An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: Three new theft protection features that Google announced earlier this year have reportedly started rolling out on Android. The tools — Theft Detection Lock, Offline Device Lock and Remote Lock — are aimed at giving users a way to quickly lock down their devices if they've been swiped, so thieves can't access any sensitive information. Android reporter Mishaal Rahman shared on social media that the first two tools had popped up on a Xiaomi 14T Pro, and said some Pixel users have started seeing Remote Lock.

Theft Detection Lock is triggered by the literal act of snatching. The company said in May that the feature "uses Google AI to sense if someone snatches your phone from your hand and tries to run, bike or drive away." In such a scenario, it'll lock the phone's screen.
The Android reporter summarized the other two locking features in a post on Reddit:

• Remote Lock "lets you remotely lock your phone using just your phone number in case you can't sign into Find My Device using your Google account password."

• Offline Device Lock "automatically locks your screen if a thief tries to keep your phone disconnected from the Internet for an extended period of time."

"All three features entered beta in August, starting in Brazil. Google told me the final versions of these features would more widely roll out this year, and it seems the features have begun expanding."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Somewhere over the streets of San Francisco's Mission, a microphone sits surveilling ... for banger songs. Bop Spotter is a project by technologist Riley Walz in which he has hidden an Android phone in a box on a pole, rigged it to be solar powered, and has set it to record audio and periodically sends it to Shazam's API to determine which songs people are playing in public. Walz describes it as ShotSpotter, but for music. "This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals," Walz's website reads. "It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what's popping off in real-time."

ShotSpotter, of course, is the microphone-based, "gunshot detection" surveillance company that cities around the country have spent millions of dollars on. ShotSpotter is often inaccurate, and sometimes detects things like fireworks or a car backfiring as gunshots. Chicago, one of ShotSpotter's biggest clients, is finally allowing its contract with the company to end. Bop Spotter, on the other hand, is designed to figure out what cool music people are blasting from their cars or as they walk down the street. "I am a chronic Shazam-er. Most songs I listen to come from first hearing them at a party, store, or on the street," Walz told 404 Media. "Years ago I had the thought that it'd be cool to Shazam 24/7 from a fixed location, and I recently learned about ShotSpotter, and thought it'd be amusing to do what they do with music instead of gunshots. Was a great weekend project."

Walz said that the phone itself is rigged to a solar panel, and that it records audio in 10-minute blocks while in airplane mode. "Then it connects to WiFi to send the file to my server, which then split it into 20-second chunks that get passed to Shazam's API. The device doesn't Shazam directly, that would use way too much power. Probably $100 of parts," he said. BopSpotter's website has a constant feed of songs it hears, as well as links to play the songs in Spotify or Apple Music. As I'm writing this, BopSpotter has picked up "Not Like Us" by Kendrick Lamar, "The Next Episode" by Dr. Dre, and "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley (a Rick Roll already?) among dozens of songs in the last few hours. The site also has a constant feed of the device's power levels. So far in three days, it has detected 380 songs. "I thought the solar panel would be annoying but it provides 4 times more power than the phone needs," Walz said. "The hardest part was scoping out which pole to actually put it up on. I had to balance finding a busy location where lots of music could be picked up, with enough sunlight, and good connection to a public wifi network."

Walz didn't say where exactly the phone is located.

An anonymous reader shares a report: HoloLens 2 production has ended, Microsoft confirmed to UploadVR. Now is the last time to buy the device before stock runs out, the company has been telling its partners and customers. HoloLens 2 will continue to receive "updates to address critical security issues and software regressions" until December 31 2027. As soon as 2028 starts, software support for HoloLens 2 will end. For the original HoloLens headset from 2016, software support will end after December 10 of this year, just over two months from now. Production of it ended back in 2018. HoloLens 2 launched in 2019, three years after the original, with upgrades to almost every aspect: a wider field of view, higher resolution, eye tracking, vastly improved hand tracking, and more powerful compute housed in the rear of the strap to deliver a balanced comfortable design.

Uplevel provides insights from coding and collaboration data, according to a recent report from CIO magazine — and recently they measured "the time to merge code into a repository [and] the number of pull requests merged" for about 800 developers over a three-month period (comparing the statistics to the previous three months).

Their study "found no significant improvements for developers" using Microsoft's AI-powered coding assistant tool Copilot, according to the article (shared by Slashdot reader snydeq): Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study...

In addition to measuring productivity, the Uplevel study looked at factors in developer burnout, and it found that GitHub Copilot hasn't helped there, either. The amount of working time spent outside of standard hours decreased for both the control group and the test group using the coding tool, but it decreased more when the developers weren't using Copilot.
An Uplevel product manager/data analyst acknowledged to the magazine that there may be other ways to measure developer productivity — but they still consider their metrics solid. "We heard that people are ending up being more reviewers for this code than in the past... You just have to keep a close eye on what is being generated; does it do the thing that you're expecting it to do?"

The article also quotes the CEO of software development firm Gehtsoft, who says they didn't see major productivity gains from LLM-based coding assistants — but did see them introducing errors into code. With different prompts generating different code sections, "It becomes increasingly more challenging to understand and debug the AI-generated code, and troubleshooting becomes so resource-intensive that it is easier to rewrite the code from scratch than fix it."

On the other hand, cloud services provider Innovative Solutions saw significant productivity gains from coding assistants like Claude Dev and GitHub Copilot. And Slashdot reader destined2fail1990 says that while large/complex code bases may not see big gains, "I have seen a notable increase in productivity from using Cursor, the AI powered IDE." Yes, you have to review all the code that it generates, why wouldn't you? But often times it just works. It removes the tedious tasks like querying databases, writing model code, writing forms and processing forms, and a lot more. Some forms can have hundreds of fields and processing those fields along with doing checks for valid input is time consuming, but can be automated effectively using AI.
This prompted an interesting discussion on the original story submission. Slashdot reader bleedingobvious responded: Cursor/Claude are great BUT the code produced is almost never great quality. Even given these tools, the junior/intern teams still cannot outpace the senior devs. Great for learning, maybe, but the productivity angle not quite there.... yet.

It's damned close, though. GIve it 3-6 months.
And Slashdot reader abEeyore posted: I suspect that the results are quite a bit more nuanced than that. I expect that it is, even outside of the mentioned code review, a shift in where and how the time is spent, and not necessarily in how much time is spent.
Agree? Disagree? Share your own experiences in the comments.

And are developers really saving time with AI coding assistants?

Meta unveiled prototype AR glasses codenamed Orion on Wednesday, featuring a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and silicon carbide lenses that beam graphics directly into the wearer's eyes. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the device's capabilities, including ingredient recognition, holographic gaming, and video calling, controlled by a neural wristband that interprets hand gestures through electromyography.

Despite technological advances, Meta has shelved Orion's commercial release, citing manufacturing complexities and costs reaching $10,000 per unit, primarily due to difficulties in producing the silicon carbide lenses. The company now aims to launch a refined, more affordable version in coming years, with executives hinting at a price comparable to high-end smartphones and laptops.

Zuckerberg views AR glasses as critical to Meta's future, potentially freeing the company from its reliance on smartphone platforms controlled by Apple and Google. The push into AR hardware comes as tech giants and startups intensify competition in the space, with Apple launching Vision Pro and Google partnering with Magic Leap and Samsung on headset development.

Customers of Kaspersky antivirus in the United States found out in the last few days that their cybersecurity software was automatically replaced with a new one called UltraAV, according to several customers. And while Kaspersky said earlier this month that its U.S. customers would be transitioned to UltraAV, many of its customers said they had no idea this was going to happen and that it would automatically be forced upon them. From a report: "Woke up to Kasperky [sic] completely gone from my system with Ultra AV and Ultra VPN freshly installed (not by me, just automatically while I slept)," a user on Reddit wrote. Others reported having the same experience in the same Reddit thread, as well as in other threads. A reseller, who until recently sold Kaspersky products prior to the recent sales ban, told TechCrunch that he was left "annoyed" by the move to automatically remove Kaspersky software and replace it with an entirely different antivirus. A former senior U.S. government cybersecurity official said that this was an example of the "huge risk" posed by the access granted by Kaspersky software. It's worth noting that, on the other hand, other customers did report receiving an email from Kaspersky about the transition to UltraAV.

In 2022 about 346,000 electric cars were reportedly sold in California. But the same year its greenhouse gas emissions dropped a whopping 9.3 million metric tons — the amount produced by 2.2 million gas-powered cars — lowering emissions 2.4% from the year before. "The biggest drop came from transportation, due largely to the increased use of renewable fuels," according to the state's Air Resources Board, touting a newly-released report. (And electricity sector emissions also fell by 2.6 million metric tons, or 4.1%, "even as electricity usage rose," according to The Hill — "a dichotomy that the regulators attributed to an increase in solar and wind power generation.")

So despite a growing economy, "the latest data underscores a continued trend of steady emissions decline..." according to a statement from the Board. "Between 2000 to 2022, emissions fell by 20% while California's gross domestic product increased by 78%, pointing to the effectiveness of the state's climate change and air quality programs." And the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted per unit of economic output ("carbon intensity") has also dropped 55% in the last 20 years: [In 2022] the electricity sector had its lowest carbon intensity since 2000. Wind and solar now represent 30% of generation and in-state solar increased by 15% from 2021, driven by requirements under the state's Cap-and-Trade Program and Renewables Portfolio Standard. Furthermore, California increased its battery storage by 757% from 2019 through 2023, bolstering its renewable energy efforts. The storage capacity is enough to power 6.6 million homes for up to four hours.

Industrial emissions declined by 2%, also falling to the lowest level in 22 years. While refinery emissions remained essentially flat, emissions from oil and gas extraction declined, as did emissions from other fuel use, cement manufacturing, and cogeneration facilities. [The Hill says 2022's industrial emissions were 21.7% below year-2000 levels, according to the report.]

Livestock emissions, which are responsible for 70% of agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions, peaked in 2012 and once again saw reductions in 2022. The decrease is driven by the use of methane digesters funded by the California Climate Investments and incentivized by the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which capture emissions at the source and convert them to clean fuel.

Landfill methane emissions also continued to decline in 2022. This decline can be attributed in part to the state's efforts to reduce disposal of organic waste, as well as the California Landfill Methane Regulation, which requires landfill operators to monitor and capture emissions escaping from their facilities.
One local news site calls the drop in emissions "shocking," but adds that "the trend is expected to continue. In the second quarter of 2024, 118,181 zero-emission vehicles were purchased in the state, good for about one-quarter of all new car sales."

California governor Gavin Newsom said his state "is proving that climate action goes hand-in-hand with economic growth. We've slashed carbon pollution by a whopping 20% since the turn of the century all while building the world's fifth largest economy. Cleaner air, more good jobs — that's the California way."

"The cab was cut from a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee," writes the New York Times. "The engine once revved up a 1985 Toyota Celica; and 107 hand-sewn rubber segments, courtesy of Mr. Tymofichuk's wife, help to direct low-pressure air beneath the craft so that it rises eight inches above the ground..." On a cold spring day in a small garage in Alberta, Canada, an engine revved up and an improbable machine — fabricated from auto parts, a hand-sewn rubber skirt and an abandoned fiberglass hull — came to life.

A homemade hovercraft began to rise off the ground with a small crew standing by.

The successful liftoff was the culmination of a lifelong fascination of Robert Tymofichuk, 55, who spent about 1,800 hours over a year working on it [according to this nifty video on YouTube ]. And, to the gratitude of passengers, it comes with heated seats. "If you're going through all that hassle, you might as well make yourself comfortable," Mr. Tymofichuk said. He repurposed the seats from a Volkswagen, so the heating coils were already installed.
Achieve speeds around 40 miles per hour (or 64 kmph), "Mr. Tymofichuk's hovercraft now sails above land and water, a bright red gem coasting over the Saskatchewan River," according to the article. And it also quotes Mr. Tymofichuk as saying it's the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

"To actually have something constructed with your own hands be zipping around, and it's fully functional — it's like magic."

X's struggles in Brazil got this update from the Guardian Wednesday: In a statement tweeted from X's global government affairs account, the company said the restoration of service was an "inadvertent and temporary" side-effect of switching network providers.
But Friday "After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk's social network, X, has capitulated," writes the New York Times. "In a court filing on Friday night, the company's lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil's Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site."

"The company's lawyers said X had complied with the court's orders — blocking designated accounts, paying fines, and naming a new formal representative in the country," writes TechCrunch (citing reporting by the New York Times): In a filing of its own, the Supreme Court reportedly responded by telling X it had not provided the proper paperwork and giving it five days to do so....

X came back online in Brazil earlier this week, although Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch that the timing of the company's recent switch to Cloudflare infrastructure is just a "coincidence." During the ban, Brazilian users sought out social media alternatives, leading to dramatic growth at Bluesky and Tumblr.
The New York Times believes "The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand."

Although I'm curious about that missing paperwork...

The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point [non-paywalled source] on Wednesday and signalled more reductions would follow, launching its first easing cycle since the onset of the pandemic. Financial Times: The US central bank's first cut in more than four years leaves the federal funds rate at a range of 4.75 per cent. Michelle Bowman, a governor on the Federal Open Market Committee, voted against the decision, favouring a quarter-point reduction. The half-point cut is larger than the Fed's more customary quarter-point pace and suggests the US central bank is concerned about the prospects of a weakening economy after more than a year of holding rates at a 23-year high.

"For 75 years Cosm built planetariums," reports a Texas news station, "and then a few years ago realized this technology could take you from the night sky to anywhere under the sun."

So now Los Angeles and Dallas have massive 9,600-square-foot, 8K-resolution screens that one reviewer for SFGate calls "an absolute game-changer" for sports fans. "At its best, Cosm's floor-to-ceiling screen gives anyone with a seat the opportunity to embrace a face full of on-the-field action at such high quality that it can be staggering, almost overwhelming at times — so just be sure to hold on tight, to the handrails and to your wallets."

There's also a bar with a 150-foot band of screens and a rooftop area with mounted TV, but they're "not why anyone has come," SFGate points out. Even the Dome has three distinct floors, though it's the second floor "where full visual immersion happens." The action feels so close, I can almost smell it, and all the focus is pulled to the center of the giant screen. Patrons truly do feel at the absolute heart of the action, with better seats than perhaps they could even pay for at Manchester's Old Trafford stadium. From a sports-viewing standpoint, I can't imagine it gets much better than this... Over the course of just a few minutes, the viewing angle flips from corner looks to right up against the goalkeeper's net, and then it widens out to dead center to catch crisp passes. Some angles put me right in the stands, cheering along with the loyalists at a stadium half a world away...

To be clear, the premium ticket costs are good for recouping Cosm's substantial investment in this gorgeous technological product, which has been in the works for years. The price tag is also likely to be little issue for any Los Angeles fan with money to spend, but the cost really does lay bare the growing division between the haves and have-nots in American sports society... If you paid $20 for a general admission entry that mostly just grants access to the fringes of the action, well ... good luck getting the most out of the Dome... The edges of the massive screen are stretched to comic effect, making the fisheye perspective more disorienting than fun. At the center of the room, it feels like you're absolutely in the meat of the action; at the fringes, you're left to pick at a few digital bones...

[F]or the rest of us, the normal sports fans who like to sway with strangers during the seventh-inning stretch, the ones who want to be able to take their kids to a game without feeling quite so financially wrung out, Cosm is yet another troubling sign of big, expensive things to come. Being a fan of a sports franchise in 2024 is an increasingly costly proposition. Watching your favorite NFL team now requires cable access, as well as multiple streaming services like Amazon Prime... There is no question that Cosm is a unique experience and that it will absolutely have a hand in transforming the modern digital sports-watching landscape, especially for those who want a digital re-creation of the best seat in the house over the camaraderie of a shared, in-person sports experience. The place will be able to charge incredible sums for the Super Bowl or World Series games, and — when at its best, with a prime seat in the middle of the action — the cost will be justifiable for many.

But for the folks at the financial fringes, the ones with the most spirit and often the least to spend, Cosm undoubtedly feels like a widening of the economic chasm that is pulling fans and their favorite teams further apart.
Besides sports events, Cosm's Dome also offers other immersive experiences like Circque du Soleil's "O" and Planetary Collective's "Orbital".

Another Cosm location is planned for Phoenix in 2025.

Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of "Google's seven-year mission to give AI a robot body".

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google's robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired...

Everyday Robotics spent seven years and a small Google fortune developing a one-armed robot on a wheeled platform. By the time Google pulled the plug on the project in February 2023, the robots were helping clean up researchers' desks and sorting trash during the daytime; in the evening, they were improvising dances. [Google hired a professional dancer as an artist-in-residence who teamed with "a few other engineers" to build an AI algorithm trained on the dancer's choreography preferences...]

Google founder Larry Page — favored moving directly to "end to end" (e2e) learning, where you'd hand robots a general task and they'd be able to figure out how to execute it. That, Page felt, was a goal worthy of a moonshot. But it also turned out to be out of reach. "I have come to believe," Brondmo writes, "it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks...." ["Building robots that perform useful services — like cleaning up and wiping all the tables in a restaurant, or making the beds in a hotel — will require both AI and traditional programming for a long time to come. In other words, don't expect robots to go running off outside our control, doing something they weren't programmed to do, anytime soon."]

The bottom line: So far, robot hype is outpacing robot reality. Boston Dynamics' back-flipping humanoid and quadruped bots have wowed YouTube viewers — but you wouldn't want to let them anywhere near your office or home.
It's an interesting look back. "My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired," Brondmo writes: Andy "the father of Android" Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their "spare time...." I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs' famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later — and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI — it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on "minimum viable products" and VCs' general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things...

When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved... [But] in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.
They'd tackled the problem with earnestness. ("[S]even robots working for months to learn how to pick up a rubber duckling? That wasn't going to cut it... So we built a cloud-based simulator and, in 2021, created more than 240 million robot instances in the sim.ma")

Brondmo adds this his mother had advanced Parkinson's disease, and hoped that one day robots could support her. "Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can't come soon enough.

"So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Employees' negative daily emotions and lack of well-being can ultimately hurt worker engagement -- and the economy, according to a new report released this week. Gallup, in its "State of the Global Workplace," estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP. The report includes findings from its latest annual World Poll, which surveyed 128,278 employees in more than 140 countries last year. That poll found that roughly 20% of workers globally reported feeling lonely, angry or sad on a daily basis. And 41% on average say they feel stress. Those most likely to say they feel lonely were younger workers (22%), employees who worked remotely full-time (25%) and those who felt most disengaged on the job (31%).

While work isn't always the cause of a person's negative daily emotions, employers should still be concerned. That's because work can either improve or worsen employees' well-being. On the one hand, the Gallup report noted, "when employees find their work and work relationships meaningful, employment is associated with high levels of daily enjoyment and low levels of all negative daily emotions. Notably, half of employees who are engaged at work are thriving in life overall." On the other, researchers found that being disengaged at work can negatively affect a person's wellbeing as much as -- or more than -- not having a job at all. "Employees who dislike their jobs tend to have high levels of daily stress and worry, as well as elevated levels of all other negative emotions," they wrote. "On many wellbeing items (stress, anger, worry, loneliness), being actively disengaged at work is equivalent to or worse than being unemployed."

The poll found that last year only 23% of employees were engaged at work, unchanged from the year prior. Gallup defines an engaged employee as someone "highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. They are psychological 'owners,' drive performance and innovation, and move the organization forward." But those who said they were not engaged rose by 3 percentage points to 62%. These are employees characterized as "psychologically unattached to their work and company. Because their engagement needs are not being fully met, they are putting time but not energy or passion into their work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A daredevil billionaire rocketed back into orbit Tuesday, aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture farther than anyone since NASA's Apollo moonshots. Unlike his previous chartered flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the cost with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they'll hold up in the harsh vacuum. If all goes as planned, it will be the first time private citizens conduct a spacewalk, but they won't venture away from the capsule. Considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been the sole realm of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union popped open the hatch in 1965, closely followed by the U.S. Today, they are routinely done at the International Space Station.

Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, midway through the five-day flight. But first the passengers are shooting for way beyond the International Space Station -- an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which would surpass the Earth-lapping record set during NASA's Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther. The plan is to spend 10 hours at that height -- filled with extreme radiation and riddled with debris -- before reducing the oval-shaped orbit by half. Even at this lower 435 miles (700 kilometers), the orbit would eclipse the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts flew.

All four wore SpaceX's spacewalking suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment. Isaacman and SpaceX's Sarah Gillis will take turns briefly popping out of the hatch. They'll test their white and black-trimmed custom suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder. There will be no dangling at the end of their 12-foot (3.6-meter) tethers and no jetpack showboating. Only NASA's suits at the space station come equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.

Alorica — which runs customer-service centers around the world — has introduced an AI translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers in 200 different languages. But according to the Associated Press, "Alorica isn't cutting jobs. It's still hiring aggressively." The experience at Alorica — and at other companies, including furniture retailer IKEA — suggests that AI may not prove to be the job killer that many people fear. Instead, the technology might turn out to be more like breakthroughs of the past — the steam engine, electricity, the internet: That is, eliminate some jobs while creating others. And probably making workers more productive in general, to the eventual benefit of themselves, their employers and the economy. Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said he thinks AI "will affect many, many jobs — maybe every job indirectly to some extent. But I don't think it's going to lead to, say, mass unemployment.... "

[T]he widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn't becoming reality in any widespread way — not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found "little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.'' The advisers noted that history shows technology typically makes companies more productive, speeding economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways... The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI. "I don't think we've started seeing companies saying they've saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,'' said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm's sales team. "That may come in the future. But it hasn't played out yet.''

At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to some categories of jobs isn't unfounded. Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a uproar last year by boasting that he had replaced 90% of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina. The move at Shah's company, Dukaan, which helps customers set up e-commerce sites, shrank the response time to an inquiry from 1 minute, 44 seconds to "instant." It also cut the typical time needed to resolve problems from more than two hours to just over three minutes. "It's all about AI's ability to handle complex queries with precision,'' Shah said by email. The cost of providing customer support, he said, fell by 85%....

Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London's Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists tumbled within eight months of the arrival of ChatGPT.
On the other hand, after Ikea introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries, it didn't result in massive layoffs according to the article. Instead Ikea ended up retraining 8,500 customer-service workers to handle other tasks like advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.

Long-time FOSS-watcher Bruce Byfield writes that while people "still dream of a completely free alternative, increasingly the emphasis in FOSS seems to be on accepting coexistence with proprietary software." Many, too, have always preferred the permissive BSD licenses, which permits combining FOSS and proprietary software. From some perspectives, Debian's newest [non-free firmware] repository or Nobara's popularity [a Fedora-based distro but with proprietary drivers and gaming applications] is simply an admission of the true state of affairs...

On the other hand, the FOSS philosophy may be weakened because it no longer has a strong advocate. Sixteen years ago, the FSF reached a peak of authority in the discussions of 2006-2007 about the structure of GPLv3 — then immediately lost that authority by not reaching a consensus. That was followed by the cancellation of Richard Stallman in 2017, which, deserved or not, had the side effect of silencing free software's most influential representative. Today the FSF that Stallman led continues to function, with Stallman returned to the board of directors, but its actions go unreported, and it seems to speak to a much smaller group of loyalists. The Linux Foundation, with its corporate emphasis, is not an adequate substitution. In these circumstances, there is reason to wonder whether FOSS has lost its way.

While the issue has yet to reach the mainstream, Bruce Perens, one of the coiners of the term "open source" in 1998, is already trying to describe what he calls the Post-Open Source era. Not only does Perens believe that FOSS licenses no longer fulfill their original purpose, but they no longer inform or benefit the average user. According to Perens,

"Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source, they don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them."

As a remedy, Perens proposes that licenses should be replaced by contracts. He envisions that companies pay for the benefits they receive from using FOSS. Compliance for each contract would be checked, renewed, and paid for yearly, and the payments would go towards funding FOSS development. Individuals and nonprofits would continue to use FOSS for free. In March 2024, Perens posted a draft Post-Open license. The draft includes a description of the contract-related files to be shipped with FOSS software, a description of the status of derivative works, how revenue is collected, and conditions of termination. The draft has yet to be reviewed by a lawyer, but what is immediately noticeable is how it draws on both contract language and FOSS licenses to produce something different.
Byfield concludes that "free licenses are straining to respond to loopholes, and a discussion needs to be had about whether they are adequate to modern pressures."

Politico reports U.S. states have no uniform way of policing the use of overseas subcontractors in election technology, "let alone to understand which individual software components make up a piece of code."

For example, to replace New Hampshire's old voter registration database, state election officials "turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market," Politico: "a small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software." But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.

The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain. The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia ["probably by accident," they write later] and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it... New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.

None of the findings amounted to evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said, and the company resolved the issues before the new database came into use ahead of the presidential vote this spring. This was "a disaster averted," said the person familiar with the probe, citing the risk that hackers could have exploited the first two issues to surreptitiously edit the state's voter rolls, or use them and the presence of the Ukrainian national anthem to stoke election conspiracies. [Though WSD only maintains one other state's voter registration database — Vermont] the supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.

The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems. Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure.
The article also points out that many state and federal election officials "insist there has been significant progress" since 2016, with more regular state-federal communication. "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, now the lead federal agency on election security, didn't even exist back then.

"Perhaps most importantly, more than 95% of U.S. voters now vote by hand or on machines that leave some type of paper trail, which officials can audit after Election Day."

Casey Newton, former senior editor at the Verge, weighs in on Platformer about the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

"Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly. Telegram never even pretended to." Officially, Telegram's terms of service prohibit users from posting illegal pornographic content or promotions of violence on public channels. But as the Stanford Internet Observatory noted last year in an analysis of how CSAM spreads online, these terms implicitly permit users who share CSAM in private channels as much as they want to. "There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?" asks a question on Telegram's FAQ page. The company declares that it will not intervene in any circumstances: "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants," it states. "We do not process any requests related to them...."

Telegram can look at the contents of private messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for that data. Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says) none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data. [...] To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM.... The company's refusal to answer almost any law enforcement request, no matter how dire, has enabled some truly vile behavior. "Telegram is another level," Brian Fishman, Meta's former anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. "It has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It's not 'light' content moderation; it's a different approach entirely.
The article asks whether France's action "will embolden countries around the world to prosecute platform CEOs criminally for failing to turn over user data." On the other hand, Telegram really does seem to be actively enabling a staggering amount of abuse. And while it's disturbing to see state power used indiscriminately to snoop on private conversations, it's equally disturbing to see a private company declare itself to be above the law.

Given its behavior, a legal intervention into Telegram's business practices was inevitable. But the end of private conversation, and end-to-end encryption, need not be.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [...] Anthropic, in its continued effort to paint itself as a more ethical, transparent AI vendor, has published the system prompts for its latest models (Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku) in the Claude iOS and Android apps and on the web. Alex Albert, head of Anthropic's developer relations, said in a post on X that Anthropic plans to make this sort of disclosure a regular thing as it updates and fine-tunes its system prompts. The latest prompts, dated July 12, outline very clearly what the Claude models can't do -- e.g. "Claude cannot open URLs, links, or videos." Facial recognition is a big no-no; the system prompt for Claude Opus tells the model to "always respond as if it is completely face blind" and to "avoid identifying or naming any humans in [images]." But the prompts also describe certain personality traits and characteristics -- traits and characteristics that Anthropic would have the Claude models exemplify.

The prompt for Claude 3 Opus, for instance, says that Claude is to appear as if it "[is] very smart and intellectually curious," and "enjoys hearing what humans think on an issue and engaging in discussion on a wide variety of topics." It also instructs Claude to treat controversial topics with impartiality and objectivity, providing "careful thoughts" and "clear information" -- and never to begin responses with the words "certainly" or "absolutely." It's all a bit strange to this human, these system prompts, which are written like an actor in a stage play might write a character analysis sheet. The prompt for Opus ends with "Claude is now being connected with a human," which gives the impression that Claude is some sort of consciousness on the other end of the screen whose only purpose is to fulfill the whims of its human conversation partners. But of course that's an illusion. "If the prompts for Claude tell us anything, it's that without human guidance and hand-holding, these models are frighteningly blank slates," concludes TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers. "With these new system prompt changelogs -- the first of their kind from a major AI vendor -- Anthropic is exerting pressure on competitors to publish the same. We'll have to see if the gambit works."

France is to trial a ban on mobile phones at school for pupils up to the age of 15, seeking to give children a "digital pause" that, if judged successful, could be rolled out nationwide from January. From a report: Just under 200 secondary schools will take place in the experiment that will require youngsters to hand over phones on arrival at reception. It takes the prohibition on the devices further than a 2018 law that banned pupils at primary and secondary schools from using their phones on the premises but allowed them to keep possession of them. Announcing the trial on Tuesday, the acting education minister, Nicole Belloubet, said the aim was to give youngsters a "digital pause." If the trial proves successful, the ban would be introduced in all schools from January, Belloubet said.

A commission set up by the president, Emmanuel Macron, expressed concern that the overexposure of children to screens was having a detrimental effect on their health and development. A 140-page report published in March concluded there was "a very clear consensus on the direct and indirect negative effects of digital devices on sleep, on being sedentary, a lack of physical activity and the risk of being overweight and even obese ... as well as on sight."