An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It sounds like this custom Google SoC-powered Pixel is really going to happen. Echoing reports from about a year ago, 9to5Google is reporting that the Pixel 6 is expected to ship with Google's custom "Whitechapel" SoC instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The report says "Google refers to this chip as 'GS101,' with 'GS' potentially being short for 'Google Silicon.'" It also notes that chip will be shared across the two Google phones that are currently in development, the Pixel 6 and something like a "Pixel 5a 5G." 9to5 says it has viewed documentation that points to Samsung's SLSI division (Team Exynos) being involved, which lines up with the earlier report from Axios saying the chip is "designed in cooperation with Samsung" and should be built on Samsung's 5nm foundry lines. 9to5Google says the chip "will have some commonalities with Samsung Exynos, including software components."

XDA Developers says it can corroborate the report, saying, "According to our source, it seems the SoC will feature a 3 cluster setup with a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Google also refers to its next Pixel devices as 'dauntless-equipped phones,' which we believe refers to them having an integrated Titan M security chip (code-named 'Citadel')." A "3 cluster setup" would be something like how the Snapdragon 888 works, which has three CPU core sizes: a single large ARM X1 core for big single-threaded workloads, three medium Cortex A78 cores for multicore work, and four Cortex A55 cores for background work. The Pixel 6 should be out sometime in Q4 2021, and Pixel phones always heavily, heavily leak before they launch. So I'm sure we'll see more of this thing soon. "I think the biggest benefit we'll see from a Google SoC is an expanded update timeline," writes Ron Amadeo. "Android updates go a lot smoother when you get support from the SoC manufacturer, but Qualcomm abandons all its chips after the three-year mark for major updates. This lack of support makes updates significantly harder than they need to be, and today that's where Google draws the line at updates."

"Beyond easier updates, I don't know that we can expect much from Whitechapel," adds Amadeo, noting that lots of Android manufacturers have made their own chips but none of them have been able to significantly beat Qualcomm. "It's hard to be bullish on Google's SoC future when the company doesn't seem to be making the big-money acquisitions and licensing deals that Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung are making. But at least it's a start."

Last fall, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that it was time to rein in Section 230 immunity. Now, Justice Thomas is laying out an argument for why companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google should be regulated as utilities. From a report: On Monday, the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling in finding that President Trump had acted unconstitutionally by blocking people on Twitter. That case, which the justices deemed moot, hinged on the idea that the @realdonaldtrump account was a public forum run by the President of the United States, and therefore, was constitutionally prohibited from stifling private speech. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas agrees with the decision, but argues that, in fact, Twitter's recent ban of the @realdonaldtrump account suggests that it's platforms themselves, not the government officials on them, that hold all the power. "As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms," Thomas writes. "The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions."

Thomas argues that some digital platforms are "sufficiently akin" to common carriers like telephone companies. "A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people," Thomas writes. "Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way." Thomas argues that while private companies aren't subject to the First Amendment, common carriers are unique to other private businesses in that they do not have the "right to exclude." Thomas suggests that large tech platforms with substantial market power should be bound by the same restrictions. "If the analogy between common carriers and digital platforms is correct, then an answer may arise for dissatisfied platform users who would appreciate not being blocked: laws that restrict the platform's right to exclude," Thomas writes.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alphabet's Google didn't commit copyright infringement when it used Oracle's programming code in the Android operating system, sparing Google from what could have been a multibillion-dollar award. From a report: The 6-2 ruling, which overturns a victory for Oracle, marks a climax to a decade-old case that divided Silicon Valley and promised to reshape the rules for the software industry. Oracle was seeking as much as $9 billion. The court said Google engaged in legitimate "fair use" when it put key aspects of Oracle's Java programming language in the Android operating system. Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said Google used "only what was needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program." Each side contended the other's position would undercut innovation. Oracle said that without strong copyright protection, companies would have less incentive to invest the large sums needed to create groundbreaking products. Google said Oracle's approach would discourage the development of new software that builds on legacy products.

The file-sharing blog TorrentFreak reports: Google was asked to remove a TorrentFreak article from its search results this week. The article in question reported that "The Mandalorian" was the most pirated TV show of 2020.

This notice claims to identify several problematic URLs that allegedly infringe the copyrights of Disney's hit series The Mandalorian. This is not unexpected, as The Mandalorian was the most pirated TV show of last year, as we reported in late December. However, we didn't expect to see our article as one of the targeted links in the notice. Apparently, the news that The Mandalorian is widely pirated — which was repeated by dozens of other publications — is seen as copyright infringement?

Needless to say, we wholeheartedly disagree. This is not the way.
TorrentFreak specifies that the article in question "didn't host or link to any infringing content." (TorrentFreak's article was even linked to by major sites including CNET, Forbes, Variety, and even Slashdot.)

TorrentFreak also reports that it wasn't Disney who filed the takedown request, but GFM Films... At first, we thought that the German camera company GFM could have something to do with it, as they worked on The Mandalorian. However, earlier takedown notices from the same sender protected the film "The Last Witness," which is linked to the UK company GFM Film Sales. Since we obviously don't want to falsely accuse anyone, we're not pointing fingers.
So what happens next? We will certainly put up a fight if Google decides to remove the page. At the time of writing, this has yet to happen. The search engine currently lists the takedown request as 'pending,' which likely means that there will be a manual review. The good news is that Google is usually pretty good at catching overbroad takedown requests. This is also true for TorrentFreak articles that were targeted previously, including our coverage on the Green Book screener leak.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Friday Tesla decided to appeal a U.S. National Labor Relations Board ruling that it violated America's labor laws, reports Reuters. And they're even appealing its order that Elon Musk delete a 2018 tweet which the Board said "coercively threatened" workers considering unionization with the loss of stock options.

But Tesla is also facing growing unionization efforts in other countries. Tesla is building a giant plant in Germany, but "it hasn't yet made nice with the mighty auto union" IG Metall, reports Business Insider, noting that a battle with the union "could threaten Tesla's ambitious plans for the European market."
And this union is especially motivated, Stephen Silvia, a professor at American University researching comparative labor relations, tells Business Insider: Allowing a massive non-union plant to build cars in Germany would set the dangerous precedent that companies don't need to engage in collective bargaining, he said. It would also mean thousands of members would potentially go without the contractually enforced job security, wages, and benefits the rest of the industry enjoys. Moreover, IG Metall stands to lose bargaining power with other automakers if it can't get Tesla to play ball, said Arthur Wheaton, an automotive industry expert at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. It's especially crucial that IG Metall preserve all the sway it can at a time when carmakers are pivoting to EV production, which, Wheaton said, requires roughly 30% fewer workers than traditional auto manufacturing....

Silvia, who has spoken to the union about its plans, anticipates a public relations campaign and protests to exert political and social pressure on Tesla to "be a good corporate citizen."

"It's very difficult to force a completely unwilling company," Silvia said. "They'll just have to make [Tesla's] life as uncomfortable as possible..." Wheaton, however, thinks IG Metall's main weapon for putting the squeeze on Tesla is blocking the completion of the factory altogether. IG Metall could work with environmentalist groups to slow down construction, he said.

A "Science of Love" app analyzed text conversations uploaded by its users to assess the degree of romantic feelings (based on the phrases and emojis used and the average response time). Then after more than four years, its parent company ScatterLab introduced a conversational A.I. chatbot called Lee-Luda — which it said had been trained on 10 billion such conversational logs.

But because it used billions of conversations from real people, its problems soon went beyond sexually explicit comments and "verbally abusive" language: It also soon became clear that the huge training dataset included personal and sensitive information. This revelation emerged when the chatbot began exposing people's names, nicknames, and home addresses in its responses. The company admitted that its developers "failed to remove some personal information depending on the context," but still claimed that the dataset used to train chatbot Lee-Luda "did not include names, phone numbers, addresses, and emails that could be used to verify an individual." However, A.I. developers in South Korea rebutted the company's statement, asserting that Lee-Luda could not have learned how to include such personal information in its responses unless they existed in the training dataset. A.I. researchers have also pointed out that it is possible to recover the training dataset from the AI chatbot. So, if personal information existed in the training dataset, it can be extracted by querying the chatbot.

To make things worse, it was also discovered that ScatterLab had, prior to Lee-Luda's release, uploaded a training set of 1,700 sentences, which was a part of the larger dataset it collected, on Github. Github is an open-source platform that developers use to store and share code and data. This Github training dataset exposed names of more than 20 people, along with the locations they have been to, their relationship status, and some of their medical information...

[T]his incident highlights the general trend of the A.I. industry, where individuals have little control over how their personal information is processed and used once collected. It took almost five years for users to recognize that their personal data were being used to train a chatbot model without their consent. Nor did they know that ScatterLab shared their private conversations on an open-source platform like Github, where anyone can gain access.
What makes this unusual, the article points out, is how the users became aware of just how much their privacy had actually been compromised. "[B]igger tech companies are usually much better at hiding what they actually do with user data, while restricting users from having control and oversight over their own data."

And "Once you give, there's no taking back."

Time magazine reports: On March 10, photos and videos on Twitter were loading more slowly than usual for users in Russia. It was not a network fault or server error but a deliberate move by Russia's state internet regulator Roskomnadzor to limit traffic to the social media site, in what experts say was the first public use of controversial new technology that the Russian authorities introduced after 2019... The action came after Russian authorities had accused Twitter and other social networks in January of failing to delete posts urging children to take part in anti-government protests... In response to the slowdown, Twitter said it did not support any "unlawful behaviour" and was "deeply concerned" by the regulator's attempts to block online public conversation.

But on March 16 Roskomnadzor gave a fresh warning that if Twitter refused to comply with its removal requests within a month, the regulator will consider blocking access to the social network in Russia outright... Twitter has only 700,000 monthly active users in Russia, a fraction of the 68.7 million in the U.S. Despite its use by opposition politicians and journalists the Kremlin doesn't consider it "the most dangerous" platform, says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian cyber expert. Experts say that the authorities used the Twitter slowdown to test technology that could be used to disrupt other, more popular social networks like Facebook, which has an estimated 23 million active monthly users in Russia...

As the government has ramped up its efforts to control what citizens can access online it also has several projects in the pipeline that experts say is part of a strategy to push foreign tech companies out of the Russian market completely. From April 1, Roskomnadzor requires tech companies selling smartphones in Russia to prompt users to download government-approved apps, including search engines, maps and payment systems... In November 2019, the Kremlin made its most controversial move yet toward controlling the country's Internet infrastructure with the so-called "sovereign Internet" law. A series of amendments to existing laws theoretically enabled the Russian authorities to isolate "RuNet" — the unofficial name for websites hosted in Russia and sites on Russian domain names — from the global web in vaguely defined times of crisis, giving the Russian authorities control over flows of data coming in and out of the country... The "sovereign Internet" law required Internet Service Providers to install Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) equipment, which has been used by some countries, like China, for censorship. DPI equipment enables Russia to circumvent providers, automatically block content the government has banned and reroute internet traffic.

Russia's major ISPs have now installed DPI equipment, according to Alena Epifanova, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations. But no one knows if or when Russia will be able to cut off its Internet from the global web.
The article also notes Russia passed a law in December which gives Roskomnadzor "the power to restrict or fully block websites that, according to officials, discriminate against Russian state media."

Reuters reports: A Volkswagen joint venture in China has agreed to buy green car credits from Tesla to help meet local environmental rules
The deal, the first of its kind to be reported between the two companies in China, highlights the scale of the task Volkswagen faces in transforming its huge petrol carmaking business into a leader in electric vehicles to rival Tesla. Shares in Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest automaker, have soared this year as investors warm to its plans to go electric. But in China, and elsewhere, the German company is still heavily reliant on traditional combustion-engine vehicles.

China, the world's biggest auto market where over 25 million vehicles were sold last year, runs a credit system that encourages automakers to work towards a cleaner future by, for example, improving fuel efficiency or making more electric cars. Manufacturers are awarded green credits that can be offset against negative credits for producing more polluting vehicles.
The VW-venture's gas-powered SUVs and sedans "have so far proved far more popular in China than their electric vehicles," Reuters notes.

MarketWatch adds that "A deal to buy credits from Tesla at a premium represents Volkswagen buoying the margins of one of its fiercest rivals in the electric-vehicle space." According to Swiss bank UBS, Tesla and Volkswagen will be the two global leaders in electric-vehicle sales within the next two years. The analysts expect that Volkswagen will catch up with Tesla in terms of total volume of cars sold as soon as next year, when the two companies could deliver around 1.2 million cars each.

Slashdot reader quonset quotes Business Insider: A user in a low level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.

Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known Facebook users' phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook's password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user's phone number.

A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the data was scraped due to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019.

This week the lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times urged readers to switch their browser from Chrome, Safari, or Microsoft Edge to a private browser.

"For about a week, I tested three of the most popular options — DuckDuckGo, Brave and Firefox Focus. Even I was surprised that I eventually switched to Brave as the default browser on my iPhone." Firefox Focus, available only for mobile devices like iPhones and Android smartphones, is bare-bones. You punch in a web address and, when done browsing, hit the trash icon to erase the session. Quitting the app automatically purges the history. When you load a website, the browser relies on a database of trackers to determine which to block.

The DuckDuckGo browser, also available only for mobile devices, is more like a traditional browser. That means you can bookmark your favorite sites and open multiple browser tabs. When you use the search bar, the browser returns results from the DuckDuckGo search engine, which the company says is more focused on privacy because its ads do not track people's online behavior. DuckDuckGo also prevents ad trackers from loading. When done browsing, you can hit the flame icon at the bottom to erase the session.

Brave is also more like a traditional web browser, with anti-tracking technology and features like bookmarks and tabs. It includes a private mode that must be turned on if you don't want people scrutinizing your web history. Brave is also so aggressive about blocking trackers that in the process, it almost always blocks ads entirely. The other private browsers blocked ads less frequently....

In the end, though, you probably would be happy using any of the private browsers... For me, Brave won by a hair. My favorite websites loaded flawlessly, and I enjoyed the clean look of ad-free sites, along with the flexibility of opting in to see ads whenever I felt like it. Brendan Eich, the chief executive of Brave, said the company's browser blocked tracking cookies "without mercy."

"If everybody used Brave, it would wipe out the tracking-based ad economy," he said.

Count me in.

Long-time Slashdot reader xiando quotes the backstory from LinuxReviews.org: CentOS used to be the go-to alternative for those who wanted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without having to pay RedHat to use it. It was a almost 1:1 clone until RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version, not a stable RHEL release without the branding. Almalinux is one of several projects that have made their own RHEL forks in response. The first Almalinux version is now released.
ZDNet notes that CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer has announced his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement named Rocky Linux. But they offer this report on AlmaLinux: CloudLinux — which was founded in 2009 to provide a customized, high-performance, lightweight RHEL/CentOS server clone for multitenancy web and server hosting companies — came ready to deliver. The new free AlmaLinux is now stable and ready for production workloads. The company also announced the formation of a non-profit organization: AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation. This group will take over managing the AlmaLinux project going forward. CloudLinux has committed a $1 million annual endowment to support the project.

Jack Aboutboul, former Red Hat and Fedora engineer and architect, will be AlmaLinux's community manager. Altogether, Aboutboul brings over 20 years of experience in open-source communities as a participant, manager, and evangelist... "In an effort to fill the void soon to be left by the demise of CentOS as a stable release, AlmaLinux has been developed in close collaboration with the Linux community," said Aboutaboul in a statement. "These efforts resulted in a production-ready alternative to CentOS that is supported by community members...."

In talking with CentOS business users, who deployed CentOS on web and host servers, I found many of them to be very hopeful about AlmaLinux. One from a mid-Atlantic-based Linux hosting company said, "What we want is a stable Linux that our customers can rely on from year to year. Since CentOS Stream can't deliver that, we think — hope — that AlmaLinux can do it for us and our users instead...."

This first release of AlmaLinux is a one-to-one binary compatible fork of RHEL 8.3. Looking ahead, AlmaLinux will seek to keep step-in-step with future RHEL releases... The GitHub page has already been published and the completed source code has been published in the main download repository. The CloudLinux engineering team has also published FAQ on AlmaLinux Wiki.
"The sudden shift in direction for CentOS that was announced in December created a big void for millions of CentOS users," said Simon Phipps, open source advocate and a former president of the Open Source Initiative who is on the governing board of the AlmaLinux project. In a statement, Phipps said that "As a drop-in open-source replacement, AlmaLinux provides those users with continuity and new opportunity to be part of a vibrant community built around creating and supporting this new Linux distribution under non-profit governance.

"I give a lot of credit to CloudLinux for stepping in to offer CentOS users a lifeline to continue with AlmaLinux."

Volkswagen's early April Fool's Day prank (pretending to re-name the company "Voltswagen") "may have put the company at risk of running afoul of U.S. securities law by wading into the murky waters of potentially misleading investors," reports CNN: "This is not the sort of thing that a responsible global company should be doing," said Charles Whitehead, Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law at Cornell Law School...

Volkswagen is indeed investing heavily in electric vehicles, but confusion over the name change could prompt scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission or litigation from investors who feel misled by the joke. The Securities Exchange Act prohibits companies from making false or misleading statements to investors... Quipping about the status of a business that Volkswagen is positioning as more environmentally friendly also could irk investors, especially in light of the 2015 diesel emissions scandal the company has been trying to put behind it.

"Will the SEC inquire? Well, of course they will," Whitehead said. "It's gotten enough publicity and people are concerned about it and there are issues about whether or not companies should be doing this that I'm sure [the SEC is] going to make a phone call." A representative from Volkswagen's headquarters said Wednesday afternoon the company had not been contacted by the SEC. The agency declined to comment on the matter.

There is precedent for the SEC taking action against cheeky statements regarding big companies. In 2018, Tesla CEO Elon Musk settled with the SEC for $20 million after the agency said his tweet about securing funding to take the company private at $420 a share — an apparent joke about weed — misled investors...

it didn't help that the statement announcing the purported name change included no reference to April Fools' Day — and it landed two days before the holiday... Volkswagen's stock fell nearly 4% on Wednesday in the wake of news of the debacle. And that's no joke.
Whitehead doesn't think the SEC would ultimately consider a name change material to investors, though he adds that "These are all kind of gray areas, which is why a responsible company just doesn't go down this path...." But with some VW stock near a six-year high, a Bloomberg columnist calls the episode a reminder "that we now live in the meme-stock age where even bad jokes can add or subtract billions of dollars in market value." They also call it a lesson in just how difficult it is to "be Elon."

"Charming young Redditors in an authentic way isn't an easy act to pull off..." Despite being one of the planet's richest people, Musk's counterculture savvy and feisty irreverence has made him a hero for Redditors. Tesla has weaponized its soaring share price to raise billions of dollars in cheap funding. That money pays for new factories and products and is a threat to established carmakers. VW must fund its investments via the cash it generates. Even after this year's blistering run its share price is less than 10 times the value of its earnings. It would be self-defeating if VW didn't try to be a bit "cooler."

There's also a double-standard in play. We expect VW to be reliable, while Tesla gets to be quirky. Indeed, Musk gets away with things that others wouldn't. For years Tesla has marketed an autopilot system called "Full Self Driving" that can't yet drive entirely by itself — the timeline for when it will be able to do that always seems to be just around the corner....

Following VW's successful "Power Day" — a straight copy of Musk's "Battery Day" event — I quipped that it wouldn't be long before VW boss Herbert Diess was appointed "TechnoKaiser." Finance blog Zerohedge came up with the better punchline: "VW should go full Elon and file an 8K saying its new title is Voltswagen," it tweeted. VW appears to have taken that tongue-in-cheek advice rather too literally. More fool them.
Bloomberg's columnist also acknowledges that Volkswagen "has an ambitious and convincing electric-vehicle plan and may soon leapfrog Tesla to become the world's largest battery-vehicle manufacturer. But being ploddingly German is an impediment in today's stock market."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Washington Post article, written by Matthew Cappucci and Jason Samenow: The National Weather Service experienced a major, systemwide Internet failure Tuesday morning, making its forecasts and warnings inaccessible to the public and limiting the data available to its meteorologists. The outage highlights systemic, long-standing issues with its information technology infrastructure, which the agency has struggled to address as demands for its services have only increased. In addition to Tuesday morning's outage, the Weather Service has encountered numerous, repeated problems with its Internet services in recent months, including: a bandwidth shortage that forced it to propose and implement limits to the amount of data its customers can download; the launch of a radar website that functioned inadequately and enraged users; a flood at its data center in Silver Spring, Md., that has stripped access to key ocean buoy observations; and multiple outages to NWS Chat, its program for conveying critical information to broadcasters and emergency managers, relied upon during severe weather events. The Weather Service is working to evaluate and implement solutions to these problems which are, in the meantime, impacting its ability to fulfill its mission of protecting life and property. [...]

Problems with the Weather Service's Internet systems have persisted for years, in part because of increasing demand from users, which the agency has struggled to meet. In December, because of an escalating bandwidth shortage, the Weather Service proposed limiting users to 60 connections per minute on a large number of its websites. Constituents complained about the quota and, earlier this month, the Weather Service announced it would instead impose a data limit of 120 requests per minute and only on servers hosting model data, beginning April 20. Meanwhile, on March 9, the Weather Service's headquarters in Silver Spring "experienced a ruptured water pipe, which caused significant and widespread flooding," which affected a data center, the agency said in a statement. "Some NWS data stopped flowing, including data from ocean buoys," the statement said, noting some of the buoys are used "to detect and locate a seismic event that could cause a tsunami."

Neil Jacobs, former acting head of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the Weather Service, said many of the agency's Internet infrastructure problems are tied to the fact they run on internal hardware rather than through cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud. "I've demanded in writing that NWS transition these applications to our Cloud partners. It's part of an internal strategy I've laid out," Jacobs, a Trump administration appointee, told the Capital Weather Gang in an email before he left office. In July, NOAA released its Cloud Strategy, which stated, "the volume and velocity of our data are expected to increase exponentially with the advent of new observing system and data-acquisition capabilities, placing a premium on our capacity and wherewithal to scale the IT infrastructure and services to support this growth. Modernizing our infrastructure requires leveraging cloud services as a solution to meet future demand."

whoever57 writes: A blind person with a guide dog was denied rides and harassed because of her guide dog. She sued Uber, which tried to blame its contractors and deny liability. However, an arbitrator has rejected that argument and found the company liable, awarding the blind passenger $1.1 million. The arbitrator found that Uber staffers coached drivers on how to deny rides to disabled passengers without it appearing to be a violation of the law. The staffers also advocated to keep problematic drivers on the platform.

A group of scientists from MIT have equipped a robot with a wrist-mounted camera and an RF reader to help it find hidden objects. "As long an item has an RF tag on it, the robot can find it, even if it's hidden behind things like wrapping paper," reports Engadget. From the report: The team told MIT News the most challenging aspect of developing RF Grasp was integrating both sight and RF vision into its decision-making process. They compare the current system to how you might react to a sound in the distance by turning your head to pinpoint its source. RF Grasp will initially use its RF reader to find tagged objects, but the closer it gets to something, the more it depends on the information it collects through its camera to make a decision. Compared to a robot with only a visual system, RF Grasp can locate and pick up an object in about half as many total movements. It also has the unique ability to clean up and declutter its working space as it goes about its tasks.

The team sees RF Grasp helping companies like Amazon further automate and streamline their warehouses. "Perception and picking are two roadblocks in the industry today," said Associate Professor Alberto Rodriguez, one of the researchers who worked on the project.

CNN has an exclusive look at the supersonic presidential jet currently being developed by a California startup and U.S Air Force. From the report: It's a 31-passenger derivative of Exosonic's 70-passenger commercial airliner concept and is the ultimate in business jets -- luxury leather, oak and quartz fittings, private suites for work and rest, and all at cruise times twice that of existing aircraft. The functions of presidential craft varies according to need, but this plane might primarily be used as Air Force Two, which is the call sign for jets carrying the US vice president.

The first of two private suites is the three-passenger meeting room, with secure video teleconferencing so distinguished visitors can work, go online, or address the press. The rotatable seats are leather with wooden shells and the video monitor is capable of being stored in a rolled position so there is space on the credenza sideboard for food platters or presentation equipment. The second eight-passenger suite has lie-flat seats and adjustable table heights and it's where senior staffers can work collaboratively and rest. Then there's the main cabin with 20 business-class seats, plus two galleys, two lavatories and plenty of stowage space. Following the trend in modern aircraft design, the seatbacks have spaces for holding personal electronic devices rather than traditional seat-back monitors.

Exosonic's plane boasts a 5,000-nautical-mile range and, thanks to boom-softening techniques, it should be able to fly overland at almost twice the speed of sound without upsetting residents down below. Tie tells CNN that the company expects its supersonic plane to be flying by the mid-2030s.

The Council of the German city of Dortmund has announced that it's embracing free and open-source software, wherever possible. The Document Foundation reports: The Dortmund Council has declared digitalisation to be a political leadership task in its Memorandum 2020 to 2025. In the course of this, two central resolutions for free software were passed on February 11, 2021, for which the minutes were published on March 30:

- "Use of open source software where possible."
- "Software developed by the administration or commissioned for development is made available to the general public."

With this resolution, city policy takes on the shaping of municipal digital sovereignty and digital participation. The resolution means a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of open source software -- and at the expense of proprietary software. In the future, the administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application. Based on the report of the Dortmund city administration on the investigation of the potentials of free software and open standards, open source software is understood in the sense of free software.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cable company WideOpenWest (which markets itself as WOW!) yesterday told customers that it is imposing a data cap and explained the change with a pizza analogy that would seem more appropriate for a kindergarten classroom than for an email informing Internet users of new, artificial limits on their data usage. The email said WOW is "introducing a monthly data usage plan for your Internet service on June 1, 2021" and described the system as follows:

"What's a monthly data usage plan? Let us illustrate ... Imagine that the WOW! network is a pizza. Piping hot. Toppings galore. Every WOW! customer gets their own slice of pizza, but the size of their slice is dependent on their Internet service plan. While customers who subscribe to 1 Gig get the largest slices, those with Internet 500 get a slightly smaller piece, and so on. But, it's all the same delicious, high-speed pizza that you know and love. Now, say you're not full after your slice and you grab another. That extra slice is like a data overage. Don't worry -- we got extra pizza... umm, data... just in case. If you exceed your data allowance, we'll automatically apply increments of 50GB for $10 to your account for the remainder of the current calendar month. Total overage charges will not exceed $50 per billing statement no matter how much data you use. Even better -- the first time you experience a data overage, we'll proactively waive fees."

The email did not mention that, unlike pizza, Internet data doesn't run out and that there is plenty for everyone as long as a network is properly constructed and provisioned. And despite paragraphs of comparing data to pizza, the email literally never says how much data customers will be allowed to use before they are charged extra. The answer is in a newly updated "network management practices" document that says the monthly cap will range from 1TB to 3TB: the 50Mbps download plan gets 1TB, plans between 100 and 300Mbps download speeds get 1.5TB, the 500 and 600Mbps plans get 2.5TB, and the gigabit plan gets 3TB. WOW has over 800,000 internet customers in parts of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In a separate document, WOW says that "[u]nlimited data plans may be added for an additional monthly charge" but doesn't say how much it will cost.

It's apparently not a bad April Fools' Day joke, either. People in the DSLReports forum have reportedly confirmed the changes with a WOW representative.

Waymo Chief Executive John Krafcik is leaving the company after more than five years [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], bringing an end to the former auto executive's leadership of Google parent Alphabet driverless car effort. From a report: The company said Friday that it is promoting its chief technology and operating officers, Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana, to lead a decade-old effort to make self-driving cars a reality. They will share the title of co-chief executive. Under Mr. Krafcik, Waymo broadened its business beyond years of mapping roads and designing software to begin running robotaxis around a segment of Phoenix. He also led Waymo's conversion into an independent subsidiary of Alphabet and raised an external investment round of $3.25 billion. In a blog post, Mr. Krafcik said he will serve as an adviser to Waymo, adding that "Dmitri and Tekedra have my full confidence and support."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Even state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) algorithms struggle to recognize the accents of people from certain regions of the world. That's the top-line finding of a new study published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and the Delft University of Technology, which found that an ASR system for the Dutch language recognized speakers of specific age groups, genders, and countries of origin better than others. The coauthors of this latest research set out to investigate how well an ASR system for Dutch recognizes speech from different groups of speakers. In a series of experiments, they observed whether the ASR system could contend with diversity in speech along the dimensions of gender, age, and accent.

The researchers began by having an ASR system ingest sample data from CGN, an annotated corpus used to train AI language models to recognize the Dutch language. [...] When the researchers ran the trained ASR system through a test set derived from the CGN, they found that it recognized female speech more reliably than male speech regardless of speaking style. Moreover, the system struggled to recognize speech from older people compared with younger, potentially because the former group wasn't well-articulated. And it had an easier time detecting speech from native speakers versus non-native speakers. Indeed, the worst-recognized native speech -- that of Dutch children -- had a word error rate around 20% better than that of the best non-native age group. In general, the results suggest that teenagers' speech was most accurately interpreted by the system, followed by seniors' (over the age of 65) and children's. This held even for non-native speakers who were highly proficient in Dutch vocabulary and grammar. One solution to remove the bias is to mitigate it at the algorithmic level. "[We recommend] framing the problem, developing the team composition and the implementation process from a point of anticipating, proactively spotting, and developing mitigation strategies for affective prejudice [to address bias in ASR systems]," the researchers wrote in a paper detailing their work.

"A direct bias mitigation strategy concerns diversifying and aiming for a balanced representation in the dataset. An indirect bias mitigation strategy deals with diverse team composition: the variety in age, regions, gender, and more provides additional lenses of spotting potential bias in design. Together, they can help ensure a more inclusive developmental environment for ASR."