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Apple's Foldable iPhone Is 'On Track' To Launch In September 3

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's foldable iPhone is still "on track" for a September unveiling alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. 9to5Mac reports: The report notes that Apple's stock took a hit earlier today after Nikkei Asia indicated the iPhone Fold was having serious production issues. Clearly, sources within Apple were motivated to share positive news via Gurman. Not long ago, Gurman himself said that he was expecting an iPhone Fold release date that was a little bit later than iPhone 18 Pro. That's still very possible, but it sounds like Apple is internally feeling optimistic about its targeted September launch.

The report continues: "While the complexity of the new display and materials may limit initial supply for several weeks, Apple is currently operating with a plan to put the device on sale around the same time -- or very soon after -- the new non-foldable models, the people said." Gurman adds an important qualifier: "Still, the release is six months away and production has yet to ramp up. That means the timing isn't final."

Submission + - Skilled Older Workers Turn To AI Training To Stay Afloat (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: [Five skilled workers aged 50 and older spoke] to the Guardian about how, after struggling to find work in their fields, they have turned to an emerging and growing category of work: using their expertise to train artificial intelligence models. Known as data annotation, the work involves labeling and evaluating the information used to train AI models like Open AI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. A doctor, for example, might review how an AI model answers medical questions to flag incorrect or unsafe responses and suggest better ones, helping the system learn how to generate more accurate and reliable responses. The ultimate goal of training is to level up AI models until they’re capable of doing a job as well as a human could – meaning they could someday replace some of these human workers.

The companies behind AI training, such as Mercor, GlobalLogic, TEKsystems, micro1 and Alignerr, operate large contractor networks staffed by people like Ciriello. Their clients include tech giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta, academic researchers and industries including healthcare and finance. For experienced professionals, AI training contracts can be a side hustle – or a temporary fallback following a layoff – where top experts can, in some cases, earn over $180 an hour. But that’s on the high end. For some older workers [...], it represents another thing entirely: a last refuge in a brutal job market that is harder to stay in, or re-enter, the older they get. For many of them, whether or not they’re training their AI replacements in their professions is besides the point. They need the work now.

[...] “There’s just a lot of desperation out there,” Johnson said. As opportunities narrow, many turn to what Joanna Lahey, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies age discrimination and labor outcomes, calls “bridge jobs” – lower-paying, less demanding roles that help workers stay financially afloat as they approach retirement. Historically, that meant taking temp assignments, retail and fast-food work and gig roles like Uber and food delivery. Now, for skilled workers – engineers, lawyers, nurses or designers, for example – using their expertise for AI data training is becoming the new bridge job. “[AI] training work may be better in some ways than those earlier alternatives,” Lahey told the Guardian.

AI training can offer flexibility, quick income and intellectual engagement. But it’s often a clear step down. Professionals in fields such as software development, medicine or finance typically earn six-figure salaries that come with benefits and paid leave, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to online job postings, AI training gigs start at $20 an hour, with pay increasing to between $30 and $40 an hour. In some cases, AI trainers with coveted subject matter expertise can earn over $100 an hour. AI training is contract-based, though, meaning the pay and hours are unstable, and it often doesn’t come with benefits.
The Courts

John Deere To Pay $99 Million In Monumental Right-To-Repair Settlement (thedrive.com) 12

Posted by BeauHD from the legally-binding dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere's authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF) -- far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide "the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair" of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment's software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday's settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward. The report notes that a judge's approval of the settlement is still required but likely to happen. John Deere also faces another lawsuit by the U.S. FTC, accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs.

Comment Re:We cut back on cyber security (Score 1) 35

by rsilvergun (#66084266) Attached to: Iran-Linked Hackers Disrupted US Oil, Gas, Water Sites
There's nothing ironic about it they got what they paid for. People forget that Trump was a Russian stooge for ages. The reason he wasn't bankrupted during his most incompetent business deals is because he was laundering money for the Russian mafia.

Never mind the fact that Russia and the Israeli government both have massive amounts of dirt on Trump thanks to his long-term friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. You would have to be incredibly naive not to know that the Russian government has evidence of trump raping kids. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. We learn from the Epstein files that the Russians provided a lot of girls to Jeffrey Epstein and we have eight credible women accusing Trump of raping them when they were children details of which have been corroborated by several journalists.

The problem is you can lay out all the evidence and proof of that but nobody is going to believe you because it's too fucking insane to think that we elected a pedophile who is under the control of a hostile foreign Nation to be president of the United states. I don't think the human brain is capable of grasping the enormity of that.

You get the same problem with things like the Iran Contra affair or how Ronald Reagan arranged for Americans to be held hostage so that he could win his election. It's just something that you don't want to believe is true no matter how true it is because you don't want to face a world that fucked up.
Businesses

'Survivor' Style Corporate Retreat Descends Into Hellish Nightmare (thedailybeast.com) 61

Posted by BeauHD from the makes-for-a-great-story dept.
A $500,000 "Survivor"-style corporate retreat for 120 Plex employees in Honduras "turned into a week-long disaster involving illness, wild animals, armed guards, and employees stranded on a remote island," reports the Daily Beast. The CEO was bedridden by E. coli, staff were collapsing in brutal heat during Navy SEAL-led drills, there were fire ant attacks, uncooked food, and failing utilities. At one point, a porcupine even crashed through the ceiling of a guest's room. Here's an excerpt from the report: Tech media company Plex flew its 120 employees to a Honduran resort in 2017 for what was billed as a Survivor-style getaway. They called it "Plexcon." The first harbinger of trouble was an email that arrived before the group departed, informing them that the hotel manager and chef had both quit within days of each other. Things went sharply downhill from there.

CEO Keith Valory, 54, had flown out a day early, intending to channel his inner Jeff Probst and welcome his staff off the buses like a game show host. Instead, he spent the arrival morning flat on his back. "I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get, possibly, ever," Valory told the Wall Street Journal this week. "Just as people were arriving on the buses, I was like, 'Uh oh.' I lost 8 or 10 pounds. They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost."

With the CEO incapacitated, chief product officer and co-founder Scott Olechowski, 52, stepped in to run proceedings -- beginning with a forced eating challenge in which one employee had to consume a dead tarantula. [...] Sean Hoff, 42, founder of Moniker Partners, the independent retreat agency that planned the trip, was running himself ragged attempting damage control -- the showers, water, and electricity kept cutting out. [...] Meanwhile, senior software engineer Rick Phillips, 53, was trying to sleep when he heard a crash in his room. He ignored it until morning. "I got up and went over to get in the shower, and there was a porcupine," he said. "It must have climbed a tree and fallen through the ceiling."

Comment Yeah the radicals are cool with bombs dropping (Score 1) 141

by rsilvergun (#66084180) Attached to: Iran Demands Bitcoin For Ships Passing Hormuz During Ceasefire
The rank and filed that those radicals need to stage an actual revolution aren't. Just like when 9/11 happened in America I can tell you right now that every single regular Iranian person is going to rally around the government and the military. Doesn't matter how terrible the government and the military are when your country is attacked you rally round them.

On top of that Trump has done numerous stupid things guaranteed to undermine any opposition of the Iranian regime. Go look up YouTuber Belle of the Ranch. She does a good job talking about it and how incredibly inept the Trump administration has been. Like criminally inept.

There are no upsides and no good outcomes from this. This is downhill for everybody. Which is to be expected from a man who bankrupted casinos.

Comment We cut back on cyber security (Score 5, Interesting) 35

by rsilvergun (#66084114) Attached to: Iran-Linked Hackers Disrupted US Oil, Gas, Water Sites
So that Russia could have more access to our politicians and voters. It worked Trump's president again. But it does mean that we are substantially more vulnerable to other attacks. Especially when a senile old man can easily be tricked into starting a war that even Bush Jr wasn't dumb enough to start...

As for Iran yeah, we attacked them without any reason to do so. We already had a perfectly good deal to stop them from building nukes. But it came from a black man so it had to go.

And now it looks like all told this little adventure is going to cost us about a trillion dollars. That's another trillion dollars of debt and inflation. Almost as if electing a well-known rapist and pedophile with a long history of bankrupting businesses including casinos was a bad idea...

Funny thing is I don't see anyone defending El presidente in public anymore. Trolls will yell TDS at me but they never actually defend his actions anymore. Not outside of their safe spaces.

And despite $4 a gallon gas and a huge wave of inflation about to hit in a few months that we all know is coming, Trump still somehow has a 36 to 40% approval rate depending on the poll. I don't even know what you do about that it's fucking insane.
Security

Iran-Linked Hackers Disrupted US Oil, Gas, Water Sites (thehill.com) 35

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
The FBI says (PDF) Iran-linked hackers disrupted internet-connected systems used by U.S. oil, gas, and water companies. Even with the recent two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States and Israel, hackers backing Tehran say they won't end their retaliatory cyberattacks. The Hill reports: The report warned that similar companies across the country should be aware of an increased push by hackers to take over programmable logic controller (PLC) systems, which can be used to digitally control physical machinery from remote locations. Secure internet access for PLCs from one company, Rockwell Automation, were removed by Iran-linked coders who then "maliciously interacted with project files and altered data," according to the report. Hackers first gained access to some of the platforms in January of last year. All access to compromised platforms ended in March, the report said. The FBI said the move resulted in "operational disruption" and "financial loss."

[...] Rockwell Automation wasn't the only company to recently face cyberattacks from Iran-linked hackers. Stryker, a major U.S. medical device maker, was targeted by Iran-affiliated coders in mid-March. It was unclear if physical operations were affected by the security breach. FBI Director Kash Patel was personally impacted by hackers who leaked his emails and records related to his personal travels and business from more than 10 years ago. [...]

The FBI urged companies to adopt network defenders and multifactor authentication to prevent future attacks. Tuesday's report was published alongside the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. "Government and experts have been warning about internet connected systems for years, and how vulnerable they are," one source familiar with the federal investigation into the hacks told CNN. Many companies have "ealready removed those systems and followed the guidance," the person added.

Submission + - John Deere To Pay $99 Million In Monumental Right-To-Repair Settlement (thedrive.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF)—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

Comment Being a woman put Kamala in a tough spot (Score 1) 141

by rsilvergun (#66084038) Attached to: Iran Demands Bitcoin For Ships Passing Hormuz During Ceasefire
A sizable percentage of likely Democrat voters are worried that a woman would get bullied in international negotiations by male world leaders. This is of course a silly thing to think but they think it.

To counteract that women who run for president, and this goes for both Kamala and Hillary as well as the various women who ran in the primary, all have to do a bunch of saber rattling to show how tough they are to those voters.

The problem is that saber rattling inevitably backfires and a bunch of young men see it and get spooked that the woman in question is going to drag us into a war with a draft.

There's an old saying about war, don't give your opponents problems give them dilemmas. What I described above is a dilemma. There's no actual right answer or good solution. If you skip the saber rattling you lose the voters who think you aren't going to be able to negotiate and if you do the saber rattling you lose the voters who think you're going to draft them off to die in the Middle East.

The Republican party has a lot of these kind of dilemmas and they can usually solve them with overwhelming propaganda and dog whistles because they have a much larger media apparatus and a lot more money. Those aren't options for the Democratic party.

Because of all this under the current system it's basically impossible for a woman to become president. I think if they completely eliminated voter suppression then they could win but that's going to be a multi-generational effort.

This is what Jasmine Crockett meant when she said the Democrats are going to nominate the safest white boy they can find. They aren't in a position where they can risk running a woman again. We've got 20 or 30 years of civil rights organization and voting rights organization before that can happen...
Bitcoin

NYT Claims Adam Back Is Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto (nytimes.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the unraveling-the-mystery dept.
A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou claims a British cryptographer named Adam Back is the strongest circumstantial candidate yet for being Satoshi Nakamoto. The report citing overlaps in writing style, ideology, technical background, and old posts that outlined key parts of Bitcoin years before its launch. Carreyrou is a renowned investigative journalist and author, best known for exposing the massive fraud at Theranos while at the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt from the report: ... As anyone steeped in Bitcoin lore will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining anonymity on the internet, leaving few, if any, digital footprints behind. But Satoshi did leave behind a corpus of texts, including a nine-page white paper (PDF) outlining his invention and his many posts on the Bitcointalk forum, an online message board where users gathered to discuss the digital currency's software, economics and philosophy. And that corpus, it turned out, had expanded significantly during the impostor's civil trial when Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who collaborated with Satoshi in Bitcoin's early days, released a trove of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him. Emails Satoshi sent to other early Bitcoin adopters had surfaced before, but none came close in volume to the Malmi dump. If Satoshi was ever going to be found, I was convinced the key lay somewhere in these texts.

Then again, others must have gone down this road before me. Journalists, academics and internet sleuths had been trying to identify Satoshi for 16 years. During that span, more than 100 names had been put forward, including those of an Irish cryptography student, an unemployed Japanese American engineer, a South African criminal mastermind and the mathematician portrayed in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." The most alluring theories had focused on coincidences that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi: a particular code-writing style, a mysterious work history, an expertise in Bitcoin's key technical concepts, an anti-government worldview. But they had run aground under the weight of an alibi or some other piece of inconsistent or contrary evidence. Each failure had been met with glee by many members of the Bitcoin community. As they liked to point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his coins. Any evidence short of that would be circumstantial.

It seemed foolish to think that I could somehow crack a case that had confounded so many others. But I craved the thrill of a big, challenging story. So I decided to try once more to unmask Bitcoin's mysterious creator. Back, for his part, denies being Satoshi, writing in a post on X: "i'm not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas."
Books

Amazon Is Ending Support For Older Kindles 36

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
Starting May 20th, Amazon will stop Kindle Store access for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier. After that date, those devices will "no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download new content." Owners can still read content already on the device, but if an affected device is reset or deregistered after the cutoff, it can't be re-registered. The Verge reports: The complete list of affected devices goes all the way back to the original Kindle that launched in 2007 with a full keyboard and scroll wheel. [...] Amazon will be notifying affected users over email ahead of May 20th with an explanation of what their older devices can and cannot do. Pre-2012 Kindle Fire devices will be subjected to the same limitations as Kindle e-readers when it comes to books, but other apps and Amazon services on those devices won't be impacted.

For longtime users wanting to take the opportunity to upgrade to newer Kindle hardware, Amazon will offer a 20 percent discount on new Kindle devices and a $20 ebook credit that will be added to their accounts after upgrading, valid until June 20th, 2026, at 11:59PM PT. Their older purchases will be available on new devices as long as they log in to the same account they've been using for the past 14 years or more.

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