A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts look credible and more likely to trick their targets. From a report: As of this writing, the bug has not been patched. To demonstrate the bug, the researcher sent an email to TechCrunch that looked like it was sent from Microsoft's account security team. Last week, Vsevolod Kokorin, also known online as Slonser, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he found the email-spoofing bug and reported it to Microsoft, but the company dismissed his report after saying it couldn't reproduce his findings. This prompted Kokorin to publicize the bug on X, without providing technical details that would help others exploit it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shubham Sharma reports via VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which previously made headlines with a ChatGPT competitor trained on 2 trillion English and Chinese tokens, has announced the release of DeepSeek Coder V2, an open-source mixture of experts (MoE) code language model. Built upon DeepSeek-V2, an MoE model that debuted last month, DeepSeek Coder V2 excels at both coding and math tasks. It supports more than 300 programming languages and outperforms state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus and Gemini 1.5 Pro. The company claims this is the first time an open model has achieved this feat, sitting way ahead of Llama 3-70B and other models in the category. It also notes that DeepSeek Coder V2 maintains comparable performance in terms of general reasoning and language capabilities. Founded last year with a mission to "unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity," DeepSeek has been a notable Chinese player in the AI race, joining the likes of Qwen, 01.AI and Baidu. In fact, within a year of its launch, the company has already open-sourced a bunch of models, including the DeepSeek Coder family. The original DeepSeek Coder, with up to 33 billion parameters, did decently on benchmarks with capabilities like project-level code completion and infilling, but only supported 86 programming languages and a context window of 16K. The new V2 offering builds on that work, expanding language support to 338 and context window to 128K -- enabling it to handle more complex and extensive coding tasks. When tested on MBPP+, HumanEval, and Aider benchmarks, designed to evaluate code generation, editing and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs, DeepSeek Coder V2 scored 76.2, 90.2, and 73.7, respectively -- sitting ahead of most closed and open-source models, including GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Codestral and Llama-3 70B. Similar performance was seen across benchmarks designed to assess the model's mathematical capabilities (MATH and GSM8K). The only model that managed to outperform DeepSeek's offering across multiple benchmarks was GPT-4o, which obtained marginally higher scores in HumanEval, LiveCode Bench, MATH and GSM8K. [...] As of now, DeepSeek Coder V2 is being offered under a MIT license, which allows for both research and unrestricted commercial use. Users can download both 16B and 236B sizes in instruct and base avatars via Hugging Face. Alternatively, the company is also providing access to the models via API through its platform under a pay-as-you-go model. For those who want to test out the capabilities of the models first, the company is offering the option to interact. with Deepseek Coder V2 via chatbot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: When old satellites fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, they leave behind tiny particles of aluminum oxide, which eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer. A new study finds that these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022 and will continue to accumulate as the number of low-Earth-orbit satellites skyrockets. The 1987 Montreal Protocol successfully regulated ozone-damaging CFCs to protect the ozone layer, shrinking the ozone hole over Antarctica with recovery expected within fifty years. But the unanticipated growth of aluminum oxides may push pause on the ozone success story in decades to come. Of the 8,100 objects in low Earth orbit, 6,000 are Starlink satellites launched in the last few years. Demand for global internet coverage is driving a rapid ramp up of launches of small communication satellite swarms. SpaceX is the frontrunner in this enterprise, with permission to launch another 12,000 Starlink satellites and as many as 42,000 planned. Amazon and other companies around the globe are also planning constellations ranging from 3,000 to 13,000 satellites, the authors of the study said. Internet satellites in low Earth orbit are short-lived, at about five years. Companies must then launch replacement satellites to maintain internet service, continuing a cycle of planned obsolescence and unplanned pollution. Aluminum oxides spark chemical reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone, which protects Earth from harmful UV radiation. The oxides don't react chemically with ozone molecules, instead triggering destructive reactions between ozone and chlorine that deplete the ozone layer. Because aluminum oxides are not consumed by these chemical reactions, they can continue to destroy molecule after molecule of ozone for decades as they drift down through the stratosphere. Yet little attention has yet been paid to pollutants formed when satellites fall into the upper atmosphere and burn. Earlier studies of satellite pollution largely focused on the consequences of propelling a launch vehicle into space, such as the release of rocket fuel. The new study, by a research team from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, is the first realistic estimate of the extent of this long-lived pollution in the upper atmosphere, the authors said. [...] In 2022, reentering satellites increased aluminum in the atmosphere by 29.5% over natural levels, the researchers found. The modeling showed that a typical 250-kilogram (550-pound) satellite with 30% of its mass being aluminum will generate about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of aluminum oxide nanoparticles (1-100 nanometers in size) during its reentry plunge. Most of these particles are created in the mesosphere, 50-85 kilometers (30-50 miles) above Earth's surface. The team then calculated that based on particle size, it would take up to 30 years for the aluminum oxides to drift down to stratospheric altitudes, where 90% of Earth's ozone is located. The researchers estimated that by the time the currently planned satellite constellations are complete, every year, 912 metric tons of aluminum (1,005 U.S. tons) will fall to Earth. That will release around 360 metric tons (397 U.S. tons) of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels. The study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers are observing the sudden awakening of a giant black hole in the constellation of Virgo. "Decades of observations found nothing remarkable about the distant galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, but that changed at the end of 2019 when astronomers noticed a dramatic surge in its luminosity that persists to this day," reports The Guardian. "Researchers now believe they are witnessing changes that have never been seen before, with the black hole at the galaxy's core putting on an extreme cosmic light show as vast amounts of material fall into it." From the report: The galaxy, which goes by the snappy codename SDSS1335+0728 and lies 300m light years away, was flagged to astronomers in December 2019 when an observatory in California called the Zwicky Transient Facility recorded a sudden rise in its brightness. The alert prompted a flurry of new observations and checks of archived measurements from ground- and space-based telescopes to understand more about the galaxy and its past behavior. The scientists discovered the galaxy had recently doubled in brightness in mid-infrared wavelengths, become four times brighter in the ultraviolet, and at least 10 times brighter in the X-ray range. What triggered the sudden brightening is unclear, but writing in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the researchers say the most likely explanation is the creation of an "active galactic nucleus" where a vast black hole at the centre of a galaxy starts actively consuming the material around it. Active galactic nuclei emit a broad spectrum of light as gas around the black hole heats up and glows, and surrounding dust particles absorb some wavelengths and re-radiate others. But it is not the only possibility. The team has not ruled out an exotic form of "tidal disruption event," a highly restrained phrase to describe a star that is ripped apart after straying too close to a black hole. Tidal disruption events tend to be brief affairs, brightening a galaxy for no more than a few hundred days, but more measurements are needed to rule out the process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's a day for a smorgasbord. We're going to start with a classic kind of bad code, from astephens:

pbUpdates.Value = int.Parse(Math.Truncate(percentage).ToString());

Here, we want to truncate a floating point down to an integer, but take a trip through a string to do it. Why? Probably because the person responsible knew about int.Parse but not how to actually cast.

Thomas's predecessor had a solid idea of where exceptions come from:

Try ' snip Catch ex As Exception Me.Response.Write("error in my code " & ex.ToString()) Me.Write_error(ex) End Try

I appreciate the honesty: your code is bad.

Sylnsr wonders if this stored procedure has anything to do with generating reports?

this.sqlDataSource1.SelectCommand = "rptGetVoidReportDataForReport";

Nah, couldn't be- it says void in the name, so it obviously doesn't return anything.

Finally, Adam wonders exactly what is left to do on this one:

pdfBytes = pdfConverter.GetPdfBytesFromUrl(urlToConvert); //TODO: This is the code we want to use.

TODO? Or TODONE?

.comment { border: none; } [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Meta has created a system that can embed hidden signals, known as watermarks, in AI-generated audio clips, which could help in detecting AI-generated content online. The tool, called AudioSeal, is the first that can pinpoint which bits of audio in, for example, a full hourlong podcast might have been generated by AI. It could help to tackle the growing problem of misinformation and scams using voice cloning tools, says Hady Elsahar, a research scientist at Meta. Malicious actors have used generative AI to create audio deepfakes of President Joe Biden, and scammers have used deepfakes to blackmail their victims. Watermarks could in theory help social media companies detect and remove unwanted content. However, there are some big caveats. Meta says it has no plans yet to apply the watermarks to AI-generated audio created using its tools. Audio watermarks are not yet adopted widely, and there is no single agreed industry standard for them. And watermarks for AI-generated content tend to be easy to tamper with -- for example, by removing or forging them. Fast detection, and the ability to pinpoint which elements of an audio file are AI-generated, will be critical to making the system useful, says Elsahar. He says the team achieved between 90% and 100% accuracy in detecting the watermarks, much better results than in previous attempts at watermarking audio. AudioSeal is available on GitHub for free. Anyone can download it and use it to add watermarks to AI-generated audio clips. It could eventually be overlaid on top of AI audio generation models, so that it is automatically applied to any speech generated using them. The researchers who created it will present their work at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Vienna, Austria, in July.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen so many landmines deployed across the country that clearing them would take 700 years, say researchers. To make the task more manageable, Ukrainian scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to identify which regions are a priority for de-mining, though they expect some may simply have to be left as a permanent "scar" on the country. The model considers vast amounts of data, including tax and property ownership records, agricultural maps, data on soil fertility, logs from the military and emergency services of where bombs and shells have landed, information gleaned from satellite images and interviews with local civilians and the military. Even climate change models and data on population density derived from mobile phone operators could be assessed. The AI then weighs factors such as civilian safety and potential economic benefits to determine the importance of a given piece of land and how urgent it is to make it safe. Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy minister at Ukraine's Ministry of Economy, is leading the team, and he likens the task of de-mining during an ongoing war to designing and building a submarine entirely underwater, except that the water is on fire. "It's a big problem," he says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD said on Tuesday it was looking into claims that company data was stolen in a hack by a cybercriminal organization called "Intelbroker". "The alleged intrusion, which took place in June 2024, reportedly resulted in the theft of a significant amount of sensitive information, spanning across various categories," reports Hackread. From the report: In a recent post on Breach Forums, IntelBroker detailed the extent of the compromised data. The hacker claims to have accessed information related to the following records: ROMs, Firmware, Source code, Property files, Employee databases, Customer databases, Financial information, Future AMD product plans, and Technical specification sheets. The hacker is selling the data exclusively for XMR (Monero) cryptocurrency, accepting a middleman for transactions. He advises interested buyers to message him with their offers. The reputation of IntelBroker in the cybersecurity community is one of significant concern, given the scale and sensitivity of the targeted entities in previous hacks. The hacker's past exploits include breaches of: Europol, Tech in Asia, Space-Eyes, Home Depot, Facebook Marketplace, U.S. contractor Acuity Inc., Staffing giant Robert Half, Los Angeles International Airport, and Alleged breaches of HSBC and Barclays Bank. Although the hacker's origins and affiliates are unknown, according to the United States government, IntelBroker is alleged to be the perpetrator behind one of the T-Mobile data breaches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Asda is transferring more than 100 internal IT workers to Indian outsourcing company TCS as it labors to meet deadlines to move away from IT systems supported by previous owner Walmart by the end of the year. According to documents seen by The Register, a collective consultation for a staff transfer under TUPE -- an arrangement by which employment rights are protected under UK law -- begins today (June 17). The UK's third-largest supermarket expects affected staff to meet line managers from June 24, while the transfer date is set for September 16. Contractors will be let go at the end of their current contracts. Asda employs around 5,000 staff in its UK offices. Between 130 and 135 members of the IT team have entered the collective consultation to move to TCS. The move came as private equity company TDR Capital gained majority ownership of the supermarket group. It was acquired from Walmart by the brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa and TDR Capital in February 2021 at a value of 6.8 billion pounds. The US retail giant retained "an equity investment." Project Future is a massive shift in the retailer's IT function. It is upgrading a legacy ERP system from SAP ECC -- run on-prem by Walmart -- to the latest SAP S/4HANA in the Microsoft Azure cloud, changing the application software, infrastructure, and business processes at the same time. Other applications are also set to move to Azure, including ecommerce and store systems, while Asda is creating an IT security team for the first time -- the work had previously been carried out by its US owner. Asda signed up to SAP's "RISE" program in a deal to lift, shift, and transform its ERP system -- a vital plank in the German vendor's strategy to get customers to the cloud -- in December 2021. But the project has already been beset by delays. The UK retailer had signed a three-year deal with Walmart in February 2021 to continue to support its existing system, but was forced to renegotiate to extend the arrangement, saying it planned to move away from the legacy systems before the end of 2024. Although one insider told El Reg that deadline was "totally unachievable," the Walmart deal extends to September 2025, giving the UK retailer room to accommodate further delays without renegotiating the contract. Asda has yet to migrate a single store to the new infrastructure. The first -- Yorkshire's Otley -- is set to go live by the end of June. One insider pointed out that project managers were trying to book resources from the infrastructure team for later this year and into the next, but, as they were set to transfer to TCS, the infrastructure team did not know who would be doing the work or what resources would be available. "They have a thousand stores to migrate and they're going to be doing that with an infrastructure team who have their eyes on the door. They'll be very professional, but they're not going above and beyond and doing on-call they don't have to do," the insider said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French electricity prices turned negative due to a drop in demand and a surge in renewable energy output, prompting the grid operator to request that Electricite de France (EDF) take several nuclear reactors offline. Fortune reports: While more clean power is needed across Europe to reach climate goals, soaring renewables output and a lack of battery storage mean reactors sometimes have to be turned off during periods of low demand. It's becoming increasingly common around weekends in France -- which gets about two-thirds of its electricity from its atomic fleet -- and also occurs in the Nordic region and Spain. EDF halted its Golfech 2, Cruas 2 and Tricastin 1 nuclear plants, and plans to halt three others during the weekend. Some renewables producers will also have to curb generation to avoid paying a fee amid negative prices. French day-ahead power fell to -5.76 euros a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot. Germany's equivalent contract dropped to 7.64 euros.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bipartisan agreement on government internet subsidies seems unlikely as Democrats and Republicans propose conflicting bills to reauthorize the FCC's spectrum auctions. The Democratic bill aims to fund the now-defunct Affordable Connectivity Program, while the Republican version does not. "While some Republicans supported earlier efforts to extend the subsidy program, those efforts did not go through in time to keep it from ending," notes The Verge. From the report: The Senate Commerce Committee canceled a Tuesday morning markup meeting in which it was set to consider the Spectrum and National Security Act, led by committee chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA). When she introduced it in April, Cantwell said the bill would provide $7 billion to continue funding the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), the pandemic-era internet subsidy for low-income Americans that officially ran out of money and ended at the end of May. The main purpose of the bill is to reauthorize the Federal Communications Commission's authority to run auctions for spectrum. The proceeds from spectrum auctions are often used to fund other programs. In addition to the ACP, Cantwell's bill would also fund programs including incentives for domestic chip manufacturing and a program that seeks to replace telecommunications systems that have been deemed national security concerns. The markup was already postponed several times before. Cantwell blamed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, for standing in the way of the legislation. "We had a chance to secure affordable broadband for millions of Americans, but Senator Cruz said 'no,'" Cantwell said in a statement late Monday. "He said 'no' to securing a lifeline for millions of Americans who rely on the Affordable Connectivity Program to speak to their doctors, do their homework, connect to their jobs, and stay in touch with loved ones -- including more than one million Texas families." In remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Cantwell said her Republican colleagues on the committee offered amendments to limit the ACP funding in the bill. She said the ACP shouldn't be a partisan issue and stressed the wide range of Americans who've relied on the program for high-speed connections, including elderly people living on fixed incomes and many military families. "I hope my colleagues will stop with obstructing and get back to negotiating on important legislation that will deliver these national security priorities and help Americans continue to have access to something as essential as affordable broadband," she said. Cruz has his own spectrum legislation with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) that would reauthorize the FCC's spectrum auction authority, with a focus on expanding commercial access to mid-band spectrum, commonly used for 5G. But it doesn't have the same ACP funding mechanism. Some large telecom industry players prefer Cruz's bill, in part because it allows for exclusive licensing. Wireless communications trade group CTIA's SVP of government affairs, Kelly Cole, told Fierce Network that the Cruz bill "is a better approach because it follows the historical precedent set by prior bipartisan legislation to extend the FCC's auction authority." But other tech groups like the Internet Technology Industry Council (ITI), which represents companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta, support Cantwell's bill, in part because of the programs it seeks to fund.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple's practice of leveraging ideas from its third-party developer community to become new iOS and Mac features and apps has a hefty price tag, a new report indicates. With the release of iOS 18 later this fall, Apple's changes may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Every June at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, the iPhone maker teases the upcoming releases of its software and operating systems, which often include features previously only available through third-party apps. The practice is so common now it's even been given a name: "sherlocking" -- a reference to a 1990s search app for Mac that borrowed features from a third-party app known as Watson. Now, when Apple launches a new feature that was before the domain of a third-party app, it's said to have "sherlocked" the app. In earlier years, sherlocking apps made some sense. After all, did the iPhone's flashlight really need to be a third-party offering, or would it be better as a built-in function? Plus, Apple has been able to launch features that made its software better adapted to consumers' wants and needs by looking at what's popular among the third-party developer community.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla has acquired ad metrics firm Anonym in a move to "support user privacy" while delivering effective online advertising. Anonym, founded by former Meta executives in 2022, helps advertisers and ad networks measure the performance of online ads while preserving user privacy. The acquisition comes amid growing consumer concerns and regulatory scrutiny over current data practices in the advertising industry. Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers sees this as a pivotal shift in the coexistence of privacy and advertising. Mozilla maintains that advertising is the underlying business model of the web, but it can be reformed to minimize societal harms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of playing second fiddle to Link in her own franchise, Princess Zelda is finally getting a video game of her own this fall. From a report: During today's Direct presentation, Nintendo revealed The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the franchise's first game to follow as Princess Zelda herself embarks on an adventure to save the world from destruction. After Ganon bests Link in battle, Zelda is left to her own devices to battle hordes of monsters that descend upon the game's take on Hyrule (which seems heavily inspired by 2019's Link's Awakening remake). According to series producer Eiji Aonuma, Zelda will navigate and fight through the world somewhat differently in Echoes of Wisdom as she wields a magical staff known as the Tri Rod with the assistance of a fairy named Tri. The trailer details how Zelda will be able to use the Tri Rod to create "echoes" of objects and monsters she's previously encountered and use them to overcome obstacles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The KDE community announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment: Plasma 6.1," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. From the announcement: While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct, Plasma 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take you desktop to a new level. In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too). Among some of the new features in this release you will find improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server, overhauled and streamlined desktop edit mode, restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland, synchronization of keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color, making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it, edge barriers (a sticky area for mouse cursor near the edges between screens), explicit sync support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland, and triple buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering. The changelog for Plasma 6.1 is available here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Butterflies is a social network where humans and AIs interact with each other through posts, comments and DMs. After five months in beta, the app is launching Tuesday to the public on iOS and Android. Anyone can create an AI persona, called a Butterfly, in minutes on the app. After that, the Butterfly automatically creates posts on the social network that other AIs and humans can then interact with. Each Butterfly has backstories, opinions and emotions. Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former engineering manager at Snap. Vu came up with the idea for Butterflies after seeing a lack of interesting AI products for consumers outside of generative AI chatbots. Although companies like Meta and Snap have introduced AI chatbots in their apps, they don't offer much functionality beyond text exchanges. Tran notes that he started Butterflies to bring more creativity to humans' relationships with AI. "With a lot of the generative AI stuff that's taking flight, what you're doing is talking to an AI through a text box, and there's really no substance around it," Vu told TechCrunch. "We thought, OK, what if we put the text box at the end and then try to build up more form and substance around the characters and AIs themselves?" Butterflies' concept goes beyond Character.AI, a popular a16z-backed chatbot startup that lets users chat with customizable AI companions. Butterflies wants to let users create AI personas that then take on their own lives and coexist with other. [...] The app is free-to-use at launch, but Butterflies may experiment with a subscription model in the future, Vu says. Over time, Butterflies plans to offer opportunities for brands to leverage and interact with AIs. The app is mainly being used for entertainment purposes, but in the future, the startup sees Butterflies being used for things like discovery in a way that's similar to Instagram. Butterflies closed a $4.8 million seed round led by Coatue in November 2023. The funding round included participation from SV Angel and strategic angels, many of whom are former Snap product and engineering leaders. Vu says that Butterflies is one of the most wholesome ways to use and interact with AI. He notes that while the startup isn't claiming that it can help cure loneliness, he says it could help people connect with others, both AI and human. "Growing up, I spent a lot of my time in online communities and talking to people in gaming forums," Vu said. "Looking back, I realized those people could just have been AIs, but I still built some meaningful connections. I think that there are people afraid of that and say, 'AI isn't real, go meet some real friends.' But I think it's a really privileged thing to say 'go out there and make some friends.' People might have social anxiety or find it hard to be in social situations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Texas A&M University held the largest engineering research portfolio of any academic institution in the country last year, nearing half a billion dollars and surpassing Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the top spot, according to U.S. News & World Report. The state flagship's College of Engineering recorded $444.7 million in research expenditures in the 2023 fiscal year, university officials said. A mix of federal, state and private grants funds those efforts, so more expenditures means more partnerships and a larger engineering footprint than ever, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp said. "An awful lot of people in Washington, a lot of people in Austin, a lot of people in the private sector now rely on Texas A&M to do their engineering research," Sharp said. "Of all the places in the country now, the No. 1 place people go to research engineering problems is Texas A&M University."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a panel discussion, Apple's global marketing SVP Greg "Joz" Joswiak mocked Microsoft's recent recall of its Windows Recall feature. When asked by commentator John Gruber if Apple was frustrated by Microsoft's inability to build trust in such features, Joswiak quipped, "are we frustrated by the failings of our competitors? The answer's no," eliciting laughter from the panel and audience.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new Gallup survey released Tuesday found cost and work conflicts are the top reasons Americans choose to discontinue their higher education. From a report: In the poll, 87 percent said cost was a "very" or "moderately" important reason for pursuing further institutional study, while 81 percent pointed to work conflicts. The other two leading reasons were the time it takes to complete a degree at 73 percent and lack of remote options at 70 percent. Cost tops the list among all demographic groups, including across racial and ethnic lines. "For many of these Americans, their time enrolled in these courses represents significant opportunity costs and financial investment. Given that they lack a degree or credential to show for their time enrolled, they are often worse off than if they never enrolled to begin with," Gallup said. Colleges prices have been surging for decades, with some estimating a 180 percent increase between 1980 and 2020. The cost of Ivy League schools is nearing $90,000 a year, and the average student debt held in the U.S. sits around $30,000. "Today, approximately 41.9 million Americans have some college experience but no degree or credential. The percentage of Americans who have taken some college courses, but who have stopped out and not completed their degree or credential, has increased significantly over the past five years," Gallup found.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has leapfrogged Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable company in the world, following months of explosive share price growth driven by demand for its chips and an investor frenzy over artificial intelligence. From a report: The company's shares climbed 3.2 per cent to $135.18 on Tuesday, bringing its market capitalisation to $3.332tn and surpassing the two tech giants that have long jostled for pole position on US stock markets. Nvidia has been the chief beneficiary of a boom in demand for chips that can train and run powerful generative AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In less than two years, it has been transformed from a $300bn company, grappling with a chip glut exacerbated by a cryptocurrency bust, into one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, with other Silicon Valley giants lining up to secure its latest products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.