GM's president of global markets says their EV portfolio "is growing faster than the market," according to Investopedia, "because we have an all-electric vehicle for just about everybody, no matter what they like to drive." The headline at Barrons? "Don't Look Now, but GM's EV Sales Are on Fire." GM delivered almost 32,000 all-electric vehicles in the third quarter — a record — and up about 58% from a year earlier. The more affordable Chevy Equinox, which starts at about $35,000 before any federal tax credit, helped boost sales. GM delivered almost 10,000 of the new EVs, up from 1,013 in the second quarter, when they first went on sale. EV penetration of total GM car sales was about almost 5%, up almost two percentage points year over year. EVs accounted for 19.4% of Cadillac sales, up about 11 percentage points year over year. Year to date, GM has delivered just over 70,000 all-electric cars. GM originally planned to manufacture 200,000 EVs in 2024. That still looks aggressive, but the strong third-quarter showing makes 120,000 possible, which would be up almost 60% year over year — a respectable outcome. More important to investors than EV sales right now might be dealer inventories. GM said there were about 627,000 vehicles on dealer lots at the end of September. That's a little better than what Wolfe Research analyst Emmanuel Rosner expected. It indicates GM dealers have roughly 60 days worth of sales on their lots. That's a safe level. Lower dealer inventories reduce presure to reduce prices. They also reduce the need to cut production because dealer lots are full... GM expects to generate a full-year operating profit of about $14 billion. Meanwhile, Stellantis "slashed its financial guidance recently, partly because it needs to dramatically reduce its U.S. inventories," according to the article. For example, its Jeep dealers ended August with roughly 122 days worth of sales on their lots, while its Dodge dealers "had almost 150 days of inventory." And Investopedia argues that while GM's EV sales growth is "soaring," Ford's is showing "only modest gains." [W]hile Ford's overall U.S. sales were 0.7% higher at 504,039, it had just a 12% gain in EVs to 23,509.3 In the second quarter, Ford's EV sales had soared 61% to 23,957. Sales growth was more than three times higher for Ford's hybrid models, with President of Ford Blue and Ford Customer Service Division Andrew Frick arguing that the company has "listened to customers to offer them vehicles with powertrains to meet their specific needs." Ford is hoping to boost EV sales by offering buyers a free home charger and installation.

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"AI-driven 0-day detection is here," argues a new blog post from ZeroPath, makers of a GitHub app that "detects, verifies, and issues pull requests for security vulnerabilities in your code." They write that AI-assisted security research "has been quietly advancing" since early 2023, when researchers at the DARPA and ARPA-H's Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge demonstrated the first practical applications of LLM-powered vulnerability detection — with new advances continuing. "Since July 2024, ZeroPath's tool has uncovered critical zero-day vulnerabilities — including remote code execution, authentication bypasses, and insecure direct object references — in popular AI platforms and open-source projects." And they ultimately identified security flaws in projects owned by Netflix, Salesforce, and Hulu by "taking a novel approach combining deep program analysis with adversarial AI agents for validation. Our methodology has uncovered numerous critical vulnerabilities in production systems, including several that traditional Static Application Security Testing tools were ill-equipped to find..." TL;DR — most of these bugs are simple and could have been found with a code review from a security researcher or, in some cases, scanners. The historical issue, however, with automating the discovery of these bugs is that traditional SAST tools rely on pattern matching and predefined rules, and miss complex vulnerabilities that do not fit known patterns (i.e. business logic problems, broken authentication flaws, or non-traditional sinks such as from dependencies). They also generate a high rate of false positives. The beauty of LLMs is that they can reduce ambiguity in most of the situations that caused scanners to be either unusable or produce few findings when mass-scanning open source repositories... To do this well, you need to combine deep program analysis with an adversarial agents that test the plausibility of vulnerabilties at each step. The solution ends up mirroring the traditional phases of a pentest — recon, analysis, exploitation (and remediation which is not mentioned in this post)... AI-driven vulnerability detection is moving fast... What's intriguing is that many of these vulnerabilities are pretty straightforward — they could've been spotted with a solid code review or standard scanning tools. But conventional methods often miss them because they don't fit neatly into known patterns. That's where AI comes in, helping us catch issues that might slip through the cracks. "Many vulnerabilities remain undisclosed due to ongoing remediation efforts or pending responsible disclosure processes," according to the blog post, which includes a pie chart showing the biggest categories of vulnerabilities found: 53%: Authorization flaws, including roken access control in API endpoints and unauthorized Redis access and configuration exposure. ("Impact: Unauthorized access, data leakage, and resource manipulation across tenant boundaries.") 26%: File operation issues, including directory traversal in configuration loading and unsafe file handling in upload features. ("Impact: Unauthorized file access, sensitive data exposure, and potential system compromise.") 16%: Code execution vulnerabilities, including command injection in file processing and unsanitized input in system commands. ("Impact: Remote code execution, system command execution, and potential full system compromise.") The company's CIO/cofounder was "former Red Team at Tesla," according to the startup's profile at YCombinator, and earned over $100,000 as a bug-bounty hunter. (And another co-founded is a former Google security engineer.) Thanks to Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety for sharing the article.

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Former FTX executive Nishad Singh was ordered to forfeit $11 billion, reports CNBC — and is subject to three years of supervised release, making him "the fourth ex-employee of the collapsed crypto exchange to be punished." But while he'd faced a maximum sentence of 75 years, he'll serve no time, according to this report from the Associated Press: Singh, the company's former engineering director, was sentenced in Manhattan by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who said his cooperation was "remarkable." The judge noted that Singh did not learn of the billions of dollars that were misappropriated from FTX customer accounts and investors until two months before the fraud unraveled... Singh, 29, testified a year ago at Bankman-Fried's trial, saying he was "blindsided and horrified" when he saw the extent of the fraud behind the once-celebrated and seemingly pioneering firm. At sentencing, Singh said he was "overwhelmed with remorse" for his role in the fraud. "I strayed so far from my values, and words can't express how sorry I am," he said.... The sentencing came a month after Caroline Ellison, another key witness at Bankman-Fried's trial and a former top executive in his cryptocurrency empire, was sentenced to two years in prison. At the time, Kaplan praised her cooperation but said it wasn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. On Wednesday, Kaplan drew a distinction between the cooperation by Ellison and Singh's work with prosecutors, saying Ellison had participated in the fraud "from the beginning" and had been aware of all the wrongdoing for years... [Defense attorney Andrew Goldstein] said leniency would encourage future cooperators in other criminal cases to come forward. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos credited Singh with providing information within weeks of the fraud being publicly revealed, saying he helped prosecutors learn about crimes they might otherwise have never discovered, including his own. Roos said, for instance, that Singh told prosecutors about campaign finance violations that occurred as FTX executives made tens of millions of dollars in donations to political candidates. The prosecutor also said Singh revealed private conversations with Bankman-Fried that strengthened the government's case and enabled it to bring charges more quickly against multiple people. Singh gave prosecutors "documentary evidence the government did not have and likely never would have had," Roos said. Bankman-Fried, of course, began a 25-year sentence last November. And three weeks ago FTX executive Ryan Salame made an update on his LinkedIn profile. "I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as Inmate at FCI Cumberland!" "His post quickly went viral," notes CNN, "prompting Salame to joke on X: "Today I learned people still use LinkedIn."

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The Washington Post reports that America's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) "is considering legal action against Meta over allegations that it improperly used financial data obtained from third parties in its highly-lucrative advertising business..." The article says a Meta securities filing Thursday revealed it had received a formal notification about the federal investigation last month. The filing said only that the inquiry relates to "advertising for financial products and services on our platform." A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment on the investigation. "We disagree with the claims," the company's filing said, "and believe an enforcement action is unwarranted...." The CFPB's probe underscores its aggressive recent focus on Big Tech. In recent years, major companies including Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have launched a wave of new financial services, including credit cards and apps that help users send money to friends... Under its current director, Rohit Chopra, the CFPB has also sought to ensure that tech giants adhere to the same safeguards that have long applied to their brick-and-mortar banking predecessors. The bureau formalized its tech crackdown in 2021, when Chopra ordered companies including Facebook to turn over records related to their payment apps and other financial service offerings. At the time, he expressed fear that these giants already possessed troves of customer data and could solidify their dominance if they gained greater insight into users' purchasing and spending habits. "This data can be monetized by companies that seek to profit from behavioral targeting, particularly around advertising and e-commerce," Chopra said in a statement announcing the review. "That many Big Tech companies aspire to grow in this space only heightens these concerns." Since then, the watchdog agency has proposed new rules that could treat Apple, Google and PayPal-owned Venmo more like banks, opening the door for federal regulators to inspect some of their operations in a bid to protect users' deposits. The rules, which have not been finalized, have sparked fierce lobbying opposition from major tech companies.

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While Amazon, Google, and other companies build new data centers — sometimes for their AI projects — parts of America "are facing higher electric bills," reports the Washington Post: The facilities' extraordinary demand for electricity to power and cool computers inside can drive up the price local utilities pay for energy and require significant improvements to electric grid transmission systems. As a result, costs have already begun going up for customers — or are about to in the near future, according to utility planning documents and energy industry analysts. Some regulators are concerned that the tech companies aren't paying their fair share, while leaving customers from homeowners to small businesses on the hook. In Oregon, electric utilities are warning regulators that consumers need protections from rising rates caused by data centers. From Virginia to Ohio and South Carolina, companies are battling over the extent of their responsibility for increases, attempting to fend off anger from customers. In the Mid-Atlantic, the regional power grid's energy costs shot up dramatically, and data centers are cited as among root causes of rate increases of up to 20 percent expected in 2025... The tech firms and several of the power companies serving them strongly deny they are burdening others. They say higher utility bills are paying for overdue improvements to the power grid that benefit all customers. In some cases, they said in response to criticism from consumer and business advocates that they are committed to covering additional costs. But regulators — and even some utilities — are growing skeptical. A jarring example of fallout on consumers is playing out on the Mid-Atlantic regional power grid, called PJM Interconnection, which serves 13 states and D.C. The recent auction to secure power for the grid during periods of extreme weather and high demand resulted in an 800 percent jump in the price that the grid's member utilities had to pay. The impact will be felt by millions by the spring, according to public records. Power bills will increase as much as 20 percent for customers of a dozen utilities in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and West Virginia, regulatory filings show. That includes households in the Baltimore area, where annual bills will increase an average of $192, said Maryland People's Counsel David Lapp, a state appointee who monitors utilities. The next auction, in 2025, could be more painful, Lapp said, leaving customers potentially "looking at increases of as much as $40 to $50 a month...." Advocates cite another source of cost-shifting onto consumers: discounted rates that power companies and local government officials use to entice tech companies to build data centers... Google worked out a deal with Dominion Energy, blessed by regulators, to pay 6 cents per kilowatt hour for its power. That is less than half of what residential customers pay, as well as substantially less than is paid by businesses... The article points out that in Pennsylvania, "Amazon's novel plan to fuel a data center from a reactor at the nearby Susquehanna nuclear plant is now in jeopardy, after regulators blocked it Friday. They cited potential impact on consumers as among their concerns. The plan threatens to leave other ratepayers stuck with a bill of $50 million to $140 million, according to testimony from [power utility] AEP and utility conglomerate Exelon." And meanwhile, one Virginia retiree complained about a proposed $54 million transmission line and substation for an Amazon data center. "They are already making money hand over fist, and now they want us to pay for this?

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In 1896 the Dow Jones Industrial Average (or DJIA) was created as a kind of proxy indicator for the wider stock market. "A stock is typically added only if the company has an excellent reputation, demonstrates sustained growth and is of interest to a large number of investors," according to a source cited by Yahoo Finance. Its mix of stocks might be informally considered a sign of the times, since it's made up of 30 stocks that according to Wikipedia have been changed only 57 times over the last 128 years. Wait — make that 58.... CNBC reports that NVIDIA is replacing Intel in the DJIA, "a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in AI and a major shift in the semiconductor industry." Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia's GPUs, such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia's revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is "insane...." While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors. Intel said in a filing this week that the board's audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August." The DJIA will now include four of six tech companies worth $1 trillion — Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Amazon (which joined in February, replacing the owners of the Walgreens pharmacy chain). The other two trillion-dollar tech companies (not included in the DJIA) are Meta and Alphabet. Adding NVIDIA to the DJIA will ensure "more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry" within the average, the index's curators told the Washington Post. And also leaving the DJIA is power-generation company AES (which according to CNBC had a power mix of 54% renewables, 27% natural gas, 17% coal). It will be replaced by Vistra, defined by Wikipedia as America's largest competitive power generator, "with a capacity of approximately 39GW powered by a diverse portfolio including natural gas, nuclear, solar, and battery energy storage facilities." In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Vistra Energy was ranked as the 756th-largest public company in the world. The company owns the Moss Landing Power Plant in California which currently (2021) contains the largest battery energy storage system in the world (400-MW/1,600-MWh). As of 2020, the company was ranked as the highest CO2 emitter in the U.S.

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The free face-image search engine PimEyes "scans through billions of images from the internet and finds matches of your photo that could have appeared in a church bulletin or a wedding photographer's website," -us/news/technology/they-made-a-public-rolodex-of-our-faces-here-s-how-i-tried-to-get-out/ar-AA1tlpPuwrites a Washington Post columnist. So to find and delete themselves from "the PimEyes searchable Rolodex of faces," they "recently handed over a selfie and a digital copy of my driver's license to a company I don't trust." PimEyes says it empowers people to find their online images and try to get unwanted ones taken down. But PimEyes face searches are largely open to anyone with either good or malicious intent. People have used PimEyes to identify participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and creeps have used it to publicize strangers' personal information from just their image. The company offers an opt-out form to remove your face from PimEyes searches. I did it and resented spending time and providing even more personal information to remove myself from the PimEyes repository, which we didn't consent to be part of in the first place. The increasing ease of potentially identifying your name, work history, children's school, home address and other sensitive information from one photo shows the absurdity of America's largely unrestrained data-harvesting economy. While PimEyes' CEO said they don't keep the information you provide to opt-out, "you give PimEyes at least one photo of yourself plus a digital copy of a passport or ID with personal details obscured..." according to the article. (PimEyes' confirmation email "said I might need to repeat the opt-out with more photos...") Some digital privacy experts said it's worth opting out of PimEyes, even if it's imperfect, and that PimEyes probably legitimately needs a personal photo and proof of identity for the process. Others found it "absurd" to provide more information to PimEyes... or they weren't sure opting out was the best choice... Experts said the fundamental problem is how much information is harvested and accessible without your knowledge or consent from your phone, home speakers, your car and information-organizing middlemen like PimEyes and data brokers. Nathan Freed Wessler, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney focused on privacy litigation, said laws need to change the assumption that companies can collect almost anything about you or your face unless you go through endless opt-outs. "These systems are scary and abusive," he said. "If they're going to exist, they should be based on an opt-in system."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: A few weeks ago, analysts at a specialized technological lab put a microchip from China under a powerful microscope. Something didn't look right... The microscopic proof was there that a chunk of the electronic components from Chinese high-tech champion Huawei Technologies had been produced by the world's most advanced chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. That was a problem because two U.S. administrations in succession had taken actions to assure that didn't happen. The news of the breach of U.S. export controls, first reported in October by the tech news site the Information, has sent a wave of concern through Washington... The chips were routed to Huawei through Sophgo Technologies, the AI venture of a Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic... "It raises some fundamental questions about how well we can actually enforce these rules," said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington... Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed that TSMC recently halted shipments to a "certain customer" and notified the United States after suspecting that customer might have directed its products to Huawei... There's been much intrigue in recent days in the industry over how the crypto billionaire's TSMC-made chips reportedly ended up at Huawei. Critics accuse Sophgo of working to help Huawei evade the export controls, but it is also possible that they were sold through an intermediary, which would align with Sophgo's denial of having any business relationship with Huawei... While export controls are often hard to enforce, semiconductors are especially hard to manage due to the large and open nature of the global chip trade. Since the Biden administration implemented sweeping controls in 2022, there have been reports of widespread chip smuggling and semiconductor black markets allowing Chinese companies to access necessary chips... Paul Triolo, technology policy lead at Albright Stonebridge Group, said companies were trying to figure out what lengths they had to go to for due diligence: "The guidelines are murky."

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from CNBC: Threads now has nearly 275 million monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. "We continue to be on track towards this becoming our next major social app," Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts, adding that he was "quite pleased" with the trajectory of the app. The latest numbers indicate Threads is up 175% from a year ago when it reached 100 million users... The app is now signing up more than 1 million users per day, Zuckerberg also said on Wednesday. X remains ahead of Threads in terms of users, but not by much. Musk's social media app now has roughly 318 million monthly users, according to an estimate by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That's down 24% since Musk completed his acquisition of the company in October 2022, according to Sensor Tower. The news also drew a reaction from ActivityPub/Activity Streams 2.0 co-author Evan Prodromou, who pointed out that the 275 million monthly active users is up from the 200 million reported just 13 weeks ago at the end of July. "And most of them have access to the Fediverse. With more, hopefully, getting access soon."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson's disease and other health dangers. In a October 31 letter (PDF) to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a "highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities". The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter (PDF) to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October. The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson's and other "life threatening diseases" as well as "grave impacts on the environment". "Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson's disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson's, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues," they wrote. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were "well documented" and that it was "irresponsible" for the EPA to continue to allow its use. "I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat," Booker said. The EPA has long maintained that there is no "clear link" between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position. Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by January 17, 2025.

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Starlink has launched home Internet service to 99.5% of residents in the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) after a multi-year collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to minimize interference with radio telescopes. "The vast majority of people within the areas of Virginia and West Virginia collectively known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) can now receive high speed satellite Internet service," the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory announced said. "The newly available service is the result of a nearly three-year collaborative engineering effort between the US National Science Foundation (NSF), SpaceX, and the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), which operates the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) in West Virginia within the NRQZ." Ars Technica reports: There's a controversy over the 0.5 percent of residents who aren't included and are said to be newly blocked from using the Starlink Roam service. Starlink markets Roam as a service for people to use while traveling, not as a fixed home Internet service. The Pendleton County Office of Emergency Management last week issued a press release (PDF) saying that "customers with the RV/Roam packages had been using Starlink for approximately two years throughout 100% of the NRQZ. Now, the 0.5% have lost coverage after having it for two years. This means that a large section of southeastern Pendleton County and an even larger section of northern Pocahontas will NOT be able to utilize Starlink." PCMag wrote that "Starlink is now live in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory's telescopes." Pendleton County Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Gillespie told Ars today that Roam coverage was cut off in the remaining four cell areas. "After the agreement, we all lost effective use within the four cells," Gillespie told Ars in an email. Gillespie's press release said that, "in many cases, Starlink was the only Internet provider option residents and emergency responders had. This is unacceptable."

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Jay Newman, who made billions for Elliott Management pursuing Argentina's defaulted debt, wrote a 2022 thriller about corrupt spies and hedge funds. Now federal prosecutors are examining parallels between his novel "Undermoney" and real-world events. The investigation centers on Amit Forlit, an Israeli private investigator facing U.S. extradition charges for alleged email theft from Argentine officials during Elliott's sovereign debt battle. Prosecutors are probing whether Forlit's alleged $20 million hacking operation aided Elliott's eventual $2.2 billion settlement with Argentina. "There's not that much fiction in 'Undermoney,'" Newman told interviewers while promoting the book, which features Israeli operatives and hedge fund intrigue. Newman and Elliott deny any wrongdoing, with Newman calling suggestions of illegal activity "categorically false." The probe is examining $20 million paid to a Forlit-controlled company via a consulting firm that worked for Elliott, according to court statements and people familiar with the matter. Forlit denied involvement in hacking during a 2022 deposition. Prosecutors are also investigating Forlit's work for ExxonMobil regarding climate change critics. Neither Elliott nor ExxonMobil has been accused of wrongdoing. Newman, who left Elliott in 2016 with a $70 million bonus after the Argentina settlement, met regularly with Forlit to discuss the Argentine case, WSJ has reported. His novel follows dark money trails through Washington power corridors and Wall Street trading floors, featuring Israeli operatives described as "expensive, but consistent."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...] Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades. Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."

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Identity management firm Okta said Friday it has patched a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that affected customers using usernames longer than 52 characters in its AD/LDAP delegated authentication service. The flaw, introduced on July 23 and fixed October 30, allowed attackers to authenticate using only a username if they had access to a previously cached key. The bug stemmed from Okta's use of the Bcrypt algorithm to generate cache keys from combined user credentials. The company switched to PBKDF2 to resolve the issue and urged affected customers to audit system logs.

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California signed an agreement with major airlines to increase the use of sustainable aviation fuels, aiming to reach 200 million gallons by 2035 or about 40% of the state's air travel demand. The Hill reports: The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Airlines for America (A4A) -- an industry trade group representing almost a dozen airlines -- pledged to increase the availability of sustainable aviation fuels statewide. Sustainable aviation fuels -- lower-carbon alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuels -- are typically made from nonpetroleum feedstocks, such as biomass or waste. At a San Francisco International Airport ceremony Wednesday, the partners committed (PDF) to using 200 million gallons of such fuels by 2035 -- an amount estimated to meet about 40 percent of travel demand within the state at that point, according to CARB. That quantity also represents a more than tenfold increase from current usage levels of these fuels, the agency added. Among A4A member airlines are Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Atlas Air Worldwide, Delta Air Lines, FedEx, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and UPS, while Air Canada is an associate member. To achieve the 2035 goals, CARB and A4A said they plan to work together to identify, assess and prioritize necessary policy measures, such as incentivizing relevant investments and streamlining the permitting processes. A Sustainable Aviation Fuel Working Group, which will include government and industry stakeholders, will meet annually to both discuss progress and address barriers toward meeting these goals, the partners added. A public website will display updated information about the availability and use of conventional and sustainable fuels across California, while also providing details about state policies, according to the agreement.

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Waymo is advancing autonomous driving with a new training model for its robotaxis built on Google's multimodal large language model (MLLM) Gemini. The Verge reports: Waymo released a new research paper today that introduces an "End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving," also known as EMMA. This new end-to-end training model processes sensor data to generate "future trajectories for autonomous vehicles," helping Waymo's driverless vehicles make decisions about where to go and how to avoid obstacles. But more importantly, this is one of the first indications that the leader in autonomous driving has designs to use MLLMs in its operations. And it's a sign that these LLMs could break free of their current use as chatbots, email organizers, and image generators and find application in an entirely new environment on the road. In its research paper, Waymo is proposing "to develop an autonomous driving system in which the MLLM is a first class citizen." The paper outlines how, historically, autonomous driving systems have developed specific "modules" for the various functions, including perception, mapping, prediction, and planning. This approach has proven useful for many years but has problems scaling "due to the accumulated errors among modules and limited inter-module communication." Moreover, these modules could struggle to respond to "novel environments" because, by nature, they are "pre-defined," which can make it hard to adapt. Waymo says that MLLMs like Gemini present an interesting solution to some of these challenges for two reasons: the chat is a "generalist" trained on vast sets of scraped data from the internet "that provide rich 'world knowledge' beyond what is contained in common driving logs"; and they demonstrate "superior" reasoning capabilities through techniques like "chain-of-thought reasoning," which mimics human reasoning by breaking down complex tasks into a series of logical steps. Waymo developed EMMA as a tool to help its robotaxis navigate complex environments. The company identified several situations in which the model helped its driverless cars find the right route, including encountering various animals or construction in the road. [...] But EMMA also has its limitations, and Waymo acknowledges that there will need to be future research before the model is put into practice. For example, EMMA couldn't incorporate 3D sensor inputs from lidar or radar, which Waymo said was "computationally expensive." And it could only process a small amount of image frames at a time. There are also risks to using MLLMs to train robotaxis that go unmentioned in the research paper. Chatbots like Gemini often hallucinate or fail at simple tasks like reading clocks or counting objects.

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The feds have indicted Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national and founder of Gotbit, on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation. Crypto News reports: According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the indictment alleges that Andriunin and his firm participated in a long-running scheme to artificially boost trading volumes for various cryptocurrency companies, including some based in the United States, to make them appear more popular and increase their trading value. Andriunin allegedly led these activities between 2018 and 2024 as Gotbit's CEO. He could face up to 20 years in prison, additional fines, and asset forfeiture if convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Prosecutors say the scheme involved "wash trading," where the firm used its software to make fake trades that inflated a cryptocurrency's trading volume. This practice, called market manipulation, can mislead investors by giving the impression that demand for a particular cryptocurrency is higher than it actually is. Wash trades are illegal in traditional finance and are considered fraudulent because they deceive investors and manipulate market behavior. Court documents also identify Gotbit's two directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, as co-conspirators. The indictment claims Gotbit documented these activities in detailed records, tracking differences between genuine and artificial trading volumes. The firm allegedly pitched these services to prospective clients, explaining how Gotbit's tactics would bypass detection on public blockchains, where transactions are recorded transparently. The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it seized over $25 million worth of cryptocurrency assets connected to these schemes and made four arrests across multiple firms. If you've been following the crypto industry, you're probably familiar with "pump-and-dump" schemes that have popped up throughout the years. Although it's a form of market manipulation, it's not quite the same as "wash trading." In a pump-and-dump scheme, the perpetrator artificially inflates the price of a security (often a low-priced or thinly traded stock) by spreading misleading or exaggerated information to attract other buyers, who then drive up the price. Once the price has risen due to increased demand, the manipulators "dump" their shares at the inflated price, selling to the new buyers and pocketing the profits. The price typically crashes after the dump, leaving unsuspecting investors with overvalued shares and significant losses. Wash trading, on the other hand, involves simultaneously buying and selling of the same asset to create the illusion of higher trading volume and activity. The purpose is to mislead other investors about the asset's liquidity and demand, often giving the impression that it is more popular or actively traded than it actually is. Wash trades usually occur without real changes in ownership or price movement, as the buyer and seller may even be the same person or entity. This tactic can manipulate prices indirectly by creating a perception of interest, but it does not involve a direct inflation followed by a sell-off, like a pump-and-dump scheme.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Royal Navy: The Royal Navy has successfully demonstrated the capabilities of ground-breaking cold atom technology. P2000 vessel HMS Pursuer hosted the trial, which unlocks new possibilities in areas such as covert monitoring, which require precise signals for accurate positioning, navigation and timing. The Office of the Chief of Technology Officer (OCTO) for the RN worked with UK quantum technology company Aquark Technologies. The trial involved the company's miniature cold atom systems, founded on Aquark's unique laser-cooling method, known as supemolasses. This method to generate cold atoms does not need an applied magnetic field, therefore reducing the size, weight, power consumption and cost of sensors. A cold atom is an atom that has been laser-cooled to extremely low temperatures, typically near absolute zero (-273.15C). At these temperatures, the thermal motion of atoms is very slow, allowing their quantum mechanical properties to be precisely controlled. Quantum Sensing is an advanced sensor technology that detects changes in motion, and electric and magnetic fields, by collecting data at the atomic level. Commander Matthew Steele, who heads up Future Technology for OCTO, said: "Quantum technologies being developed in the UK will offer an alternative Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) capability necessary to operate effectively in GPS denied or degraded environments." "Over the next three years, the Navy seeks to accelerate the development of quantum technologies -- such as Aquarks -- through funding and sea trials, to secure the Royal Navy an opportunity to invest in a non-GPS-based PNT capability and to maintain its global operating advantage."

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Disney's recently formed Office of Technology Enablement will coordinate the company's exploration, adoption and use of artificial intelligence, AR and VR tech. Engadget reports: It has tapped Jamie Voris, previously the CTO of its Studios Technology division, to oversee the effort. Before joining Disney in 2010, Voris was the chief technology officer at the National Football League. More recently, he led the development of the company's Apple Vision Pro app. Voris will report to Alan Bergman, the co-chairman of Disney Entertainment. Reuters reports the company eventually plans to grow the group to about 100 employees. "The pace and scope of advances in AI and XR are profound and will continue to impact consumer experiences, creative endeavors, and our business for years to come -- making it critical that Disney explore the exciting opportunities and navigate the potential risks," Bergman wrote in an email Disney shared with Engadget. "The creation of this new group underscores our dedication to doing that and to being a positive force in shaping responsible use and best practices." A Disney spokesperson told Engadget the Office of Technology Enablement won't take over any existing AI and XR projects at the company. Instead, it will support Disney's other teams, many of which are already working on products that involve those technologies, to ensure their work fits into the company's broader strategic goals. "It is about bringing added focus, alignment, and velocity to those efforts, and about reinforcing our commitment being a positive force in shaping responsible use and best practices," the spokesperson said.

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The Biden administration is investing $825 million in a new semiconductor research and development facility in Albany, New York. Reuters reports: The New York facility will be expected to drive innovation in EUV technology, a complex process necessary to make semiconductors, the U.S. Department of Commerce and Natcast, operator of the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NTSC) said. The launch of the facility "represents a key milestone in ensuring the United States remains a global leader in innovation and semiconductor research and development," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said. From the U.S. Department of Commerce press release: EUV Lithography is essential for manufacturing smaller, faster, and more efficient microchips. As the semiconductor industry pushes the limits of Moore's Law, EUV lithography has emerged as a critical technology to enable the high-volume production of transistors beyond 7nm, previously unattainable. As the NSTC develops capabilities and programs, access to EUV lithography R&D is essential to meet its three primary goals 1) extend U.S. technology leadership, 2) reduce the time and cost to prototype, and 3) build and sustain a semiconductor workforce ecosystem.

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