Last year was the hottest on record and the Earth is headed towards a global warming of 2.7 degrees, yet top fossil fuel and cement producers show a disregard for climate change and actively make things worse. From a report: A new Carbon Majors Database report found that just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. Thirty-eight percent of total emissions during this period came from nation-states, 37 percent from state-owned entities and 25 percent from investor-owned companies.

Nearly 200 parties adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, 58 of the 100 state- and investor-owned companies in the Carbon Majors Database have increased their production in the years since (The Climate Accountability Institute launched Carbon Majors in 2013 to hold fossil fuel producers accountable and is hosted by InfluenceMap). This number represents producers worldwide, including 87 percent of those assessed in Asia, 57 percent in Europe and 43 percent in North America.

It's not a clear case of things slowly turning around, either. The International Energy Agency found coal consumption increased by eight percent over the seven years to 8.3 billion tons -- a record high. The report names state-owned Coal India as one of the top three carbon dioxide producers. Russia's state-owned energy company Gazprom and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco rounded out the trio of worst offenders.

As political pressure mounts, TikTok says it's committed to fostering educational content on its app. "The company announced on Tuesday that it's expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The STEM feed will begin to automatically appear alongside the "For You" and "Following" feeds for users under the age of 18. Users above the age of 18 can enable the STEM feed via the app's "content preferences" settings. The feed includes English-speaking content with auto-translate subtitles. TikTok says that since launching the feed in the U.S. last year, 33% of users have the STEM feed enabled and a third of teens go to the STEM feed every week. The app has seen a 24% growth in STEM-related content in the U.S. since the feed launched. Over the past three years, almost 15 million STEM-related videos have been published on the app globally.

The company is expanding its partnerships with Common Sense Networks and Poynter to assess all of the content appearing on the STEM feed. Common Sense Networks will examine the content to ensure it's appropriate for the STEM feed, while Poynter will assess the reliability of the information. Content that doesn't pass both of these checkpoints will not be eligible for the STEM feed.

A nearly two-pound piece of trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida. Alejandro Otero said it "tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida," reports Ars Technica. "Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there." From the report: A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time -- 2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC) -- that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida. This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

Otero's likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson. Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object "as soon as possible to determine its origin," Finch told Ars. "More information will be available once the analysis is complete." [...] In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from "the responsible agencies" to resolve the cost of damages to his home.

If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. "It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused." This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan's space agency.

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: Analytics platform Databricks has launched an open source foundational large language model, hoping enterprises will opt to use its tools to jump on the LLM bandwagon. The biz, founded around Apache Spark, published a slew of benchmarks claiming its general-purpose LLM -- dubbed DBRX -- beat open source rivals on language understanding, programming, and math. The developer also claimed it beat OpenAI's proprietary GPT-3.5 across the same measures.

DBRX was developed by Mosaic AI, which Databricks acquired for $1.3 billion, and trained on Nvidia DGX Cloud. Databricks claims it optimized DBRX for efficiency with what it calls a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture â" where multiple expert networks or learners divide up a problem. Databricks explained that the model possesses 132 billion parameters, but only 36 billion are active on any one input. Joel Minnick, Databricks marketing vice president, told The Register: "That is a big reason why the model is able to run as efficiently as it does, but also runs blazingly fast. In practical terms, if you use any kind of major chatbots that are out there today, you're probably used to waiting and watching the answer get generated. With DBRX it is near instantaneous."

But the performance of the model itself is not the point for Databricks. The biz is, after all, making DBRX available for free on GitHub and Hugging Face. Databricks is hoping customers use the model as the basis for their own LLMs. If that happens it might improve customer chatbots or internal question answering, while also showing how DBRX was built using Databricks's proprietary tools. Databricks put together the dataset from which DBRX was developed using Apache Spark and Databricks notebooks for data processing, Unity Catalog for data management and governance, and MLflow for experiment tracking.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police, written by Dhruv Bhutani: As someone who is an early adopter of all things smart and has invested a significant amount of money in building a fancy smart home, it saddens me to say that I feel cheated by the thousands of dollars I've spent on smart devices. And it's not a one-off. Amazon's recent move to block off local ADB connections on Fire TV devices is the latest example in a long line of grievances. A brand busy wrestling away control from the consumer after they've bought the product, the software update gimps a feature that has been present on the hardware ever since it launched back in 2014. ADB-based commands let users take deep control of the hardware, and in the case of the Fire TV hardware, it can drastically improve the user experience. [...] A few years ago, I decided to invest in the NVIDIA Shield. The premium streamer was marketed as a utopia for streaming online and offline sources with the ability to plug in hard drives, connect to NAS drives, and more. At launch, it did precisely that while presenting a beautiful, clean interface that was a joy to interact with. However, subsequent updates have converted what was otherwise a clean and elegant solution to an ad-infested overlay that I zoom past to jump into my streaming app of choice. This problem isn't restricted to just the Shield. Even my Google TV running Chromecast has a home screen that's more of an advertising space for Google than an easy way to get to my content.

But why stop at streaming boxes? Google's Nest Hubs are equal victims of feature deterioration. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Nest Hubs and outfitted them in most of my rooms and washrooms. However, Google's consistent degradation of the user experience means I use these speakers for little more than casting music from the Spotify app. The voice recognition barely works on the best of days, and when it does, the answers tend to be wildly inconsistent. It wasn't always the case. In fact, at launch, Google's Nest speakers were some of the best smart home interfaces you could buy. You'd imagine that the experience would only improve from there. That's decidedly not the case. I had high hopes that the Fuchsia update would fix the broken command detection, but that's also not the case. And good luck to you if you decided to invest in Google Assistant-compatible displays. Google's announcement that it would no longer issue software or security updates to third-party displays like the excellent Lenovo Smart Display, right after killing the built-in web browser, is pretty wild. It boggles my mind that a company can get away with such behavior.

Now imagine the plight of Nest Secure owners. A home security system isn't something one expects to switch out for many many years. And yet, Google decided to kill the Nest Secure home monitoring solution merely three years after launching the product range. While I made an initial investment in the Nest ecosystem, I've since switched over to a completely local solution that is entirely under my control, stores data locally, and won't be going out of action because of bad decision-making by another company. "It's clear to me that smart home devices, as they stand, are proving to be very poor investments for consumers," Bhutani writes in closing. "Suffice it to say that I've paused any future investments in smart devices, and I'll be taking a long and hard look at a company's treatment of its current portfolio before splurging out more cash. I'd recommend you do the same."

"Subscribers of both Disney+ and Hulu can now access Hulu content through the Disney+ app," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as the Burbank media and entertainment giant launched its one-app integration of the two streaming services Wednesday..." The move is part of Disney's plan to increase viewer engagement and reduce churn on Disney+, which has 111.3 million subscribers globally. Disney has lost billions on its direct-to-consumer business as it tries to compete with Netflix, but the company has told investors that its streaming segment will begin to turn a profit by the end of fiscal 2024. Streaming losses have been a key component of a nasty activist shareholder campaign ahead of next week's annual meeting.

Disney+ has typically served up family-friendly content and major brands such as Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, whereas Hulu's offering has been the streaming home of more adult-oriented programming. Disney executives described the combined app experience as the most extensive technical advancement to the Disney+ streaming platform since it launched in November 2019... The price of the bundle plan starts at $9.99 with ads... Upgrading to the bundle of Hulu on Disney+ will start at $2 more per month, Disney said.

New documents from a class action against Meta "reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years," reports the Observer.

"One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too." Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data.

In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs' attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo's software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat. According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed "Ghostbusters" — in reference to the Snapchat logo — where they developed "kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains," allowing them "to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage."

The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track "detailed in-app activity" by "parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo's program...." The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. "The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook's then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat," the document alleged.

Personal data from 73 million AT&T customers has leaked onto the dark web, reports CNN — both current and former customers.

AT&T has launched an investigation into the source of the data leak... In a news release Saturday morning, the telecommunications giant said the data was "released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago," and contains information such as account holders' Social Security numbers. ["The information varied by customer and account," AT&T said in a statement, " but may have included full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode."]

"It is not yet known whether the data ... originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company added. "Currently, AT&T does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in exfiltration of the data set."

The data seems to have been from 2019 or earlier. The leak does not appear to contain financial information or specifics about call history, according to AT&T. The company said the leak shows approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders were affected.
CNN says the first reports of the leak came two weeks ago from a social media account claiming "the largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers. Reached for a comment by CNN, AT&T had said at the time that "We have no indications of a compromise of our systems."

AT&T's web site now includes a special page with an FAQ — and the tagline that announces "We take cybersecurity very seriously..."

"It has come to our attention that a number of AT&T passcodes have been compromised..."

The page points out that AT&T has already reset the passcodes of "all 7.6 million impacted customers." It's only further down in the FAQ that they acknowledge that the breach "appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders." Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation... We encourage customers to remain vigilant by monitoring account activity and credit reports. You can set up free fraud alerts from nationwide credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can also request and review your free credit report at any time via Freecreditreport.com...

We will reach out by mail or email to individuals with compromised sensitive personal information and offering complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services... If your information was impacted, you will be receiving an email or letter from us explaining the incident, what information was compromised, and what we are doing for you in response.

Victoria Song reports via The Verge: When Gmail launched with a goofy press release 20 years ago next week, many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gargantuan 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive quantity in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fools' Day, portending some kind of prank. But soon, invites to Gmail's very real beta started going out -- and they became a must-have for a certain kind of in-the-know tech fan. At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids' table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn't know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever.

Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail did revolutionize email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users -- about 1/7 of the global population -- and these days, it's a practical necessity to do anything online. It often feels like Gmail has always been here and always will be. But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's champing at the bit to open up Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate how we communicate online. What was once a game-changing tool sometimes feels like it's been sidelined. In another 20 years, will Gmail still be this central to our lives? Or will it -- and email -- be a thing of the past?

U.S. users have just a few more days to make the transition from Google Podcasts as the company moves forward with the process of discontinuing the service globally. From a report: Google is currently sending in-app notifications to users in the U.S. that starting April 2nd they will no longer be able to use Google Podcasts and is recommending to export subscriptions to YouTube Music. The Google Podcasts streaming service launched six years ago. It's app has more than 500 million downloads on Google Play and apart from offering a large selection of podcasts it also allows subscribing to favorite channels, downloading and playing on various devices. The service integrates with Google's ecosystem, providing users with personalized recommendations based on interests, listening history, and preferences.

Anthropic's recently released Claude 3 Opus large language model has beaten OpenAI's GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. A report adds: "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. "RIP GPT-4."

Since GPT-4 was included in Chatbot Arena around May 10, 2023 (the leaderboard launched May 3 of that year), variations of GPT-4 have consistently been on the top of the chart until now, so its defeat in the Arena is a notable moment in the relatively short history of AI language models. One of Anthropic's smaller models, Haiku, has also been turning heads with its performance on the leaderboard.

"For the first time, the best available models -- Opus for advanced tasks, Haiku for cost and efficiency -- are from a vendor that isn't OpenAI," independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. "That's reassuring -- we all benefit from a diversity of top vendors in this space. But GPT-4 is over a year old at this point, and it took that year for anyone else to catch up." Chatbot Arena is run by Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS ORG), a research organization dedicated to open models that operates as a collaboration between students and faculty at University of California, Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Global bank messaging network SWIFT is planning a new platform in the next one to two years to connect the wave of central bank digital currencies now in development to the existing finance system, it has told Reuters. From the report: The move, which would be one of the most significant yet for the nascent CBDC ecosystem given SWIFT's key role in global banking, is likely to be fine-tuned to when the first major ones are launched. Around 90% of the world's central banks are now exploring digital versions of their currencies. Most don't want to be left behind by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but are grappling with technological complexities.

SWIFT's head of innovation, Nick Kerigan, said its latest trial, which took 6 months and involved a 38-member group of central banks, commercial banks and settlement platforms, had been one of the largest global collaborations on CBDCs and "tokenised" assets to date. It focused on ensuring different countries' CBDCs can all be used together even if built on different underlying technologies, or "protocols", thereby reducing payment system fragmentation risks.

The European Union has launched investigations into Apple, Meta and Google under its sweeping new digital-competition law, adding to the regulatory scrutiny large U.S. tech companies are facing worldwide. From a report: The suite of probes [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; official press release here] announced Monday are the first under the EU's Digital Markets Act law, which took effect earlier this month. They come less than a week after the Justice Department sued Apple over allegations it makes it difficult for competitors to integrate with the iPhone, ultimately raising prices for customers. Apple and Google will now face EU scrutiny of how they are complying with rules that say they must allow app developers to inform customers about alternative offers outside those companies' main app stores. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said it is concerned about constraints the tech companies place on developers' ability to freely communicate with users and promote their offers.

The bloc will also examine changes that Google made to how its search results appear in Europe. The new digital competition law says companies cannot give their own services preference over similar services that are offered by rivals. Another probe will look at how Apple complies with rules that say users should be able to easily remove software applications and change default settings on their iPhones, as well as how the company shows choice screens that offer alternative search engine and browser options.

The Baffler says a new publishing house launched earlier this month "brings Silicon Valley-style startup disruption to the business of books."

Authors Equity has "a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers," and like a handful of other publishers "is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead." It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells....

Authors Equity's website presents its vision in strikingly neoliberal corporatespeak. The company has four Core Principles: Aligned Incentives; Bespoke Teams; Flexibility and Transparency; and Long-Term Collaboration. What do they mean by these MBA keywords? Aligned Incentives is explained in the language of human capital: "Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves." Authors, that is, take on more of the financial risk of publication. At a traditional publishing house, advances provide authors with guaranteed cash early in the process that they can use to live off while writing. With Authors Equity, nothing is guaranteed and nothing given ahead of time; an author's pay depends on their book's profits.

In an added twist, "Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we're in a position to win together." Typically, only an author's agent's income is directly tied to an author's financial success, but at Authors Equity, others could have a stake. This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books' profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like.

"Bespoke Teams" is a euphemism for gigification. With a tiny initial staff of six, Authors Equity uses freelance workers to make books, unlike traditional publishers, which have many employees in many departments... Their fourth Core Principle — Long-Term Collaboration — addresses widespread frustration with a systemic problem in traditional publishing: the fetishization of debut authors who receive decent or better advances, fail to earn out, and then struggle to have a career. It's a real problem and one where authors' interests and capitalist rationalization are, as it were, aligned. Authors Equity sees that everyone might profit when an author can build a readership and develop their skill.
The article concludes with this prediction. "It's not impossible that we'll look back in twenty years and see its founding as auguring the beginning of the startup age in publishing."

Food for thought... Pulp-fiction mystery writer Mickey Spillane once said, "I'm a writer, not an author. The difference is, a writer makes money."

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

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

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

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

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. Mozilla only began bundling Onerep in Firefox last month, when it announced the reputation service would be offered on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story.

But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 -- around the same time he launched Onerep. Shelest maintained that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep," and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him. "I get it," Shelest wrote. "My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn't taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn't have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I'm aiming to do better in the future." The full statement is available here (PDF).

In a statement released today, a spokesperson for Mozilla said it was moving away from Onerep as a service provider in its Monitor Plus product. "Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," Mozilla wrote. "We're working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first." KrebsOnSecurity also reported that Shelest's email address was used circa 2010 by an affiliate of Spamit, a Russian-language organization that paid people to aggressively promote websites hawking male enhancement drugs and generic pharmaceuticals. As noted in the March 14 story, this connection was confirmed by research from multiple graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University.

Shelest denied ever being associated with Spamit. "Between 2010 and 2014, we put up some web pages and optimize them -- a widely used SEO practice -- and then ran AdSense banners on them," Shelest said, presumably referring to the dozens of people-search domains KrebsOnSecurity found were connected to his email addresses (dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com). "As we progressed and learned more, we saw that a lot of the inquiries coming in were for people." Shelest also acknowledged that Onerep pays to run ads on "on a handful of data broker sites in very specific circumstances." "Our ad is served once someone has manually completed an opt-out form on their own," Shelest wrote. "The goal is to let them know that if they were exposed on that site, there may be others, and bring awareness to there being a more automated opt-out option, such as Onerep."

Apple has held preliminary talks with Baidu about using the Chinese company's generative AI technology in its devices in China, the latest example of the iPhone maker's efforts to widen its AI capabilities. From a report: The U.S. tech giant has been exploring using external partners to help accelerate its AI ambitions. It has held discussions with companies including Google and OpenAI about using their technology to power its mobile features. In China, Apple has been looking for a local generative AI model provider, mainly because China requires such models to be vetted by its cyberspace regulator before being launched to the public, people familiar with the matter said.

Apple has launched a new "Documentation" page to its website that provides links to user guides, repair manuals, tech specs, software downloads, and more for a variety of its products. MacRumors reports: Some of this information was previously found across separate pages on Apple's website, and it has now been combined in one place for convenient access. The page includes categories for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, HomePod, displays like the Studio Display and Pro Display XDR, accessories like the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard, and software. There is also a search tool on the page that provides links to support documents and other relevant information based on the keywords entered.

The European Union has agreed to launch four Galileo navigation satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at a 30 percent premium over the standard launch price. Ars Technica reports: According to Politico, the security agreement permits staff working for the EU and European Space Agency to have access to the launch pad at all times and, should there be a mishap with the mission, the first opportunity to retrieve debris. With the agreement, final preparations can begin for two launches of two satellites each, on the Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. These Galileo missions will occur later this year. The satellites, which each weigh about 700 kg, will be launched into an orbit about 22,000 km above the planet.

The heightened security measures are due to the proprietary technology incorporated into the satellites, which cost hundreds of millions of euros to build; they perform a similar function to US-manufactured Global Positioning System satellites. The Florida launches will be the first time Galileo satellites, which are used for civilian and military purposes, have been exported outside of European territory. Due to the extra overhead related to the national security mission, the European Union agreed to pay 180 million euros for the two launches, or about $196 million. This represents about a 30 percent premium over the standard launch price of $67 million for a Falcon 9 launch. Over the past two years, the European Space Agency (ESA) had to rely on SpaceX for several launches, including significant projects like the Euclid space telescope and other ESA satellites, due to the cessation of collaborations with Roscosmos after the invasion of Ukraine and delays in the Ariane 6 rocket's development. With the Ariane 5 retired and no immediate replacement, Europe's access to space was compromised.

That said, the Ariane 6 is working towards a launch window in the coming months, promising a return to self-reliance for ESA with a packed schedule of missions ahead.

"Engineers have sent a 'poke' to the Voyager 1 probe," reports CNN, "and received a potentially encouraging response..."

"A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing..." [T]hey hope to fix a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that has persisted for five months. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system. While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers...

On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn't in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA's Deep Space Network was able to decode it... The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system's memory, according to an update NASA shared.

"The (flight data system) memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft's status," according to a NASA blog post. "It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue."
"The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth," according to NASA's statement.

CNN reminds readers that Voyager 1 "is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away." Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now in interstellar space.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news.