An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath couldn't be happier with the integration of Google built-in, the branded product that embeds Google apps and services directly into the company's EVs. But don't expect the EV maker to drop Android Auto or Apple CarPlay as a result. On the sidelines of CES 2024, Ingenlath committed to sticking with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, the middleware that allows drivers to project their smartphone onto the car's infotainment display. He went a step further and questioned automakers that have. GM, for instance, decided not to make the new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV compatible with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. "It's still too important for our customers to have the choice," Ingenlath said during an interview at CES 2024. He later added that, in his view, removing the option isn't the right way of treating customers. "Our priority is very clear; We have a really fantastic system together with Google," he said. While Ingenlath admitted that adding that Google Built-in provides the best experience, he asked "why would we try to dogmatically educate our customers?" Polestar has been a champion of Google built-in. However, it's willingness to keep Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is notable because it illustrates the complexity of appeasing customers even if it might overshadow the native technology in the vehicle. "Ingenlath seems convinced that as Google built-in improves and continues to add apps and services, consumers will give up Android Auto or Apple CarPlay on there own," adds TechCrunch. "And the updates do keep coming." "At CES 2024, for instance, Polestar announced that the Chrome browser would start rolling out to Polestar 2 in beta, allowing drivers to surf the internet via the central vehicle display while parked. Ingenlath hinted of more improvements in the future, including more precise navigation in Google Maps that drills down to the specific lane as well as customized features designed for Polestar customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dustin Bailey reports via GamesRadar: Valve has suddenly taken action against multiple fan games, stunning a fandom that had grown used to the company's freewheeling stance on unofficial community projects. One of those projects was Team Fortress: Source 2, an effort to bring the beloved multiplayer game back to life in a more modern engine using the S&box project. The project had already run into development difficulties and had essentially been on hiatus since September 2023, but now Valve has issued a DMCA takedown against it, effectively serving as the "nail in the coffin" for the project, as the devs explain on X. [...] The other project is Portal 64, a demake of the 2009 puzzle game that ports it to run on an actual N64. Developer James Lambert had been working on the project for years, but it gained substantial notoriety this past December with the release of First Slice, a playable demo featuring the first 13 test chambers. It doesn't appear that Valve issued a formal DMCA against Portal 64, but the end result is the same. In a Patreon post (which was eventually made public on X), Lambert said he had "been in communication with Valve about the future of the project. There is some news and it isn't good. Because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, they have asked me to take the project down." I'm not fully clear on what "proprietary libraries" means here, but it seems likely that Portal 64 was developed using some variation of Nintendo's official development tools for N64, which were never officially released to the public. Open-source alternatives to those tools do exist, but might not have been in use here. [...] Given Valve's historic acceptance of fan games, the moves have been pretty shocking to the community.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux kernel 6.7 has been released, including support for the new next-gen copy-on-write (COW) bcachefs file system. The Register reports: Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday, noting that it is "one of the largest kernel releases we've ever had." Among the bigger and more visible changes are a whole new file system, along with fresh functionality for several existing ones; improved graphics support for several vendors' hardware; and the removal of an entire CPU architecture. [...] The single biggest feature of 6.7 is the new bcachefs file system, which we examined in March 2022. As this is the first release of Linux to include the new file system, it definitely would be premature to trust any important data to it yet, but this is a welcome change. The executive summary is that bcachefs is a next-generation file system that, like Btrfs and ZFS, provides COW functionality. COW enables the almost instant creation of "snapshots" of all or part of a drive or volume, which enables the OS to make disk operations transactional: In other words, to provide an "undo" function for complex sets of disk write operations. Having a COW file system on Linux isn't new. The existing next-gen file system in the kernel, Btrfs, also supports COW snapshots. The version in 6.7 sees several refinements. It inherits a feature implemented for Steam OS: Two Btrfs file systems with the same ID can be mounted simultaneously, for failover scenarios. It also has improved quota support and a new raid_stripe_tree that improves handling of arrays of dissimilar drives. Btrfs remains somewhat controversial. Red Hat banished it from RHEL years ago (although Oracle Linux still offers it) but SUSE's distros depend heavily upon it. It will be interesting to see how quickly SUSE's Snapper tool gains support for bcachefs: This new COW contender may reveal unquestioned assumptions built into the code. Since Snapper is also used in several non-SUSE distros, including Spiral Linux, Garuda, and siduction, they're tied to Btrfs as well. The other widely used FOSS next-gen file system, OpenZFS, also supports COW, but licensing conflicts prevent ZFS being fully integrated into the Linux kernel. So although multiple distros (such as NixOS, Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, Ubuntu, and Void Linux) support ZFS, it must remain separate and distinct. This results in limitations, such as the ZFS Advanced Read Cache being separate from Linux's page cache. Bcachefs is all-GPL and doesn't suffer from such limitations. It aims to supply the important features of ZFS, such as integrated volume management, while being as fast as ext4 or XFS, and also surpass Btrfs in both performance and, crucially, reliability. A full list of changes in this release can be viewed via KernelNewbies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday said it had opened an investigation into whether Boeing failed to ensure that its 737 Max 9 plane was safe and manufactured to match the design approved by the agency. The New York Times (non-paywalled source): The F.A.A. said the investigation stemmed from the loss of a fuselage panel of a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines shortly after it took off on Friday from Portland, Ore., leaving a hole in the side of the passenger cabin. The plane returned to Portland for an emergency landing. "This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again," the agency said. In a letter to Boeing dated Jan. 10, the F.A.A. said that after the Portland incident, it was notified of additional issues with other Boeing 737 Max 9 planes. The letter does not detail what other issues were reported to the agency. Alaska and United Airlines, which operate most of the Max 9s in use in the United States, said on Monday that they discovered loose hardware on the panel when conducting preliminary inspections on their planes. The new investigation is the latest setback for Boeing, which is one of just two suppliers of large planes for most airlines. The company has struggled to regain the public's trust after two crashes, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, involving the 737 Max 8 killed a total of 346 people.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek.com: A Dutch engineer recruited by the country's intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines. De Volkskrant's investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai. Van Sabben was allegedly recruited in 2005 -- a couple of years before the Stuxnet malware was triggered -- after American and Israeli intelligence agencies asked their Dutch counterpart for help. However, the Dutch agency reportedly did not inform its country's government and it was not aware of the full extent of the operation. Van Sabben was described as perfect for the job as he had a technical background, he was doing business in Iran and was married to an Iranian woman. It's believed that the Stuxnet malware was planted on a water pump that the Dutch national installed in the nuclear complex in Natanz, which he had infiltrated. It's unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack. [...] Michael Hayden, who at the time was the chief of the CIA, did agree to talk to De Volkskrant, but could not confirm whether Stuxnet was indeed delivered via water pumps due to it still being classified information. One interesting piece of information that has come to light in De Volkskrant's investigation is that Hayden reportedly told one of the newspaper's sources that it cost between $1 and $2 billion to develop Stuxnet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quonset writes: Hertz rental has announced it's selling off one third of its 20,000 electric vehicle fleet and replacing them with gas powered vehicles. The reason? It's costing them too much to repair damaged EVs and their depreciation is hurting the bottom line. "[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle," Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call. And EV price declines in the new car market have pushed down the resale value of Hertz's used EV rental cars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to "sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization." From a report: The cuts were announced today to employees in an all-hands meeting and internal memo The Verge has obtained. They'll impact 170 people across various departments. Based on Citron's message to employees and my understanding of the business, Discord isn't in dire financial straits, though it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after a surge during the pandemic. In his memo to employees, which you can read in full below, Citron said Discord grew its headcount too fast over the last few years -- an admission that has become quite common among tech CEOs as of late. "We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020," Citron wrote. "As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google formally endorsed the concept of right to repair Thursday and is set to testify in favor of a strong right to repair bill in Oregon later Thursday, a massive step forward for the right to repair movement. 404 Media: "Google believes that users should have more control over repair -- including access to the same documentation, parts and tools that original equipment manufacturer (OEM) repair channels have -- which is often referred to as 'Right to Repair,'" Google's Steven Nickel wrote in a white paper published Thursday. Crucially, Google specifically says that regulators should ban "parts pairing," which is a tactic used by Apple, John Deere, and other major manufacturers to artificially restrict which repair parts can be used with a given device: "Policies should constrain OEMs from imposing unfair anti-repair practices. For example, parts-pairing, the practice of using software barriers to obstruct consumers and independent repair shops from replacing components, or other restrictive impediments to repair should be discouraged," the white paper says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch: Civil liberties advocates have long argued that "geofence" search warrants are unconstitutional for their ability to ensnare entirely innocent people who were nearby at the time a crime was committed. But errors in the geofence warrant applications that go before a judge can violate the privacy of vastly more people -- in one case almost two miles away. Attorneys at the ACLU of Northern California found what they called an "alarming error" in a geofence warrant application that "resulted in a warrant stretching nearly two miles across San Francisco." The error, likely caused by a typo, allowed the requesting law enforcement agency to capture information on anyone who entered the stretch of San Francisco erroneously marked on the search warrant. "Many private homes were also captured in the massive sweep," wrote Jake Snow, ACLU staff attorney, in a blog post about the findings. It's not known which law enforcement agency requested the nearly two-mile-long geofence warrant, or for how long the warrant was in effect. The attorneys questioned how many other geofence warrant application mistakes had slipped through and resulted in the return of vastly more data in error.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. software giant Ivanti has confirmed that hackers are exploiting two critical-rated vulnerabilities affecting its widely-used corporate VPN appliance, but said that patches won't be available until the end of the month. From a report: Ivanti said the two vulnerabilities -- tracked as CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887 -- were found in its Ivanti Connect Secure software. Formerly known as Pulse Connect Secure, this is a remote access VPN solution that enables remote and mobile users to access corporate resources over the internet. Ivanti said it is aware of "less than 10 customers" impacted so far by the "zero day" vulnerabilities, described as such given Ivanti had zero time to fix the flaws before they were maliciously exploited.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Millions of dollars have gone down the drain right when the Chicago Public Schools face a looming budget deficit -- as a brand-new CPS Inspector General report revealed the district lost thousands of computers and devices in a school year. In all, more than $20 million were lost -- as about students failed to return 77,505 laptops and other electronic devices within a year. This is even though the district spends millions to track such devices. The underlying concern is that taxpayer dollars will be used to replace them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The stock market has a new, but familiar, monarch. Microsoft's AI-powered stock rally has made the software giant the largest U.S. company by market value, surpassing Apple for the first time since November 2021. WSJ: Shares edged higher Thursday morning, bringing Microsoft's market value to nearly $2.87 trillion. Apple, meanwhile, fell 1%, pulling its market capitalization just below that threshold. Either Apple or Microsoft has held the title since Feb. 4, 2019, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Microsoft's stock has been on the rise for the past year thanks to the continued growth of its cloud computing division, even as major competitors like Amazon and Google have experienced a gradual slowdown in sales growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, in a wide-ranging interview with Indian newspaper Economic Times praised the South Asian market for blocking Chinese apps in 2020 and said he hopes the U.S. will follow suit. He said: I hope there will be a movement towards a nationwide ban of the application soon, much like India led the way so many years ago. It is taking time, and I wish it was done as swiftly and with the alacrity that India banned not just TikTok but a number of other Chinese apps that had questionable data sharing and privacy policies. If TikTok is neither banned nor ByteDance is forced to divest this year, I would consider it a huge miss. Because only when action is taken would it be possible for us to go after the smaller players too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The cost of switching between cloud-computing providers has long drawn complaints, with the services derided as "roach motels" that let businesses check in but not out. Now Google is taking steps to change that. Effective immediately, the company is eliminating fees levied on customers who want to leave its cloud for a rival service -- a policy shift that may pressure competitors Amazon and Microsoft to do the same. The move follows intensifying scrutiny of cloud services by regulators and lawmakers around the world. UK antitrust authorities launched a probe that is looking at such penalties, and the fees emerged as a key issue when the US Federal Trade Commission asked for public comments on a variety of cloud concerns. Google Vice President Amit Zavery, who helps oversee the cloud business, said switching fees only represent about 2% of the total costs of migrating to a new provider -- and don't deter many clients from moving their data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced that it will eliminate at least 17 features from its Assistant product, following news that it had laid off "hundreds" of employees from the division. The company is cutting "underutilized features" to "focus on quality and reliability, it wrote in a blog post, even though a good number of people may still rely on those functions. From a report: The 17 functions being removed include: accessing or managing your cookbook; using your voice to send an email, video or audio message; rescheduling events in Google Calendar with your voice; and using App Launcher in Google Assistant driving mode on Google Maps to read and send messages, make calls, and control media. It also describes what Assistant can still do related to those functions, or alternate ways of doing them. A list is here, though Google said they're just "some" of the affected features.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Broadcom is tossing the majority of VMware's Cloud Services Providers as part of its shakeup of the virtualization titan's partner programs, say sources, leaving customers unclear who their IT supplier will be. The $61 billion purchase of VMware by Broadcom in November was swiftly followed by news of how it planned to reorganize the business into several Broadcom divisions. A month later we revealed that Broadcom intended to discontinue VMware's channel program, and that some solution providers/ resellers would be transitioned to its own scheme, but on an invitation-only basis, from February. However, while Broadcom informed one part of VMware's channel of this change, a second notice was also sent to Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), informing them that their program is going to be terminated at the end of April. This program allows service providers such as smaller cloud operators to sell a VMware-based cloud service. In the letter, seen by The Register, Broadcom tells its cloud provider partners: "Effective April 30, 2024, the ability to transact as a VMware Cloud Services Provider, under the VMware Partner Connect Program, will come to an end. However, we want to emphasize that you may have the opportunity to join the Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner Program. This invite-only program has simpler requirements and offers expanded benefits, and we will begin inviting partners to join in early 2024." One service provider told us their company had been left in the dark since that letter was received, and Broadcom has given them no indication of whether they will be invited to join its partner program or not, or what their customers are supposed to do if the company loses the right to operate a VMware cloud service. "I don't know how many smaller providers are affected by this but it must be a very large number," the source told us. "The VCSP program was the only way for MSPs and service providers to offer a multi-tenant VMware-based cloud service." Chatter among some in the industry is that Broadcom is only interested in keeping the largest and most profitable customers, and the company simply doesn't care about the smaller users and the providers that service them. Unconfirmed fears that are only ten percent of Vmware's biggest CSPs will be invited to the new master program. "This all sounds very much like Broadcom taking an aggressive approach to its route to market and focusing on those partners that can deliver growth and significant revenue," said Omdia chief analyst Roy Illsley. "I suspect the intention is to ensure that VMware consists of only profitable products and they are sold in a more cohesive way with the rest of Broadcom. So I expect to see some news on this continuing to come out for most of 2024 as the company puts this plan into action. I would not rule out disposals of some assets in a drive to streamline the portfolio to those that fit with Broadcom's strategy." "How can they just cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice, and zero details?" said one service provider. "They sent the notices out the Friday before the holidays, with no follow-up, which makes the situation even more egregious. What are we supposed to tell our customers? It's mind-boggling."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kirkman14 writes: Josh Renaud of breakintochat.com has recovered two early examples of "artificial creativity" software for the Commodore Amiga that generate new music by recombining patterns extracted from existing music. Developed by cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen and his Israeli software firm LKP Ltd. in 1986-87, "Computer Composer" demo and "Magic Harp" baroque were early attempts at AI-like autonomous music generation. Kirschen's technology was used to help score a BBC TV documentary in 1988, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. None of the Amiga software was ever sold, though the technology was ported to PC and published under the name "The Music Creator" in 1989.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Apple delisting a dozen global crypto apps -- relied by big traders in India, in part due to its tax evasive properties -- from its Indian App Store seems the final nail in the coffin, capping a brutal two years. The pending removal across Google Play, internet providers and beyond caps a journey mired with shutdowns, pivots and relocations abroad for Indian crypto startups. The web3 dreams of local entrepreneurs now appear dashed against the rocky shores of regulatory resistance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In order to reach places like Alpha Centauri this century, we'll need to utilize gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion. To that end, NASA has selected the Swarming Proxima Centauri project for Phase I development as part of this year's NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. According to Universe Today, Swarming Proxima Centauri is "a collaborative effort between Space Initiatives Inc. and the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) led by Space Initiative's chief scientist Marshall Eubanks." From the report: According to Eubanks, traveling through interstellar space is a question of distance, energy, and speed. At a distance of 4.25 light-years (40 trillion km; 25 trillion mi) from the Solar System, even Proxima Centauri is unfathomably far away. To put it in perspective, the record for the farthest distance ever traveled by a spacecraft goes to the Voyager 1 space probe, which is currently more than 24 billion km (15 billion mi) from Earth. Using conventional methods, the probe accomplished a maximum speed of 61,500 km/h (38,215 mph) and has been traveling for more than 46 years straight. In short, traveling at anything less than relativistic speed (a fraction of the speed of light) will make interstellar transits incredibly long and entirely impractical. Given the energy requirements this calls for, anything other than small spacecraft with a maximum mass of a few grams is feasible. [...] In contrast, concepts like Breakthrough Starshot and the Proxima Swarm consist of "inverting the rocket" -- i.e., instead of throwing stuff out, stuff is thrown at the spacecraft. Instead of heavy propellant, which constitutes the majority of conventional rockets, the energy source for a lightsail is photons (which have no mass and move at the speed of light). But as Eubanks indicated, this does not overcome the issue of energy, making it even more important that the spacecraft be as small as possible. "Bouncing photons off of a laser sail thus solves the speed-of-stuff problem," he said. "But the trouble is, there is not much momentum in a photon, so we need a lot of them. And given the power we are likely to have available, even a couple of decades from now, the thrust will be weak, so the mass of the probes needs to be very small -- grams, not tons." Their proposal calls for a 100-gigawatt (GW) laser beamer boosting thousands of gram-scale space probes with laser sails to relativistic speed (~10-20% of light). They also proposed a series of terrestrial light buckets measuring a square kilometer (0.386 mi2) in diameter to catch the light signals from the probes once they are well on their way to reaching Proxima Centauri (and communications become more difficult). By their estimates, this mission concept could be ready for development around midcentury and could reach Proxima Centauri and its Earth-like exoplanet (Proxima b) by the third quarter of this century (2075 or after). [...] Eubanks and his colleagues hope that the development of a coherent swarm of robotic probes will have applications closer to home. Swarm robotics is a hot field of research today and is being investigated as a possible means of exploring Europa's interior ocean, digging underground cities on Mars, assembling large structures in space, and providing extreme weather tracking from Earth's orbit. Beyond space exploration and Earth observation, swarm robotics also has applications in medicine, additive manufacturing, environmental studies, global positioning and navigation, search and rescue, and more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We ofter talk about dates and timekeeping as extraordinarily difficult tasks. And, at least in part, that may have to do with their origins as legacy technologies in the most legacy sense: we have strong evidence of calendar systems all the way back into the Neolithic period, and maybe some hints of them as far back as the Paleolithic. Literally, stone age technology, still in use today.

I wonder if that's why calendar's hold such a mystical hold over us? Many of us likely remember the New Age predictions that 2012 was going to mark the end of the world or some great reconfiguration of the world, simply because it marked the end of a cycle in the Mayan Calendar. Before that, prophecies centered on the year 2000, not just because of the Y2K bug, but simply because it's a round number and people felt like that's a good place to call it. Before that, there was the astrological predictions of the Age of Aquarius (which may fall anywhere from 1844 to sometime in the 24th century, but was real popular for a minute in the 60s and 70s). And we can walk farther back into history, finding eschatological predictions centered around significant dates.

Will some future society see the Y2K38 bug as a similar marker of the End Times™? And when that passes, will they turn to this prediction, found in Etienne's codebase?

tempDate = DateTime.Parse(dr["Start_Date"].ToString(), auCulture.DateTimeFormat); //Check for End of Time if (tempDate.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy") == "31/12/3000")

You've heard it here first: December 31st, 3000, is the End of Time. Most importantly, if you're into this sort of thing, is that this code was committed to the code base in 2012. Which clearly shows us that 2012 was just the first step in a cosmic transformation that will end time as we know it by the 31st century. And this prediction has just as much veracity and predictive power as every other such prediction, so you've been warned. Prepare yourselves, for the end times will be upon us… well after you and I are all dead.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!