The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to advance a bill that would make it easier for the Biden administration to restrict the export of AI systems, citing concerns China could exploit them to bolster its military capabilities. From a report: The bill, sponsored by House Republicans Michael McCaul and John Molenaar and Democrats Raja Krishnamoorthi and Susan Wild, also would give the Commerce Department express authority to bar Americans from working with foreigners to develop AI systems that pose risks to U.S. national security. Without this legislation "our top AI companies could inadvertently fuel China's technological ascent, empowering their military and malign ambitions," McCaul, who chairs the committee, warned on Wednesday.

"As the (Chinese Communist Party) looks to expand their technological advancements to enhance their surveillance state and war machine, it is critical we protect our sensitive technology from falling into their hands," McCaul added. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The bill is the latest sign Washington is gearing up to beat back China's AI ambitions over fears Beijing could harness the technology to meddle in other countries' elections, create bioweapons or launch cyberattacks.

With JPMorgan and Mastercard piloting biometric payment options, a future where consumers can pay with their face is rapidly approaching. "Our focus on biometrics as a secure way to verify identity, replacing the password with the person, is at the heart of our efforts in this area," said Dennis Gamiello, executive vice president of identity products and innovation at Mastercard. Based on the positive feedback received thus far, Gamiello says the biometric checkout technology will roll out to more new markets later this year. CNBC reports: Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success -- 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. Late last year, Mastercard said it was teaming with NEC to bring its Biometric Checkout Program to the Asia-Pacific region.

A deal that PopID recently signed with JPMorgan is a sign of things to come in the U.S., said John Miller, PopID CEO, and what he thinks will be a "breakthrough" year for pay-by-face technology. The consumer case is tied to the growing importance of loyalty programs. Most quick-service restaurants require consumers to provide their loyalty information to earn rewards -- which means pulling out a phone, opening an app, finding the link to the loyalty QR code, and then presenting the QR code to the cashier or reader. For payment, consumers are typically choosing between pulling out their wallet, selecting a credit card, and then dipping or tapping the card or pulling out their phone, opening it with Face ID, and then presenting it to the reader. Miller says PopID simplifies this process by requiring just tapping an on-screen button, and then looking briefly at a camera for both loyalty check-in and payment.

"We believe our partnership with JPMorgan is a watershed moment for biometric payments as it represents the first time a leading merchant acquirer has agreed to push biometric payments to its merchant customers," Miller said. "JPMorgan brings the kind of credibility and assurance that both merchants and consumers need to adopt biometric payments." Juniper Research forecasts over 100% market growth for global biometric payments between 2024 and 2028, and by 2025, $3 trillion in mobile, biometric-secured payments. Sheldon Jacobson, a professor in computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said he sees biometric identification as part of a technology continuum that has evolved from payment with a credit card to smartphones. "The next natural step is to simply use facial recognition," he said.

This week the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the launch of the High Performance Software Foundation, which "aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for high performance computing" (or HPC) by "increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts."

It promises initiatives focused on "continuously built, turnkey software stacks," as well as other initiatives including architecture support and performance regression testing. Its first open source technical projects are:

- Spack: the HPC package manager.

- Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.

- Viskores (formerly VTK-m): a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.

- HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers.

- Apptainer: Formerly known as Singularity, Apptainer is a Linux Foundation project providing a high performance, full featured HPC and computing optimized container subsystem.

- E4S: a curated, hardened distribution of scientific software packages.

As use of HPC becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation will provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance computing ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate on the scientific software.

The High Performance Software Foundation benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including Premier Members Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories; General Members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Intel, Kitware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Associate Members University of Maryland, University of Oregon, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
In a statement, an AMD vice president said that by joining "we are using our collective hardware and software expertise to help develop a portable, open-source software stack for high-performance computing across industry, academia, and government." And an AWS executive said the high-performance computing community "has a long history of innovation being driven by open source projects. AWS is thrilled to join the High Performance Software Foundation to build on this work. In particular, AWS has been deeply involved in contributing upstream to Spack, and we're looking forward to working with the HPSF to sustain and accelerate the growth of key HPC projects so everyone can benefit."

The new foundation will "set up a technical advisory committee to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics," according to the announcement, following a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Efforts to build a global quantum internet have received a boost from two developments in quantum information storage that could one day make it possible to communicate securely across hundreds or thousands of kilometers. The internet as it exists today involves sending strings of digital bits, or 0s and 1s, in the form of electrical or optical signals, to transmit information. A quantum internet, which could be used to send unhackable communications or link up quantum computers, would use quantum bits instead. These rely on a quantum property called entanglement, a phenomenon in which particles can be linked and measuring one particle instantly influences the state of another, no matter how far apart they are. Sending these entangled quantum bits, or qubits, over very long distances, requires a quantum repeater, a piece of hardware that can store the entangled state in memory and reproduce it to transmit it further down the line. These would have to be placed at various points on a long-distance network to ensure a signal gets from A to B without being degraded.

Quantum repeaters don't yet exist, but two groups of researchers have now demonstrated long-lasting entanglement memory in quantum networks over tens of kilometers, which are the key characteristics needed for such a device. Can Knaut at Harvard University and his colleagues set up a quantum network consisting of two nodes separated by a loop of optical fibre that spans 35 kilometers across the city of Boston. Each node contains both a communication qubit, used to transmit information, and a memory qubit, which can store the quantum state for up to a second. "Our experiment really put us in a position where we're really close to working on a quantum repeater demonstration," says Knaut. To set up the link, Knaut and his team entangled their first node, which contains a type of diamond with an atom-sized hole in it, with a photon that they sent to their second node, which contains a similar diamond. When the photon arrives at the second diamond, it becomes entangled with both nodes. The diamonds are able to store this state for a second. A fully functioning quantum repeater using similar technology could be demonstrated in the next couple of years, says Knaut, which would enable quantum networks connecting cities or countries.

In separate work, Xiao-Hui Bao at the University of Science and Technology of China and his colleagues entangled three nodes together, each separated by around 10 kilometers in the city of Hefei. Bao and his team's nodes use supercooled clouds of hundreds of millions of rubidium atoms to generate entangled photons, which they then sent across the three nodes. The central of the three nodes is able to coordinate these photons to link the atom clouds, which act as a form of memory. The key advance for Bao and his team's network is to match the frequency of the photons meeting at the central node, which will be crucial for quantum repeaters connecting different nodes. While the storage time was less than Knaut's team, at 100 microseconds, it is still long enough to perform useful operations on the transmitted information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Richard "Rick" Slayman, the first human to receive a genetically modified pig kidney transplant, has died almost two months after the procedure. Slayman, who had end-stage kidney disease, underwent the transplant in March at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston at age 62. The hospital said in a statement on Saturday that there was "no indication" that his death was the result of the transplant. The transplant surgeon had said he hoped the transplant would function for at least two years.

"The Mass General transplant team is deeply saddened at the sudden passing of Mr. Rick Slayman," read the hospital statement. "Mr. Slayman will forever be seen as a beacon of hope to countless transplant patients worldwide and we are deeply grateful for his trust and willingness to advance the field of xenotransplantation." The surgery was a milestone for the field of xenotransplantation -- the transplant of organs from one species to another -- as a way to alleviate the organ shortage for people who need transplants. The effort to genetically modify animal organs is in hopes that the human body will not reject the foreign tissue. NPR notes that there are more than 100,000 people in the U.S. on the waitlist for organs.

The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees: Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.

But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...

As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.

But Microsoft's work with the oil industry continued unabated, with the company announcing a slew of new partnerships in 2020 and 2021 aimed at cutting fossil fuel producers' costs and boosting production.
The last straw for one technical account manager was a 2023 LinkedIn post by a Microsoft technical architect about the company's work on oil and gas industry automation. The post said Microsoft's cloud service was "unlocking previously inaccessible reserves" for the fossil fuel industry, promising that with Microsoft's Azure service, "the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever."

The technical account manager resigned from the position they'd held for nearly a decade, citing the blog post in a resignation letter which accused Microsoft of "extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg). And speaking on technology's advance, Altman said "Phones are unbelievably good.... I personally think the iPhone is like the greatest piece of technology humanity has ever made. It's really a wonderful product."


Q: What comes after it?

Altman: I don't know. I mean, that was what I was saying. It's so good, that to get beyond it, I think the bar is quite high.

Q: You've been working with Jony Ive on something, right?

Altman: We've been discussing ideas, but I don't — like, if I knew...


Altman said later he thought voice interaction "feels like a different way to use a computer."

But the conversation turned to Apple in another way. It happened in a larger conversation where Altman said OpenAI has "currently made the decision not to do music, and partly because exactly these questions of where you draw the lines..."

Altman: Even the world in which — if we went and, let's say we paid 10,000 musicians to create a bunch of music, just to make a great training set, where the music model could learn everything about song structure and what makes a good, catchy beat and everything else, and only trained on that — let's say we could still make a great music model, which maybe we could. I was posing that as a thought experiment to musicians, and they were like, "Well, I can't object to that on any principle basis at that point — and yet there's still something I don't like about it." Now, that's not a reason not to do it, um, necessarily, but it is — did you see that ad that Apple put out... of like squishing all of human creativity down into one really iPad...?

There's something about — I'm obviously hugely positive on AI — but there is something that I think is beautiful about human creativity and human artistic expression. And, you know, for an AI that just does better science, like, "Great. Bring that on." But an AI that is going to do this deeply beautiful human creative expression? I think we should figure out — it's going to happen. It's going to be a tool that will lead us to greater creative heights. But I think we should figure out how to do it in a way that preserves the spirit of what we all care about here.
What about creators whose copyrighted materials are used for training data? Altman had a ready answer — but also some predictions for the future. "On fair use, I think we have a very reasonable position under the current law. But I think AI is so different that for things like art, we'll need to think about them in different ways..." Altman:I think the conversation has been historically very caught up on training data, but it will increasingly become more about what happens at inference time, as training data becomes less valuable and what the system does accessing information in context, in real-time... what happens at inference time will become more debated, and what the new economic model is there.
Altman gave the example of an AI which was never trained on any Taylor Swift songs — but could still respond to a prompt requesting a song in her style. Altman: And then the question is, should that model, even if it were never trained on any Taylor Swift song whatsoever, be allowed to do that? And if so, how should Taylor get paid? So I think there's an opt-in, opt-out in that case, first of all — and then there's an economic model.
Altman also wondered if there's lessons in the history and economics of music sampling...

Brian Shelton's type 1 diabetes was treated with an infusion of insulin-producing pancreas cells (grown from stem cells). In 2021, the New York Times reported: Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes. "It's a whole new life," Shelton said. Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution. The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with Type 1 diabetes.
"By fall 2023, three patients, including Shelton, had achieved insulin independence by day 180 post-transplant," MedScape reported (in January of 2024): In the phase 1/2 study, 14 patients with type 1 diabetes and impaired hypoglycemia awareness or recurrent hypoglycemia received portal vein infusions of VX-880 [Vertex Pharmaceutical's pancreatic islet cell replacement therapy] along with standard immunosuppression. As of the last data cut, all 14 patients demonstrated islet cell engraftment and production of endogenous insulin. After more than 90 days of follow-up, 13 of the patients have achieved A1c levels < 7% without using exogenous insulin.
Brian Shelton and another patient died, and while Vertex says their deaths were unrelated to the treatment, they have "placed the study on a protocol-specified pause, pending review of the totality of the data by the independent data monitoring committee and global regulators." (MedScape adds that Vertex "is continuing with a phase 1/2 clinical trial of a different product, VX-264, which encapsulates the same VX-880 cells in a device designed to eliminate the need for immunosuppression.")

And meanwhile, a new study in China (again using stem cell-derived islet tissue) has provided "encouraging evidence that islet tissue replacement is an effective cure for diabetic patients," the researchers wrote in Nature. The treatment was administered to 59-year-old, type-2 diabetic.

"Marked changes in the patient's glycemic control were observed as early as week 2," the researchers write, and after week 32, the patient's Time In Tight Range (TITR) "had readily reached 99% and was maintained thereafter."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

China launched an uncrewed lunar mission Friday that aims to bring back samples from the far side of the moon for the first time, in a potentially major step forward for the country's ambitious space program. From a report: The Chang'e-6 probe -- China's most complex robotic lunar mission to date -- blasted off on a Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China's Hainan island, where space fans had gathered to watch the historic moment. The country's National Space Administration said the launch was a success. The launch marks the start of a mission that aims to be a key milestone in China's push to become a dominant space power with plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and build a research base on its south pole.

It comes as a growing number of countries, including the United States, eye the strategic and scientific benefits of expanded lunar exploration in an increasingly competitive field. China's planned 53-day mission would see the Chang'e-6 lander touch down in a gaping crater on the moon's far side, which never faces Earth. China became the first and only country to land on the moon's far side during its 2019 Chang'e-4 mission. Any far-side samples retrieved by the Chang'e-6 lander could help scientists peer back into the evolution of the moon and the solar system itself -- and provide important data to advance China's lunar ambitions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Last week, hundreds of nurses protested the implementation of sloppy AI into hospital systems in front of Kaiser Permanente. Their primary concern: that systems incapable of empathy are being integrated into an already dysfunctional sector without much thought toward patient care: "No computer, no AI can replace a human touch," said Amy Grewal, a registered nurse. "It cannot hold your loved one's hand. You cannot teach a computer how to have empathy."

There are certainly roles automation can play in easing strain on a sector full of burnout after COVID, particularly when it comes to administrative tasks. The concern, as with other industries dominated by executives with poor judgement, is that this is being used as a justification by for-profit hospital systems to cut corners further. From a National Nurses United blog post (spotted by 404 Media): "Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care," they added.

Kaiser Permanente, for its part, insists it's simply leveraging "state-of-the-art tools and technologies that support our mission of providing high-quality, affordable health care to best meet our members' and patients' needs." The company claims its "Advance Alert" AI monitoring system -- which algorithmically analyzes patient data every hour -- has the potential to save upwards of 500 lives a year. The problem is that healthcare giants' primary obligation no longer appears to reside with patients, but with their financial results. And, that's even true in non-profit healthcare providers. That is seen in the form of cut corners, worse service, and an assault on already over-taxed labor via lower pay and higher workload (curiously, it never seems to impact outsized high-level executive compensation).

Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference in May, Google has decided to lay off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others. "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers." TechCrunch reports: The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we're told. [...] Though Google didn't detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.

On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn't eliminate its Python team; it replaced that team with another group based in Munich -- at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters in a post on Mastodon last Thursday.

The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.

UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million. From a report: That's on top of the amount in advance funding and interest-free loans UnitedHealth provided to support care providers reeling from the disruption, a sum said to be north of $6 billion. In its results for the quarter ended March 31, filed today, UnitedHealth stated that the total impact on the company from the attack in Q1 was $0.74 per share, which is expected to rise to a sum between $1.15 and $1.35 per share by the end of the year.

The remediation efforts spent on the attack are ongoing, so the total costs related to business disruption and repairs are likely to exceed $1 billion over time, potentially including the reported $22 million payment made to the ALPHV/BlackCat-affiliated criminals behind the attack. It's a charge that eclipsed that of casino group MGM, which didn't pay a ransom following an attack on its systems last year, and which faces recovery costs of $100 million to rebuild its systems and paying for the fallout from outages, operational disruptions, allegedly leaked data and more.

Top takeaways from Stanford's new AI Index Report [PDF]:
1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.
2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.
3. Frontier models get way more expensive. According to AI Index estimates, the training costs of state-of-the-art AI models have reached unprecedented levels. For example, OpenAI's GPT-4 used an estimated $78 million worth of compute to train, while Google's Gemini Ultra cost $191 million for compute.
4. The United States leads China, the EU, and the U.K. as the leading source of top AI models. In 2023, 61 notable AI models originated from U.S.-based institutions, far outpacing the European Union's 21 and China's 15.
5. Robust and standardized evaluations for LLM responsibility are seriously lacking. New research from the AI Index reveals a significant lack of standardization in responsible AI reporting. Leading developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, primarily test their models against different responsible AI benchmarks. This practice complicates efforts to systematically compare the risks and limitations of top AI models.
6. Generative AI investment skyrockets. Despite a decline in overall AI private investment last year, funding for generative AI surged, nearly octupling from 2022 to reach $25.2 billion. Major players in the generative AI space, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Inflection, reported substantial fundraising rounds.
7. The data is in: AI makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work. In 2023, several studies assessed AI's impact on labor, suggesting that AI enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated AI's potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Still, other studies caution that using AI without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.
8. Scientific progress accelerates even further, thanks to AI. In 2022, AI began to advance scientific discovery. 2023, however, saw the launch of even more significant science-related AI applications -- from AlphaDev, which makes algorithmic sorting more efficient, to GNoME, which facilitates the process of materials discovery.
9. The number of AI regulations in the United States sharply increases. The number of AIrelated regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years. In 2023, there were 25 AI-related regulations, up from just one in 2016. Last year alone, the total number of AI-related regulations grew by 56.3%.
10. People across the globe are more cognizant of AI's potential impact -- and more nervous. A survey from Ipsos shows that, over the last year, the proportion of those who think AI will dramatically affect their lives in the next three to five years has increased from 60% to 66%. Moreover, 52% express nervousness toward AI products and services, marking a 13 percentage point rise from 2022. In America, Pew data suggests that 52% of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about AI, rising from 37% in 2022.

NASA announced on Wednesday that they have selected three companies to develop preliminary designs for vehicles to take astronauts around the south polar region of the Moon. "After the astronauts return to Earth, these vehicles would be able to self-drive around as robotic explorers, similar to NASA's rovers on Mars," reports the New York Times. "The self-driving capability would also allow the vehicle to meet the next astronaut mission at a different location." From the report: The companies are Intuitive Machines of Houston, which in February successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon; Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo.; and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon. NASA had asked for proposals of what it called the lunar terrain vehicle, or L.T.V., that could drive at speeds up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel a dozen miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to drive around for eight hours. The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their designs. Then NASA will choose one of them for the demonstration phase. The L.T.V. will not be ready in time for the astronauts of Artemis III, the first landing in NASA's return-to-the-moon program, which is currently scheduled for 2026.

The plan is for the L.T.V. to be on the lunar surface ahead of Artemis V, the third astronaut landing that is expected in 2030, said Lara Kearney, manager of the extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program at the NASA Johnson Space Center. "If they can get there earlier, we'll take it earlier," Ms. Kearney said. The L.T.V. contract will be worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years -- five years of development and then a decade of operations on the moon, most of it going to the winner of this competition. But Ms. Kearney said the contracts allow NASA to later finance the development of additional rovers, or allow other companies to compete in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The White House has announced the "first government-wide policy (PDF) to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits." To coordinate these efforts, every federal agency must appoint a chief AI officer with "significant expertise in AI." Some agencies have already appointed chief AI officers, but any agency that has not must appoint a senior official over the next 60 days. If an official already appointed as a chief AI officer does not have the necessary authority to coordinate AI use in the agency, they must be granted additional authority or else a new chief AI officer must be named.

Ideal candidates, the White House recommended, might include chief information officers, chief data officers, or chief technology officers, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy said. As chief AI officers, appointees will serve as senior advisers on AI initiatives, monitoring and inventorying all agency uses of AI. They must conduct risk assessments to consider whether any AI uses are impacting "safety, security, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, democratic values, human rights, equal opportunities, worker well-being, access to critical resources and services, agency trust and credibility, and market competition," OMB said. Perhaps most urgently, by December 1, the officers must correct all non-compliant AI uses in government, unless an extension of up to one year is granted.

The chief AI officers will seemingly enjoy a lot of power and oversight over how the government uses AI. It's up to the chief AI officers to develop a plan to comply with minimum safety standards and to work with chief financial and human resource officers to develop the necessary budgets and workforces to use AI to further each agency's mission and ensure "equitable outcomes," OMB said. [...] Among the chief AI officer's primary responsibilities is determining what AI uses might impact the safety or rights of US citizens. They'll do this by assessing AI impacts, conducting real-world tests, independently evaluating AI, regularly evaluating risks, properly training staff, providing additional human oversight where necessary, and giving public notice of any AI use that could have a "significant impact on rights or safety," OMB said. Chief AI officers will ultimately decide if any AI use is safety- or rights-impacting and must adhere to OMB's minimum standards for responsible AI use. Once a determination is made, the officers will "centrally track" the determinations, informing OMB of any major changes to "conditions or context in which the AI is used." The officers will also regularly convene "a new Chief AI Officer Council to coordinate" efforts and share innovations government-wide. Chief AI officers must consult with the public and maintain options to opt-out of "AI-enabled decisions," OMB said. "However, these chief AI officers also have the power to waive opt-out options "if they can demonstrate that a human alternative would result in a service that is less fair (e.g., produces a disparate impact on protected classes) or if an opt-out would impose undue hardship on the agency."

Gizmodo reports that increased activity on the Moon "may affect the unique radio silence on the lunar far side, an ideal location for radio telescopes to pick up faint signals from the cosmic past." This week, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) held the first Moon Farside Protection Symposium in Italy to advocate for preserving radio silence on the far side of the Moon. The symposium hopes to raise awareness about the threat facing the far side of the Moon and develop approaches to shielding it from artificial radio emissions....

NASA has shown interest in using the lunar radio silence, proposing an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope is designed to observe the universe at frequencies below 30 megahertz, which are largely unexplored by humans since those signals are reflected by the Earth's ionosphere, according to NASA. At those low frequencies, radio telescopes on the Moon can detect near-Earth objects approaching our planet before other observatories, it can search for signals of alien civilizations, and study organic molecules in interstellar space...

As more missions head towards the Moon, however, that perfect silence is increasingly being compromised. Earlier this week, for example, China launched a satellite to relay communication between ground operations on Earth and an upcoming mission on the far side of the Moon. The satellite, Queqiao-2, is the first of a constellation of satellites that China hopes to deploy by 2040 to communicate with future crewed missions on the Moon and Mars. As part of its Artemis program, NASA is aiming to build the Lunar Gateway, a space station designed to orbit the Moon to support future missions to the lunar surface and Mars. In advance of this, a NASA-funded cubesat, called CAPSTONE, has entered into a unique halo orbit to demonstrate the stability and practicality of this trajectory for future lunar missions... CAPSTONE marks the beginning of something big — establishing a permanent communication link between Earth and lunar assets, and ensuring the steady, uninterrupted flow of data.

NASA and its Chinese counterparts have eerily similar plans for lunar exploration, and the Moon is currently a 'free-for-all' with no regulations set in place as to who can own our dusty orbital companion.
"In other words, things are about to get real loud out there as far as radio transmissions are concerned."

Joe_Dragon shares a report: Since Apple announced plans for the 0.50 euro Core Technology Fee that apps distributed using the new EU App Store business terms must pay, there have been ongoing concerns about what that fee might mean for a developer that suddenly has a free app go viral. Apple's VP of regulatory law Kyle Andeers today met with developers during a workshop on Apple's Digital Markets Act compliance. iOS developer Riley Testut, best known for Game Boy Advance emulator GBA4iOS, asked what Apple would do if a young developer unwittingly racked up millions in fees.

Testut explained that when he was younger, that exact situation happened to him. Back in 2014 as an 18-year-old high school student, he released GBA4iOS outside of the App Store using an enterprise certificate. The app was unexpectedly downloaded more than 10 million times, and under Apple's new rules with Core Technology Fee, Testut said that would have cost $5 million euros, bankrupting his family. He asked whether Apple would actually collect that fee in a similar situation, charging the high price even though it could financially ruin a family. In response, Andeers said that Apple is working on figuring out a solution, but has not done so yet. He said Apple does not want to stifle innovation and wants to figure out how to keep young app makers and their parents from feeling scared to release an app.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: We've been ableto design and 3D-print plastic phone cases and toys at home for a decade now. For almost every other consumer product made in a factory, the robots have taken over the heavy lifting. But fashion is still stuck in the 20th century. Take a typical pair of chinos. Cotton threads are woven on a large loom at a mill somewhere in Asia, then shipped to a dye house, then shipped (usually a great distance) to a garment factory somewhere else in Asia. There, the fabric is laid flat and cut into shapes, with the excess fabric being landfilled, incinerated, or (very rarely) recycled. Underpaid and exploited garment workers hand-sew those pieces of fabric into pants, which are then shipped across the ocean to a fulfillment warehouse or a store near you. This global apparel supply chain is inefficient and emissions-heavy -- an estimated 4 percent of global waste and 2 to 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to fashion production. Brands have to make risky predictions many months in advance about which items will sell, leading them to over order on a massive scale.

Now, Walmart is piloting a project with the San Francisco Bay area startup Unspun to test whether it can manufacture the retailer's in-house brand of chinos in the US using a technology called 3D weaving. The experiment is part of a push to nearshore Walmart's supply chain and cut down on emissions and waste associated with textile production. While still very much in the prototype phase -- the two companies are exploring how to use Unspun's technology to supply pants to Walmart's stores -- if successful, this project could upend the way apparel is manufactured on a huge scale. Unspun hopes to eventually deploy 3D weaving micro-factories throughout the United States, so that anyone can order custom and locally made apparel on demand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu out of existence on March 4th, it wasn't just an attack on the leading way to play Nintendo Switch games without a Switch. It was a warning to anyone building a video game emulator. Seven developers have now stepped away from projects, are shutting them down, or have left the emulation scene entirely. Of those that remain, many are circling the wagons, getting quieter and more careful, trying not to paint targets on their backs. Four developers declined to talk to The Verge, telling me they didn't want to draw attention. One even tried to delete answers to my questions after we'd begun, suddenly scared of attracting press.

Not everyone is so afraid. Four other emulator teams tell me they're optimistic Nintendo won't challenge them, that they're on strong legal footing, and that Yuzu may have been an unusually incriminating case. One decade-long veteran tells me everyone's just a bit more worried. But when I point out that Nintendo didn't have to prove a thing in court, they all admit they don't have money for lawyers. They say they'd probably be forced to roll over, like Yuzu, if the Japanese gaming giant came knocking. "I would do what I'd have to do," the most confident of the four tells me. "I would want to fight it... but at the same time, I know we exist because we don't antagonize Nintendo."

There's a new meme where Yuzu is the mythical Hydra: cut off one head, and two more take its place. It's partly true in how multiple forks of Yuzu (and 3DS emulator Citra) sprung up shortly after their predecessors died: Suyu, Sudachi, Lemonade, and Lime are a few of the public names. But they're not giving Nintendo the middle finger: they're treating Nintendo's lawsuit like a guidebook about how not to piss off the company. In its legal complaint, Nintendo claimed Yuzu was "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale," giving users "detailed instructions" on how to "get it running with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games," among other things. Okay, no more guides, say the Switch emulator developers who spoke to me. They also say they're stripping out some parts of Yuzu that made it easier to play pirated games. As Ars Technica reported, a forked version called Suyu will require you to bring the firmware, title.keys, and prod.keys from your Switch before you can decrypt and play Nintendo games. Only one of those was technically required before. (Never mind that most people don't have an easily hackable first-gen Switch and would likely download these things off the net.) The developer of another fork tells me he plans to do something similar, making users "fend for yourself" by making sure the code doesn't auto-generate any keys.

Most developers I spoke to are also trying to make it clear they aren't profiting at Nintendo's expense. One who initially locked early access builds behind a donation page has stopped doing that, making them publicly available on GitHub instead. The leader of another project tells me nothing will ever be paywalled, and for now, there's "strictly no donation," either. When I ask about the Dolphin Emulator, which faced a minor challenge from Nintendo last year, I'm told it publicly exposes its tiny nonprofit budget for anyone to scrutinize. But I don't know that these steps are enough to prevent Nintendo from throwing around its weight again, particularly when it comes to emulating the Nintendo Switch, its primary moneymaker. Since Yuzu's shut down, a slew of other emulators left the scene. The include (as highlighted by The Verge):

- The Citra emulator for Nintendo 3DS is gone
- The Pizza Boy emulators for Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color are gone
- The Drastic emulator for Nintendo DS is free for now and will be removed
- The lead developer of Yuzu and Citra has stepped away from emulation
- The lead developer of Strato, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from emulation
- Dynarmic, used to speed up various emulators including Yuzu, has abruptly ended development
- One contributor on Ryujinx, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from the project
- AetherSX2, a PS2 emulator, is finally gone (mostly unrelated; development was suspended a year ago)