A U.S. judge has granted the FTC request to temporarily block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, scheduling a hearing for a preliminary injunction and preventing the deal from closing until a court ruling is made. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge Edward Davila scheduled a two-day evidentiary hearing on the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction for June 22-23 in San Francisco. Without a court order, Microsoft could have closed on the $69 billion deal as early as Friday. Davila said the temporary restraining order "is necessary to maintain the status quo while the complaint is pending (and) preserve this court's ability to order effective relief in the event it determines a preliminary injunction is warranted and preserve the FTC's ability to obtain an effective permanent remedy in the event that it prevails in its pending administrative proceeding."

Microsoft and Activision must submit legal arguments opposing a preliminary injunction by June 16; the FTC must reply on June 20. Davila said the bar on closing will remain in place until at least five days after the court rules on the preliminary injunction request. The case reflects the muscular approach to antitrust enforcement taken by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.

Google has launched its script editor tool, offering advanced automations for Google Home-powered smart homes. The Verge reports: Available starting Tuesday, June 13th, to those in the Google Home public preview, the script editor is part of Google's new home.google.com web interface, which also has live feeds for any Nest cams on your account. The script editor will be coming to the new Google Home app preview starting June 14th. There's no date for general availability.

Along with allowing for multiple starters and actions, the script editor adds more advanced conditions. For example, you can set an automation to run only if the TV is on and it's after 6PM but before midnight. The script editor automations are created in the new Google Home web interface, you can apply for the public preview here.

The script editor allows you to do everything you can in the Home app when setting up automations, plus "more than 100 new features and capabilities to fit your unique understanding of your home and what you want it to do," according to a blog post by Anish Kattukaran, director of product management at Google Home. This includes access to nearly 100 starters and actions, including Matter sensors -- something not currently possible in the Home app. For example, an Eve Motion sensor connected via Matter to Google Home can't currently be used as a starter for automations in the Home app but can be used as one in the script editor. Google has some example automations that you can view here.

Hmmmmmm writes: Fast food giant McDonald's has released a new retro-style game featuring Grimace, the purple milkshake blob. While it's clearly meant to be played in a browser on a phone or computer, it's also a fully working Game Boy Color game that you can download and play on the original hardware. Grimace's Birthday was developed by Krool Toys, a Brooklyn-based independent game studio and "creative engineering team" with a history of creating playable Game Boy games as unique PR for music artists and brands. The game assumes you're playing in an emulator via a browser window -- you can play that version of the game here -- but we also got it running on an Analogue Pocket thanks to a Game Boy Color FPGA core and a downloadable ROM hosted on the Internet Archive.

The game is so period-authentic that there's even a screen telling original monochrome Game Boy owners that the game "requires a color device to play." Even on Game Boy hardware, it still makes references to people "playing on mobile devices." The game involves simple 2D platforming and skateboarding, not unlike some sections of the Game Boy Color Tony Hawk games; Grimace needs to collect milkshakes and do sick stunts as he tries to track down other McDonaldland characters so he can party with them. It's short -- there are only four levels and one bonus round, plus score attack and free-skate modes -- but the pixel art is legitimately great, and the levels that are here are cleverly designed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Moderators of many Reddit communities are pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted indefinitely. For the vast majority of subreddits, the blackout to protest Reddit's expensive API pricing changes was expected to last from Monday until Wednesday. But in response to a Tuesday post on the r/ModCoord subreddit, users are chiming in to say that their subreddits will remain dark past that 48-hour window. "Reddit has budged microscopically," u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, "our core concerns still aren't satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began." SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge -- "like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well" -- and said that "more is needed for Reddit to act."

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in. SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. "For example, r/stopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns," SpicyThunder335 wrote. As an alternative, SpicyThunder335 recommended implementing a "weekly gesture of support on 'Touch-Grass-Tuesdays,'" which would be left up to the discretion of individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they're on board. As of this writing, more than 8,400 subreddits have gone private or into a restricted mode. The blackouts caused Reddit to briefly crash on Monday.

New York City's food delivery workers will be guaranteed a minimum wage for the first time under new regulations announced by Mayor Eric Adams. Gothamist reports: Tens of thousands of delivery workers are slated to make at least $17.96 per hour plus tips by July 12, and at least $19.96 an hour by 2025, city officials said. That's a sharp increase from what delivery workers make now. Many take home less than the city's minimum wage of $15 an hour. The $19.96 hourly rate is less than the $23.82 the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections originally proposed last November -- but is still almost three times more than what delivery workers currently make, according to the city agency.

Sunday's announcement comes after months of back-and-forth between delivery workers, elected officials and app companies over the minimum wage rates. City officials blew past a Jan. 1 deadline set by City Council legislation to establish the new wage rules. Delivery companies, like Uber and DoorDash, argued that the new legislation will force a raise in prices and less schedule flexibility, while some advocates claim these companies are manipulating employees into testifying against the measure. DoorDash spokesperson Eli Scheinholtz said the company was considering litigation against the city over the new pay rules. "The ones that bring you pizza in the snow, and that Thai food you like in the rain," said Mayor Adams. "This new minimum pay rate will guarantee these workers, and their families, can earn a living. They should not be delivering food to your household, if they can't put food on the plate in their household."

schwit1 shares a report from VentureBeat: [A]s those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources -- books, articles, photographs and so on -- that were created without the help of artificial intelligence. Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content?

A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: "We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." Specifically looking at probability distributions for text-to-text and image-to-image AI generative models, the researchers concluded that "learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse -- a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution ... this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning."

"Over time, mistakes in generated data compound and ultimately force models that learn from generated data to misperceive reality even further," wrote one of the paper's leading authors, Ilia Shumailov, in an email to VentureBeat. "We were surprised to observe how quickly model collapse happens: Models can rapidly forget most of the original data from which they initially learned." In other words: as an AI training model is exposed to more AI-generated data, it performs worse over time, producing more errors in the responses and content it generates, and producing far less non-erroneous variety in its responses. As another of the paper's authors, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, wrote in a blog post discussing the paper: "Just as we've strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we're about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data." schwit1 writes: "Garbage in, garbage out -- and if this paper is correct, generative AI is turning into the self-licking ice cream cone of garbage generation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have devised a novel attack that recovers the secret encryption keys stored in smart cards and smartphones by using cameras in iPhones or commercial surveillance systems to video record power LEDs that show when the card reader or smartphone is turned on. The attacks enable a new way to exploit two previously disclosed side channels, a class of attack that measures physical effects that leak from a device as it performs a cryptographic operation. By carefully monitoring characteristics such as power consumption, sound, electromagnetic emissions, or the amount of time it takes for an operation to occur, attackers can assemble enough information to recover secret keys that underpin the security and confidentiality of a cryptographic algorithm. [...]

On Tuesday, academic researchers unveiled new research demonstrating attacks that provide a novel way to exploit these types of side channels. The first attack uses an Internet-connected surveillance camera to take a high-speed video of the power LED on a smart card reader -- or of an attached peripheral device -- during cryptographic operations. This technique allowed the researchers to pull a 256-bit ECDSA key off the same government-approved smart card used in Minerva. The other allowed the researchers to recover the private SIKE key of a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone by training the camera of an iPhone 13 on the power LED of a USB speaker connected to the handset, in a similar way to how Hertzbleed pulled SIKE keys off Intel and AMD CPUs. Power LEDs are designed to indicate when a device is turned on. They typically cast a blue or violet light that varies in brightness and color depending on the power consumption of the device they are connected to.

There are limitations to both attacks that make them unfeasible in many (but not all) real-world scenarios (more on that later). Despite this, the published research is groundbreaking because it provides an entirely new way to facilitate side-channel attacks. Not only that, but the new method removes the biggest barrier holding back previously existing methods from exploiting side channels: the need to have instruments such as an oscilloscope, electric probes, or other objects touching or being in proximity to the device being attacked. In Minerva's case, the device hosting the smart card reader had to be compromised for researchers to collect precise-enough measurements. Hertzbleed, by contrast, didn't rely on a compromised device but instead took 18 days of constant interaction with the vulnerable device to recover the private SIKE key. To attack many other side channels, such as the one in the World War II encrypted teletype terminal, attackers must have specialized and often expensive instruments attached or near the targeted device. The video-based attacks presented on Tuesday reduce or completely eliminate such requirements. All that's required to steal the private key stored on the smart card is an Internet-connected surveillance camera that can be as far as 62 feet away from the targeted reader. The side-channel attack on the Samsung Galaxy handset can be performed by an iPhone 13 camera that's already present in the same room. Videos here and here show the video-capture process of a smart card reader and a Samsung Galaxy phone, respectively, as they perform cryptographic operations. "To the naked eye, the captured video looks unremarkable," adds Ars.

"But by analyzing the video frames for different RGB values in the green channel, an attacker can identify the start and finish of a cryptographic operation."

The company that currently owns the Atari name and trademarks has decided to give owners of the old Atari Video Computer System (aka the Atari 2600) something new to do. From a report: Mr. Run and Jump is a new Atari-published platformer that is coming to vintage Atari consoles in cartridge form, complete with a box and instruction manual. Preorders for the cartridge begin on July 31 for $59.99. The version of Mr. Run and Jump coming to the 2600 is a primitive version of a much different-looking game with the same name that's coming to PCs and all major game consoles on July 25. We've got to hand it to Atari here -- as a PR gambit for a new game, porting a rough version of your game to a 46-year-old game console and then giving it a physical release complete with box and manual is pretty good.

Atari is billing this release as "the first 2600 cartridge launch for a new Atari title since 1990," though there have also been some limited-run cartridge releases for games like 2005's Yars' Return. There were also a few new 2600-inspired games and remakes, including Vctr Sctr, in Atari's 50th-anniversary collection, which also got a physical release on modern consoles. Although modern game development for the 2600, NES, Game Boy, and other retro consoles are mostly the provenance of homebrew developers working in emulators, physical cartridge releases aren't uncommon. Limited Run Games and other independent and crowdfunded outfits have released plenty of physical cartridges for old consoles, including a Smash Bros-style NES game that includes a Wi-Fi chip to support online play.

Amazon is turning to artificial intelligence to help users find the right product. From a report: The e-retailer recently began testing a feature in its shopping app that uses AI to summarize reviews left by customers on some products. It provides a brief overview of what shoppers liked and disliked about the product, along with a disclaimer that the summary is "AI-generated from the text of customer reviews." A mobile listing for a children's "Magic Mixies" cauldron toy says that buyers gave positive feedback around its "fun factor, appearance, value, performance, quality, charging, and leakage."

"However, the majority of customers have expressed negative opinions on these aspects," the summary states. "For example, some customers have paid over $100 for a toy that wasn't worth it, while others have experienced issues with the product's quality and charging." Amazon confirmed that it's testing the feature. The company didn't share specific details about it works or what AI models are being used to summarize.

Microsoft will make it possible for users of its Azure Government cloud computing service, which include a variety of US agencies, to access artificial intelligence models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI. From a report: Microsoft, which is the largest investor in OpenAI and uses its technology to power its Bing chatbot, plans to announce Wednesday that Azure Government customers can now use two of OpenAI's large language models: The startup's latest and most powerful model, GPT-4, and an earlier one, GPT-3, via Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service.

The Redmond, Washington-based company plans Wednesday to release a blog post, viewed by Bloomberg, about the program, although its doesn't name specific US agencies expected to use the large language models at launch. The Defense Department, the Energy Department and NASA are among the federal government customers of Azure Government. The Defense Technical Information Center -- a part of the Defense Department that focuses on gathering and sharing military research -- will be experimenting with the OpenAI models through Microsoft's new offering, a DTIC official confirmed.

Meta said on Tuesday that it would provide researchers with access to components of a new "human-like" artificial intelligence model that it said can analyze and complete unfinished images more accurately than existing models. From a report: The model, I-JEPA, uses background knowledge about the world to fill in missing pieces of images, rather than looking only at nearby pixels like other generative AI models, the company said. That approach incorporates the kind of human-like reasoning advocated by Meta's top AI scientist Yann LeCun and helps the technology to avoid errors that are common to AI-generated images, like hands with extra fingers, it said.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is a prolific publisher of open-sourced AI research via its in-house research lab. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that sharing models developed by Meta's researchers can help the company by spurring innovation, spotting safety gaps and lowering costs. "For us, it's way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we're using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make," he told investors in April.

The extent of area burned in California's summer wildfires increased about fivefold from 1971 to 2021, and climate change was a major reason why, according to a new analysis. Scientists estimate the area burned in an average summer may jump as much as 50% by 2050. From a report: Days after wildfire smoke from Canada turned skies orange along the US Eastern Seaboard, the study is further confirmation of past research showing that higher temperatures and drier conditions in many parts of the world make wildfires more likely. Wildfires worsened by greenhouse gases emitted by human activities tore through Australia in 2019 and 2020 and Siberia in 2020. The peer-reviewed research, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that wildfires in California's northern and central forests scorch the most area when temperatures are high and less area when it's cooler.

Marco Turco, a climate researcher at the University of Murcia in Spain, and colleagues designed the study to try to identify how much of the increase in the burned area of California fires was due to climate change, and how much to natural variability. They conducted a statistical analysis of temperature and forest-fire data for California summers in the period 1971 to 2021. They then drew on modeling that shows how the last several decades might have evolved without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The result: Burned area grew 172% more than it would have without climate change. Manmade effects began to overwhelm what would be expected without greenhouse gas pollution after 2001, the researchers concluded.

Experts say the subsea cable market is in danger of dividing into eastern and western blocs amid fears of espionage and geopolitical tensions. From a report: Nearly 1.4mn kilometres of metal-encased fibre criss-crosses the world's oceans, speeding internet traffic seamlessly around the globe. The supply and installation of these cables has been dominated by companies from France, the US and Japan. The Chinese government started successfully penetrating the global market, but consecutive US administrations have since managed to freeze China out of large swathes of it. This was ostensibly because of concerns of espionage and worries about what Beijing might do to disrupt strategic assets operated by Chinese companies in the event of a conflict. Despite being routinely blocked from international subsea cable projects involving US investment, Chinese companies have adapted by building international cables for China and many of its allied nations. This has raised fears of a dangerous division in who owns and manages the infrastructure underpinning the global web.

In 2018, Amazon, Meta and China Mobile agreed to work together on a cable connecting California to Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. But a spate of manoeuvres in Washington to block Chinese participation in US cables led to China Mobile pulling out of the consortium. Meta and Amazon filed a new application for the system in 2021, this time with no Chinese investment, no connection to Hong Kong, and a new name: Cap-1. Then, last year, the application for Cap-1 was withdrawn altogether, even though most of the 12,000km cable had already been built. China's original involvement remained a security concern for the US government, according to two people briefed on the discussions. "There are hundreds of millions of dollars sunk in the Pacific," said a person involved in the aborted project. Over the last five years, as tensions between the two countries have mounted and fears have grown in Washington about the risks of espionage, the US government has sought to pull apart an interwoven network of internet cables that had developed through international collaboration over decades.

In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the "noise" and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass. From a report: The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company's increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they'll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes.

Huffman says the blackout hasn't had "significant revenue impact" and that the company anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online by Wednesday. "There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well," the memo reads. "We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail."

A French start-up founded four weeks ago by a trio of former Meta and Google artificial intelligence researchers has raised $113.3 million in Europe's largest-ever seed round. From a report: Mistral AI's first round of financing values the Paris-based concern at $259 million, including the funds raised, according to people close to the company. The record amount raised highlights the growing frenzy surrounding AI and Europe's desire to create a viable alternative to Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.

"There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor," said Arthur Mensch, Mistral's chief executive. The former DeepMind researcher founded the start-up with Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who both recently left Meta after working at Facebook's parent company for the past few years. [...] Mistral has yet to develop its first product, and its first few employees started work only days ago. It plans to launch early next year a new "large language model," similar to the "generative AI" system that powers OpenAI's breakout ChatGPT app.