An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's Kuiper division can start launching satellites to offer broadband service in the US, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday. The FCC's International Bureau approved Kuiper's orbital debris mitigation plan. This approval was needed to satisfy a condition imposed in 2020 when the Amazon subsidiary received tentative approval for a network of 3,236 satellites in low-Earth orbit. "Our action will allow Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world," yesterday's FCC order said.

Amazon's biggest competitor for low-latency satellite broadband will be SpaceX's Starlink service, but Amazon's launch schedule puts it a few years behind SpaceX. The companies have fought each other in FCC proceedings, with Amazon objecting to SpaceX's satellite plans and SpaceX filing objections to Amazon's. In approving Amazon's plan yesterday, the FCC dismissed objections from other satellite providers such as SpaceX and Viasat. As the FCC order notes, SpaceX argued that the commission "should limit Kuiper to deploy only 578 satellites in its 630 kilometer orbital shell, and defer action regarding the remainder of the constellation," in order to "address Kuiper's ability to coexist with other systems in and around its 590 kilometer and 610 kilometer shells, and allow for 'continued monitoring' of deployment." A Space filing last month said, "Granting an initial 578 satellites of Amazon's 3,236-satellite system would offer Amazon a path to begin deploying for 'many months,' while providing the Commission with time and additional data to assess the serious issues raised in this proceeding." [...]

According to the FCC, SpaceX also argued "that Kuiper's satellite disposal strategy will place the Kuiper satellites in an elliptical orbit that, because of the variable effects of atmospheric drag on orbit evolution, will result in large uncertainties in the predicted trajectories of the Kuiper satellites, making it difficult for other operators to assess and mitigate risk." SpaceX contended that "the large covariances involved in the elliptical orbits may therefore pose a risk to SpaceX's satellites operating at the same altitudes during their orbit raising phase of operations." However, Kuiper responded that it "will perform orbit determination using Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements on all Kuiper satellites during the deorbiting process and share high-accuracy location information with operators on a real-time basis." The FCC accepted that plan and imposed it as a condition on the license. SpaceX and Viasat both "raised concerns that Kuiper's satellite designs are not sufficiently finalized to enable review," but Amazon said the design is complete and that it doesn't expect material changes, the FCC order said. Kuiper would have to apply for a license modification if it does make significant changes.

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said in a message to employees Thursday that the company is reducing headcount by 7%, or about 130 positions. From a report: "The current macroeconomic environment is tough, and as a result, companies are still spending but they are taking a more conservative approach to software investments and are taking more time to make purchasing decisions," Sijbrandij said in his message to employees. GitLab had 1,860 employees according to PitchBook data.

The alleged Chinese spy balloon that flew over the US was capable of collecting communications signals and was part of a broader People's Liberation Army intelligence-gathering effort that spanned more than 40 countries, a State Department official said Thursday. From a report: High-resolution imagery provided by U-2 spy planes that flew past the balloon revealed an array of surveillance equipment that was inconsistent with Beijing's claim that it was a weather device blown off course, the official said in a statement provided on condition of anonymity. The statement, released before State and Defense Department officials appeared before Congress in open hearings and closed briefings on Thursday, marks the fullest accounting yet for the Biden administration's insistence over the course of a week-long drama that the balloon was meant to spy on the US. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in an interview with CBS News that the Pentagon acted to limit what the balloon could learn about US nuclear capabilities.

Microsoft-owned GitHub is laying off 10% of its staff. From a report: In a message to staff on Thursday, GitHub's CEO Thomas Dohmke said that due to "new budgetary realignments" the company must reduce the workforce "by up to 10% through the end of FY23." The company is also going fully remote, Dohmke wrote, telling staff they're "seeing very low utilization rates" in their offices. "We are not vacating offices immediately, but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so," Dohmke wrote.

"We announced a number of difficult but necessary decisions and budgetary realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward," a GitHub spokesperson told Fortune in a written statement. The company declined to comment on whether these cuts are a part of Microsoft's layoffs that impacted 10,000 employees last month.

Zhu Su and Kyle Davies, the founders of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), have teamed with the co-founders of crypto exchange CoinFlex on the creation of Open Exchange, touting it as the "world's first public market place for crypto claims trading and derivatives." From a report: Noting a $20 billion market of claimants "desperately searching" for resolution to money lost at bankrupt crypto firms like Celsius, Genesis, BlockFi, Mt. Gox and 3AC, Open Exchange promises the ability to monetize claims by providing a marketplace for their trading.

Growing concerns about China's military and economic ambitions have lawmakers and the White House weighing yet another effort to restrict Beijing's access to advanced technologies that could be used in war. From a report: This time, the U.S. government appears poised to extend its restrictions to a new area: American dollars that are used to finance the development of such technologies within Chinese borders. For months, the Biden administration has been preparing curbs on the investments that U.S. firms can make in China, particularly in areas like advanced computing.

Those measures are now largely complete and could be issued within two months. The Treasury Department has been reaching out to other governments, including the European Union, to try to ensure that they do not rush in to provide similar financing to China after the United States cuts it off, according to people familiar with the discussions. The voyage of a spy balloon across the United States has set off newfound fears about the national security threats posed by the Chinese government. This week, lawmakers on both sides warned the White House that if the administration did not move ahead with investment restrictions, Congress would propose its own.

Matthew Hillier can't get Comcast service at his home in Arvada, Colorado. But that didn't stop Comcast from claiming it serves his house when it submitted data for the Federal Communications Commission's new broadband map. From a report: Comcast eventually admitted to the FCC that it doesn't serve the address -- but only after Ars got involved. Comcast will have to correct its submission for Hillier's house, and a bigger correction might be needed because it appears Comcast doesn't serve dozens of other nearby homes that it claimed as part of its coverage area.

When Hillier looked up his address on the FCC map, it showed Comcast claims to offer 1.2Gbps download and 35Mbps upload speeds at the house. In reality, he makes do with CenturyLink Internet that tops out at 60Mbps downloads and 5Mbps uploads. Hillier -- an engineer with 30 years experience who previously worked for several telecom firms, including Comcast and Charter -- submitted a challenge to the FCC in mid-November, telling the commission that Comcast doesn't serve his address. Correcting false data is important because the map will be used to determine which parts of the US are eligible for $42.45 billion in federal grants to expand broadband availability. Program rules require ISPs to respond to challenges within 60 days, and Comcast's first response to Hillier's insisted that it actually does serve the house, which is on a street called Quartz Loop. "The provider subject to your challenge has disputed your challenge," the FCC told Hillier in an automated email on January 21. Comcast admitted to the FCC that it doesn't offer service at Hillier's home in Arvada on February 3, one day after Ars contacted Comcast's public relations department.

Seymour Hersh is a former New York Times and New Yorker reporter who won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including a 1970 Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. In his first post to Substack, Hersh details the covert operation the United States conducted last year to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

"In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery," writes Hersh. "Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House -- but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution." We covered the news last October from an environmental standpoint as it led to what became the biggest single release of climate-damaging methane ever recorded.

In a lengthy and detailed post, citing a source with direct knowledge of the operation, Hersh describes the planning involved, operation itself, and fallout. Slashdot reader r1348 shares an excerpt from Hersh's report: Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions. Speaking about Biden's decision to sabotage the pipeline as winter approached, the source said: "I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did." Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, "Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did. It was a beautiful cover story," he went on. "Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal."

In response to the report, White House spokesperson Adrienne Watson said: "This is false and complete fiction." Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the CIA, similarly wrote: "This claim is completely and utterly false."

Android 14 is here -- or the first preview is, at least. From a report: Google is kicking off the months-long developer preview process for Android's latest version, which will get a final release in the second half of the year. Even with multiple previews, Google likes to keep the final set of Android features under wraps at least until its I/O conference in May, so we can't look at the features here to determine the scope of Android 14. These are just some of the features Google wants developers to have a head start on. The biggest news is that Android 14 will block the installation of old Android apps. As Android changes over the years, new APIs and increased security, privacy, or background processing restrictions could break old apps, but Android's backward-compatibility system keeps these old apps running. Apps can declare the newest version of Android they support via a "Target SDK" flag.

To prevent old apps from breaking, new features and app restrictions in, say, Android 12 only apply to apps that target Android 12 or above. Older apps will continue to run with the older set of restrictions they're used to. (A different setting, called "Minimum SDK," determines if a new app can run on an old Android OS.) The system works great for honest developers, but if you're building a piece of malware, it's an easy decision to target a very old version of Android. While you'll get access to fewer features, you'll also be subject to fewer security and privacy restrictions. For the first time, Android 14 will close this malware loophole by simply refusing to install old apps. The cutoff point is generous enough that it shouldn't cause anyone problems; any app targeting the 8-year-old Android 6.0 or below will be blocked. Google says it picked Android 6 because it's the version that introduced runtime permissions, the allow/deny boxes that pop up asking for things like camera access. In addition, "some malware apps use a targetSdkVersion of [Android 5.1] to avoid being subjected to the runtime permission model introduced in 2015 by Android 6.0," Google said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the test, I asked the new Bing -- now available in a trial format -- to write a cover letter for the position of social media content producer at Insider's bureau in Singapore. It flat out refused to do so. "I'm sorry, but I cannot write a cover letter for you. That would be unethical and unfair to other applicants," the new Bing told me. However, it did provide me with a few tips and links to several cover-letter writing resources including Zippia, a career-building platform. Some of the tips Bing gave me include "research the company and the role, and tailor your cover letter to show how you fit their needs and values" and "use a clear and professional tone, and avoid spelling and grammar errors." Its human-like touch was also apparent when it wished me luck at the end of its response -- with a smiley emoji: "I hope this helps you to write a cover letter that stands out. Good luck!"

Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel. From a report: Greg KH was planning on Linux 6.1 being LTS given its December debut. But he was waiting on feedback from kernel stakeholders over their test results with Linux 6.1 and plans around using Linux 6.1 for the long-term. He's finally collected enough positive responses -- along with co-maintainer Sasha Levin -- that there is confidence in maintaining Linux 6.1 as an LTS series.

As of now the plan is on maintaining Linux 6.1 through December 2026, which is just a few months longer than the current Linux 5.15 LTS series that will be maintained through October 2026. We'll see over time if Linux 6.1 ends up potentially being maintained for the longer six-year LTS period that would put it through 2028. However, the number of Linux LTS series being maintained in tandem is growing and will ultimately depend upon how much these kernels are used by major industry players and how much commitment there is for testing of the point release candidates, etc.

Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday -- but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft's announcement yesterday of the "new Bing," which the company has demoed extensively to the press and offered limited public access to. From a report: In perhaps the most interesting demo, Google showed off how it will use generative AI in the future to summarize information from the web. In the demo, the company showed a search for the question "what are the best constellations to look for while stargazing?" with an AI-generated response highlighting a few key options and how to spot them. "New generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints right in search results," said Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan. "With this you'll be able to quickly understand the big picture and then go on to explore different angles."

Raghavan referred to this sort of response as a "NORA" reply -- standing for "no one right answer." (A common criticism of AI-generated search responses is that they tend to pick a single answer as definitive.) He did not specify when this feature would be available. The lack of information speaks to Google's current difficulties in search. Although the company is a leader in AI and has been slowly weaving AI features into search for years, it's yet to launch a direct competitor to the conversational ChatGPT. On Monday, it announced its rival service, Bard, but the system is currently only being tested in closed beta, with wider public availability promised sometime 'in the coming weeks."

India's push to ban over 90 lending apps has sent shockwaves to the fintech industry as many scramble to understand why they have been impacted. The Ministry of Electronics and IT's move is reportedly aimed at protecting the nation's integrity and curb China's influence in the South Asian market, the state-owned broadcaster Prasar Bharti said on Sunday. In meetings with fintech associations on Tuesday, officials from the IT Ministry and influential think tank Niti Aayog offered broader explanations about the decision. From a report: The IT Ministry is concerned about the past and current presence of Chinese investors on the cap tables of some lending apps in India, the officials said, according to a source familiar with the matter. Another concern is the rising reports of cybercrimes that are linked to China. The officials said the Ministry of Home Affairs has received reports of criminal activities involving Chinese firms that are tapping APIs to access Indian lending apps and obtaining and storing data of Indian consumers outside of the country, the source said.

The growing ease with which anyone can create convincing audio in someone else's voice has a lot of people on edge, and rightly so. Resemble AI's proposal for watermarking generated speech may not fix it in one go, but it's a step in the right direction. From a report: AI-generated speech is being used for all kinds of legitimate purposes, from screen readers to replacing voice actors (with their permission, of course). But as with nearly any technology, speech generation can be turned to malicious ends as well, producing fake quotes by politicians or celebrities. It's highly desirable to find a way to tell real from fake that doesn't rely on a publicist or close listening.

[...] Resemble AI is among a new cohort of generative AI startups aiming to use finely tuned speech models to produce dubs, audiobooks, and other media ordinarily produced by regular human voices. But if such models, perhaps trained on hours of audio provided by actors, were to fall into malicious hands, these companies may find themselves at the center of a PR disaster and perhaps serious liability. So it's very much in their interest to find a way to make their recordings both as realistic as possible and easily verifiable as being generated by AI.

Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot Bard delivered an inaccurate answer. From a report: The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a "launchpad for curiosity" that would help simplify complex topics. In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?" Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate. The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Many people in the United States would like to control the information that companies can learn about them online. Yet when presented with a series of true-or-false questions about how digital devices and services track users, most Americans struggled to answer them, according to a report published (PDF) on Tuesday by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The report analyzed the results of a data privacy survey that included more than 2,000 adults in the United States. Very few of the respondents said they trusted the way online services handled their personal data. The survey also tested people's knowledge about how apps, websites and digital devices may amass and disclose information about people's health, TV-viewing habits and doorbell camera videos. Although many understood how companies can track their emails and website visits, a majority seemed unaware that there are only limited federal protections for the kinds of personal data that online services can collect about consumers.

Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the report said. Only one person received an A grade, for correctly answering 16 of the questions. No one answered all of them correctly. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents said they had "little control over what marketers" could learn about them online, while 73 percent said they did not have "the time to keep up with ways to control the information that companies" had about them. "The big takeaway here is that consent is broken, totally broken,"Joseph Turow, a media studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was the lead author of the report, said in an interview. "The overarching idea that consent, either implicit or explicit, is the solution to this sea of data gathering is totally misguided -- and that's the bottom line."

The survey results challenge a data-for-services trade-off argument that the tech industry has long used to justify consumer tracking and to forestall government limits on it: Consumers may freely use a host of convenient digital tools -- as long as they agree to allow apps, sites, ad technology and marketing analytics firms to track their online activities and employ their personal information. But the new report suggests that many Americans aren't buying into the industry bargain. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they didn't think it was fair that a store could monitor their online activity if they logged into the retailer's Wi-Fi. And 61 percent indicated they thought it was unacceptable for a store to use their personal information to improve the services they received from the store. Only a small minority -- 18 percent -- said they did not care what companies learned about them online. "When faced with technologies that are increasingly critical for navigating modern life, users often lack a real set of alternatives and cannot reasonably forgo using these tools," Lina M. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech (PDF) last year.

In the talk, Ms. Khan proposed a "type of new paradigm" that could impose "substantive limits" on consumer tracking.

The latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey results are now available, showing a significant milestone for Microsoft's operating system. From a report: According to Valve, Windows 11 crossed a 30% share on Steam in January 2023. Windows 11's growth on Steam is directly related to Windows 10's decline. The latter remains the most popular OS among the gaming audience, but its market share lost 1.96 points in January 2023.

Windows 10 holds approximately 63.46% of all Steam customers. Windows 11, on the other hand, gained 1.91% points. This allowed the operating system to cross the 30% mark and reach its all-time high of 30.33%. Despite being out of support since 2020 (no paid security updates since January 2023), Windows 7 still has 1.6% of all Steam users. In January 2023, its 64-bit version lost 0.06 points. Overall, 96.02% of all Steam customers use Windows (0.13). macOS is second with 2.61% (+0.13), and Linux is third with 1.38% (no changes last month).

Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. From a report: Mozilla conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit. So a Firefox build incorporating Gecko rather than WebKit currently cannot be distributed through the iOS App Store.

As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS. The major browser makers -- Apple, Google, and Mozilla -- each have their own browser rendering engines. Apple's Safari is based on WebKit; Google's Chrome and its open source Chromium foundation is based on Blink (forked from WebKit a decade ago); and Mozilla's Firefox is based on Gecko. Microsoft developed its own Trident rendering engine in the outdated Internet Explorer and a Trident fork called EdgeHTML in legacy versions of Edge but has relied on Blink since rebasing its Edge browser on Chromium code.

Meta is asking many of its managers and directors to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as part of a process to become a more efficient organization, known internally as a "flattening," Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Higher-level managers are sharing the directive with their reports in the coming weeks, separate from the company's regular performance review process, which is also occurring, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a matter that wasn't public.

Microsoft has announced a new version of its search engine Bing, powered by an upgraded version of the same AI technology that underpins chatbot ChatGPT. The company is launching the product alongside an upgraded version of its Edge browser, promising that the two will provide a new experience for browsing the web and finding information online. The Verge: "It's a new day in search," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an event announcing the product. We're currently following the event live, and adding more information to this story as we go. Microsoft argued that the search paradigm hasn't changed in 20 years and that roughly half of all searches don't answer users' questions. The arrival of conversational AI can change this, says the company, delivering information more fluidly and quickly. The "new Bing," as Microsoft is calling it, offers a "chat" function, where users can ask questions and receive answers from the latest version AI language model built by OpenAI. TechCrunch adds: As expected, the new Bing now features the option to start a chat in its toolbar, which then brings you to a ChatGPT-like conversational experience. One major point to note here is that while OpenAI's ChatGPT bot was trained on data that only covers to 2021, Bing's version is far more up-to-date and can handle queries related to far more recent events.

Another important feature here -- and one that I think we'll see in most of these tools -- is that Bing cites its sources and links to them in a "learn more" section at the end of its answers. Every result will also include a feedback option. It's also worth stressing that the old, link-centric version of Bing isn't going away. You can still use it just like before, but now enhanced with AI. Microsoft stressed that it is using a new version of GPT that is able to provide more relevant answers, annotate these and provide up-to-date results, all while providing a safer user experience. It calls this the Prometheus model. Further reading: Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web (Microsoft blog).