Amazon's Audible will begin inviting a select group of US-based audiobook narrators to train AI on their voices, the clones of which can then be used to make audiobook recordings. From a report: The effort, which kicks off next week, is designed to add more audiobooks to the service, quickly and cheaply -- and to welcome traditional narrators into the evolving world of audiobook automation which, to date, many have regarded warily. Last year, Audible began offering US-based, self-published authors who make their books available on the Kindle Store the option of having their works narrated by a generic "virtual voice." The initiative has been popular. As of May, more than 40,000 books in Audible were marked as having made use of the technology. Under the new arrangement, rather than limiting the audio work entirely to company-owned synthetic voices, Audible will be encouraging professional narrators to get in on the action.

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"Six years after sailing out of San Francisco with the ambition of developing the technology to rid the world's oceans of plastic, The Ocean Cleanup returned to San Francisco with the knowledge and know-how to relegate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the history books," according to a new announcement from the group. As the Los Angeles Time describes it, "After three years extracting plastic waste from the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an environmental nonprofit says it can finish the job within a decade..." Twice the size of Texas, the mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii is growing at an exponential pace, according to researchers. At current levels, the cleanup would take a decade with a price tag of $7.5 billion, the Netherlands-based Ocean Cleanup said in a press release, announcing the group's intention to eliminate the garbage patch entirely. However, computer models suggest a more aggressive approach could complete the job in just five years and cost $4 billion. The cleanup vessels deploy enormous u-shaped floating barriers to funnel trash toward a focal point where it can then be loaded aboard and brought to shore... In their three years at sea, the Ocean Cleanup vessels have removed more than a million pounds of trash, representing 0.5% of the total accumulation. "We have shown the world that the impossible is now possible. The only missing thing is who will ensure this job gets done," said Boyan Slat, founder and chief executive of the Ocean Cleanup. Project founder Boyan Slat said in their statement that "Today's announcement is clear: clean oceans can be achieved in a manageable time and for a clear cost. "Through the hard work of the past 10 years, humanity has the tools needed to clean up the ocean. We have shown the world that the impossible is now possible... [F]or the first time, we can tell the world what it costs, what is needed and how long it could take. It is time for action." Next year the group will take "a one-year operational hiatus," according to the announcement — to deploy a new initiative mapping areas of intense plastic accumulation to make extractions "more impactful."

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U.S. Justice Department officials "are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming weapons into illegal homemade machine guns," reports the Associated Press: "Law enforcement cannot do this alone," [U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Friday] during a gathering in Washington of federal law enforcement officials, members of the 3D-printing industry and academia. "We need to engage software developers, technology experts and leaders in the 3-D-printing industry to identify solutions in this fight...." Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a sweet sixteen party in Alabama last year... Monaco on Friday also announced several other efforts designed to crack down on the devices, including a national training initiative for law enforcement and prosecutors. The deputy attorney general is also launching a committee designed to help spot trends and gather intelligence.

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Workers get the right to request a four-day workweek under a new proposal by the U.K. government. But a professor of economics at the University of Leeds argues "There remain problems, however" — starting with the fact that "under current laws, employers can still resist the requests of workers, if they want to." There is also the problem of unevenness in the effect of the law. While workers in well-paid jobs have bargaining leverage to assert their legal rights, others in lower-paid jobs face minimal protection and risk direct exploitation... [A]dvancing the case for a four-day working week is likely to be more difficult if it is seen as benefiting only one section of society (one that already enjoys strong rights and privileges).... Another problem is the scope for compressed hours — working a five-day week of around 40 hours in four days. Under the new proposal, workers requesting and getting a four-day working week will still be required to put in the same hours. Longer work days may be welcomed by some — for example, they may cut down on childcare costs. But they risk undermining the benefits of a shorter working week. Indeed, they may threaten the health of workers by creating heavier work days which they need longer to recover from. At worst, a three-day weekend may be needed to recover from a four-day working week with longer days. While a four-day work week could improve the quality of life and help address climate change, the analysis argues that the government's proposal ultimately raises issues about the "purpose and potential" of a four-day working week, possibly suggesting other policy changes that may also be needed. "It is important that low wages are addressed alongside work-time reduction." "If the government is serious about achieving a four-day working week to raise productivity and improve employee wellbeing, it needs to encourage trials in the public sector... " "The government also needs to target a future date, say 2040, for the realisation of a four-day working week. This could be facilitated by establishing a partnership of unions and employers to identify barriers to a four-day working week and ways to overcome them."

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"The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years," Elon Musk posted on X.com this weekend. Musk said the launches will happen when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens, which the science blog NextBigFuture identifies as "about November through December 2026." Musk noted that the 2026 missions "will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars," but "If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years." "Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet."

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Security engineer Bryan Hance co-founded the nonprofit Bike Index, back in 2013, reports the Los Angeles Times, "where cyclists can register their bikes and contact information, making it easier to reunite lost or stolen bikes with their owners." It now holds descriptions and serial numbers of about 1.3 million bikes worldwide. "But in spring 2020, Hance was tipped to something new: Scores of high-end bikes that matched the descriptions of bikes reported stolen from locations across the Bay Area were turning up for sale on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram pages attached to someone in Mexico, thousands of miles away..." The Facebook page he first spotted disappeared, replaced by pages that were blocked to U.S. computers; Hance managed to get in anyway, thanks to creative use of a VPN. He started reaching out to the owners whose stolen bikes he suspected he was seeing for sale. "Can you tell me a little bit about how your bike was stolen," he would ask. Often, the methods were sophisticated and selective. Thieves would break into a bicycle room at an apartment complex with a specialized saw and leave minutes later with only the fanciest mountain bikes... Over time, he spoke to more than a dozen [police] officers in jurisdictions across the Bay Area, including Alameda, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties... [H]ere was Hance, telling officers that he believed he had located a stolen bike, in Mexico. "That's gone," the officer would inform him. Or, one time, according to Hance: "We're not Interpol." Hance also tried to get Meta to do something. After all, he had identified what could be hundreds of stolen bikes being sold on its platforms, valued, he estimated, at well over $2 million. He said he got nowhere... [Hance] believed he'd figured out the identity of the seller in Jalisco, and was monitoring that person's personal social media accounts. In early 2021, he had spotted something that might break open the case: the name of a person who was sending the Jalisco seller photos of bikes that matched descriptions of those reported stolen by Bay Area cyclists. Hance theorized that person could be a fence who was collecting stolen bikes on this side of the border and sending photos to Jalisco so they could be posted for sale. Hance hunted through the Jalisco seller's Facebook friends until he found the name there: Victor Romero, of San Jose. More sleuthing revealed that a man by the name of Victor Romero ran an auto shop in San Jose, and, judging by his own Facebook photos, was an avid mountain biker. There was something else: Romero's auto shop in San Jose had distinctive orange shelves. One photo of a bike listed for sale on the Jalisco seller's site had similar orange shelves in the backdrop. Hance contacted a San Francisco police detective who had seemed interested in what he was doing. Check out this guy's auto shop, he advised. San Francisco police raided Romero in the spring of 2021. They found more than $200,000 in cash, according to a federal indictment, along with screenshots from his phone they said showed Romero's proceeds from trafficking in stolen bikes. They also found a Kona Process 153 mountain bike valued at about $4,700 that had been reported stolen from an apartment garage in San Francisco, according to the indictment. It had been disassembled and packaged for shipment to Jalisco. In January, a federal grand jury indicted Victoriano Romero on felony conspiracy charges for his alleged role in a scheme to purchase high-end stolen bicycles from thieves across the Bay Area and transport them to Mexico for resale. But bikes continue to be stolen, and "The guy is still operating," Hance told the Los Angeles Times. "We could do the whole thing again."

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Alorica — which runs customer-service centers around the world — has introduced an AI translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers in 200 different languages. But according to the Associated Press, "Alorica isn't cutting jobs. It's still hiring aggressively." The experience at Alorica — and at other companies, including furniture retailer IKEA — suggests that AI may not prove to be the job killer that many people fear. Instead, the technology might turn out to be more like breakthroughs of the past — the steam engine, electricity, the internet: That is, eliminate some jobs while creating others. And probably making workers more productive in general, to the eventual benefit of themselves, their employers and the economy. Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said he thinks AI "will affect many, many jobs — maybe every job indirectly to some extent. But I don't think it's going to lead to, say, mass unemployment.... " [T]he widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn't becoming reality in any widespread way — not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found "little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.'' The advisers noted that history shows technology typically makes companies more productive, speeding economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways... The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI. "I don't think we've started seeing companies saying they've saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,'' said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm's sales team. "That may come in the future. But it hasn't played out yet.'' At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to some categories of jobs isn't unfounded. Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a uproar last year by boasting that he had replaced 90% of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina. The move at Shah's company, Dukaan, which helps customers set up e-commerce sites, shrank the response time to an inquiry from 1 minute, 44 seconds to "instant." It also cut the typical time needed to resolve problems from more than two hours to just over three minutes. "It's all about AI's ability to handle complex queries with precision,'' Shah said by email. The cost of providing customer support, he said, fell by 85%.... Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London's Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists tumbled within eight months of the arrival of ChatGPT. On the other hand, after Ikea introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries, it didn't result in massive layoffs according to the article. Instead Ikea ended up retraining 8,500 customer-service workers to handle other tasks like advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.

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This week after striking for over a month, videogame performers reached agreements with 80 games this week, reports the Associated Press. "SAG-AFTRA announced the agreements with the 80 individual video games on Thursday. Performers impacted by the work stoppage can now work on those projects. "The strike against other major video game publishers, including Disney and Warner Bros.' game companies and Electronic Arts Productions Inc., will continue." The interim agreement secures wage improvements, protections around "exploitative uses" of artificial intelligence and safety precautions that account for the strain of physical performances, as well as vocal stress. The tiered budget agreement aims to make working with union talent more feasible for independent game developers or smaller-budget projects while also providing performers the protections under the interim agreement. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator, said in a statement that companies signing the agreements are "helping to preserve the human art, ingenuity and creativity that fuels interactive storytelling." "These agreements signal that the video game companies in the collective bargaining group do not represent the will of the larger video game industry," Crabtree-Ireland continued. "The many companies that are happy to agree to our AI terms prove that these terms are not only reasonable, but feasible and sustainable for businesses." Deadline calls the agreement "a blow for major developers." As Deadline previously reported, AI is the one and only issue at the crux of this strike, as the union has managed to find common ground with the developers on every other provision. More specifically, the union has said that the sticking point in these negotiations is encompassing all performers in any AI provisions, without loopholes related to whether an actors' likeness is recognizable. In video games, similar to other forms of animated content, motion capture performers and voice actors are often performing as creatures or other non-human characters that make their voice and likeness unrecognizable.

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"Solar farms could blanket millions of acres in the United States over the coming decades," writes the New York Times. But "the sites that capture that energy take up land that wildlife needs to survive and thrive." "We have to address both challenges at the same exact time," said Rebecca Hernandez, a professor of ecology at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on how to do just that. Insects, those small animals that play a mighty role in supporting life on Earth, are facing alarming declines. Solar farms can offer them food and shelter by providing a diverse mix of native plants. Such plants can also decrease erosion, nourish the soil and store planet-warming carbon. They can also attract insects that improve pollination of nearby crops... On a recent morning at the solar meadow in Ramsey, it was time to count insects... In solar pollinator habitat, Minnesota was an early leader among states. Since 2017, funded by the Department of Energy, Lee Walston [a landscape ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory] has been studying sites there and throughout the Midwest. "If you build it, will they come?" he asks in his research. So far, the answer is a resounding yes, if you grow the right plants. In a study published late last year, his team found that insect abundance had tripled over five years on test plots at two other Minnesota solar sites. The abundance of native bees grew twentyfold. The results come amid a global decline of wildlife that leaders are struggling to address. Some of the most well-known insect species are in trouble: Later this year, the federal government is expected to rule on whether to place monarch butterflies on the Endangered Species List. North American birds, for their part, are down almost 30% since 1970. But at this site, called Anoka County Solar, acoustic monitoring has documented 73 species of birds, presumably attracted by the buffet of seeds and insects. Some build nests in the structures supporting the panels. Mammals are showing up, too... What makes this meadow possible is the height of the panels. A prairie restoration firm had told ENGIE, the owner and developer, that taller panels would allow for a sharp increase in native vegetation species, providing much more ecological diversity, said John Gantner, the director of engineering and delivery for ENGIE's smaller-scale sites. The price of the additional steel and the native seeds were "insignificant to the overall project cost," Gantner said. Over the life of the project, ENGIE has found, pollinator-friendly landscaping actually saves money because it needs far less mowing... Nationwide, it's unclear what portion of solar farms include any kind of pollinator habitat. The federal project that Walston is part of has a running rough count of just under 24,000 acres. That's compared with about 600,000 acres of currently operating large-scale sites across the country, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, with a sharp increase expected over the next couple decades. The article adds that it also helps develoipers get their projects approved "at a time when communities are increasingly wary of vast solar farms. Developers are taking note..." Others have also suggested "agrivoltaics" — where farming land is also used for generating renewable energy.

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A schoolteacher using an interactive whiteboard is surprised by an alert. Their school is in "hard lockdown." They knew — instantly — something was about to happen, and "got everybody into a corner," they later told CNN. Classroom doors at the school are always locked, so they then "turned off the lights. And just kind of held everyone nice and tight, and just said, 'Wait for everything to happen, everything to pass.'" The school was Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, where on Wednesday 11 students were shot and two killed. Two schoolteachers were also killed. But according to CNN, social studies teacher Stephen Kreyenbuhl "said the school's new alert system bought him critical time to prepare and protect his students before a shooter opened fire just down the hall..." The CrisisAlert system, designed by Centegix, includes a device the size of an ID badge. It's equipped with a button that, when pressed rapidly, can quietly notify administrators and local law enforcement to the exact location of an active emergency. The company works with school districts and law enforcement agencies to integrate the system into their current safety procedures and automate as much as possible. Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told CNN Apalachee High School had the system for less than a week and had tested it for the first time only the day before the shooting... Brent Cobb, the company's CEO, told CNN in an interview earlier this year that their CrisisAlert technology was designed following the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida to give teachers and administrators a fast and discreet way to call for help.... "[Y]ou need everyone to know immediately" that a crisis is taking place. Once a lockdown is activated, the CrisisAlert system is designed to trigger a series of responses: Pre-recorded warnings sound over the intercom system to alert the entire campus to the lockdown, while on-site safety administrators, like school resource officers [a law-enforcement officer with arrest powers, usually armed], are notified of the location of the incident. Cobb told CNN in some school districts the system is also integrated with local law enforcement agencies and can automatically call 911 and send messages to officers of the exact location of the incident. This is what happened in Barrow County. The goal, he said, is to help decrease police response times, an issue that has come under scrutiny in recent years following the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where it took officers 77 minutes to adequately respond to a shooter. In an exclusive interview with CNN Thursday, Smith scrolled through the series of alerts and the detailed map his officers received to guide them to where the shooting was happening... [Social studies teacher] Kreyenbuhl said he is grateful the district implemented a system that enabled him to protect his students. "I actually saw the lockdown initiate before I even heard the gunshots, so I had time to prepare," he said.... "It's insane the technology we have access to."

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The Wall Street Journal writes that Telegram "has become the premier internet platform to buy everything from hacked data and weapons to illicit drugs and child sexual abuse material, according to current and former law-enforcement officials and cybercrime researchers..." And it's also being used by identity thieves: There are thousands of channels and groups on Telegram that offer stolen identities that can be used to open bank and investment accounts. Some claim to offer already created bank accounts created with stolen details. A channel called Bank Store Online listed accounts at over 60 banks and cryptocurrency exchanges for sale, ranging from $80 for a personal account to $1,800 for a business one. Payments were charged in crypto... There are thousands of channels and groups on Telegram that offer stolen identities that can be used to open bank and investment accounts. Some claim to offer already created bank accounts created with stolen details. A channel called Bank Store Online listed accounts at over 60 banks and cryptocurrency exchanges for sale, ranging from $80 for a personal account to $1,800 for a business one. Payments were charged in crypto. In Russia, where Durov launched Telegram in 2013, it is also the go-to platform where middlemen arrange deals that get around U.S. sanctions, such as smuggling in weapons parts, the Journal previously reported. Several groups advertise the sale of drones and Starlinks — small antennas to access the satellite internet network run by Elon Musk's SpaceX — to Russian combat units in Ukraine. In February, Musk tweeted that no Starlinks had been directly or indirectly sold to Russia, to the best of the company's knowledge. "It's ground zero for every illicit activity you can think of," said Evan Kohlmann, founder of Cloudburst Technologies, which monitors cybercrime on Telegram and elsewhere, and a frequent adviser to U.S. agencies.

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"If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations..." writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But "We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there's a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence..." From 6.2 onwards, Plasma itself will show a system notification asking for a donation once per year, in December. The idea here is to get the message that KDE really does need your financial help in front of more eyeballs — especially eyeballs not currently looking at KDE's public-facing promotion efforts... [W]e tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings' Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification's header. Ultimately the decision to do this came down to the following factors: — We looked at FOSS peers like Thunderbird and Wikipedia which have similar things (and in Wikipedia's case, the message is vastly more intrusive and naggy). In both cases, it didn't drive everyone away and instead instead resulted in a massive increase in donations that the projects have been able to use to employ lots of people. - KDE really needs something like this to help our finances grow sustainably in line with our userbase and adoption by vendors and distributors. The blog post also answers the question: what are you going to do with all that money? This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively. But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer and the one that as your representative, I'd advocate for. It's basically the platform I ran on two years ago: extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more! I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers. I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness. These have been dreams for a long time, and throughout KDE we've been slowly moving towards them over the years. With a lot more money, we can turbocharge the pace! If that stuff sounds good, you can start with a donation today. A reaction from GamingOnLinux: I think it is fair for KDE to expose that they need funding and asking that from inside the UI would not hurt for a software that delivered so much for free (as in freedom and as in "gratis"). Linux magazine points out that other new features for 6.2 "include the ability to block apps from inhibiting sleep mode, a new 'fill' mode for wallpaper, an overhauled System Settings Accessibility page, and the usual slew of bug fixes."

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"China is on track to launch its Tianwen-3 mission to Mars in 2028, two years earlier than previously planned," writes the South China Morning Post, a change that one space policy research believes "suggests a rising confidence by China in its ability to get the technology right for the complex operation." On Thursday, Liu Jizhong, chief designer of China's Mars mission, told the Second International Conference on Deep Space Exploration in Huangshan, Anhui province, that the team aimed to bring back around 600 grams (21 oz) of Martian soil... A 2028 launch date should see Martian samples returned to Earth around July 2031, according to a previous presentation made by Tianwen-1 mission lead Sun Zezhou at Nanjing University in 2022. The mission will actually consist of two launches from Earth, reports Space News: Two Long March 5 rocket launches will carry a lander and ascent vehicle and an orbiter and return module respectively. Entry, descent and landing will build on technology used for the Tianwen-1 rover landing. The mission may also include a helicopter and a six-legged crawling robot for collecting samples away from the landing site... NASA is working on its own, more complex Mars sample return mission. However the program is being reassessed, following projected cost overruns. Studies are being conducted to identify concepts that can deliver samples faster and cheaper than current plans. Liu stated that the search for evidence of life is the Tianwen-3's top scientific goal, according to state media China Central Television (CCTV). Earlier reporting notes that potential landing areas will be selected based partly on astrobiological relevance. This includes environments potentially suitable for the emergence of life and its preservation, such as sedimentary or hydrothermal systems, evidence of past aqueous activity and geological diversity. "China states that it plans to work with scientists worldwide to cooperatively study and share Martian samples and data," according to the article: The China National Space Administration has made samples from its Chang'e-5 lunar nearside sample return mission available to research applications for international researchers. The same is expected for the recently-completed Chang'e-6 lunar farside mission." Further ahead, Tianwen-3 will include partnering with countries and research institutions to define the objectives and tasks of a future Mars research station. This will include analyzing requirements, conducting conceptual studies, design implementation plans, and tackling key technological challenges. Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the news.

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Wired interviews America's foreign policy chief, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about U.S. digital polices, starting with a new "cybersecurity bureau" created in 2022 (which Wired previously reported includes "a crash course in cybersecurity, telecommunications, privacy, surveillance, and other digital issues.") Look, what I've seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is increasingly central to our foreign policy. There's almost a perfect storm that's come together over the last few years, several major developments that have really brought this to the forefront of what we're doing and what we need to do. First, we have a new generation of foundational technologies that are literally changing the world all at the same time — whether it's AI, quantum, microelectronics, biotech, telecommunications. They're having a profound impact, and increasingly they're converging and feeding off of each other. Second, we're seeing that the line between the digital and physical worlds is evaporating, erasing. We have cars, ports, hospitals that are, in effect, huge data centers. They're big vulnerabilities. At the same time, we have increasingly rare materials that are critical to technology and fragile supply chains. In each of these areas, the State Department is taking action. We have to look at everything in terms of "stacks" — the hardware, the software, the talent, and the norms, the rules, the standards by which this technology is used. Besides setting up an entire new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy — and the bureaus are really the building blocks in our department — we've now trained more than 200 cybersecurity and digital officers, people who are genuinely expert. Every one of our embassies around the world will have at least one person who is truly fluent in tech and digital policy. My goal is to make sure that across the entire department we have basic literacy — ideally fluency — and even, eventually, mastery. All of this to make sure that, as I said, this department is fit for purpose across the entire information and digital space. Wired notes it was Blinken's Department that discovered China's 2023 breach of Microsoft systems. And on the emerging issue of AI, Blinken cites "incredible work done by the White House to develop basic principles with the foundational companies." The voluntary commitments that they made, the State Department has worked to internationalize those commitments. We have a G7 code of conduct — the leading democratic economies in the world — all agreeing to basic principles with a focus on safety. We managed to get the very first resolution ever on artificial intelligence through the United Nations General Assembly — 192 countries also signing up to basic principles on safety and a focus on using AI to advance sustainable development goals on things like health, education, climate. We also have more than 50 countries that have signed on to basic principles on the responsible military use of AI. The goal here is not to have a world that is bifurcated in any way. It's to try to bring everyone together.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Britain's competition watchdog on Friday issued a statement of objections over Google's ad tech practices, which the regulator provisionally found are impacting competition in the U.K. In a statement, the Competition and Markets Authority alleged that the U.S. internet search titan "has harmed competition by using its dominance in online display advertising to favour its own ad tech services." The "vast majority" of the U.K.'s thousands of publishers and advertisers use Google's technology in order to bid for and sell space to display ads in a market where players were spending £1.8 billion annually as of a 2019 study, according to the CMA. The regulator added that it is also "concerned that Google is actively using its dominance in this sector to preference its own services." So-called "self-preferencing" of services by technology giants is a key concern for regulators scrutinizing these companies. The CMA further noted that Google disadvantages ad technology competitors, preventing them from competing on a "level playing field...." In the CMA's decision Friday, the watchdog said that, since 2015, Google has abused its dominant position as the operator of both ad buying tools "Google Ads" and "DV360," and of a publisher ad server known as "DoubleClick For Publishers," in order to strengthen the market position of its advertising exchange, AdX... AdX, on which Google charges its highest fees to advertisers, is the "centre of the ad tech stack" for the company, the CMA said, with Google taking roughly 20% of the amount for each bid that's processed on its platform.

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The Register reports that Google "recently rewrote the firmware for protected virtual machines in its Android Virtualization Framework using the Rust programming language." And they add that Google "wants you to do the same, assuming you deal with firmware." A post on Google's security blog by Android engineers Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier promises to show "how to gradually introduce Rust into your existing firmware," adding "You'll see how easy it is to boost security with drop-in Rust replacements, and we'll even demonstrate how the Rust toolchain can handle specialized bare-metal targets." This prompts the Register to quip that easy "is not a term commonly heard with regard to a programming language known for its steep learning curve." Citing the lack of high-level security mechanisms in firmware, which is often written in memory-unsafe languages such as C or C++, Lozano and Maier argue that Rust provides a way to avoid the memory safety bugs like buffer overflows and use-after-free that account for the majority of significant vulnerabilities in large codebases. "Rust provides a memory-safe alternative to C and C++ with comparable performance and code size," they note. "Additionally it supports interoperability with C with no overhead." At one point the blog post explains that "You can replace existing C functionality by writing a thin Rust shim that translates between an existing Rust API and the C API the codebase expects." But their ultimate motivation is greater security. "Android's use of safe-by-design principles drives our adoption of memory-safe languages like Rust, making exploitation of the OS increasingly difficult with every release." And the Register also got this quote from Lars Bergstrom, Google's director of engineering for Android Programming Languages (and chair of the Rust Foundation's board of directors). "At Google, we're increasing Rust's use across Android, Chromium, and more to reduce memory safety vulnerabilities. We're dedicated to collaborating with the Rust ecosystem to drive its adoption and provide developers with the resources and training they need to succeed. "This work on bringing Rust to embedded and firmware addresses another critical part of the stack."

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Harvard's school of public policy is publishing a Misinformation Review for peer-reviewed, scholarly articles promising "reliable, unbiased research on the prevalence, diffusion, and impact of misinformation worldwide." This week it reported that "Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI." They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing. The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society's evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern... [T]he abundance of fabricated "studies" seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks. "Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon..." the article points out. "Google Scholar's central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking..."

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Digital rights activists want device manufacturers to disclose a "guaranteed minimum support time" for devices — and federal regulations ensuring a product's core functionality will work even after its software updates stop. Influential groups including Consumer Reports, EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, iFixit, and U.S. Pirg have now signed a letter to the head of America's Consumer Protection bureau (at the Federal Trade Commision), reports The Register: In an eight-page letter to the Commission (FTC), the activists mentioned the Google/Levis collaboration on a denim jacket that contained sensors enabling it to control an Android device through a special app. When the app was discontinued in 2023, the jacket lost that functionality. The letter also mentions the "Car Thing," an automotive infotainment device created by Spotify, which bricked the device fewer than two years after launch and didn't offer a refund... Environmental groups and computer repair shops also signed the letter... "Consumers need a clear standard for what to expect when purchasing a connected device," stated Justin Brookman, director of technology policy at Consumer Reports and a former policy director of the FTC's Office of Technology, Research, and Investigation. "Too often, consumers are left with devices that stop functioning because companies decide to end support without little to no warning. This leaves people stranded with devices they once relied on, unable to access features or updates...." Brookman told The Register that he believes this is the first such policy request to the FTC that asks the agency to help consumers with this dilemma. "I'm not aware of a previous effort from public interest groups to get the FTC to take action on this issue — it's still a relatively new issue with no clear established norms," he wrote in an email. "But it has certainly become an issue" that comes up more and more with device makers as they change their rules about product updates and usage. "Both switching features to a subscription and 'bricking' a connected device purchased by a consumer in many cases are unfair and deceptive practices," the groups write, arguing that the practices "infringe on a consumer's right to own the products they buy." They're requesting clear "guidance" for manufacturers from the U.S. government. The FTC has a number of tools at its disposal to help establish standards for IoT device support. While a formal rulemaking is one possibility, the FTC also has the ability to issue more informal guidance, such as its Endorsement Guides12 and Dot Com Disclosures.13 We believe the agency should set norms... The groups are also urging the FTC to: Encourage tools and methods that enable reuse if software support ends. Conduct an educational program to encourage manufacturers to build longevity into the design of their products. Protect "adversarial interoperability"... when a competitor or third-party creates a reuse or modification tool [that] adds to or converts the old device. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the article.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education" recounts an experiment Eric Klopfer conducted in his undergrad CS class at MIT. He divided the class into three groups and gave them a programming task to solve in the Fortran language, which none of them knew. Reminiscent of how The Three Little Pigs used straw, sticks, and bricks to build their houses with very different results, Klopfer allowed one group to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, while the second group was told to use Meta's Code Llama LLM, and the third group could only use Google. The group that used ChatGPT, predictably, solved the problem quickest, while it took the second group longer to solve it. It took the group using Google even longer, because they had to break the task down into components. Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem from memory, and the tables turned. The ChatGPT group "remembered nothing, and they all failed," recalled Klopfer. Meanwhile, half of the Code Llama group passed the test. The group that used Google? Every student passed. "This is an important educational lesson," said Klopfer. "Working hard and struggling is actually an important way of learning. When you're given an answer, you're not struggling and you're not learning. And when you get more of a complex problem, it's tedious to go back to the beginning of a large language model and troubleshoot it and integrate it." In contrast, breaking the problem into components allows you to use an LLM to work on small aspects, as opposed to trying to use the model for an entire project, he says. "These skills, of how to break down the problem, are critical to learn."

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Long-time FOSS-watcher Bruce Byfield writes that while people "still dream of a completely free alternative, increasingly the emphasis in FOSS seems to be on accepting coexistence with proprietary software." Many, too, have always preferred the permissive BSD licenses, which permits combining FOSS and proprietary software. From some perspectives, Debian's newest [non-free firmware] repository or Nobara's popularity [a Fedora-based distro but with proprietary drivers and gaming applications] is simply an admission of the true state of affairs... On the other hand, the FOSS philosophy may be weakened because it no longer has a strong advocate. Sixteen years ago, the FSF reached a peak of authority in the discussions of 2006-2007 about the structure of GPLv3 — then immediately lost that authority by not reaching a consensus. That was followed by the cancellation of Richard Stallman in 2017, which, deserved or not, had the side effect of silencing free software's most influential representative. Today the FSF that Stallman led continues to function, with Stallman returned to the board of directors, but its actions go unreported, and it seems to speak to a much smaller group of loyalists. The Linux Foundation, with its corporate emphasis, is not an adequate substitution. In these circumstances, there is reason to wonder whether FOSS has lost its way. While the issue has yet to reach the mainstream, Bruce Perens, one of the coiners of the term "open source" in 1998, is already trying to describe what he calls the Post-Open Source era. Not only does Perens believe that FOSS licenses no longer fulfill their original purpose, but they no longer inform or benefit the average user. According to Perens, "Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source, they don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them." As a remedy, Perens proposes that licenses should be replaced by contracts. He envisions that companies pay for the benefits they receive from using FOSS. Compliance for each contract would be checked, renewed, and paid for yearly, and the payments would go towards funding FOSS development. Individuals and nonprofits would continue to use FOSS for free. In March 2024, Perens posted a draft Post-Open license. The draft includes a description of the contract-related files to be shipped with FOSS software, a description of the status of derivative works, how revenue is collected, and conditions of termination. The draft has yet to be reviewed by a lawyer, but what is immediately noticeable is how it draws on both contract language and FOSS licenses to produce something different. Byfield concludes that "free licenses are straining to respond to loopholes, and a discussion needs to be had about whether they are adequate to modern pressures."

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