents are not yet great at coordinating and delegating to other agents in real time. We've found that multi-agent systems excel at valuable tasks that involve heavy parallelization, information that exceeds single context windows, and interfacing with numerous complex tools. Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the news.

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Threads now has 350 million users — but this week a strange bug affected some Threads accounts (on both desktop and mobile). "One user's post will get repeated over and over again..." explains TechCrunch, "as though every user on your feed is saying the same thing." "Siri, unsubscribe me from 2025," one Threads user wrote, per a screenshot from social media expert Alexa Heinrich. But then, everyone else on Heinrich's feed appeared to be echoing the same cheugy joke... While it's not yet clear what caused the bug, Meta Communications Director Andy Stone responded to app researcher Jane Manchun Wong's post about the issue. "Whoops, well that clearly shouldn't have happened! We're working on getting it fixed now," Stone said. I thought the bug was only affecting user feeds (and not replies). But either way, Wong came up with the perfect comeback. "Whoops, well that clearly shouldn't have happened! We're working on getting it fixed now."

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Intel is outsourcing much of its marketing work to Accenture, "as new CEO Lip-Bu Tan works to slash costs and improve the chipmaker's operations," reports OregonLive. From the report: The company said it believes Accenture, using artificial intelligence, will do a better job connecting with customers. It says it will tell most marketing employees by July 11 whether it plans to lay them off. "The transition of our marketing and operations functions will result in significant changes to team structures, including potential headcount reductions, with only lean teams remaining," Intel told employees in a notice describing its plans. The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed a copy of the material. Intel declined to say how many workers will lose their jobs or how many work in its marketing organization, which employs people at sites around the globe, including in Oregon. But it acknowledged its relationship with Accenture in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive. "As we announced earlier this year, we are taking steps to become a leaner, faster and more efficient company," Intel said. "As part of this, we are focused on modernizing our digital capabilities to serve our customers better and strengthen our brand. Accenture is a longtime partner and trusted leader in these areas and we look forward to expanding our work together."

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YouTube is quietly hosting Pac-Man Superfast within its "Playables" section. "You'd be forgiven for not knowing about YouTube Playables," writes Ars Technica's Kyle Orland. "Few seemed to note its official announcement last year as a collection of free-to-play web games built for the web using standard rendering APIs." "The seeming competitor to Netflix's mobile gaming offerings is still described in an official FAQ as 'an experimental feature rolled out to select users in eligible countries/regions,' which doesn't make this post-Stadia gaming effort seem like a huge priority for Google." From the report: Weird origins aside, Pac-Man Superfast pretty much delivers what its name promises. While gameplay starts at an "Easy" speed that roughly matches the arcade original, the speed of both Pac-Man and the ghosts is slightly increased every few seconds (dying temporarily reduces the speed to a lower level). After a few minutes, you're advancing past the titular "Super Fast" speed to extreme reflex-testing speeds like Crazy, Insane, Maniac, and a final test that's ominously named "Doom." Those who've played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game's original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work in similar ways here. Successfully executing those patterns becomes a tense battle of nerves here, though, requiring multiple direction changes every second at the highest speeds. While the game will technically work with swipe controls on a smartphone or tablet, high-level play really requires the precision of a keyboard via a desktop/laptop web browser (we couldn't get the game to recognize a USB controller, unfortunately). As exciting as the high-speed maze gameplay gets, though, Pac-Man Superfast is hampered by a few odd design decisions. The game ends abruptly after just 13 levels, for instance, making it impossible to even attempt the high-endurance 256-level runs that Pac-Man is known for. The game also throws an extra life at you every 5,000 points, making it relatively easy to brute force your way to the end as long as you focus on the three increasingly high-point-value items that appear periodically on each stage. Despite this, the game doesn't give any point reward for unused extra lives or long-term survival at high speeds, limiting the rewards for high-level play. And the lack of a built-in leaderboard makes it hard to directly compare your performance to friends and/or strangers anyway.

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French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe to reassert itself as a global space power, warning that France risks being sidelined in the low Earth orbit satellite market dominated by players like SpaceX and China. Phys.Org reports: Macron spoke at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget outside the French capital a day after France more than doubled its stake in satellite operator Eutelsat, the EU rival to Elon Musk's Starlink. Macron called for more investment as the European space industry struggles to remain competitive in the face of US and Chinese rivals. "SpaceX has disrupted the market, Amazon is also getting involved. China is not far behind, and I think we all need to be very clear-headed," Macron said. Europe must become "a space power once again, with France at its heart," he said. He warned that Europeans were "on the verge of being completely" squeezed out of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation market. Macron said France and its partners should not be reliant on non-European constellations in low orbit, calling it "madness." He called non-European players to team up with France. "This must be the solution for our major strategic partners in the Gulf, India, Canada and Brazil," he said. "We really need to succeed in increasing our collective investment effort," Macron added, noting the importance of private investors and public-private collaboration. He also said France planned to organize a space summit in early 2026 to "mobilize our public and private partners across the globe."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son is envisaging setting up a $1 trillion industrial complex in Arizona that will build robots and artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Son is seeking to team up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co for the project, which is aimed at bringing back high-end tech manufacturing to the U.S. and to create a version of China's vast manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, the report said. SoftBank officials have spoken with U.S. federal and state government officials to discuss possible tax breaks for companies building factories or otherwise investing in the industrial park, including talks with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the report said. SoftBank is keen to have TSMC involved in the project, codenamed Project Crystal Land, but it is not clear in what capacity, the report said. It is also not clear the Taiwanese company would be interested, it said. TSMC is already building chipmaking factories in the U.S. with a planned investment of $165 billion. Son is also sounding out interest among tech companies including Samsung Electronics, the report said. The plans are preliminary and feasibility depends on support from the Trump administration and state officials, it said. A commitment of $1 trillion would be double that of the $500 billion "Stargate" project which seeks to build out data centre capacity across the U.S., with funding from SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.

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The superyacht Bayesian, owned by UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, has been recovered off the coast of Sicily nearly a year after it sank during a storm, killing Lynch, his daughter, and five others. Italian authorities hope the $30 million salvage will uncover the cause of the sinking, which is under investigation for suspected manslaughter amid concerns about design flaws and storm vulnerability. The Guardian reports: The white top and blue hull of the 56-meter (184ft) vessel emerged from the depths of the sea in a holding area of a yellow floating crane barge, as salvage crews readied it to be hauled ashore for further investigation. The Italian coastguard said the recovery was scheduled to begin on Saturday morning. A spokesperson for TMC Maritime, which is conducting the recovery operation, said the vessel had been slowly raised from the seabed, 50 meters (165ft) down, over the past three days to allow the steel lifting straps, slings and harnesses to be secured under the keel. The operation -- which has cost approximately $30 million -- was made easier after the vessel's 72-meter mast was detached using a remote-controlled cutting tool and placed on the seabed on Tuesday. The vessel will be transported to the port of Termini Imerese, where investigators are expected to examine it as part of an inquiry into the cause of the sinking. [...] The salvage operation was very complex, and was temporarily suspended in mid-May after Rob Cornelis Maria Huijben, a 39-year-old Dutch diver, died during underwater work. The British-based consultancy TMC Marine, which oversaw a consortium of salvage specialists undertaking the project, said the hull would be lifted on to a specially manufactured steel cradle on the quayside once it had been transported to Termini Imerese. Investigators hope the yacht will yield vital clues to the causes of the sinking. A forensic examination of the hull will seek to determine whether one of the hatches remained open and whether the keel was improperly raised.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: To comply with a new regulation that takes effect today, Apple has added an energy efficiency label to its iPhone and iPad pages in EU countries. Apple is also required to start including a printed version of the label with the devices sold there. The label grades a given iPhone or iPad model's energy efficiency from a high of A to a low of G, based on the EU's testing parameters. However, Apple said that certain aspects of the testing methods outlined by the European Commission are "ambiguous," so it chose to be conservative with its scores until testing is standardized. In a 44-page document (PDF) detailing its testing methodology for the labels, Apple said its current iPhone models qualified for the highest energy efficiency grade of A, but the company voluntarily downgraded these scores to a B as a cautionary measure. The label also provides details about a given iPhone or iPad model's battery life per full charge cycle, repairability grade, impact resistance, ingress protection rating for water and dust resistance, and how many full charge cycles the battery is rated for. Likewise, this information is based on Apple's interpretation of the EU's testing parameters. On the web, the label can be viewed by clicking or tapping on the colorful little tag icon on various iPhone and iPad pages on Apple's localized websites for EU countries. It is shown on both Apple's main product marketing pages for all iPhone and iPad models that are currently sold in the EU, and on the purchase page for those devices. The label is accompanied by a product information sheet (PDF) that provides a comprehensive overview of even more details, such as the device's battery capacity in mAh, screen scratch resistance based on the Mohs hardness scale, the minimum guaranteed timeframe for availability of security updates, and much more.

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Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from The Guardian: The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity AI, in the corporation's first move to protect its content from being scraped without permission to build artificial intelligence technology. The corporation has sent a letter to Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup, saying it has gathered evidence that Perplexity's model was "trained using BBC content." The letter, first reported by the Financial Times, threatens an injunction against Perplexity unless it stops scraping all BBC content to train its AI models, and deletes any copies of the broadcaster's material it holds unless it provides "a proposal for financial compensation." The legal threat comes weeks after Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and the boss of Sky both criticised proposals being considered by the government that could let tech companies use copyright-protected work without permission. "If we currently drift in the way we are doing now we will be in crisis," Davie said, speaking at the Enders conference. "We need to make quick decisions now around areas like ... protection of IP. We need to protect our national intellectual property, that is where the value is. What do I need? IP protection; come on, let's get on with it." "Perplexity's tool [which allows users to choose between different AI models] directly competes with the BBC's own services, circumventing the need for users to access those services," the corporation said. Perplexity told the FT that the BBC's claims were "manipulative and opportunistic" and that it had a "fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law."

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According to Bloomberg (paywalled), Meta reportedly explored acquiring Perplexity AI but the deal fell through, with conflicting accounts on whether it was mutual or Perplexity backed out. Instead, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, taking a 49% stake as part of its broader push to catch up with OpenAI and Google in the AI race. "Meta's attempt to purchase Perplexity serves as the latest example of Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive push to bolster his company's AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet," reports CNBC. "Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, and he is going to extreme lengths to hire top AI talent."

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The company behind Applebee's and IHOP plans to use AI in its restaurants and behind the scenes to streamline operations and encourage repeat customers. From a report: Dine Brands is adding AI-infused tech support for all of its franchisees, as well as an AI-powered "personalization engine" that helps restaurants offer customized deals to diners, said Chief Information Officer Justin Skelton. The Pasadena, Calif.-based company, which also owns Fuzzy's Taco Shop and has over 3,500 restaurants across its brands, is taking a "practical" approach to AI by focusing on areas that can drive sales, Skelton said. Streamlining tech support for Dine Brands' more than 300 franchisees is important because issues like a broken printer take valuable time away from actually managing restaurants, Skelton said. Dine Brands' AI tool, which was built with Amazon's Q generative AI assistant, allows the company's field technology services staff to query its knowledge base for tech help using plain English, rather than needing to manually search for answers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare. The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That's an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute. Cloudflare said the attackers "carpet bombed" an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack. [...] Cloudflare said the record DDoS exploited various reflection or amplification vectors, including the previously mentioned Network Time Protocol; the Quote of the Day Protocol, which listens on UDP port 17 and responds with a short quote or message; the Echo Protocol, which responds with the same data it receives; and Portmapper services used identify resources available to applications connecting through the Remote Procedure Call. Cloudflare said the attack was also delivered through one or more Mirai-based botnets. Such botnets are typically made up of home and small office routers, web cameras, and other Internet of Things devices that have been compromised.

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