Friday, January 26th, 2024

Time	Event
12:01a	FTC Launches Inquiry Into AI Deals by Tech Giants The Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry (non-paywalled link) on Thursday into the multibillion-dollar investments by Microsoft, Amazon and Google in the artificial intelligence start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic, broadening the regulator's efforts to corral the power the tech giants can have over A.I. The New York Times: These deals have allowed the big companies to form deep ties with their smaller rivals while dodging most government scrutiny. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, while Amazon and Google have each committed billions of dollars to Anthropic, another leading A.I. start-up. Regulators have typically focused on bringing antitrust lawsuits against deals where the tech giants are buying rivals outright or using acquisitions to expand into new businesses, leading to increased prices and other harm, and have not regularly challenged stakes that the companies buy in start-ups. The F.T.C.'s inquiry will examine how these investment deals alter the competitive landscape and could inform any investigations by federal antitrust regulators into whether the deals have broken laws. The F.T.C. said it would ask Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google and Anthropic to describe their influence over their partners and how they worked together to make decisions. It also said it would demand that they provide any internal documents that could shed light on the deals and their potential impact on competition. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:00a	Cruise Says Hostility Toward Regulators Led To Grounding of Its Autonomous Cars Cruise, the driverless car subsidiary of General Motors, said in a report on Thursday that an adversarial approach taken (non-paywalled link) by its top executives toward regulators had led to a cascade of events that ended with a nationwide suspension of Cruise's fleet. From a report: The roughly 100-page report was compiled by a law firm that Cruise hired to investigate whether its executives had misled California regulators about an October crash in San Francisco in which a Cruise vehicle dragged a woman 20 feet. The investigation found that while the executives had not intentionally misled state officials, they had failed to explain key details about the incident. In meetings with regulators, the executives let a video of the crash "speak for itself" rather than fully explain how one of its vehicles severely injured the pedestrian. The executives later fixated on protecting Cruise's reputation rather than giving a full account of the accident to the public and media, according to the report, which was written by the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm. The company said that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating the incident, as well as state agencies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The report is central to Cruise's efforts to regain the public's trust and eventually restart its business. Cruise has been largely shut down since October, when the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its license to operate because its vehicles were unsafe. It responded by pulling its driverless cars off the road across the country, laying off a quarter of its staff and replacing Kyle Vogt, its co-founder and chief executive, who resigned in November, with new leaders. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:02a	OpenAI Drops Prices and Fixes 'Lazy' GPT-4 That Refused To Work OpenAI is always making slight adjustments to its models and pricing, and today brings just such an occasion. From a report: The company has released a handful of new models and dropped the price of API access -- this is primarily of interest to developers, but also serves as a bellwether for future consumer options. GPT-3.5 Turbo is the model most people interact with, usually through ChatGPT, and it serves as a kind of industry standard now -- if your answers aren't as good as ChatGPT's, why bother? It's also a popular API, being lower cost and faster than GPT-4 on a lot of tasks. So paying users will be pleased to hear that input prices are dropping by 50% and output by 25%, to $0.0005 per thousand tokens in, and $0.0015 per thousand tokens out. As people play with using these APIs for text-intensive applications, like analyzing entire papers or books, those tokens really start to add up. And as open source or self-managed models catch up to OpenAI's performance, the company needs to make sure its customers don't just leave. Hence the steady ratcheting down of prices -- though it's also a natural result of streamlining the models and improving their infrastructure. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:40a	Netflix Co-CEO Calls Vision Pro 'Subscale' and Wonders If Anybody Would Actually Use It Netflix is on everything. It's on your phone, computer, and game console, going all the way back to the Nintendo Wii. Hell, you can get your Netflix fix on a Peloton. One place where Netflix won't be is Apple's upcoming Vision Pro VR headset. Why isn't Netflix planning an app for what is Apple's big $3,500 gamble on the future of augmented reality? According to co-CEO Greg Peters, it's because the company doesn't know if anybody's actually going to use it. Gizmodo: More specifically, he called the device "subscale," adding that he didn't know if it would be "relevant to most of our members." That was in an interview with business analyst Ben Thompson, where Peters implied his company is being far more selective, at least when it comes to Apple's $3,500 "spatial computer." "We have to be careful about making sure that we're not investing in places that are not really yielding a return, and I would say we'll see where things go with Vision Pro," the Netflix co-CEO said. The interview dropped barely a day after Peters got done extolling how the company gained more than 13 million new subscribers in the last three months of 2023 while also mentioning potentially increasing subscription prices. Other common apps like Spotify and YouTube also don't plan to have a Vision Pro-specific app at launch, instead directing people to log on through their Safari browser. Peters added that they still want to work with Apple, and "sometimes we find a great space of overlap. We can move very, very quickly. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer." The investment Netflix is talking about is not unchecking a box to enable the iPad app on the Vision Pro. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:01a	NASA's Ingenuity Mission Is Over cusco writes: After three years and 72 flights of its 5-flight mission the mission of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is finally over. Images show that Ingenuity suffered damage to one of its rotor blades and will not be able to take off again. NASA's press release, also shared by cusco: Ingenuity landed on Mars Feb. 18, 2021, attached to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover and first lifted off the Martian surface on April 19, proving that powered, controlled flight on Mars was possible. After notching another four flights, it embarked on a new mission as an operations demonstration, serving as an aerial scout for Perseverance scientists and rover drivers. In 2023, the helicopter executed two successful flight tests that further expanded the team's knowledge of its aerodynamic limits. [...] Over an extended mission that lasted for almost 1,000 Martian days, more than 33 times longer than originally planned, Ingenuity was upgraded with the ability to autonomously choose landing sites in treacherous terrain, dealt with a dead sensor, cleaned itself after dust storms, operated from 48 different airfields, performed three emergency landings, and survived a frigid Martian winter. Designed to operate in spring, Ingenuity was unable to power its heaters throughout the night during the coldest parts of winter, resulting in the flight computer periodically freezing and resetting. These power "brownouts" required the team to redesign Ingenuity's winter operations in order to keep flying. With flight operations now concluded, the Ingenuity team will perform final tests on helicopter systems and download the remaining imagery and data in Ingenuity's onboard memory. The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:01a	George Carlin Estate Sues Creators Of AI-Generated Comedy Special George Carlin's estate is suing over the release of a comedy special that uses generative AI to mimic the deceased comedian's voice and style of humor. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in California federal court on Thursday, accuses the creators of the special of utilizing without consent or compensation George Carlin's entire body of work consisting of five decades of comedy routines to train an AI chatbot, which wrote the episode's script. It also takes issue with using his voice and likeness for promotional purposes. The complaint seeks a court order for immediate removal of the special, as well as unspecified damages. It's among the first legal actions taken by the estate of a deceased celebrity for unlicensed use of their work and likeness to manufacture a new, AI-generated creation and was filed as Hollywood is sounding the alarm over utilization of AI to impersonate people without consent or compensation. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
12:00p	NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans' domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency. The New York Times: The letter [PDF], addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications. Still, the revelation is the latest disclosure to bring to the fore a legal gray zone: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies sometimes purchase potentially sensitive and revealing domestic data from brokers that would require a court order to acquire directly. It comes as the Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on companies that trade in personal location data that was gathered from smartphone apps and sold without people's knowledge and consent about where it would end up and for what purpose it would be used. In a letter to the director of national intelligence dated Thursday, the senator, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, argued that "internet metadata" -- logs showing when two computers have communicated, but not the content of any message -- "can be equally sensitive" as the location data the F.T.C. is targeting. He urged intelligence agencies to stop buying internet data about Americans if it was not collected under the standard the F.T.C. has laid out for location records. "The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans' privacy are not just unethical, but illegal," Mr. Wyden wrote. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:01p	Shameless Insult, Malicious Compliance, Junk Fees, Extortion Regime: Industry Reacts To Apple's Proposed Changes Over Digital Markets Act In response to new EU regulations, Apple on Thursday outlined plans to allow iOS developers to distribute apps outside the App Store starting in March, though developers must still submit apps for Apple's review and pay commissions. Now critics say the changes don't go far enough and Apple retains too much control. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney: They are forcing developers to choose between App Store exclusivity and the store terms, which will be illegal under DMA (Digital Markets Act), or accept a new also-illegal anticompetitive scheme rife with new Junk Fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process. 37signals's David Heinemeier Hansson, who is also the creator of Ruby on Rails: Let's start with the extortion regime that'll befell any large developer who might be tempted to try hosting their app in one of these new alternative app stores that the EU forced Apple to allow. And let's take Meta as a good example. Their Instagram app alone is used by over 300 million people in Europe. Let's just say for easy math there's 250 million of those in the EU. In order to distribute Instagram on, say, a new Microsoft iOS App Store, Meta would have to pay Apple $11,277,174 PER MONTH(!!!) as a "Core Technology Fee." That's $135 MILLION DOLLARS per year. Just for the privilege of putting Instagram into a competing store. No fee if they stay in Apple's App Store exclusively. Holy shakedown, batman! That might be the most blatant extortion attempt ever committed to public policy by any technology company ever. And Meta has many successful apps! WhatsApp is even more popular in Europe than Instagram, so that's another $135M+/year. Then they gotta pay for the Facebook app too. There's the Messenger app. You add a hundred million here and a hundred million there, and suddenly you're talking about real money! Even for a big corporation like Meta, it would be an insane expense to offer all their apps in these new alternative app stores. Which, of course, is the entire point. Apple doesn't want Meta, or anyone, to actually use these alternative app stores. They want everything to stay exactly as it is, so they can continue with the rake undisturbed. This poison pill is therefore explicitly designed to ensure that no second-party app store ever takes off. Without any of the big apps, there will be no draw, and there'll be no stores. All of the EU's efforts to create competition in the digital markets will be for nothing. And Apple gets to send a clear signal: If you interrupt our tool-booth operation, we'll make you regret it, and we'll make you pay. Don't resist, just let it be. Let's hope the EU doesn't just let it be. Coalition of App Fairness, an industry body that represents over 70 firms including Tinder, Spotify, Proton, Tile, and News Media Europe: "Apple clearly has no intention to comply with the DMA. Apple is introducing new fees on direct downloads and payments they do nothing to process, which violates the law. This plan does not achieve the DMA's goal to increase competition and fairness in the digital market -- it is not fair, reasonable, nor non-discriminatory," said Rick VanMeter, Executive Director of the Coalition for App Fairness. "Apple's proposal forces developers to choose between two anticompetitive and illegal options. Either stick with the terrible status quo or opt into a new convoluted set of terms that are bad for developers and consumers alike. This is yet another attempt to circumvent regulation, the likes of which we've seen in the United States, the Netherlands and South Korea. Apple's 'plan' is a shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent -- it must not stand and should be rejected by the Commission." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:01p	Nintendo Plans To Launch Next Switch This Year With LCD, Omdia Says Nintendo plans to launch a new 8-inch LCD-equipped Switch game console this year, well-regarded analyst firm Omdia said Friday [unpaywalled-link]. Bloomberg: The new device from the Kyoto-based games maker will be responsible for a doubling in shipments of so-called amusement displays in 2024, Hayase said in Tokyo on Friday. His research focuses on small and medium displays and he bases annual forecasts on checks with companies in the supply chain. Nintendo's seven-year-old Switch has sold over 132 million units and is approaching the end of its life cycle. The company has been tight-lipped about any potential successor, but expectations have narrowed to this year's holiday period for the release of the next generation. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:10p	Astronomers Discover Giant Ancient Stars in Milky Way Astronomers have discovered a mysterious group of giant elderly stars at the heart of the Milky Way that are emitting solar system-sized clouds of dust and gas. The stars, which have been named "old smokers," sat quietly for many years, fading almost to invisibility, before suddenly puffing out vast clouds of smoke. The discovery was made during the monitoring of almost a billion stars in infrared light during a 10-year survey of the night sky. The Guardian: The astronomers had set out to capture rarely seen newborn stars -- known as protostars -- while undergoing the equivalent of a stellar growth spurt. During these periods, young stars rapidly acquire mass by gorging on surrounding star-forming gas, leading to a sudden increase in luminosity. The team tracked hundreds of millions of stars and identified 32 erupting protostars that increased in brightness at least 40-fold and in some cases more than 300-fold. Another group of red giant stars near the centre of the Milky Way unexpectedly showed up in the analysis, however. When they were studied in more detail using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, seven of the stars were deemed to be a new type of red giant star, which the researchers named "old smokers." Convection currents and instabilities within the star could trigger the release of enormous columns of smoke, Prof Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire, who led the observations, suggested. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:00p	Linux App Store Flathub Now Has Over One Million Active Flatpak App Users prisoninmate shares a 9to5linux report: Flathub is currently one of the most popular app stores for Linux serving 1.6 billion downloads of over 2,400 apps in the Flatpak format, of which more than 850 apps have been verified by their original authors. And now, Flathub proudly announced today that it surpassed 1 million active users of Flatpak apps. The team believes that the recent growth in users comes from several factors, including the availability of some very popular apps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Spotify, OBS Studio, Google Chrome, Telegram), support for new and verified apps, the inclusion of Flathub as the default app source for the Steam Deck's desktop mode, as well as the growing adoption among many popular GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora Linux, Linux Mint, KDE neon, and others. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:01p	Apple Faces 'Strong Action' If App Store Changes Fall Short, EU's Breton Says Apple faces strong action if changes to its App Store do not meet incoming European Union regulations, the bloc's industry chief said on Friday. Reuters: In a move designed to comply with the EU's incoming Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company will soon allow software developers to distribute their apps to Apple devices via alternative stores. From early March, developers will be able to offer alternative app stores on iPhones and opt out of using Apple's in-app payment system, which charges commissions of up to 30%. However, critics have said the changes do not go far enough, arguing Apple's fee structure remains unfair, and that the changes may be in violation of the DMA. Asked about Apple's plans, EU industry chief Thierry Breton exclusively told Reuters: "The DMA will open the gates of the internet to competition so that digital markets are fair and open. Change is already happening. As from 7 March we will assess companies' proposals, with the feedback of third parties." He added: "If the proposed solutions are not good enough, we will not hesitate to take strong action." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:00p	US Energy Secretary Says Anti-EV Sentiment is 'Political Nonsense' An anonymous reader shares a report: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm can relate to Americans' anxiety over electric vehicles. The former governor of Michigan and longtime EV owner (who currently drives a Ford Mach-E) says she has experienced her own challenges with public charging on road trips. She has heard from drivers who are reluctant to give up their eight-cylinder engines and large trucks and SUVs for an electric model. But she is convinced that more Americans will soon realize the benefits of owning one, helping to change the current anti-EV rhetoric in this country. [...] "All of those factories that I was talking about regarding building electric vehicles and electric vehicle batteries, 60% of them are going into red states. So, you know, people in red states love their EVs, too, and are working at these factories," Granholm said. "I just think that over time, the political nonsense about it will die down and people's experience will speak much more loudly." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:01p	Aviation Sector Sees No Fast Tech Solution To GPS Interference Problem Global regulators, aviation security specialists and manufacturers failed to reach an agreement on a quick technical fix to the problem of GPS spoofing near war zones, instead calling for better training of pilots to deal with the issue, Reuters reports, citing sources briefed on the talks. From the report: Airlines have been urging quick action after a series of incidents where navigation systems were disrupted to show a false location or wrong time, though aircraft flight controls remained intact. Spoofing might involve one country's military sending false Global Positioning System signals to an enemy plane or drone to hinder its ability to function, which has a collateral effect on nearby airliners. GPS jamming and spoofing have grown worse in Eastern Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East, according to industry group OpsGroup. GPS is a growing part of aviation infrastructure as it replaces traditional radio beams used to guide planes towards landing. The first international meeting bringing together the sector was held on Thursday in Cologne, Germany, organized by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and international trade group the International Air Transport Association (IATA). GPS interference "can pose significant challenges to aviation safety," and requires that airlines increase data-sharing on jamming and spoofing events, EASA and IATA said in a joint statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
9:00p	California Lawmakers Push for Watermarks on AI-Made Photo, Video California lawmakers are drawing up multiple plans to require watermarks on content created by AI to curb the abuses within the emerging technology, which has affected sectors from political races to the stock market. From a report: At least five lawmakers have promised or are considering different proposals that would require AI companies to implement some type of verification that a video, photo, or written work was made by the technology. The activity comes as advanced AI has rapidly evolved to create realistic images or audio on an unprecedented level. Advocates worry the technology could be ripe for abuse and lead to a wider proliferation of deepfakes, where a person's likeness is digitally manipulated to typically misrepresent them -- with it already being used in the presidential race. But such measures are likely to face scrutiny by the tech sector. Amid a pivotal election year and an online world full of disinformation, the ability to know what's real or not is crucial, said Drew Liebert, director of the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy. The harm from AI is already happening, with Liebert noting the aftermath of an AI-generated photo that went viral in May of last year that falsely portrayed another terrorist attack in the US. "The famous photograph now that was put on the internet that alleged that the Pentagon was attacked, that actually caused momentarily a [$500 billion] dollar loss in the stock market," he said. The loss would not as been as severe, he said, "if people would have been able to instantly determine that it was not a real image at all." Ask Slashdot:Could a Form of Watermarking Prevent AI Deep Faking? Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
11:31p	Mozilla Says Apple's New Browser Rules Are 'as Painful as Possible' for Firefox Apple's new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS. Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it's "extremely disappointed" with the way things turned out. From a report: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps," DeMonte says. "The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear." In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari. The change opens the door for other popular engines, such as Blink, which is used by Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as Gecko, the engine used by Firefox. It also means third-party browsers could become fully functional on iOS without any of the limitations that come along with WebKit. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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