Saturday, December 16th, 2023

Time	Event
12:02a	McDonald's Ice Cream Machine Hackers Say They Found the 'Smoking Gun' That Killed Their Startup An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over three years have passed since McDonald's sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future ofa three-person startup called Kytch -- and with it, perhaps one of McDonald's best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines. Until then, Kytch had been selling McDonald's restaurant owners a popular internet-connected gadget designed to attach to their notoriously fragile and often broken soft-serve McFlurry dispensers, manufactured by McDonalds equipment partner Taylor. The Kytch device would essentially hack into the ice cream machine's internals, monitor its operations, and send diagnostic data over the internet to an owner or manager to help keep it running. But despite Kytch's efforts to solve the Golden Arches' intractable ice cream problems, a McDonald's email in November 2020 warned its franchisees not to use Kytch, stating that it represented a safety hazard for staff. Kytch says its sales dried up practically overnight. Now, after years of litigation, the ice-cream-hacking entrepreneurs have unearthed evidence that they say shows that Taylor, the soft-serve machine maker, helped engineer McDonald's Kytch-killing email -- kneecapping the startup not because of any safety concern, but in a coordinated effort to undermine a potential competitor. And Taylor's alleged order, as Kytch now describes it, came all the way from the top. On Wednesday, Kytch filed a newly unredacted motion for summary adjudication in its lawsuit against Taylor for alleged trade libel, tortious interference, and other claims. The new motion, which replaces a redacted version from August, refers to internal emails Taylor released in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, which were quietly unsealed over the summer. The motion focuses in particular on one email from Timothy FitzGerald, the CEO of Taylor parent company Middleby, that appears to suggest that either Middleby or McDonald's send a communication to McDonald's franchise owners to dissuade them from using Kytch's device. "Not sure if there is anything we can do to slow up the franchise community on the other solution," FitzGerald wrote on October 17, 2020. "Not sure what communication from either McD or Midd can or will go out." In their legal filing, the Kytch cofounders, of course, interpret "the other solution" to mean their product. In fact, FitzGerald's message was sent in an email thread that included Middleby's then COO, David Brewer, who had wondered earlier whether Middleby could instead acquire Kytch. Another Middleby executive responded to FitzGerald on October 17 to write that Taylor and McDonald's had already met the previous day to discuss sending out a message to franchisees about McDonald's lack of support for Kytch. But Jeremy O'Sullivan, a Kytch cofounder, claims -- and Kytch argues in its legal motion -- that FitzGerald's email nonetheless proves Taylor's intent to hamstring a potential rival. "It's the smoking gun," O'Sullivan says of the email. "He's plotting our demise." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
12:45a	OpenAI Suspends ByteDance's Account After It Used GPT To Train Its Own AI Model TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has been secretly using OpenAI's technology to develop its own competing large language model (LLM). "This practice is generally considered a faux pas in the AI world," writes The Verge's Alex Heath. "It's also in direct violation of OpenAI's terms of service, which state that its model output can't be used 'to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services.'" From the report: Nevertheless, internal ByteDance documents shared with me confirm that the OpenAI API has been relied on to develop its foundational LLM, codenamed Project Seed, during nearly every phase of development, including for training and evaluating the model. Employees involved are well aware of the implications; I've seen conversations on Lark, ByteDance's internal communication platform for employees, about how to "whitewash" the evidence through "data desensitization." The misuse is so rampant that Project Seed employees regularly hit their max allowance for API access. Most of the company's GPT usage has been done through Microsoft's Azure program, which has the same policy as OpenAI. In response, OpenAI said that it has suspended ByteDance's account: "All API customers must adhere to our usage policies to ensure that our technology is used for good. While ByteDance's use of our API was minimal, we have suspended their account while we further investigate. If we discover that their usage doesn't follow these policies, we will ask them to make necessary changes or terminate their account." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
1:25a	Firefox's Android Browser Adds 450+ New Extensions Firefox's Android browser now has over 450 new extensions available on Mozilla's Firefox Browser Add-ons page. "These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves adding anti-tracking privacy tools, content blockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, like streaming music, or those that allow users to personalize the browser's user interface -- like switching all websites to a dark mode or offering a better way to manage tabs," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years following the 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browser that replaced the app's previous codebase with "GeckoView," a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the company said it made a decision to limit the supported extensions to only those within the "Recommended Extensions" program -- meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers' hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development -- and opportunity for software developers focused on this market. While Firefox's nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox's mainstream users were also without. In August of this year, Mozilla said it had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today's news that there are now 450+ extensions available. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:02a	Vera Molnar, Pioneer of Computer Art, Dies At 99 Alex Williams reports via The New York Times: Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99. Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is scheduled to present a major exhibition of her work in February. Ms. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947. While her computer-aided paintings and drawings, which drew inspiration from geometric works by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, were eventually exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, her work was not always embraced early in her career. Ms. Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer. In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called "Machine Imaginaire" -- imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper. She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and '60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was "very complicated and expensive," she once said, adding, "They were selling calculation time in seconds." [...] Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer. One early series, "Interruptions," involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: "She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines." Another series, "(Des)Ordres" (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating. Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing "1% of Disorder," another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. "I love order, but I can't stand it," she told Mr. Obrist. "I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words." And so, she concluded, "chaos, perhaps, came from this." [...] Her career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. She began using computers with screens, which allowed her to instantly assess the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens, it was "like a conversation, like a real pictorial process," she said in a recent interview with the generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. "You move the 'brush' and you see immediately if it suits you or not." [...] Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with "Themes and Variations," a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with the artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby's. The series fetched $1.2 million in sales. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:30a	Biggest Solar Flare In Years Temporarily Disrupts Radio Signals On Earth An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center. Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:00a	Researchers Develop World's First Antenna For Ultra-Secure 6G Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have developed a special antenna that can control all five important aspects of electromagnetic waves using computer software. Interesting Engineering reports: The antenna, which they have named 'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control. [...] The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are, their timing, frequency, direction, and even the way they vibrate, all at the same time. It's the first time anyone has made an antenna that can do all these things simultaneously, marking a significant breakthrough in this field. The antenna is special because it can be used in advanced information systems, like the ones we might have in the future. It's great for handling a lot of data and keeping that data very safe. It can also transfer power wirelessly, meaning it can charge devices without physical connections. One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals, adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations. Although demonstrated in the microwave band, the UMA's concept can be expanded to terahertz frequencies using specific technologies, enabling applications in augmented reality, holography, integrated sensing and communications for 6G, quantum optics, and quantum information science, noted the researchers in their study. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:00a	Sales of Solana Phone Surge As Traders Chase BONK Arbitrage Solana Saga smartphones sales are surging after arbitrage traders realized every phone comes with an airdrop of BONK meme coins valued at more than the cost of the hardware. "Saga sales have >10x'd in the past 48 hours, and are now on track to sell out before the new year," said Solana co-founder Raj Gokal in a post on X. As a result, Gokal's counterpart, Anatoly Yakovenko, said they'll need to raise the price. CoinDesk reports: The euphoria around BONK -- Solana's dog-themed equivalent to Dogecoin -- has led to a turnaround story for Saga, which just one week ago faced dimming prospects amid forgettable sales figures. Saga is a blockchain-enabled smartphone with special features for storing one's crypto securely on the phone's own hardware. The Saga Discord server exploded on Thursday with newcomers declaring they just bought the phone and wanted to get the airdrop. According to posts on the Discord server, the BONK airdrop is available to those who download the BONK app from Saga's crypto-forward custom app store. "When you physically have the phone you will be able to mint 'Genesis token' through the 'dApp store, [this] token is eligible to claim the bonk drop," said a user who identified themselves as an employee of Solana Mobile in the Discord server. "The bonk drop is NOT forever, at some point that promotion will end," the user, whose screen name was Jax, said in the Discord. "As of right now the claim is live and is up to the bonk team on when they'd want to close it. No end date yet." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Microsoft Releases Phi-2, a Small LLM That Outperforms Llama 2 and Mistral 7B An anonymous reader quotes a report from : Microsoft Research, the blue sky division of the software giant, [...] announced the release of its Phi-2 small language model (SML), a text-to-text AI program that is "small enough to run on a laptop or mobile device," according to a post on X. At the same time, Phi-2 with its 2.7 billion parameters (connections between artificial neurons) boasts performance that is comparable to other, much larger models including Meta's Llama 2-7B with its 7 billion parameters and even Mistral-7B, another 7 billion parameter model. Microsoft researchers also noted in their blog post on the Phi-2 release that it outperforms Google's brand new Gemini Nano 2 model despite it having half a billion more parameters, and delivers less "toxicity" and bias in its responses than Llama 2. Microsoft also couldn't resist taking a little dig at Google's now much-criticized, staged demo video for Gemini in which it showed off how its forthcoming largest and most powerful new AI model, Gemini Ultra, was able to solve fairly complex physics problems and even correct students' mistakes on them. As it turned out, even though it is likely a fraction of the size of Gemini Ultra, Phi-2 also was able to correctly answer the question and correct the student using the same prompts. However, despite these encouraging findings, there is a big limitation with Phi-2, at least for the time being: it is licensed only for "research purposes only," not commercial usage, under a custom Microsoft Research License, which further states Phi-2 may only be used for "non-commercial, non-revenue generating, research purposes." So, businesses looking to build products atop it are out of luck. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34p	Amazon, Etsy, Launch Categories With 'Gifts For Programmers' Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: It's a question that comes up all the time on Reddit. Etsy even created a special page for programmer-themed gift suggestions (showing more than 5,000 results). While CNET sticks to broader lists of "tech gifts" — and a separate list for "Star Wars gifts" — other sites around the web have been specifically honing in on programmer-specific suggestions. (Blue light-blocking glasses... A giant rubber duck... The world's strongest coffee... A printer that transfers digital images onto cheese...) So while in years past Amazon has said they laughed at customer reviews for cans of uranium, this year Amazon has now added a special section that's entirely dedicated to Gifts for Computer Programmers, according to this funny rundown of 2023's "Gifts for Programmers" (that ends up recommending ChatGPT gift cards and backyard office sheds): From the article: [Amazon's Gifts for Programmers section] shows over 3,000 results, with geek-friendly subcategories like "Glassware & Drinkware" and "Novelty Clothing"... For the coder in your life, Amazon offers everything from brain–teasing programming puzzles to computer–themed jigsaw puzzles. Of course, there's also a wide selection of obligatory funny t–shirts... But this year there's also tech-themed ties and motherboard-patterned socks... Some programmers, though, might prefer a gift that's both fun and educational. And what's more entertaining than using your Python skills to program a toy robot dog...? But if you're shopping for someone who's more of a cat person, Petoi sells a kit for building a programmable (and open source) cat robot named "Nybble". The sophisticated Arduino-powered feline can be programmed with Python and C++ (as well as block-based coding)... [part of] the new community that's building around "OpenCat", the company's own quadruped robotic pet framework (open sourced on GitHub). Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34p	Is Climate-Friendy Flying Possible? The US Tries Subsidizing Sustainable Aviation Fuels "Unlike automobiles, jumbo jets cannot run on batteries," notes the Washington Post. So Friday the White unveiled a plan for "subsidizing sustainable aviation fuels" — which could also give the U.S. a leg up in a brand new industry: Senior White House officials said the program would make the airline industry cleaner while bringing prosperity to rural America. But environmental groups and some scientists expressed reservations about the plan, which would award subsidies based on a scientific model that has previously been used to justify incentives for corn-based ethanol. Studies have found the gasoline additive is exacerbating climate change. The new tax credits, created through President Biden's signature climate law, are meant to spur production of jet fuels that create no more than half the emissions of the petroleum-based product. Each gallon of such fuel qualifies for a tax credit up to $1.75 per gallon. "The concern is they will end up subsidizing fuels that take an enormous amount of land to produce," said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University... Administration officials said on a call with reporters Thursday that they are carefully weighing such concerns. Agencies are in the process of updating the scientific model for gauging climate friendliness of jet fuels, they said, and it will be revised to factor in the emissions impact of cropland converted from food to fuel production. Federal agencies plan to complete their revisions by March 1. "The sustainable aviation fuel industry is a potential 36 billion gallon industry that for all intents and purposes is just getting started," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on the call. "This is a big, big deal." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:34p	Threads Plans to Interoperate With Other Platforms in the Fediverse An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: On Friday, two days after Threads finally started publicly testing ActivityPub integration, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Threads detailing the company's plans for its continued integration with the fediverse. Right now, it's possible to follow a few Threads accounts (including Mosseri's) from other platforms, but Meta has much bigger plans for Threads interoperability that Mosseri says will take "the better part of a year" to realize... Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to "all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers." The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. According to the article, Threads is also planning to support the ability to follow non-Threads fediverse accounts — and even taking that openness in the other direction. "Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server," Mosseri writes. Flipboard and Wordpress already allow ActivityPub integration, according to NBC News. They estimate there's 11 million users of the Fediverse now, "the vast majority of them on Mastodon." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:34p	Asteroid Pieces Brought to Earth May Offer a Clue to Life's Origin In 2020 a NASA spacecraft visited the asteroid Bennu. In October it returned to earth with a sample. Monday scientists got their first data about it at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union — which is a truly big deal. "Before Earth had biology, it had chemistry," writes the Washington Post. "How the one followed from the other — how a bunch of boring molecules transformed themselves into this special thing we call life — is arguably the greatest unknown in science." The mission's top scientist, Dante Lauretta... showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and "maybe — still early phase — maybe insights into the origin of life." This analysis has only just started. The team has not yet released a formal scientific paper. In his lecture, Lauretta cited one interesting triangular, light-colored stone, which he said contained something he'd never seen before in a meteorite. "It's a head-scratcher right now. What is this material?" he said. In an interview after the lecture, Lauretta said almost 5 percent of the sample is carbon. "That is a very carbon-rich sample — the richest we have in all our extraterrestrial material. ... We're still unraveling the complex organic chemistry, but it looks promising to really understand: Did these carbon-rich asteroids deliver fundamental molecules that may have gone on to contribute to the origin of life...?" This space dirt has astrobiological import, though. By looking at prebiotic chemistry on Bennu, scientists will have a better idea what they are looking at if and when they find suspicious molecules elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. "This is almost the perfect laboratory control from non-biological chemistry," Glavin said. "This better prepares us for our search for life on Mars, or Europa or Enceladus — places that might have had life at one point." Space.com quotes Lauretta as saying "We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:34p	Why Google Will Stop Telling Law Enforcement Which Users Were Near a Crime Earlier this week Google Maps stopped storing user location histories in the cloud. But why did Google make this move? Bloomberg reports that it was "so that the company no longer has access to users' individual location histories, cutting off its ability to respond to law enforcement warrants that ask for data on everyone who was in the vicinity of a crime." The company said Thursday that for users who have it enabled, location data will soon be saved directly on users' devices, blocking Google from being able to see it, and, by extension, blocking law enforcement from being able to demand that information from Google. "Your location information is personal," said Marlo McGriff, director of product for Google Maps, in the blog post. "We're committed to keeping it safe, private and in your control." The change comes three months after a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation that found police across the US were increasingly using warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases, and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime. "It's well past time," said Jennifer Lynch, the general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that defends digital civil liberties. "We've been calling on Google to make these changes for years, and I think it's fantastic for Google users, because it means that they can take advantage of features like location history without having to fear that the police will get access to all of that data." Google said it would roll out the changes gradually through the next year on its own Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS mobile operating systems, and that users will receive a notification when the update comes to their account. The company won't be able to respond to new geofence warrants once the update is complete, including for people who choose to save encrypted backups of their location data to the cloud. The EFF general counsel also pointed out to Bloomberg that "nobody else has been storing and collecting data in the same way as Google." (Apple, for example, is technically unable to provide the same data to police.) Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:34p	US Officials Doubt the Performance of Huawei's Advanced Chip An anonymous reader quotes this report from Bloomberg: The U.S. doubts whether Huawei Technologies Co. can produce the advanced chip in its new smartphone at the scale or performance threshold necessary to meet market demand, a senior Commerce Department official told lawmakers Tuesday. "Neither the performance nor yields may match the market of the device," Thea Kendler, assistant secretary for export administration, said during testimony before a House Foreign Affairs Committee oversight panel. "Moreover, the semiconductor chip that is inside that phone is a poorer performance than what they had years ago," Kendler said. "So our export controls are meaningful in slowing China's advanced technology acquisition...." The [U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security] is under pressure from Republicans to be tougher on Huawei and its chipmaking partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp [or SMIC]. Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and others have called for the Bureau of Industry and Security to fully cut off both firms from their American suppliers. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg News in a Monday interview that the U.S. will take the "strongest possible" action to protect its national security following the breakthrough, while declining to confirm the existence of an investigation into Huawei or SMIC. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:12p	Seeking 'Superbug' Antibiotics, Scientists Use AI to Synthesize Molecules from Neanderthals An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The quest for new antibiotics is going back to the Stone Age. The urgency to identify possible candidates has never been greater as the global population faces nearly 5 million deaths every year that are associated with microbial resistance, according to the World Health Organization. A research team led by bioengineering pioneer César de la Fuente is using artificial intelligence-based computational methods to mine genetic information from extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals and long-gone ice age creatures such as the woolly mammoth and giant sloth. The scientists say some of these small protein, or peptide, molecules they have identified have bacteria-fighting powers that may inspire new drugs to fight infections in humans. The innovative work also opens up a completely new way to think about drug discovery. "It has enabled us to uncover new sequences, new types of molecules that we have not previously found in living organisms, expanding the way we think about molecular diversity," said de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he heads the machine biology group. "Bacteria from today have never faced those molecules so they may give us a better opportunity at targeting the pathogens that are problematic today...." The idea to look at extinct molecules came up during a lab brainstorm when the blockbuster movie "Jurassic Park" was mentioned. "The notion (in the film) was to bring back entire organisms, and obviously, they had a lot of issues," De la Fuente said. His team started thinking about a more feasible idea: "Why not bring back molecules from the past?" Advances in the recovery of ancient DNA from fossils mean that detailed libraries of genetic information about extinct human relatives and long-lost animals are now publicly available... In research expected to publish next year, de la Fuente and his colleagues have developed a new deep-learning model to explore what he describes as the "extinctome" — the protein sequences of 208 extinct organisms for which detailed genetic information is available. The team found more than 11,000 previously unknown potential antimicrobial peptides unique to extinct organisms and synthesized promising candidates... He said that the peptides they discovered displayed "excellent anti-infective activity" in mice. "Molecular de-extinction offers a unique opportunity to combat antibiotic resistance by resurrecting and tapping into the power of molecules from the past," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
11:19p	Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Help Teachers Incorporate AI Into CS Education Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Earlier this month, Amazon came under fire as the Los Angeles Times reported on a leaked confidential document that "reveals an extensive public relations strategy by Amazon to donate to community groups, school districts, institutions and charities" to advance the company's business objectives. "We will not fund organizations that have positioned themselves antagonistically toward our interests," explained Amazon officials of the decision to cut off donations to the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture after it ran an exhibit ("Burn Them All Down") that the artist called a commentary on how public officials were not listening to community concerns about the growing number of Amazon warehouses in Southern California's Inland Empire neighborhoods... Interestingly on the same day the Los Angeles Times was sounding the alarm on Amazon philanthropy, the White House and National Science Foundation (NSF) held a White House-hosted event on K-12 AI education. There it was announced that the Amazon-backed nonprofit Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) will develop new K-12 computer science standards that incorporate AI into foundational computer science education with support from the NSF, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. CSTA separately announced it had received a $1.5 million donation from Amazon to "support efforts to update the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards to reflect the rapid advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)," adding that the CSTA standards — which CSTA credited Microsoft Philanthropies for helping to advance — "serve as a model for CS teaching and learning across grades K-12" in 42 states. The announcements, the White House noted, came during Computer Science Education Week, the signature event of which is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-backed Code.org's Hour of Code (which was AI-themed this year), for which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — not teachers — provided the event's signature tutorials used by the nation's K-12 students. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also advisors to Code.org's TeachAI initiative, which was launched in May "to provide thought leadership to guide governments and educational leaders in aligning education with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world and connecting the discussion of teaching with AI to teaching about AI and computer science." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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