"I have no musical talent at all," says Oliver McCann. "I can't sing, I can't play instruments, and I have no musical background at all!"

But the Associated Press describes 37-year-old McCann as a British "AI music creator" — and last month McCann signed with an independent record label "after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what's billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator." McCann is an example of how ChatGPT-style AI song generation tools like Suno and Udio have spawned a wave of synthetic music, a movement most notably highlighted by a fictitious group, Velvet Sundown, that went viral even though all its songs, lyrics and album art were created by AI. Experts say generative AI is set to transform the music world. However, there are scant details, so far, on how it's impacting the $29.6 billion global recorded music market, which includes about $20 billion from streaming.

The most reliable figures come from music streaming service Deezer, which estimates that 18% of songs uploaded to its platform every day are purely AI generated, though they only account for a tiny amount of total streams, hinting that few people are actually listening. Other, bigger streaming platforms like Spotify haven't released any figures on AI music... "It's a total boom. It's a tsunami," said Josh Antonuccio, director of Ohio University's School of Media Arts and Studies. The amount of AI generated music "is just going to only exponentially increase" as young people grow up with AI and become more comfortable with it, he said. [Antonuccio says later the cost of making a hit record "just keeps winnowing down from a major studio to a laptop to a bedroom. And now it's like a text prompt — several text prompts." Though there's a lack of legal clarity over copyright issues.]

Generative AI, with its ability to spit out seemingly unique content, has divided the music world, with musicians and industry groups complaining that recorded works are being exploited to train AI models that power song generation tools... Three major record companies, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed lawsuits last year against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In June, the two sides also reportedly entered negotiations that could go beyond settling the lawsuits and set rules for how artists are paid when AI is used to remix their songs.

GEMA, a German royalty collection society, has sued Suno, accusing it of generating music similar to songs like "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega and "Forever Young" by Alphaville. More than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn, released a silent album to protest proposed changes to U.K. laws on AI they fear would erode their creative control.

Meanwhile, other artists, such as will.i.am, Timbaland and Imogen Heap, have embraced the technology. Some users say the debate is just a rehash of old arguments about once-new technology that eventually became widely used, such as AutoTune, drum machines and synthesizers.

schwit1 shares a report from the Korea Herald: Korean Air, South Korea's flagship carrier, on Tuesday announced a sweeping $50 billion deal to purchase next-generation aircraft from Boeing and spare engines from GE Aerospace and CFM International, its largest-ever investment aimed at fueling long-term growth. The deal, signed during President Lee Jae Myung's visit to Washington, includes $36.2 billion for 103 Boeing aircraft, $690 million for 19 spare engines, and a $13 billion long-term engine maintenance contract. The fleet order spans a wide mix of models: 20 Boeing 777-9s, 25 Boeing 787-10s, 50 Boeing 737-10s, and eight Boeing 777-8F freighters. Deliveries will be phased through the end of the 2030s. Korean Air will also acquire 11 spare engines from GE Aerospace and eight from CFM International, alongside a 20-year maintenance service agreement with GE covering 28 aircraft.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Go, a $4.57 monthly subscription tier initially available only in India. The service provides, compared to the free tier, extended access to GPT-5, image generation, file uploads, advanced data analysis, longer conversation memory, and custom GPTs at Rs 399 per month. ChatGPT Go excludes features found in the $20 ChatGPT Plus tier including legacy models like 4o, Sora video generation, deep research, agent mode, and connectors. OpenAI said "other countries and regions may be eligible in the future" for ChatGPT Go.

India has emerged as a key market for American technology firms looking for users. In the past 15 years, firms like Amazon, Google, and Meta, alongside venture capitalists and private equity, have poured more than $200 billion into the country, all chasing its vast pool of users and the businesses serving this population. India is the second largest market for OpenAI, startup's chief executive Sam Altman said in a podcast recently. Perplexity partnered with Indian telecoms giant Bharti Airtel last month to provide its premium Pro service to 360 million customers for free for an entire year.

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company.

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic." [D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an "Artificial Intelligence Bot" [which performed automated if-then responses]. Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain "free" access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL's sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users' passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets...

Of course, Da Chronic — actually a 17-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche — had other reasons, too. Rekouche wanted to hack AOL because he loved being online with his friends, who were a refuge from a difficult life at home, and he couldn't afford the hourly fee. Plus, it was a thrill to cause havoc and break AOL's weak systems and use them exactly how they weren't meant to be, and he didn't want to keep that to himself. Other hackers "hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these noobs and lamers and destroying the community," Rekouche told me recently by phone...

Rekouche also couldn't have imagined what else his program would mean: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach... In 2014, [AOL CEO Steve] Case himself acknowledged on Reddit that "the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us," but that "some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things."

When he first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said, the Facebook founder confessed to Case that "he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]."
"I can't imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today," Da Chronic says in a new interview with Fast Company. "They'll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That's totally not allowed."

AOHell's creators had called their password-stealing techniques "phishing" — and the name stuck. (AOL was working with federal law enforcement to find him, according to a leaked internal email, but "I didn't even see that until years later.") Enrolled in college, he decided to write a technical academic paper about his program. "I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat."

He's got an interesting perspective today, noting with today's AI tool's it's theoretically possible to "craft dynamic phishing emails... when I see these AI coding tools I think, this might be like today's Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work."

What's the moral of the story? "I didn't have any qualifications or anything like that," Da Chronic says. "So you don't know who your adversary is going to be, who's going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who's going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Hundreds of printer models from Brother and other vendors are impacted by potentially serious vulnerabilities discovered by researchers at Rapid7. The cybersecurity firm revealed on Wednesday that its researchers identified eight vulnerabilities affecting multifunction printers made by Brother. The security holes have been found to impact 689 printer, scanner and label maker models from Brother, and some or all of the flaws also affect 46 Fujifilm Business Innovation, five Ricoh, six Konica Minolta, and two Toshiba printers. Overall, millions of enterprise and home printers are believed to be exposed to hacker attacks due to these vulnerabilities.

The most serious of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2024-51978 and with a severity rating of 'critical', can allow a remote and unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication by obtaining the device's default administrator password. CVE-2024-51978 can be chained with an information disclosure vulnerability tracked as CVE-2024-51977, which can be exploited to obtain a device's serial number. This serial number is needed to generate the default admin password. "This is due to the discovery of the default password generation procedure used by Brother devices," Rapid7 explained. "This procedure transforms a serial number into a default password. Affected devices have their default password set, based on each device's unique serial number, during the manufacturing process."

Having the admin password enables an attacker to reconfigure the device or abuse functionality intended for authenticated users. The remaining vulnerabilities, which have severity ratings of 'medium' and 'high', can be exploited for DoS attacks, forcing the printer to open a TCP connection, obtain the password of a configured external service, trigger a stack overflow, and perform arbitrary HTTP requests. Six of the eight vulnerabilities found by Rapid7 can be exploited without authentication. Brother has patched most of the flaws, but CVE-2024-51978 requires a new manufacturing process to fully resolve, which will apply only to future devices.

Starbucks is piloting a generative AI assistant called "Green Dot Assist" to streamline barista tasks and improve service speed, with plans for a broader rollout in fiscal 2026. The assistant is built on Microsoft Azure's OpenAI platform. CNBC reports: Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks' intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troubleshooting equipment errors. Baristas can either type or verbally ask their queries in conversational language.

As the AI assistant evolves, Starbucks has even bigger plans for its next generation. Those ideas include automatically creating a ticket with IT for equipment issues or generating suggestions for a substitute when a barista calls out of work, according to [Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Deb Hall Lefevre]. [...] Lefevre said tenured baristas have been learning to use the new POS in as little as an hour. Plus, the technology can offer personalized recommendations and loyal customers' repeat orders, helping Starbucks achieve the personalized touch it's looking to bring back to its cafes. "It's just another example of how innovation technology is coming into service of our partners and making sure that we're doing all we can to simplify the operations, make their jobs just a little bit easier, maybe a little bit more fun, so that they can do what they do best," Lefevre told CNBC.

AI company Anthropic (founded in 2021 by a team that left OpenAI) is now making about $3 billion a year in revenue, reports Reuters (citing "two sources familiar with the matter.") The sources said December's projections had been for just $1 billion a year, but it climbed to $2 billion by the end of March (and now to $3 billion) — a spectacular growth rate that one VC says "has never happened." A key driver is code generation. The San Francisco-based startup, backed by Google parent Alphabet and Amazon, is famous for AI that excels at computer programming. Products in the so-called codegen space have experienced major growth and adoption in recent months, often drawing on Anthropic's models.
Anthropic sells AI models as a service to other companies, according to the article, and Reuters calls Anthropic's success "an early validation of generative AI use in the business world" — and a long-awaited indicator that it's growing. (Their rival OpenAI earns more than half its revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions and "is shaping up to be a consumer-oriented company," according to their article, with "a number of enterprises" limiting their rollout of ChatGPT to "experimentation.")

Then again, in February OpenAI's chief operating officer said they had 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, according to CNBC. The latest figures from Reuters...

• Anthropic's valuation: $61.4 billion.
• OpenAI's valuation: $300 billion.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple has big plans to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. "A next-generation, chatbot version of Siri has reportedly made significant progress during testing over the past six months; some executives allegedly now see it as 'on par' with recent versions of ChatGPT," reports MacRumors. "Apple is also apparently discussing giving Siri the ability to access the internet to gather and synthesize data from multiple sources, just like ChatGPT." From the report: The report added that Apple now has artificial intelligence offices in Zurich, where employees are working on an all-new software architecture for Siri. This "monolithic model" is entirely built on an LLM engine that will eventually replace Siri's current "hybrid" architecture that has been incoherently layered up with different functionality over many years. The new model will make Siri more conversational and better at synthesizing information.

Google's Gemini is expected to be added to iOS 19 as an alternative to ChatGPT in Siri, but Apple is also apparently in talks with Perplexity to add their AI service as another option in the future, for both Siri and Safari search.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to revoke EchoStar licenses for radio frequency bands coveted by rival firms including SpaceX, which alleges that EchoStar is underutilizing the spectrum. "I have directed agency staff to begin a review of EchoStar's compliance with its federal obligations to provide 5G service throughout the United States per the terms of its federal spectrum licenses," Carr wrote in a May 9 letter to EchoStar Chairman Charles Ergen. EchoStar and its affiliates "hold a large number of FCC spectrum licenses that cover a significant amount of spectrum," the letter said.

Ergen defended his company's wireless deployment but informed investors that EchoStar "cannot predict with any degree of certainty the outcome" of the FCC proceedings. The letter from Carr and Ergen's statement is included in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted by EchoStar today. EchoStar's stock price was down about 8 percent in trading today. EchoStar bought Dish Network in December 2023 and offers wireless service under the Boost Mobile brand. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the firm "has spent years wiring thousands of cellphone towers to help Boost become a wireless operator that could rival AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, but the project has been slow-going. Boost's subscriber base has shrunk in the five years since Ergen bought the brand from Sprint." [...]

EchoStar will have to prove its case in the two FCC proceedings. The FCC set a May 27 deadline for the first round of comments in both proceedings and a June 6 deadline for reply comments. The proceedings could result in the FCC letting other companies use the spectrum and other remedies. "In particular, we seek information on whether EchoStar is utilizing the 2 GHz band for MSS consistent with the terms of its authorizations and the Commission's rules and policies governing the expectation of robust MSS," the FCC Space Bureau's call for comments said. "We also seek comment on steps the Commission might take to make more intensive use of the 2 GHz band, including but not limited to allowing new MSS entrants in the band." Last month, SpaceX urged the FCC to reallocate the spectrum, saying "the 2 GHz band remains ripe for sharing among next-generation satellite systems that seek to finally make productive use of the spectrum for consumers and first responders."

EchoStar countered that SpaceX's filing is "intended to cloak another land grab for even more free spectrum," and that its "methodology is completely nonsensical, given that EchoStar's terrestrial deployment is subject to population-based milestones that EchoStar has repeatedly demonstrated in status reports."

Back in 2000, Slashdot founder CmdrTaco marked the 4th anniversary of Jennifer Ringley's pioneering "JenniCam" livestream (saying "It sure beats the Netscape FishCam. It's nuts how Jenni's little cam became such a fixture on The Internet...")

But a new article in the Washington Post remembers how "Once, Ringley looked directly into the camera and held a note in front of her eye. It read: 'I FEEL SO LONELY.'" By 2003, Ringley had shut down the site and disappeared. She began declining interview requests, saying she was enjoying her privacy; her absence on social media continues to this day.
"But by then, the human zoo was everywhere," they write including "social media, where everyone could become a character in their own show." In 2007 Justin Kan launched Justin.TV, which eventually became Twitch, "a thrumming online city for anyone wanting to, as its slogan said, 'waste time watching other people waste time.'"

But the article also notes 2023 stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that found Americans"were spending far less time socializing than they had 20 years ago — especially 18-to-29-year-olds, who were spending two more hours a day alone." So how did this play out for the next generation of livestreaming influencers? Here's the origin story of "a lonely young woman in Texas" who's "streamed every second of her life for three years and counting." One afternoon, her boyfriend told her to try Twitch, saying, as she recalled: "Your life sucks, you work at CVS, you have no friends. ... This could be helpful." In her first stream, on a Friday night, she played 3½ hours of "World of Warcraft" for her zero followers.
Eight years later... Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life... On the live-streaming service Twitch, one of the world's most popular platforms, Emily is a legendary figure. For three years, she has ceaselessly broadcast her life — every birthday and holiday, every sickness and sleepless night, almost all of it alone. Her commitment has made her a model for success in the new internet economy, where authenticity and endurance are highly prized. It's also made her a good amount of money: $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch's 30-to-40 percent cut.

But to get there, Emily, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name be withheld due to concerns of harassment, has devoted herself to a solitary life of almost constant stimulation. For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. She has broadcast and self-narrated a thousand days of sleeping, driving and crying, lugging her camera backpack through the grocery store, talking through a screen to strangers she'll never meet. Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she's 28 and says she's too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago... But no one tells streamers when to record or when to stop. There are no labor codes, performance limits or regulations to keep the platforms from setting incentives impossibly high. Many streamers figure out the optimal strategy themselves: The more you share, the more successful you can be....

Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily's paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Streams Charts... Sometimes Emily dreads waking up and clocking into the reality show that is her life. She knows staring at screens all night is unhealthy, and when she feels too depressed to stream, she'll stay in bed for hours while her viewers watch. But she worries that taking a break would be "career suicide," as she called it. Some viewers already complain that she showers too long, sleeps in too late, doesn't have enough fun...

She said she "used to show true sadness on stream" but doesn't anymore because it makes viewers uncomfortable. When she hits a breaking point now, she said, she closes herself in the bathroom.

Waymo and Magna International plan to double production of Waymo's robotaxis at their Mesa, Arizona facility by the end of 2026, aiming to assemble over 2,000 Jaguar I-PACE vehicles and eventually tens of thousands annually, including next-gen models. CNBC reports: The "Waymo Driver Integration Plant," a 239,000 square foot facility outside of Phoenix, will assemble more than 2,000 Jaguar I-PACE robotaxis, the Alphabet company said in a statement. Waymo will add those self-driving vehicles to its existing fleet that already includes around 1,500 robotaxis. The plant will be "capable of building tens of thousands of fully autonomous Waymo vehicles per year," when it is fully built out, Waymo said. The company also said it plans to build its more advanced Geely Zeekr RT robotaxis that feature its "6th-generation Waymo Driver" technology later this year at the plant.

Waymo and Magna opened the Mesa plant in October, Forbes reported Monday. The Alphabet-owned company started its commercial robotaxi service in Phoenix in 2020 and now calls the area its domestic manufacturing home. Already, Waymo is conducting 250,000 paid, driverless rides per week across its service areas in Austin, the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and the company is planning to begin serving the Atlanta; Miami; and Washington, D.C., markets in 2026.

In February tech journalist Nicholas Carr published Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.

A University of Virginia academic journal says the book "appraises the past and present" of information technology while issuing "a warning about its future." And specifically Carr argues that the government ignored historic precedents by not regulating the early internet sometime in the 1990s. But as he goes on to remind us, the early 1990s were also when the triumphalism of America's Cold War victory, combined with the utopianism of Silicon Valley, convinced a generation of decision-makers that "an unfettered market seemed the best guarantor of growth and prosperity" and "defending the public interest now meant little more than expanding consumer choice." So rather than try to anticipate the dangers and excesses of commercialized digital media, Congress gave it free rein in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which, as Carr explains,

"...erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communications that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail."

As for the social-media platforms, Section 230 of the Act shields them from liability for all but the most egregiously illegal content posted by users, while explicitly encouraging them to censor any user-generated content they deem offensive, "whether or not such material is constitutionally protected" (emphasis added). Needless to say, this bizarre abdication of responsibility has led to countless problems, including what one observer calls a "sociopathic rendition of human sociability." For Carr, this is old news, but he warns us once again that the compulsion "to inscribe ourselves moment by moment on the screen, to reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image...[fosters] a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we're also at a further remove from those we interact with."
Carr's book suggests "frictional design" to slow posting (and reposting) on social media might "encourage civil behavior" — but then decides it's too little, too late, because our current frictionless efficiency "has burrowed its way too deeply into society and the social mind."

Based on all of this, the article's author looks ahead to the next revolution — AI — and concludes "I do not think it wise to wait until these kindly bots are in place before deciding how effective they are. Better to roll them off the nearest cliff today..."

Meta has disabled Apple Intelligence features across its iOS applications, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, according to Brazilian tech blog Sorcererhat Tech. The block affects Writing Tools, which enable text creation and editing via Apple's AI, as well as Genmoji generation. Users cannot access these features via the standard text field interface in Meta apps. Instagram Stories have also lost previously available keyboard stickers and Memoji functionality.

While Meta hasn't explained the decision, it likely aims to drive users toward Meta AI, its own artificial intelligence service that offers similar text and image generation capabilities. The move follows failed negotiations between Apple and Meta regarding Llama integration into Apple Intelligence, which reportedly collapsed over privacy disagreements. The companies also maintain ongoing disputes regarding App Store policies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Robotaxi development is speeding at a fast pace in China, but we don't hear much about it in the USA, where the news focuses mostly on Waymo, with a bit about Zoox, Motional, May, trucking projects and other domestic players. China has 4 main players with robotaxi service, dominated by Baidu (the Chinese Google.) A recent session at last week's Ride AI conference in Los Angeles revealed some details about the different regulatory regime in China, and featured a report from a Chinese-American YouTuber who has taken on a mission to ride in the different vehicles.

Zion Maffeo, deputy general counsel for Pony.AI, provided some details on regulations in China. While Pony began with U.S. operations, its public operations are entirely in China, and it does only testing in the USA. Famously it was one of the few companies to get a California "no safety driver" test permit, but then lost it after a crash, and later regained it. Chinese authorities at many levels keep a close watch over Chinese robotaxi companies. They must get approval for all levels of operation which control where they can test and operate, and how much supervision is needed. Operation begins with testing with a safety driver behind the wheel (as almost everywhere in the world,) with eventual graduation to having the safety driver in the passenger seat but with an emergency stop. Then they move to having a supervisor in the back seat before they can test with nobody in the vehicle, usually limited to an area with simpler streets.

The big jump can then come to allow testing with nobody in the vehicle, but with full time monitoring by a remote employee who can stop the vehicle. From there they can graduate to taking passengers, and then expanding the service to more complex areas. Later they can go further, and not have full time remote monitoring, though there do need to be remote employees able to monitor and assist part time. Pony has a permit allowing it to have 3 vehicles per remote operator, and has one for 15 vehicles in process, but they declined comment on just how many vehicles they actually have per operator. Baidu also did not respond to queries on this. [...] In addition, Chinese jurisdictions require that the system in a car independently log any "interventions" by safety drivers in a sort of "black box" system. These reports are regularly given to regulators, though they are not made public. In California, companies must file an annual disengagement report, but they have considerable leeway on what they consider a disengagement so the numbers can't be readily compared. Chinese companies have no discretion on what is reported, and they may notify authorities of a specific objection if they wish to declare that an intervention logged in their black box should not be counted. On her first trip, YouTuber Sophia Tung found Baidu's 5th generation robotaxi to offer a poor experience in ride quality, wait time, and overall service. However, during a return trip she tried Baidu's 6th generation vehicle in Wuhan and rated it as the best among Chinese robotaxis, approaching the quality of Waymo.

Apple's announcement that "more personalized Siri" features of Apple Intelligence would be delayed until "the coming year" reveals a troubling departure from the company's hard-earned reputation for reliability, long-time commentator John Gruber writes. Unlike other Apple Intelligence features that were demonstrated to media in June, the personalized Siri features -- promising personal context awareness, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions -- were never shown working to anyone outside Apple. Yet Apple prominently featured these capabilities in the WWDC keynote and even created TV commercials (now pulled) touting these functions to sell iPhone 16.

This represents a dangerous shift toward the pre-Jobs-return Apple that promised vaporware it couldn't deliver. Gruber writes. Apple has squandered its credibility, built meticulously over decades through consistently shipping what they promised, he writes. Gruber's post cites the following excerpt from a 2011 story: Apple doesn't often fail, and when it does, it isn't a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop. In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their BlackBerry smartphones. MobileMe was a dud. Users complained about lost e-mails, and syncing was spotty at best. Though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone, they panned the MobileMe service.

Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple's campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down." The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Gruber adds: Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then, I fear, that's all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: An Amazon-backed self-driving taxi failed to meet vehicle safety standardsbecause it lacks basics like a brake pedal and rearview mirrors, according to a report by federal inspectors that raises questions about the industry's plans to put a new generation of autonomous vehicles on U.S. roads. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report was produced as part of a review last year of an unusual vehicle by Amazon subsidiary Zoox that, without a steering wheel or other human controls, has no way for a person to drive. Zoox has asserted that the vehicle's technology, backed by artificial intelligence, complies with the agency's standards. But the NHTSA report documents "apparent noncompliances" with eight safety rules.

The contents of the previously undisclosed review suggest that rules written when autonomous vehicles were the stuff of futuristic musings pose a legal impediment to the industry's ambitions, even as plans for self-driving vehicles accelerate. Zoox has a small pilot fleet on the roads in California and Nevada and says it has completed thousands of trips carrying employees and guests. It is finalizing plans to launch public service in Las Vegas this year. [...] By documenting the apparent noncompliances of the Zoox, NHTSA could be setting the table for a recall, under agency procedures. It is unclear whether the Trump administration will attempt a change in course. The agency said it remains in discussion with Zoox and was "considering all options."

Zoox could have sought an exemption from the safety rules, but NHTSA has never granted one to an autonomous passenger vehicle. Instead, the company self-certified that its vehicle complied with the rules as it raced to be the first company to put a purpose-built robotaxi on the road and claim a share of what could become a multi trillion-dollar market. Zoox's vehicle bears little resemblance to a normal car. The plan is for customers to summon a ride using an app, much like a regular ride-hailing vehicle, getting in through bus-like doors and sitting facing one another. The vehicle navigates itself, seeing the world through a set of cameras and laser-based sensors. It largely relies on its own abilities to drive, but the company says teams of remote operators can seize control to help handle unusual situations. Passengers can call for assistance via a touch screen and open the doors using an emergency release. "We will continue to support transportation technology innovation while maintaining the safety of America's roads," NHTSA said in a statement.

"Our recent discussions with NHTSA are about mirrors, windshield wipers, a defroster, and a foot-activated brake pedal -- equipment that makes sense for vehicles with human drivers, but not for the Zoox purpose-built robotaxi," Zoox said in a statement. "Our purpose-built design means that the robotaxi can never be operated by a human driver, and our AI driver doesn't rely on this equipment to view the world."

Most virtual meeting platforms these days include AI-powered notetaking tools or bots that join meetings as guests, transcribe discussions, and/or summarize key points. "The tech companies behind them might frame it as a step forward in efficiency, but the technology raises troubling questions around etiquette and privacy and risks undercutting the very communication it's meant to improve (paywalled; alternative source)," writes Chris Stokel-Walker in a Weekend Essay for Bloomberg. From the article: [...] The push to document every workplace interaction and utterance is not new. Having a paper trail has long been seen as a useful thing, and a record of decisions and action points is arguably what makes a meeting meaningful. The difference now is the inclusion of new technology that lacks the nuance and depth of understanding inherent to human interaction in a meeting room. In some ways, the prior generation of communication tools, such as instant messaging service Slack, created its own set of problems. Messaging that previously passed in private via email became much more transparent, creating a minefield where one wrong word or badly chosen emoji can explode into a dispute between colleagues. There is a similar risk with notetaking tools. Each utterance documented and analyzed by AI includes the potential for missteps and misunderstandings.

Anyone thinking of bringing an AI notetaker to a meeting must consider how other attendees will respond, says Andrew Brodsky, assistant professor of management at the McCombs School of Business, part of the University of Texas at Austin. Colleagues might think you want to better focus on what is said without missing out on a definitive record of the discussion. Or they might think, "You can't be bothered to take notes yourself or remember what was being talked about," he says. For the companies that sell these AI interlopers, the upside is clear. They recognize we're easily nudged into different behaviors and can quickly become reliant on tools that we survived without for years. [...] There's another benefit for tech companies getting us hooked on AI notetakers: Training data for AI systems is increasingly hard to come by. Research group Epoch AI forecasts there will be a drought of usable text possibly by next year. And with publishers unleashing lawsuits against AI companies for hoovering up their content, the tech firms are on the hunt for other sources of data. Notes from millions of meetings around the world could be an ideal option.

For those of us who are the source of such data, however, the situation is more nuanced. The key question is whether AI notetakers make office meetings more useless than so many already are. There's an argument that meetings are an important excuse for workers to come together and talk as human beings. All that small talk is where good ideas often germinate -- that's ostensibly why so many companies are demanding staff return to the office. But if workers trade in-person engagement for AI readbacks, and colleagues curb their words and ideas for fear of being exposed by bots, what's left? If the humans step back, all that remains is a series of data points and more AI slop polluting our lives.

Friday the Orlando Sentinel covered NASA's 2024 mission-safety report from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (formed in 1968). The report "commended the agency's handling of last year's beleaguered Boeing's Starliner mission [prioritizing astronaut safety], but revealed yet another issue found during the flight and questioned the agency's needs for the spacecraft in the future..." [The report] stated that it was unclear how a decision was made to waive a failure tolerance requirement on some of the thrusters without flight or qualification data to justify the decision. "These examples illustrate the panel's concern that, absent role clarity, risk management choices could unintentionally devolve to contractors, whose interests may not fully align with NASA's," the report warned...

It also revealed that in addition to the thruster and leak issues on the propulsion module driving the decision to fly home without astronauts, Starliner had a new issue as it made its way back to Earth. "Overall, Starliner performed well across all major systems in the undock, deorbit, and landing sequences; however, an additional mono propellant thruster failure was discovered in the crew module — distinct from the failures in the service module experienced during orbit," the report stated. "Had the crew been aboard, this would have significantly increased the risk during reentry, confirming the wisdom of the decision."

As far as Starliner's path to certification, the ASAP report said it would continue to monitor several unresolved issues with thrusters and seek information on how NASA and Boeing plan to get the spacecraft certified. "While the thruster issues have received considerable attention, the panel has previously noted other Starliner issues that require resolution prior to certification," it stated. That includes a battery redesign and work to strengthen the landing airbag apparatus. "Beyond these technical matters, schedule and budget pose substantial challenges to Starliner certification," the report added...

"Until the Starliner certification plan is well understood, it remains unclear as to whether a second provider will be available prior to the end of the ISS's operational life [in 2030]," the report stated.
The report "also suggested that NASA immediately adapt next-generation extravehicular mobility units, or EVUs," reports ExecutiveGov, "as current space suits astronauts use for operations outside the ISS are now beyond their design life."

A German court has ruled that Amazon's Prime Video service violates a Nokia-owned patent, ordering Amazon to stop streaming in its current form or face fines of 250,000 euros per violation. However, Amazon assured customers in a statement on Friday that there is no risk of losing access to Prime Video because the decision affects only a limited functionality related to casting videos between devices.

"Prime Video will comply with this local judgement and is currently considering next steps. However, there is absolutely no risk at all for customers losing access to Prime Video," Amazon's Prime Video spokesperson told Reuters. Meanwhile, Nokia's chief licensing officer, Arvin Patel, said: "...the innovation ecosystem breaks down if patent holders are not fairly compensated for the use of their technologies, as it becomes much harder for innovators to fund the development of next generation technologies."

An aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy tested "vastly increased" levels of internet connectivity, reports the defense-news web site TWZ, callling it "a game-changer for what a ship, and its sailors, can do while at sea." The F-35 Joint Strike Fighters assigned to the carrier offer a case in point for what more shipboard bandwidth — provided by commercial providers like Starlink and OneWeb — can mean at the tactical level. Jets with the embarked Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 took on critical mission data file updates in record time last fall due to the carrier's internet innovations, a capability that is slated to expand across the fleet. "This file offers intelligence updates and design enhancements that enable pilots to identify and counter threats in specific operational environments," the Navy said in an October release announcing the feat. "The update incorporated more than 100 intelligence changes and multiple design improvements, significantly enhancing the aircraft's survivability and lethality...." [Capt. Kevin White, then the Lincoln's combat systems officer] noted how the F-35 "eats and breathes data daily," and it has to be shared with commands ashore. The connectivity innovations he's pioneered will enable such data transfers, which will only grow more complex over time. "If you can't get the data onboard, you're probably going to be at a loss," White said. "So large file transfer capability increases combat readiness...."

When the system was on, it provided not only mission benefits, but benefits to the hard-working Lincoln crew as well, which was at sea for 107 days at one point with no port calls [Capt. Pete "Repete" Riebe, told WEST conference attendees]... White said the average age of an embarked Lincoln sailor was 20.8, and Riebe noted that to attract young people into service, the Navy needs to recognize the innate connection they have to their devices. "The next generation of sailors grew up with a cell phone in their hand, and they are uncomfortable without it," Riebe said. "I don't necessarily like that, but that's reality, and if we want to compete for the best folks coming into the Navy, we need to offer them bandwidth at sea." Having better connectivity also helped with the ship's administrative functions, Riebe said, making medical, dental and other work far easier than they have been in the past...

A sailor who can FaceTime with his family back home carries less non-Navy stress with them as they focus on the life-or-death duties at hand, White said... This beefed-up bandwidth allowed 38 sailors to witness the birth of their child, while others were able to watch their kids' sporting events, White said. Several crew members pursued doctorate and master's degrees while deployed due to better internet, while others were able to deal with personal or legal issues they had left behind back home. One officer was able to commission his wife remotely from the ship... On the operational side, from "the most desolate waters," Lincoln used its bandwidth to connect with a command in Norfolk, which undertook the ship's annual cybersecurity scans "from halfway around the world," White said... Taxpayer dollars can also be saved if a ship isn't paying for WiFi access while in port, White noted, and the crew was able to start getting to know Italian allies online before an exercise, enhancing the personal aspects of such partnerships.

More bandwidth also means more onboard training, meaning some sailors who don't have to leave to go to the school house, and sailors were able to get answers to maintenance questions from ashore commands faster as well. "Just by being able to have more reliable access to support resources, we definitely become more effective at maintenance," White said.
Every day the aircraft carrier averaged four to eight terabytes of transferred data, according to the article (with a team of two full-time system administrators managing 7,000 IP addresses), and ultimately saw 780 terabytes of data transferred over five-and-a-half months. The article notes it's part of the Navy's larger "Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore" (SEA2) program to provide all its warships with high-bandwidth connectivity around the world.

The program "involves moving some communications aspects away from proprietary Defense Department satellites, while leaning on commercial satellite constellations and even cellular providers to keep ships more connected at sea for both personal and tactical uses."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.