An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has one of the toughest jobs in tech this year. On one hand, he has to deliver on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's grand metaverse ambitions as Apple and ByteDance are entering the space. At the same time, he's also attempting a dramatic cultural reset within Reality Labs, the sprawling division responsible for those ambitions. In an internal memo I obtained that he sent to employees just before the holidays, Bosworth acknowledged a sentiment I've been hearing from current and ex-employees for a while: "We have solved too many problems by adding headcount. But adding headcount also adds overhead. And overhead makes everything slower."

"Every week I see documents with 100+ editors," he wrote to the roughly 18,000 people in Reality Labs. "A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule. Sometimes there is even a 'pre-meeting' with its own document. I believe the current situation is untenable."

OpenAI this week signaled it'll soon begin charging for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot that can write essays, emails, poems and even computer code. From a report: In an announcement on the company's official Discord server, OpenAI said that it's "starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT" as one of the ways to "ensure [the tool's] long-term viability." The monetized version of ChatGPT will be called ChatGPT Professional, apparently. That's according to a waitlist link OpenAI posted in the Discord server, which asks a range of questions about payment preferences including "At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?"

The waitlist also outlines ChatGPT Professional's benefits, which include no "blackout" (i.e. unavailability) windows, no throttling and an unlimited number of message with ChatGPT -- "at least 2x the regular daily limit." OpenAI says that those who fill out the waitlist form may be selected to pilot ChatGPT Professional, but that the program is in the experimental stages and won't be made widely available "at this time."

Are today's rudimentary quantum computers already on the verge of significant feats beyond the reach of traditional computers? Or have their capabilities been exaggerated, as practical uses for the technology recede into the future? From a report: These questions have been thrown into sharp relief in recent days by a claim from a group of Chinese researchers to have come up with a way to break the RSA encryption that underpins much of today's online communications. The likelihood that quantum computers would be able to crack online encryption was widely believed a danger that could lie a decade or more in the future. But the 24 researchers, from a number of China's top universities and government-backed laboratories, said their research showed it could be possible using quantum technology that is already available.

The quantum bits, or qubits, used in today's machines are highly unstable and only hold their quantum states for extremely short periods, creating "noise." As a result, "errors accumulate in the computer and after around 100 operations there are so many errors the computation fails," said Steve Brierley, chief executive of quantum software company Riverlane. That has led to a search for more stable qubits as well as error-correction techniques to overcome the "noise," pushing back the date when quantum computers are likely to reach their full potential by many years.

The Chinese claim, by contrast, appeared to be an endorsement of today's "noisy" systems, while also prompting a flurry of concern in the cyber security world over a potentially imminent threat to online security. By late last week, a number of researchers at the intersection of advanced mathematics and quantum mechanics had thrown cold water on the claim. Brierley at Riverlane said it "can't possibly work" because the Chinese researchers had assumed that a quantum computer would be able to simply run a vast number of computations simultaneously, rather than trying to gain an advantage through applying the system's quantum properties.

A Federal Aviation Administration system failure caused some flights across the United States to be grounded, the agency said early Wednesday. From a report: The full extent of the delays was not immediately known, but the delays were spread across several airlines. More than 700 flights within, into and out of the United States had been delayed on Wednesday, and more than 90 were canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company. On social media, would-be passengers across the United States said their flights had been delayed, some reporting that their pilots or airline representatives had blamed the F.A.A. technical problem. "The F.A.A. is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System," the agency said. "We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected." Several airports, including in Philadelphia, Tampa, Fla., and Austin, Texas, advised passengers to check with their airlines for the latest information.

The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December. The Guardian reports: Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn't fulfill the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it. [...]

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users. [...] The surge in new Mastodon users continued throughout November, peaking at over 130,000 new users a day. The upticks often coincided with controversial decisions made by Elon Musk. Data from Google suggests there was also a surge in searches for Mastodon in April 2022, around the time Musk announced he had become Twitter's largest shareholder.

"Twitter, in its most basic form is simple," Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. "You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you're done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform." For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely. "Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realized how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, 'Oh, that's, that's hard. Maybe we won't go there,'" she said. "It's like the people that said 'I'm moving to Canada' when Donald Trump was elected," Coffey added. "They never actually moved to Canada."

Meta is dropping support for its first Meta Quest VR headset. The device will no longer receive future content updates, and by 2024 it will no longer get any bug fixes or security patches. Gizmodo reports: Notably, users will no longer have significant functionality. Though Meta promised you will still be able to use the headset and its installed games and apps, Quest 1 users will no longer be able to join parties, and they will also lose access to Meta's feature product Horizon Home on March 5 this year. Users will no longer be able to invite others to their homes or travel over to another user's home.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced what was originally called the Oculus Quest in 2018 as the premiere wireless VR headset. The company released the headset in 2019 (so Meta is a little off in their letter when they said they launched the device "over four years ago"), and this was all before Meta officially renamed the devices and its various services in 2021. So the Quest 1 is working off four-year-old tech, and it would make some sense why Meta would not want to support aging hardware.

Two of the US government's leading security agencies are building a machine learning-based analytics environment to defend against rapidly evolving threats and create more resilient infrastructures for both government entities and private organizations. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) -- in particular its Science and Technology Directorate research arm -- and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) picture a multicloud collaborative sandbox that will become a training ground for government boffins to test analytic methods and technologies that rely heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. It also will include an automated machine learning "loop" through which workloads -- think exporting and tuning data -- will flow.

The CISA Advanced Analytics Platform for Machine Learning (CAP-M) -- previously known as CyLab -- will drive problem solving around cybersecurity that encompasses both on-premises and cloud environments, according to the agencies. "Fully realized, CAP-M will feature a multi-cloud environment and multiple data structures, a logical data warehouse to facilitate access across CISA data sets, and a production-like environment to enable realistic testing of vendor solutions," DHS and CISA wrote in a one-page description of the project. "While initially supporting cyber missions, this environment will be flexible and extensible to support data sets, tools, and collaboration for other infrastructure security missions."

The tech giant had already remade the virtual world. For a brief period, it also tried to make it easier for people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up. From a report: In the early summer of 2017, Warren Slocum walked into a warehouse in Menlo Park, Calif., to meet with members of Facebook's staff and was mesmerized. Sitting before him was a 3-D model of the neighborhoods surrounding Facebook's headquarters. On a nearby white board, one of Facebook's real estate strategists had mapped out what had to be one of the company's most unusual bets yet: a plan for restoring a century-old railroad that's been sitting unused for about 40 years. Since he became president of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors in 2016, Mr. Slocum had been publicly advocating the rebirth of the Dumbarton Rail Corridor.

This largely deserted 18-mile route runs from Union City on the east side of San Francisco Bay and crosses over the long-abandoned Dumbarton Rail Bridge before cutting straight up the back side of Facebook's sprawling Frank Gehry-designed office complex in Menlo Park and continuing up the San Francisco Peninsula to Redwood City. The tech industry's enormous growth had clogged the roads around this route, with rush hour speeds on some major arteries creeping along at an average of 4 miles per hour in 2016. [...] Traffic to Silicon Valley from other parts of the Bay Area had long been a mess, of course, but what was new was Facebook's apparent interest in fixing it. The company's leaders thought revitalizing the rail line could be a "win-win," said Juan Salazar, Meta's current director of local policy and community engagement, who also met with Mr. Slocum that day.

Over the next three years, according to Mr. Salazar, Facebook spent nearly $20 million on plans to revive the rail corridor, hiring staff with experience in rail projects and contracting with a fleet of consultants to study the feasibility of things like electrified commuter rail and autonomous vehicle pods that looked like something out of Disneyworld. If all went according to plan, one January 2020 estimate projected, parts of the rail line would be operating by 2028. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Facebook's employees went home. Traffic died out, and the future of offices themselves became uncertain. Before long, Facebook abandoned its plans for the railroad. Interviews with more than a dozen people who worked on the project both inside and outside Facebook, as well as hundreds of pages of public records, suggest that the project was coming undone long before Covid-19 hit, buckling under a combination of political dysfunction in the region and Facebook's own waning patience.

An investigation recently revealed how images of a minor and a tester on the toilet ended up on social media. iRobot said it had consent to collect this kind of data from inside homes -- but participants say otherwise. From a report: When Greg unboxed a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in December 2019, he thought he knew what he was getting into. He would allow the preproduction test version of iRobot's Roomba J series device to roam around his house, let it collect all sorts of data to help improve its artificial intelligence, and provide feedback to iRobot about his user experience. He had done this all before. Outside of his day job as an engineer at a software company, Greg had been beta-testing products for the past decade. He estimates that he's tested over 50 products in that time -- everything from sneakers to smart home cameras.

But what Greg didn't know -- and does not believe he consented to -- was that iRobot would share test users' data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices' front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. Greg, who asked that we identify him only by his first name because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with iRobot, is not the only test user who feels dismayed and betrayed. Nearly a dozen people who participated in iRobot's data collection efforts between 2019 and 2022 have come forward in the weeks since MIT Technology Review published an investigation into how the company uses images captured from inside real homes to train its artificial intelligence. The participants have shared similar concerns about how iRobot handled their data -- and whether those practices conform with the company's own data protection promises. After all, the agreements go both ways, and whether or not the company legally violated its promises, the participants feel misled.

An anonymous reader shares a report: BMW is expanding the number of feature subscriptions it is offering in the United States. The marque has revealed that five vehicle features are now available through its subscription service, consisting of Remote Engine Start, Drive Recorder, Traffic Camera, Driving Assistance Plus with Stop&Go, and Parking Assistant Professional.

Most of these features are available through either a 1-month, 1-year, or 3-year subscription, or can be purchased outright for a one-time fee. Motorauthority reached out to BMW USA and found that the Remote Engine Start costs $10 for 1 month, $105 for 1 year, $250 for 3 years, or can be purchased for $330 for the life of the vehicle. As for the Driver Recorder, it is available for $39 for 1 year, $99 for 3 years, and $149 for a one-time payment. Driving Assistant Plus with Stop&Go can be added for $20 for 1 month, $210 for 1 year, $580 for 3 years, and $950 with a one-time payment. As for Parking Assistant Professional, it is available for $5 for 1 month, $50 for 1 year, $130 for 3 years, or a one-time fee of $220.

Richard Yoo, who founded and helped build the website hosting company that became San Antonio's premier technology firm, believes he's watching its collapse. From a report: The reputation of the company now known as Rackspace Technology, he said, "is eroding rapidly" after years of shifting business plans, executive shuffles, financial losses, staff cuts and, finally, the Dec. 2 ransomware attack that left tens of thousands of customers without access to their email, contact and calendar data.

"This is the beginning of the end," Yoo said last week. "It's already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that's on a trajectory of growth. They're on a trajectory of death. It will not be around." He puts the blame for Rackspace's deepening financial struggles -- it's posted a steady string of quarterly losses, and the value of its stock has fallen 80 percent in the past year -- on its replacement of tech-oriented leadership with board members and managers "who don't have any connection with the product." He said there's "no culture" at the company after it laid off hundreds of local staffers while it expanded globally. And he scoffed at the idea of being a "Racker," saying he never adopted the term the company uses for its employees and identity.

US aviation safety regulators intend to require passenger and cargo aircraft to meet requirements by early next year for navigation gear to deal with potentially unsafe interference from 5G mobile-phone signals. Bloomberg reports: The equipment is needed because the newer wireless signals are on frequencies near those used by planes' radio altimeters, which determine altitude over ground and can cause them to malfunction, the Federal Aviation Administration has found. Wireless companies are eager for a solution because they paid the government more than $80 billion for the new airwaves. The changes would need to be made by Feb. 1, 2024, the agency said in a notice (PDF) Monday.

The FAA said it couldn't rule out interference from 5G signals for about 100 incidents of aircraft navigation equipment issuing erroneous data. Such situations will increase as telecommunications providers expand 5G coverage throughout the US, the FAA said. [...] The FAA estimates that out of 7,993 US-registered aircraft that would need revisions, approximately 180 would require radio altimeter replacements and 820 would require the addition of filters to comply with the proposed order, at an estimated cost of as much as $26 million.

Jacob Ridley writes via PC Gamer: MSI Afterburner is an app used the world over for graphics card monitoring, overclocking, and undervolting. It's become pretty synonymous with general GPU tinkering, yet the app's developer has suggested it might not have long left to live in a forum post earlier this month. MSI disagrees, telling us "we fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner." MSI Afterburner is developed by Alexey 'Unwinder' Nicolaychuk, a Russian national who has kept the overclocking app functioning over many years. Nicolaychuk is also responsible for the development of RivaTuner Statistics Server, which is part of the foundational software layer powering Afterburner. In a post on the Guru3D forums (via TechPowerUp), Nicolaychuk suggests that Afterburner's development has been "semi-abandoned." "...MSI afterburner project is probably dead," Nicolaychuk says.

"War and politics are the reasons. I didn't mention it in MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project is semi abandoned by company during quite a long time already. Actually we're approaching the one year mark since the day when MSI stopped performing their obligations under Afterburner license agreement due to 'politic [sic] situation'." Nicolaychuk says development of the app has continued over the past 11 months, but that may also be ending soon. "I tried to continue performing my obligations and worked on the project on my own during the last 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment; I have a feeling that I'm just beating a dead horse and waste energy on something that is no longer needed by company. "Anyway I'll try to continue supporting it myself while I have some free time, but will probably need to drop it and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills."

Development of the RivaTuner Statistics Server -- software is pivotal to many of the functions of Afterburner -- is materially separate from Afterburner and will continue, Nicolaychuk notes. Nicolaychuk suggests the issue comes down to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and we've since confirmed with MSI that this is the case. MSI has stated to PC Gamer that the payments were halted due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, saying: "payments had been put on hold due to the RU/UA war and the economic regulations that entailed." [...] On this being the end for Afterburner, MSI disagrees. "We fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner," MSI tells PC Gamer. "MSI have been working on a solution and expect it to be resolved soon."

Seattle public schools have sued the tech giants behind TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, accusing them of creating a "mental health crisis among America's Youth." Engadget reports: The 91-page lawsuit (PDF) filed in a US district court states that tech giants exploit the addictive nature of social media, leading to rising anxiety, depression and thoughts of self-harm. "Defendants' growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms," the complaint states. "[They] have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants' social media platforms."

Harmful content pushed to users includes extreme diet plants, encouragement of self-harm and more, according to the complaint. That has led to a 30 percent increase between 2009 and 2019 of students who report feeling "so sad or hopeless... for two weeks or more in a row that [they] stopped doing some usual activities." That in turn leads to a drop in performance in their studies, making them "less likely to attend school, more likely to engage in substance use, and to act out, all of which directly affects Seattle Public Schools' ability to fulfill its educational mission." Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act means that online platforms aren't responsible for content posted by third parties. However, the lawsuit claims that the provision doesn't protect social media companies for recommending, distributing and promoting content "in a way that causes harm."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amendments to Building Regulations 2010 were announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) on January 6th that mandate new homes constructed in England to be fitted with infrastructure and connections required to achieve gigabit internet connectivity. Connection costs will be capped at £2,000 per home, and developers must still install gigabit-ready infrastructure (including ducts, chambers, and termination points) and the fastest-available connection if they're unable to secure a gigabit connection within the cost cap. The UK government estimates that 98 percent of installations will fall comfortably under that cap, so it's likely been put in place to avoid spiraling chargings in remote, rural areas that need widescale line upgrades. Properties constructed in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland may be exempt from this new legislation as each country sets its own building regulations independently from England.

The new legislation was introduced on December 26th, 2022, following a 12-month technical consultation that indicated around 12 percent of 171,190 new homes constructed in England didn't have gigabit broadband access upon completion. DCMS claims that gigabit broadband is currently available in over 72 percent of UK households and is targeting full nationwide gigabit-capable broadband coverage across the UK by 2030. In order to meet that goal, another law has also been introduced to make it easier to install faster internet connections into existing flats and apartments. Previously, millions of tenants living in the UK's estimated 480,000 multi-dwelling units (MDUs) needed to obtain permission from the landowner to allow a broadband operator to install connection upgrades. Broadband companies estimate that around 40 percent of these requests are ignored by landlords, leaving tenants unable to upgrade their services even if they're unfit for use. Now, the Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Act 2021 (TILPA) allows broadband providers in England and Wales to seek access rights via court if landlords and land owners don't respond to installation requests within 35 days. "An additional 2,100 residential buildings a year are estimated to be connected to faster broadband speeds as a result of these new rules, and similar legislation is due to come into force in Scotland later this year," adds the report. "The existing appeals process that allows landlords to refuse access requests will not be affected."

Using many of the same techniques that underpin DALL-E and other art generators, these scientists are generating blueprints for new proteins -- tiny biological mechanisms that can change the way of our bodies behave. From a report: Our bodies naturally produce about 20,000 proteins, which handle everything from digesting food to moving oxygen through the bloodstream. Now, researchers are working to create proteins that are not found in nature, hoping to improve our ability to fight disease and do things that our bodies cannot on their own.

David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, has been working to build artisanal proteins for more than 30 years. By 2017, he and his team had shown this was possible. But they did not anticipate how the rise of new A.I. technologies would suddenly accelerate this work, shrinking the time needed to generate new blueprints from years down to weeks. "What we need are new proteins that can solve modern-day problems, like cancer and viral pandemics," Dr. Baker said. "We can't wait for evolution." He added, "Now, we can design these proteins much faster, and with much higher success rates, and create much more sophisticated molecules that can help solve these problems."

Last year, Dr. Baker and his fellow researchers published a pair of papers in the journal Science describing how various A.I. techniques could accelerate protein design. But these papers have already been eclipsed by a newer one that draws on the techniques that drive tools like DALL-E, showing how new proteins can be generated from scratch much like digital photos. "One of the most powerful things about this technology is that, like DALL-E, it does what you tell it to do," said Nate Bennett, one of the researchers working in the University of Washington lab. "From a single prompt, it can generate an endless number of designs."

Apple, after seven years of development, is nearly ready to launch its first mixed-reality headset. But the focus on this new product will lead to an otherwise muted 2023. Bloomberg: I first wrote in 2017 about Apple's ambition to launch a high-performance AR-based headset -- complete with its own operating system, App Store and dedicated chips. Back then, Apple had aimed to get it to market by 2019. Over time, the delays stacked up. Apple had plans to launch the device in 2020, then 2021 and then 2022. The final postponement, at least for the moment, happened last year. Up until fairly recently, Apple had aimed to introduce the headset in January 2023 and ship it later this year. Now the company is aiming to unveil it this spring ahead of the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, I'm told.

Apple has already shared the device with a small number of high-profile software developers for testing, letting them get started on third-party apps. The device's operating system, dubbed "Borealis" inside the company, will be publicly named xrOS. With the current plan, Apple could introduce the device to consumers -- likely under the name Reality Pro -- and then get developers up to speed on its software features in June. On this timeline, the company would then ship the product later in the fall of 2023.

Raspberry Pi is launching a new camera module for use with its diminutive DIY computers -- the Camera Module 3. Its upgraded Sony IMX708 sensor is higher resolution, but perhaps more important is that the new module supports high dynamic range photography and autofocus. Alongside it, Raspberry Pi is also releasing a new camera board for use with M12-mount lenses. From a report: Combined, the new features mean the Camera Module 3 should be able to take more detailed photographs (especially in low light), and can focus on objects as little as 5cm away. The autofocus uses a Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) system, with Contrast Detection Autofocus used as a backup. In contrast, previous versions of the camera module had fixed-focus lenses, which Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton writes were "optimized to focus at infinity" and could only take a "reasonably sharp image" of objects around a meter away.

The new module's sensor has a resolution of 11.9 megapixels (compared to 8.1 megapixels for the last version), and has a higher horizontal resolution that should allow it to film HD video. HDR support means the Camera Module 3 can take several exposures of the same scene, and combine them so that both darker and lighter parts of an image are properly exposed (at the expense of some resolution) -- a trick commonly performed by just about every smartphone. Prices start at $25 for the Camera Module 3 with a standard field-of-view, while the ultra-wide angle version with a 102-degree field of view is $35.

Alongside reaching 32 million concurrently online users, Steam has also just surpassed 10 million concurrent in-game players for the first time. From a report: The news was shared by SteamDB, and it shows the milestones were reached on Saturday, January 7, where the in-game concurrents were at 10,082,055 million and the concurrently online users -- those who are simply on Steam but not necessarily playing a game -- were at 32,186,301. As for what these millions of people were playing, the #1 played game in the past 24 hours as of this writing was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 1.08 million concurrent players. Sitting behind Counter-Strike were DOTA 2 (766,096), Goose Goose Duck (605,694), PUBG: Battlegrounds (439,944), and Apex Legends (367,585).

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let Meta's WhatsApp pursue a lawsuit accusing Israel's NSO Group of exploiting a bug in its WhatsApp messaging app to install spy software allowing the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents. From a report: The justices turned away NSO's appeal of a lower court's decision that the lawsuit could move forward. NSO has argued that it is immune from being sued because it was acting as an agent for unidentified foreign governments when it installed the "Pegasus" spyware.

President Joe Biden's administration had urged the justices to reject NSO's appeal, noting that the U.S. State Department had never before recognized a private entity acting as an agent of a foreign state as being entitled to immunity. WhatsApp in 2019 sued NSO seeking an injunction and damages, accusing it of accessing WhatsApp servers without permission six months earlier to install the Pegasus software on victims' mobile devices.