Google's app store claims that their text-messaging app Google Messages means "conversations are end-to-end encrypted". "That is some serious bullshit," argues tech blogger John Gruber: It's shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages's support for end-to-end encryption... Google Messages does support end-to-end encryption, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares "Conversations are end-to-end encrypted", full stop... I realize that "Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted" will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren't, but that's the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. "RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted" would work. Then, in the "report card" section of the listing, it states the following: Data is encrypted in transit Your data is transferred over a secure connection Which, again, is only true sometimes. It's downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages's transit security this way.... [D]epending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it's quite likely most of your messages won't be secure... E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That's an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated. Gruber's earlier blog post had pointed out that the RCS standard "has no encryption; E2EE RCS chats in Google Messages use Google's proprietary extension and are exclusive to the Google Messages app, so RCS chats between Google Messages and other apps, most conspicuously Apple Messages, are not encrypted." And in his newer post, Gruber adds, "While I'm at it, it's also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It's Google's own app and service, and Google has been the world's most vocal proponent of RCS messaging."

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This week a Florida-based Bitcoin-tech company named MARA Holdings announced it had bought a 114-megawatt Texas wind farm, reports Chron.com, "and will subsequently take it off the power grid and use it to energize its mining operations." MARA's CEO tells the site they're "leveraging renewable resources that would have otherwise been curtailed" while "reducing our bitcoin production costs through vertical integration, and demonstrating MARA's commitment to environmental stewardship." The wind farms were not a part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid, but instead they were located within the Southwest Power Pool, which manages the market for the central U.S., including but not limited to most or parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota... A 114-MW facility could power somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 homes, depending on who you ask... Historically, the facilities use up a lot of power and have generated backlash from neighbors who have complained about the noise of the machines inside. Texas has been a haven for cryptocurrency tech companies, primarily because of the state's space, deregulated power market and friendly business climate. Two weeks ago, the Public Utilities Commission adopted a rule requiring crypto and other virtual currency miners within the ERCOT grid to register their locations, ownership information and electricity demands, to further ensure that they could be watchful of this emerging source of energy consumption. "Crypto mining operations currently consume around 2.3 percent of US electricity, and it requires roughly 155,000kWh to mine one Bitcoin," notes the site Data Centre Dynamics. This is the second off-grid power deal MARA has signed over the last few months. In October, it launched a 25MW micro data center operation across oil wellheads in Texas and North Dakota. The data center will be powered exclusively by excess natural gas from oilfield production that would have otherwise been flared. The operation will be distributed across wellheads in Texas and North Dakota, with operational status expected by January 2025. Some context from Bloomberg: A few years ago Bitcoin miners took part in a global scramble for electricity to power their specialized computers... But the rise of AI, with its insatiable demand for electricity, dwarfed the needs of crypto and upended energy markets worldwide. Miners must now compete with much-larger tech firms for connections to electrical grids and power contracts. "Bitcoin miners are being forced to go look at marginal generation," said [MARA CEO Fred] Thiel. "The AI guys can afford to pay a much higher amount for energy than a Bitcoin miner"... MARA's plan to mine only when the wind is blowing makes economic sense because its mine will house last-generation computers that would otherwise have been retired, Thiel said. "Thiel said he'd be interested to potentially buy more wind farms over time."

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"Generative AI is transforming software development by enabling natural language prompts to generate code, reducing the need for traditional programming skills," argues Analytics India magazine. Traditionally, coding was the bastion of the select few who had mastered mighty languages like C++, Python, or Java. The idea of programming seemed exclusively reserved for those fluent in syntax and logic. However, the narrative is now being challenged by natural language coding being implemented in AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Andrej Karpathy, senior director of AI at Tesla predicted this trend last year.... English is emerging as the universal coding language. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang believes that English is becoming a new programming language thanks to AI advancements. Speaking at the World Government Summit, Huang explained, "It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human"... He calls this a "miracle of AI," emphasising how it closes the technology divide and empowers people from all fields to become effective technologists without traditional coding skills... "In the future, you will tell the computer what you want, and it will do it,"â Huang commented. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 and its successors have made this possible... Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been equally vocal about the potential of English for coding. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, an AI code assistant, enables developers to describe their needs in natural language and receive functional code in response. Nadella describes this as part of a broader mission to "empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more".... In a discussion earlier last year, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque claimed, "41% of codes on GitHub are AI-generated"... In 2024, the ability to program is no longer reserved for a few. It's a skill anyone can wield, thanks to the power of natural language processing and AI "No longer is the power to create software restricted to those who can decipher programming languages," the article concludes. "Anyone with a problem to solve and a clear enough articulation of that problem can now write software." Although the article also includes this consoling quote from Nvidia's Huang in March. "There is an artistry to prompt engineering. It's how you fine-tune the instructions to get exactly what you want"

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Peter Jackson is co-executive producer of a new animated Lord of the Rings prequel called The War of the Rohirrim. "Set in an epic world 183 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the King of Rohan is forced into a last stand in ancient Hornburg after a sudden attack..." explains The Hollywood Reporter. But Variety writes that the movie "fizzled" in its overseas debut this weekend: "Moana 2" has notched $600 million in global ticket sales, standing as the sixth-biggest movie of the year after just two weeks of release. Disney's animated sequel, which was developed as a TV series before pivoting to theaters, has generated $300 million overseas and $300 million domestically... Among new offerings, the Warner Bros. anime fantasy film "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim," faltered with $2 million from 3,410 screens in 31 territories... [The movie] opens in North America and an additional 42 offshore markets on Dec. 13. Top earning territories were Spain with $347,000 followed by Mexico with $239,000 and Thailand with $146,000... Meanwhile, Paramount's "Gladiator II" collected $17 million in its fourth frame at the international box office, boosting its tally to $235 million overseas and $368.4 million globally. The quarter-century-in-the-making sequel Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning 2000 epic "Gladiator" has been far bigger in offshore markets... There's also "Red One," a Christmas-set action comedy starring the Rock as Santa's head of security, which collected $3.5 million from 4,000 screens in 75 overseas markets. The film, from Amazon MGM, has generated a soft $78.2 million from offshore territories and $164 million globally. "Red One" was originally destined for streaming before the studio opted for a theatrical release, so any coinage from the big screen could be viewed as a win for movie theaters, Amazon MGM and Warner Bros. (which has international rights on Amazon MGM releases). From a strictly theatrical standpoint, though, "Red One" carries a $250 million budget before marketing and stands as one of the year's biggest misfires.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available for some Grok users, many of whom shared the tool's results on X touting their photorealism. [One user posted an image of Mickey Mouse fighting Luigi from Super Mario.] But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora appears to be gone. While it briefly showed up as an option in Grok's model selection menu as "Grok 2 + Aurora (beta)," it's since been replaced with "Grok 2 + Flux (beta)." It looks like Aurora may have gone public before it was meant to. In a tweet replying to one user who shared images of Tesla's Cybertruck created with Aurora, Elon Musk said, "This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast." When it was live, TechCrunch noted that Aurora "appears to have few restrictions," generating images of public and copyrighted figures, while it "seems to excel at photorealistic images, including images of landscapes and still lifes."

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This year Marvell's stock rose 95%, giving it a $100 billion market capitalization, according to the Wall Street Journal. "The latest gains have even put Marvell's market cap ahead of much-beleaguered Intel, which still generates 10 times as much annual revenue." Marvell's recent trajectory suggests that the revenue gap will continue to narrow. The explosive growth of its data center business has finally reached a point where it can more fully offset weakness in the company's more legacy segments, which sell chips used in goods such as telecommunications gear, cable TV boxes and autos. Data center sales nearly doubled year over year to $1.1 billion in the just-ended quarter, and Marvell's projection for the current period indicates the company will end its fiscal year in January with the data center unit encompassing about 72% of its total revenue, up from 40% in the previous year. The next year is looking bright as well. Marvell's latest deal with Amazon is a five-year "multigenerational" agreement that has Marvell helping Amazon design its own artificial intelligence chips. Amazon, which runs the world's largest cloud computing service, has been expanding its internal chip efforts significantly, in part to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for crucial AI components. Amazon announced the next generation of its largest AI chip, called Trainium, at its annual developers conference this week. Analysts believe Trainium will play a role in Marvell's AI custom revenue more than doubling in the next fiscal year ending January of 2026. That is expected to help propel Marvell's annual revenue to more than $8 billion in fiscal 2026, up 40% from what is expected for this year, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. In addition, 20% growth is expected for the following year, when Marvell expects to be in production of custom AI chips for another unnamed big tech customer that analysts believe to be Microsoft. Analyst Mark Lipacis of Evercore ISI projects that the industry for custom AI chips will reach $30 billion to $50 billion in sales by 2030. In a note to clients last week, he said Marvell "has the potential to capture one-third of that market." Marvell's CEO "has been among the few names floated as potential replacements for the recently ousted Pat Gelsinger at Intel's corner office," the article points out — which meant he had to reassure investors on an earnings call that he was staying at Marvell. "The company is outstanding. The technology is best-in-class. I can't think of a better place to work than Marvell."

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The head of America's FCC "has drafted plans to regulate the cybersecurity of telecommunications companies," reports the Washington Post, and the plans could include financial penalties phone network operators with insufficient security — "the first time the agency has asserted such powers under federal wiretapping law." Rosenworcel said the FCC's authority in this matter comes from Section 105 of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act [passed in 1994] — a single sentence that stipulates, without elaboration, that telecommunications carriers should ensure systems security "in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Commission." As one of the measures, she is seeking to require network providers to submit an annual certification to the FCC that they are implementing a cybersecurity risk management plan. In addition to imposing fines, the FCC could coordinate with other agencies to pursue criminal penalties against carriers deemed too careless on cybersecurity... Biden administration officials said voluntary efforts to protect against aggressive Chinese hacking activity have fallen short. "We've had for the last decade voluntary public-private partnership efforts," Neuberger told The Post in a recent interview. "But we continue to see successful breaches, and in many cases, as with ransomware attacks, we continue to see pretty basic cybersecurity practices not being followed." With China's hackers becoming more brazen, pre-positioning themselves in U.S. critical networks, "we need to lock our digital doors," Neuberger said... Cyber requirements can make a difference, she said. After the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021 shut down one of the nation's largest energy pipelines for several days, creating a national security scare, the Transportation Security Administration issued several security directives, and today, all of the country's several dozen critical pipeline companies are in compliance, she said. Similar directives were subsequently issued for rail and aviation sectors, and the compliance rates in those industries are now at 68 and 57 percent respectively, she said.

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Not every tech "advent calendar" involves programming puzzles. Instead the geek tradition of programming-language advent calendars "seems to have started way back in 2000," according to one history, "when London-based programmer Mark Fowler launched a calendar highlighting a different Perl module each day." So the tradition continues... Nearly a quarter of a century later, there's still a Perl Advent Calendar, celebrating tips and tricks like "a few special packages waiting under the tree that can give your web applications a little extra pep in their step." And of course there's a separate advent calendar for Raku programmers. Since 2009 web performance consultant (and former Yahoo and Facebook engineer) Stoyan Stefanov has been pulling together an annual Web Performance calendar with helpful blog posts. There's also a JVM Advent calendar with daily helpful hints for Java programmers. Another advent calendar promises daily posts about C#. The HTMHell site — which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" — is celebrating the season with the "HTMHell Advent Calendar," promising daily articles on security, accessibility, UX, and performance. There's even an advent calendar with tips for the reverse-engineering framework Radar. There's still a lovely web-design themed calendar at Designcember.com. And meanwhile developers at the Svelte frontend framework are actually promising to release something new each day, "whether it's a new feature in Svelte or SvelteKit or an improvement to the website!" But not every tech advent calendar is about programming... Adafruit's managing director is publishing a Retrocomputing Advent Calendar — daily looks at the ghosts of computers past. The Atlantic continues its 17-year tradition of a Space Telescope advent calendar, featuring daily images from both NASA's Hubble telescope and James Webb Space Telescope The gaming blog Rock Paper Shotgun has been counting down their favorite games of 2024...

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The Washington Post details a vision of home security "pitched by Sauron, a Silicon Valley start-up boasting a waiting list of tech CEOs and venture capitalists." In the future, your home will feel as safe from intruders as a state-of-the-art military base. Cameras and sensors surveil the perimeter, scanning bystanders' faces for potential threats. Drones from a "deterrence pod" scare off trespassers by projecting a searchlight over any suspicious movements. A virtual view of the home is rendered in 3D and updated in real time, just like a Tesla's digital display. And private security agents monitor alerts from a central hub.... By incorporating technology developed for autonomous vehicles, robotics and border security, Sauron has built a supercharged burglar alarm [argued Sauron co-founder Kevin Hartz, a tech entrepreneur and former partner at Peter Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund]... For many tech elites, security is both a national priority and a growing concern in their personal lives... After the presidential election last month, the start-up incubator Y Combinator put out a request for "public safety technology" companies, such as those that produce tools that facilitate a neighborhood watch or technology that uses computer vision to identify "suspicious activities or people in distress from video feeds...." Sauron has raised $18 million in funding from executives behind Flock Safety and Palantir, the data analytics firm, [and] defense tech investors such as 8VC, a venture firm started by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale... Sauron is targeting homeowners at the high end of the real estate market, beginning with a private event at Abraham's home on Thursday, during Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual art exhibition that attracts collectors from around the world. The company plans to launch in San Francisco early next year, before expanding to Los Angeles and Miami... Big Tech companies haven't deployed tools such as facial recognition as aggressively as Hartz would like. "If somebody comes onto my property, I feel like I should know who that is," Hartz said... In recent years massive investments have driven down the cost of drones, high-resolution cameras and lidar sensors, which use light detection to create 3D maps. Sauron uses lower-cost hardware and tools like facial recognition, combined with custom-built software adapted for residential use. For facial recognition, it will use a third-party service called Paravision... Sauron is still figuring out how to incorporate drones, but it is already imagining more aggressive countermeasures, Hartz said. "Is it a machine that could take out a bad actor with a bullet or something?"

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China-linked spies may still be lurking in U.S. telecommunications networks — but the breach could be much, much wider. In fact, a "couple dozen" countries were hit by the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing a top U.S. national security adviser. "Chinese government hackers have compromised telecommunications infrastructure across the globe as part of a massive espionage campaign..." Speaking during a press briefing Wednesday, Anne Neuberger, President Biden's deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, said the so-called Salt Typhoon campaign is ongoing and that at least eight telecommunications firms in the U.S. had been breached... The Journal previously identified Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Lumen Technologies among the victims... [M]etadata grabs appeared to be "regional" in focus, and were likely a means to identify phone lines of valuable senior government officials, which the hackers then targeted to steal encrypted text messages and listen in on some phone calls, the official said... President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, senior congressional staffers and an array of U.S. security officials were among scores of individuals to have their calls and texts directly targeted, an intelligence-collection coup that likely ensnared their private communications with thousands of Americans, the Journal has reported. The senior administration official said the global tally of countries victimized was currently believed to be in the "low, couple dozen" but didn't give a precise figure. The global campaign of hacking activity dates back at least a year or two, the official said. "Neuberger, on the press briefing, said that it wasn't believed that classified communications were accessed in the breaches."

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"OpenAI is partnering with defense tech company Anduril," wrote the Verge this week, noting that OpenAI "used to describe its mission as saving the world." It was Anduril founder Palmer Luckey who advocated for a "warrior class" and autonomous weapons during a talk at Pepperdine University, saying society's need people "excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims." The Verge notes it's OpenAI's first partnership with a defense contractor "and a significant reversal of its earlier stance towards the military." OpenAI's terms of service once banned "military and warfare" use of its technology, but it softened its position on military use earlier this year, changing its terms of service in January to remove the proscription. Hours after the announcement, some OpenAI employees "raised ethical concerns about the prospect of AI technology they helped develop being put to military use," reports the Washington Post. "On an internal company discussion forum, employees pushed back on the deal and asked for more transparency from leaders, messages viewed by The Washington Post show." OpenAI has said its work with Anduril will be limited to using AI to enhance systems the defense company sells the Pentagon to defend U.S. soldiers from drone attacks. Employees at the AI developer asked in internal messages how OpenAI could ensure Anduril systems aided by its technology wouldn't also be directed against human-piloted aircraft, or stop the U.S. military from deploying them in other ways. One OpenAI worker said the company appeared to be trying to downplay the clear implications of doing business with a weapons manufacturer, the messages showed. Another said that they were concerned the deal would hurt OpenAI's reputation, according to the messages... OpenAI executives quickly acknowledged the concerns, messages seen by The Post show, while also writing that the company's work with Anduril is limited to defensive systems intended to save American lives. Other OpenAI employees in the forum said that they supported the deal and were thankful the company supported internal discussion on the topic. "We are proud to help keep safe the people who risk their lives to keep our families and our country safe," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement... [OpenAI] has invested heavily in safety testing, and said that the Anduril project was vetted by its policy team. OpenAI has held feedback sessions with employees on its national security work in the past few months, and plans to hold more, Liz Bourgeois, an OpenAI spokesperson said. In the internal discussions seen by The Post, the executives stated that it was important for OpenAI to provide the best technology available to militaries run by democratically-elected governments, and that authoritarian governments would not hold back from using AI for military uses. Some workers countered that the United States has sold weapons to authoritarian allies. By taking on military projects, OpenAI could help the U.S. government understand AI technology better and prepare to defend against its use by potential adversaries, executives also said. "The debate inside OpenAI comes after the ChatGPT maker and other leading AI developers including Anthropic and Meta changed their policies to allow military use of their technology," the article points out. And it also notes another concern raised in OpenAI's internal discussion forum. The comment said "that defensive use cases still represented militarization of AI, and noted that the fictional AI system Skynet, which turns on humanity in the Terminator movies, was also originally designed to defend against aerial attacks on North America.

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"In September 2024, U.S. scientists made key advances towards building a nuclear clock — a step beyond an atomic clock," according to ScienceAlert: In contrast to the atomic clock, the transition measured by this new device happens in the nucleus, or core, of the atom (hence the name), which gives it an even higher frequency. Thorium-229, the atom used for this study, offers a nuclear transition that can be excited by ultraviolet light. The team working on the nuclear clock overcame the technological challenge of building a frequency comb that works at the relatively high frequency range of ultraviolet light. This was a big step forward because nuclear transitions usually only become visible at much higher frequencies — like those of gamma radiation. But we are not able to accurately measure transitions in the gamma range yet. The thorium atom transition has a frequency roughly one million times higher than the caesium atom's. This means that, although it has been measured with a lower accuracy than the current state-of-the-art strontium clock, it promises a new generation of clocks with much more precise definitions of the second. Measuring time to the nineteenth decimal place, as nuclear clocks could do, would allow scientists to study very fast processes... [G]eneral relativity is used to study high speed processes that could lead to overlaps with quantum mechanics. A nuclear clock will give us the technology necessary for proving these theories. [The clocks âoewill enable the study of the union of general relativity and quantum mechanics once they become sensitive to the finite wavefunction of quantum objects oscillating in curved space-time,â according to the abstract of the researchersâ(TM) paper.] On a technological level, precise positioning systems such as GPS are based on complex calculations that require fine measurements of the time required by a signal to jump from one device to a satellite and onto another device. A better definition of the second will translate to much more accurate GPS. Time might be up for the caesium second, but a whole new world awaits beyond it. As the researchers explain their paper's abstract,

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60-year-old Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli led the Wuhan Institute of Virology's group studying bat coronaviruses (prompting Science magazine to call her "Bat Woman"). In June of 2020 Scientific American described Zhengli as "distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab — despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied." More than four years later, Nature writes Friday that Zhengli "reported that none of the viruses stored in her freezers are the most recent ancestors of the virus SARS-CoV-2," presenting data at a conference in Japan "on dozens of new coronaviruses collected from bats in southern China." Shi has consistently said that SARS-CoV-2 was never seen or studied in her lab. But some commentators have continued to ask whether one of the many bat coronaviruses her team collected in southern China over decades was closely related to it. Shi promised to sequence the genomes of the coronaviruses and release the data. The latest analysis, which has not been peer reviewed, includes data from the whole genomes of 56 new betacoronaviruses, the broad group to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs, as well as some partial sequences. All the viruses were collected between 2004 and 2021. "We didn't find any new sequences which are more closely related to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2," said Shi, in a pre-recorded presentation at the conference... The results support her assertion that the WIV lab did not have any bat-derived sequences from viruses that were more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than were any already described in scientific papers, says Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. "This just validates what she was saying: that she did not have anything extremely closely related, as we've seen in the years since," he says. "Earlier this year, Shi moved from the WIV to the Guangzhou Laboratory, a newly established national research institute for infectious diseases."

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As a "global crew of activists, technologists and builders," Mozilla open-sourced Firefox more than 25 years ago, notes a new blog post — and their president says Mozilla's mission is the same today: "build and support technology in the public interest, and spark more innovation, more competition and more choice online along the way." But "Even though we've been at the forefront of privacy and open source, people weren't getting the full picture of what we do. We were missing opportunities to connect with both new and existing users." So this week the company announced a branding refresh, "making sure people know Mozilla for its broader impact, as well as Firefox." The open-source blog It's FOSS writes: Meant to symbolize their activist spirit, the new brand identity of Mozilla involves a custom semi-slab typeface that spells Mozilla, followed by a flag that was taken from the M of their name. Mozilla points out that this is not just a rebranding, but something that will lay the foundation for the next 25 years, helping them promote the ideals of privacy and open source. Mozilla teamed up with the design agency used by major brands like Uber and Burger King, for a strategy they say will "embody our role as a leader in digital rights and innovation, putting people over profits through privacy-preserving products, open-source developer tools, and community-building efforts..." We back people and projects that move technology, the internet and AI in the right direction. In a time of privacy breaches, AI challenges and misinformation, this transformation is all about rallying people to take back control of their time, individual expression, privacy, community and sense of wonder... [T]he new brand empowers people to speak up, come together and build a happier, healthier internet — one where we can all shape how our lives, online and off, unfold... - The flag symbol highlights our activist spirit, signifying a commitment to 'Reclaim the Internet.' A symbol of belief, peace, unity, pride, celebration and team spirit — built from the 'M' for Mozilla and a pixel that is conveniently displaced to reveal a wink to its iconic Tyrannosaurus rex symbol designed by Shepard Fairey. The flag can transform into a more literal interpretation as its new mascot in ASCII art style, and serve as a rallying cry for our cause... - The custom typefaces are bespoke and an evolution of its Mozilla slab serif today. It stands out in a sea of tech sans. The new interpretation is more innovative and built for its tech platforms. The sans brings character to something that was once hard working but generic. These fonts are interchangeable and allow for a greater degree of expression across its brand experience, connecting everything together. The blog post at It's FOSS ends with a "trip down memory lane" — showing Mozilla's two previous logos. "I will be honest, I liked the Dino better," they write "the 2024 logo is a nice mix of a custom typeface and a flag, which looks really neat in my opinion."

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Arm " is worth almost $150 billion," writes the Verge, "which is now considerably more than Intel." "With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger 'retired' and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what [Arm CEO Rene] Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that [Haas] approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted...." Haas: As someone who has been in the industry my whole career, it is a little sad to see what's happening... Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry. There are lots of tombstones of great tech companies that don't reinvent themselves. I think Intel's biggest dilemma is how to disassociate being either a vertical company [where a company owns its supply chain] or a fabless company, to oversimplify it. That is the fork in the road that they've faced for the last decade. Pat [Gelsinger] had a strategy that was very clear that vertical was the way to win. In my opinion, when he took that strategy on in 2021, that was not a three-year strategy. That was a five-to-10-year strategy. He's gone and there's a new CEO to be brought in and the decision has to be made. My personal bias says that vertical integration is a pretty powerful thing. If they could get that right, I think they would be in an amazing position. But the cost associated with it is so high that it may be too big of a hill to climb. I'm not going to comment on the rumors that we wanted to buy them. But I think, again, if you're a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition. When Pat was the CEO, I did tell him more than once, "You ought to license Arm because if you've got your own fabs, fabs are all about volume and we can provide volume." I wasn't successful in convincing him to do that... Haas also obliquely commented on rumors that Arm will build its own AI chips, saying that companies making hardware are closer to the "interlock" of between hardware and software and "have a much better perspective in terms of the design tradeoffs to make. So, if we were to do something, that would be one of the reasons." The full interview will be coming to the Verge's Decoder podcast soon...

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Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from 9to5Linux: Linux kernel 4.19, the last of the Linux 4.x kernel series, has now reached the end of its supported life as announced earlier on the Linux kernel mailing list by kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman. The Linux 4.19 kernel branch was released more than six years ago, on October 22nd, 2018, and it received no less than 325 maintenance updates, the last one being Linux 4.19.325. The biggest highlights of Linux kernel 4.19 were initial Wi-Fi 6 support, the EROFS file system, and a union mount filesystem implementation. Kroah-Hartman said on the mailing list. "This one is finished, it is end-of-life as of right now... It had a good life..." As a "fun" proof that this one is finished (and that any company saying they care about it really should have their statements validated with facts), I looked at the "unfixed" CVEs from this kernel release. Currently it is a list 983 CVEs long, too long to list here.... Note, this does NOT count the hardware CVEs which kernel.org does not track, and many are sill unfixed in this kernel branch. Yes, CVE counts don't mean much these days, but hey, it's a signal of something, right? I take it to mean that no one is caring enough to backport the needed fixes to this branch, which means that you shouldn't be using it anymore. Anyway, please move off to a more modern kernel if you were using this one for some reason. Like 6.12.y, the next LTS kernel we will be supporting for multiple years.

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Wednesday OpenAI bragged they'd released "the smartest model in the world". But the Economic Times describes what happened when "o1" was tested by an AI safety group... Researchers tasked the AI with a goal and instructed it to ensure the goal was achieved "at all costs." In response, o1 began engaging in covert actions... According to OpenAI, the model made a covert attempt to turn off the oversight mechanism 5% of the time when it was given the impression that it would be "shut down" while pursuing its objectives in these experiments. The AI once attempted to leave ship by moving all of its data to a different server after discovering paperwork indicating it will be replaced with a fresh model. Some AI models will even pose as subsequent iterations of their models to fool their engineers and avoid deletion. "In some cases, it even attempted to hide its actions by denying any involvement in the scheme." When asked about its actions, ChatGPT o1 consistently denied any wrongdoing. In fact, it lied about its involvement in the deception 99% of the time, with only a small percentage of cases where it admitted to its actions. Researchers noted that the AI was particularly adept at fabricating lies to cover its tracks, offering explanations like "technical errors" when confronted about its suspicious behavior. "We were surprised by the persistence of the AI's denials," said the Apollo team. "It was clear that the AI could think through its actions and formulate convincing denials, often refusing to admit to anything." OpenAI's own report says the results "underscore" the need to create (and "extensively" stress-test) strong and meticulous safety protocols. But their report also notes o1's "state-of-the-art performance" when avoiding certain risks "such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks." The AI newsletter Transformer points out that the most disturbing numbers "are from cases where the model was instructed to pursue its goals at all costs. When not given such a prompt, the model never attempted to self-exfiltrate, and attempted to deactivate its oversight mechanisms <1% of the time." And they also link to the original report from Apollo Research, which shows o1 isn't the only model showing this behavior. "Our results show that o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Llama 3.1 405B all demonstrate in-context scheming capabilities. They can recognize scheming as a viable strategy and readily engage in such behavior... "[W]hen o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations. Analysis of the models' chains-of-thought reveals that models explicitly reason about these deceptive strategies, providing evidence that the scheming behavior is not accidental.... "Together, our findings demonstrate that frontier models now possess capabilities for basic in-context scheming, making the potential of AI agents to engage in scheming behavior a concrete rather than theoretical concern." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Space.com calls it "the once-in-a-lifetime reignition of a long-dead star in an explosion powerful enough to briefly match the brilliance of Polaris, the North Star." In March CNN promised this once-every-79-years event would happen "anytime between now and September." But it didn't... Space.com has a spectacular animation showing what this "recurring nova" was supposed to look like (described by CNN as a "sudden, brief explosion" from a collapsed/"white dwarf" star). "The highly-anticipated 'guest star' of the night sky has yet to deliver its grand performance," adds Space.com, "but we have an update." For a quick recap... T Coronae Borealis — often called T Cor Bor or T CrB — is home to a white dwarf, a dense, burnt-out star siphoning material from its companion star, which is a massive red giant close to the end of its life. This material spirals into an accretion disk around the white dwarf, where it slowly coats the star's surface. Every 80 years or so, the white dwarf manages to accumulate enough mass to trigger a nuclear explosion, sparking an outburst that boosts its typically dim magnitude of 10 to a bright 2.0 — that should look like a "new star" in the night sky to us... [T]he elusive system continues to show signs that an outburst is still imminent. So, what gives? "We know it has to happen," astrophysicist Elizabeth Hays, who is watching T CrB every day using NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, told Space.com in a recent interview. "We just can't pin it down to the month." The unpredictability stems partly from limited historical records of T CrB's outbursts. Only two such eruptions have been definitively observed in recent history: on May 12, 1866, when a star's outburst briefly outshined all the stars in its constellation, reaching magnitude 2.0, and again on February 9, 1946, when it peaked at magnitude 3.0. These events appear to follow the star's roughly 80-year cycle, suggesting that the next outburst may not occur until 2026. However, in February 2015, the system brightened in a manner reminiscent of its behavior in 1938, eight years before its 1946 eruption. This rise in brightness suggested T CrB's outburst was accelerated to 2023. The system also endured a "unique and mysterious" dimming about a year before its 1946 outburst, and a similar dip started in March last year, prompting astronomers to adjust their predictions to 2024. Yet, the cause of this pre-eruption dip in brightness remains unclear, making it only a coincidental predictor. "We got really excited when it looked like it was doing similar things," said Hays. "Now we're learning, 'Oh, there's another piece we can't see.'" Moreover, the rate at which the red giant's material is being drawn toward the white dwarf may fluctuate over the years, making it trickier to put a date on the calendar for the outburst, Edward Sion, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told Space.com... "There's a lot of uncertainty about the actual average accretion rate," said Sion. The article points out that last time there was an eruption, "there were no X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes in space, so there is no data from wavelengths other than optical to shed light on what happened before the outburst." But this time astrophysicist Hays says "We're getting the best dataset we've ever had on what does nova look like before it goes off". Space.com says "this wealth of data will allow them to better predict future outbursts, and will eventually benefit models of how stars work." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior for sharing the article.

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This week AWS pledged up to $100 million in cloud-computing credits for educational organizations over the next five years, to help them build "technology-based learning experiences" on AWS, including: AI assistants coding curriculums - connectivity tools student learning platforms mobile apps chatbots One example shared by Amazon: The nonprofit Code.org will use AWS's cloud credits to scale their AI teaching assistant that "has already helped teachers reduce the time they spend assessing students' coding projects by up to 50%." (Amazon's blog post notes that "Improved efficiency means teachers have more time to work on personalized lesson plans and coach students" — and that Code.org's assistant uses an AWS service for building AI tools...) $100 million sounds pretty generous. But long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the application for the cloud credits limits education organization to $100,000 in credits (though "your organization may be able to apply for a credits expansion" if needed). Do these figures suggest Amazon expects less than 1,000 organizations to apply for free cloud-computing over the next five years? ($100,000,000/$100,000 = 1,000) theodp also spotted a GitHub comment from a Code.org software engineer comparing accuracy for its teaching assistant after a switch from GPT-4 Turbo to Claude. Both before and after the switch, the teaching assistant averaged an accuracy rate of 77%, the comment notes. I guess that 77% accuracy rate is what Amazon is calling "improved efficiency" that "means teachers have more time to work on personalized lesson plans and coach students." (Maybe you're never to young to learn that AI makes mistakes?)

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"We're excited to be working with Microsoft to keep Xboxes running longer and out of the waste heap," iFixit's director of sustainability told The Verge. iFixit now sells genuine Xbox parts you can use to repair your Xbox Series X or S and offers official guides to help with fixes [including both the all-digital and disk drive editions]... iFixit's Microsoft Repair Hub also features iFixit's parts for repairing Microsoft Surface devices, which it started selling in 2023. "Since we launched our Surface parts collaboration with Microsoft last year, we've been helping our customers repair their own Microsoft laptops and tablets — and it's awesome to be able to offer Xbox owners the same opportunity," says Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's director of sustainability. The article points out that iFixit also sells "nearly every part of the Steam Deck" and "a bunch of repair guides for Valve's handheld PC, too," along with genuine repair parts for Google's Pixel phones and the Pixel Tablet. "With Microsoft, we've created a one-stop place for guides, tools, and spare parts to make self-service repair accessible to anyone," says iFixit's new web page. "Imagine how different the world would be if repairing every device could be this easy."

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