Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has extended its spot market share across crypto exchanges for a fourth consecutive month. From a report: The exchange market share increased from 59.4% in January to 61.8% in February, according to a report from crypto market data provider CryptoCompare. Binance had a 13.7% increase in its spot volumes to $504 billion, an all-time high market share for the exchange. This comes as regulators in the U.S. and beyond have ratcheted up their scrutiny of the exchange in recent months. Most recently, a U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC) official said that agency staff believe Binance.US may be operating an unregistered securities exchange in the U.S., an assertion to which Binance.US objected. Binance is a corporate entity that operates in US through Binance.US.

"Despite the recent criticism the exchange has received, market participants continue to take shelter on Binance under the premise that the largest exchange is seen as one of the safer trading venues," said Jacob Joseph, a research analyst at CryptoCompare, in an interview with CoinDesk. Joseph also attributes the exchange's dominance to the vast amount of liquidity available on Binance, which means reduced slippage costs and spreads, an attractive benefit for traders. "It is one of the exchanges with the most trading pairs and services available," Joseph said.

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has followed Microsoft and Google to become the latest veteran search player to dip its beak in the generative AI trend -- announcing the launch today in beta of an AI-powered summarization feature, called DuckAssist, which can directly answer straightforward search queries for users. From a report: DDG says it's drawing on natural language technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, an AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, to power the natural language summarization capability, combined with its own active indexing of Wikipedia and other reference sites it's using to source answers (the encyclopedia Britannia is another source it mentions).

Founder Gabe Weinberg tells TechCrunch the sources it's using for DuckAssist are -- currently -- "99%+ Wikipedia." But he notes the company is "experimenting with how incorporating other sources could work, and when to use them" -- which suggests it may seek to adapt sourcing to the context of the query (so, for example, a topical news-related search query might be better responded to by DuckAssist sourcing information from trusted news media). So it remains to be seen how DDG will evolve the feature -- and whether it might, for example, seek to ink partnerships with reference sites. At launch, DuckAssist is only available via DDG's apps and browser extensions -- but the company says it plans to roll it out to all search users in the coming weeks. The beta feature is free to use and does not require the user to be logged in to access it. It's only available in English for now. Per Weinberg, the AI models DDG is ("currently") using to power the natural language summarization are: The Davinci model from OpenAI and the Claude model from Anthropic. He also notes DDG is "experimenting" with the new Turbo model OpenAI recently announced.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon on Tuesday defeated a proposed class action lawsuit on behalf of nearly 7,000 workers in California that claimed the company should have reimbursed employees who worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic for home office expenses. U.S. District Judge Vincent Chhabria in San Francisco said the named plaintiff, David Williams, failed to show that Amazon had a company-wide policy of not reimbursing employees for internet, cell phone and other costs, and the judge denied his motion to certify the workers as a class.

The judge said that more than 600 of the 7,000 proposed class members were reimbursed $66.49 on average for home internet expenses, and some were reimbursed in full. Williams' motion for class certification was denied without prejudice, meaning he can file a renewed motion later on. Craig Ackermann, a lawyer for Williams, said he plans to file a new motion excluding the 619 workers who received reimbursements from the proposed class. Williams sued Amazon in 2021 individually and added class-action claims last year. He has accused Amazon of violating a California law requiring employers to reimburse workers for reasonable work-related expenses.

James Temple reports via MIT Technology Review: In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting an experiment deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada. It pumped water thousands of feet underground and then held it there, watching for what would happen. Geothermal power plants work by circulating water through hot rock deep beneath the surface. In most modern plants, it resurfaces at a well head, where it's hot enough to convert refrigerants or other fluids into vapor that cranks a turbine, generating electricity. But Houston-based Fervo Energy is testing out a new spin on the standard approach -- and on that day, its engineers and executives were simply interested in generating data.

The readings from gauges planted throughout the company's twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours. The results from the initial experiments -- which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively -- suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.

There are remaining questions about how well, affordably, and safely this will work on larger scales. But if Fervo can build commercial plants with this added functionality, it will fill a critical gap in today's grids, making it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems. "We know that just generating and selling traditional geothermal is incredibly valuable to the grid," says Tim Latimer, chief executive and cofounder of Fervo. "But as time goes on, our ability to be responsive, and ramp up and down and do energy storage, is going to increase in value even more."

NASA's Orion spacecraft performed better than expected on its first deep-space flight despite experiencing unpredicted loss of its heat shield material. Space.com reports: During Tuesday's call, NASA program managers revealed that Orion's heat shield did not perform as expected, losing more material than the agency had planned for. Nevertheless, NASA leadership is confident that everything will be ready for the crewed around-the-moon flight of Artemis 2, which is planned for next year. Howard Hu, manager of NASA's Orion Program, lauded the crew module's performance during the test flight, noting that NASA was able to accomplish 161 overall test objectives planned for the mission, even adding an additional 21 during the flight based on the spacecraft's performance.

"We also accomplished what our number one objective was, which is returning the crew module back to Earth safely from 24,500 miles per hour to a landing about 16 miles per hour when it touched down, and we were able to land within 2.4 miles of our target," Hu said during Tuesday's teleconference. "Our requirement was 6.2 miles. So, really great performance as we were able to return back from the moon." "Some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted," Hu said. "So we had more liberation of the charred material during reentry before we landed than we had expected."

Hu explained that NASA teams are investigating a wide range of data related to the performance of Orion's heat shield, including images and videos of reentry, onboard sensor readings, and even X-ray images of sample materials taken from the shield. "Overall, there's a lot of work to be done in this investigation going forward," Hu said. "We are just starting that effort because we've just gotten together all those pieces of information. Those samples, the videos, images, and the data from the spacecraft itself and correlated them together. And now we're assessing that data and moving forward with that assessment." Despite the heat shield issue, NASA says they feel confident that the crewed Artemis 2 mission will be able to launch on schedule in 2024.

"NASA is currently aiming to launch Artemis 2 in November 2024," adds Space.com. "The mission will send a crew of astronauts on an eight-day mission around the moon and back to test Orion's performance, crew interfaces, and guidance and navigation systems."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining. According to Google, when given a high-level command, such as "bring me the rice chips from the drawer," PaLM-E can generate a plan of action for a mobile robot platform with an arm (developed by Google Robotics) and execute the actions by itself.

PaLM-E does this by analyzing data from the robot's camera without needing a pre-processed scene representation. This eliminates the need for a human to pre-process or annotate the data and allows for more autonomous robotic control. It's also resilient and can react to its environment. For example, the PaLM-E model can guide a robot to get a chip bag from a kitchen -- and with PaLM-E integrated into the control loop, it becomes resistant to interruptions that might occur during the task. In a video example, a researcher grabs the chips from the robot and moves them, but the robot locates the chips and grabs them again. In another example, the same PaLM-E model autonomously controls a robot through tasks with complex sequences that previously required human guidance. Google's research paper explains (PDF) how PaLM-E turns instructions into actions.

PaLM-E is a next-token predictor, and it's called "PaLM-E" because it's based on Google's existing large language model (LLM) called "PaLM" (which is similar to the technology behind ChatGPT). Google has made PaLM "embodied" by adding sensory information and robotic control. Since it's based on a language model, PaLM-E takes continuous observations, like images or sensor data, and encodes them into a sequence of vectors that are the same size as language tokens. This allows the model to "understand" the sensory information in the same way it processes language. In addition to the RT-1 robotics transformer, PaLM-E draws from Google's previous work on ViT-22B, a vision transformer model revealed in February. ViT-22B has been trained on various visual tasks, such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and image captioning.

Mike Butcher writes via TechCrunch: SidekickWas it the pandemic? Did everyone follow too many ADHD TikTokers? Have smartphones fried our brains? Whatever the case, there is a boom in ADHD tech solutions, from online drug deliveries to web sites and apps. [...] Now there is a Sidekick, who's pitch is that it's a "productivity browser." Today it's launching a host of features geared to ADHD sufferers and the attention distracted more generally. The company claims users with ADHD noticed a "significant improvement" after using the browser. The Chromium-based browser was founded by Dmitry Pushkarev (a Stanford PhD in Molecular Biology, ex-Amazon exec and ADHDer).

So how does it work? To nullify distractions, the browser incorporates AdBlock 2.0; a Focus Mode Timer disables all sounds, badges and notifications for a selected time or indefinitely; a Task Manager organizes your day; and there's a built-in Pomodoro timer; it also claims to run 3x faster than Chrome, which, apparently, is important for ADHD sufferers. Suffice it to say, it has a number of other distraction-killing features; however, I'm not going to list them all here.

CEO and founder Dmitry Pushkarev said, in a statement, "Modern browsers are not designed for work, but for consuming web pages. This gap really hurts hundreds of millions of users. We are convinced that lowering web distraction reduces anxiety and increases the quality of people's work and the quality of their lives." He says the startup plans to make money via corporate subscribers, who will pay to get their ADHD-afflicted workers into a more productive mode.

The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called "country code top level domains" (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau. Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, presumably as a way to encourage users to pay for related services, such as registering a .com or .net domain, for which Freenom does charge a fee. On March 3, 2023, social media giant Meta sued Freenom in a Northern California court, alleging cybersquatting violations and trademark infringement. The lawsuit also seeks information about the identities of 20 different "John Does" -- Freenom customers that Meta says have been particularly active in phishing attacks against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users. The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted for the European Commission, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.

"The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers' identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes," the complaint charges. "Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers." Freenom has not yet responded to requests for comment. But attempts to register a domain through the company's website as of publication time generated an error message that reads: "Because of technical issues the Freenom application for new registrations is temporarily out-of-order. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. We are working on a solution and hope to resume operations shortly. Thank you for your understanding." Although Freenom is based in The Netherlands, some of its other sister companies named as defendants in the lawsuit names are incorporated in the United States.

It remains unclear why Freenom has stopped allowing domain registration, but it could be that the company was recently the subject of some kind of disciplinary action by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit entity which oversees the domain registrars. In June 2015, ICANN suspended Freenom's ability to create new domain names or initiate inbound transfers of domain names for 90 days. According to Meta, the suspension was premised on ICANN's determination that Freenom "has engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking in or use of domain names identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark of a third party in which the Registered Name Holder has no rights or legitimate interest."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The White House said Tuesday it backs a bill in Congress to give the Biden administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign technologies that could pose security threats. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the bipartisan bill sponsored by a dozen senators "would strengthen our ability to address discrete risks posed by individual transactions, and systemic risks posed by certain classes of transactions involving countries of concern in sensitive technology sectors."

"We look forward to continue working with both Democrats and Republicans on this bill, and urge Congress to act quickly to send it to the President's desk," he said. The bill in question is called the "Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act."

The bill, introduced by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD), doesn't single out TikTok to be banned. "Instead, Warner avoids making his bill all about TikTok," reports Ars Technica. "His office told Reuters that the RESTRICT Act will 'comprehensively address the ongoing threat posed by technology from foreign adversaries,' citing TikTok as an example of tech that could be assessed as a threat."

"[T]he RESTRICT Act is superior to the DATA Act because it provides a legal framework for the US to review all 'foreign technology coming into America,' not just from China, but also from Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. It's designed to give the US 'a systemic approach to make sure we can ban or prohibit' emerging technology threats 'when necessary.'"

According to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is readying a new batch of Macs to launch "between late spring and summer." This includes a 15-inch MacBook Air and a new 24-inch iMac. From the report: Apple's next iMac desktop is at an advanced stage of development called engineering validation testing, or EVT, and the company is conducting production tests of the machine. The next iMac will continue to come in the same 24-inch screen size as the current model, which was announced in April 2021. The versions being tested also come in the same colors as the current iMac, a palette that includes blue, silver, pink and orange.

The new iMacs will, of course, be more powerful -- with a new M-series chip to replace the M1. There also will be some behind-the-scenes changes. The computer will see some of its internal components relocated and redesigned, and the manufacturing process for attaching the iMac's stand is different. While development of the new iMacs -- codenamed J433 and J434 -- has reached a late stage, it's not expected to go into mass production for at least three months. That means it won't ship until the second half of the year at the earliest. Still, this is a great development for anyone disappointed that Apple's all-in-one desktop hasn't been updated in nearly two years.

Aside from the iMac, Apple is scheduled to launch about three new Macs between late spring and summer, I'm told. Those three models are likely to be the first 15-inch MacBook Air (codenamed J515), the first Mac Pro with homegrown Apple chips (J180) and an update to the 13-inch MacBook Air (J513). The big remaining question is which processors these new Macs will run on. We already know the Mac Pro will include the M2 Ultra, which will provide up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. We also know that Apple has developed the next iMac on the same timeline as the M3 chip, so I'd expect it to be one of the company's first M3-based machines.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence discussed the emergence of spatial audio, the state of the smart home, and how a seemingly endless stream of lawsuits between Sonos and Google impact its day to day. Here's what he had to say about looming right-to-repair legislation and how it impacted the company's focus on reparability: We factor in everything. But I would say that our team has been on this for a long time, in terms of being the right thing to do. Also, I think we're learning. When we were first bringing out our products 20 years ago, we were like, "How do you build these things so they'll make the sound you want?" So we had to use things like adhesives. We've been able to come up with ways and inventions that allow us to disassemble these products. It comes into our thinking more broadly about what we're building and how you live up to the law of the land, but even before that, we were already starting to use recycled materials. We were already starting to use things that allow it to be more easily repaired. In late 2021, the company announced plans to extend the lifespan of its products and use less energy. They started a "Design for Disassembly" program that "includes changes like swapping out adhesives for fasteners, which can make it easier for consumers to take apart Sonos products for repair," reports The Verge. When asked for additional information about the program, Sonos wouldn't confirm whether it will also make replacement parts and repair manuals available.

All of its products by the end of 2023 will use post-consumer recycled plastic and they will include "sleep mode," a feature that cuts down on power consumption while the device is idle. The goal is for Sonos products to ultimately use less than 2 watts while idle," adds The Verge.

In the longterm, Sonos aims to cut emissions from its products' energy use by 45 percent by 2040. They also want to essentially cancel its entire footprint by that date by relying on a mixture of carbon offsets and new technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: A nuclear power plant in Georgia has begun splitting atoms in one of its two new reactors, Georgia Power said Monday, a key step toward reaching commercial operation at the first new nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades in the United States. The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said operators reached self-sustaining nuclear fission inside the reactor at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta. That makes the intense heat that will be used to produce steam and spin turbines to generate electricity.

A third and a fourth reactor were approved for construction at Vogtle by the Georgia Public Service Commission in 2009, and the third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016. The company now says Unit 3 could begin commercial operation in May or June. Unit 4 is projected to begin commercial operation sometime between this November and March 2024.

The cost of the third and fourth reactors was originally supposed to be $14 billion. The reactors are now supposed to cost more than $30 billion. That doesn't include $3.68 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners after going bankrupt, which brings total spending to more than $34 billion. Georgia Power said Unit 3 would continue startup testing to show that its cooling system and steam supply system will work at the intense heat and pressure that a nuclear reactor creates. After that, operators are supposed to link the reactor to the electrical grid and gradually raise it to full power.

Intel has completed development of its Intel 18A (1.8nm-class) and Intel 20A (2nm-class) fabrication processes that will be used to make the company's own products, as well as chips for clients of its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) division, reports UDN. From a report: Wang Rui, president and chairman of Intel China, said at an event that the company had finalized the development of its Intel 18A (18 angstroms-class) and Intel 20A (20 angstroms-class) fabrication processes. This does not mean that the production nodes are ready to be used for commercial manufacturing, but rather that Intel has determined all specifications, materials, requirements, and performance targets for both technologies.

Intel's 20A fabrication technology will rely on gate-all-around RibbonFET transistors and will use backside power delivery. Shrinking metal pitches, introducing all-new transistor structure and adding backside power delivery at the same time is a risky move, but it is expected that 20A will allow Intel to leapfrog the company's competitors -- TSMC and Samsung Foundry. Intel plans to start using this node in the first half of 2024. Intel's 18A manufacturing process will further refine the company's RibbonFET and PowerVia technologies, as well as shrink transistor sizes. Development of this node is apparently going so well that Intel pulled in its introduction from 2025 to the second half of 2024. Intel originally planned to use ASML's Twinscan EXE scanners with a 0.55 numerical aperture (NA) optics for its 1.8 angstroms node, but because it decided to start using the technology sooner, it will have to rely on extensive use of existing Twinscan NXE scanners with 0.33 NA optics, as well as EUV double patterning.

The AI Education Project has developed curriculum to help teachers and students understand artificial intelligence. From a report: With students taking advantage of ChatGPT for homework and term papers, there's a lot of handwringing about whether artificial-intelligence tools are appropriate for school. Alex Kotran said his group wants to make sure those tools are used even more. Kotran is the chief executive officer of the AI Education Project (aiEDU), a nonprofit backed by companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and AT&T, that provides free materials and teacher training to boost AI understanding in school districts. The idea is to teach kids about the technology, its limits and promise, and prepare them jobs where they'll need to use AI.

The group on Tuesday is announcing a national call for AI education with an expanded list of backers and partner schools at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, Texas. So far, aiEDU has reached 100,000 students and has relationship with districts representing 1.5 million low-income and underserved kids across the country. The non-profit was founded in 2019, and Kotran thought it would take a few years before there was widespread demand from educators for these kinds of programs. "We were kind of wearing the T-shirt before the band was cool," he said. Instead the rapid increase in interest in generative AI with the popularity of programs like OpenAI's chatbot and Dall-E, its tool for digital images, has dramatically boosted demand, and the group could use more funding, he said.