Category: Science & Technology

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule having four European astronauts blasted off at 4:49 pm (local time) [3:19 am IST] from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday.

A rocket carrying Turkey’s first astronaut and three other crew members representing Europe was launched in Florida on Thursday (local time) on a trip to the International Space Station (ISS) in a mission conducted entirely by the private sector.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the four astronauts — Commander Michael Lopez-Alegr­a of the US and Spain, Pilot Walter Villadei of the Italian Air Force, and Mission Specialists Alper Gezeravci of Turkiye and Marcus Wandt of Sweden and the European Space Agency — blasted off at 4:49 pm (local time) [3:19 am IST] from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The capsule was launched with the help of a Falcon 9 rocket and commercially arranged by Axiom Space, a Texas-based privately funded space infrastructure developer. The mission marks the beginning of a planned 36-hour flight to the orbiting laboratory, according to news agency Reuters.

The launch was shown live on an Axiom webcast and X handles of SpaceX and Nasa, offering viewers around the globe a front-row seat to the mission.

Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/axiom-3-mission-all-european-crew-turkish-astronaut-spacex-rocket-nasa-space-station-2490593-2024-01-19?utm_source=directhp&utm_medium=clicktopstories&utm_campaign=hptopstories

It’s no secret that Bill Gates is bullish on artificial intelligence, but he’s now predicting that the technology will be transformative for everyone within the next five years.

The rise of AI has elicited fear that the technology will eliminate millions of jobs around the world. The International Monetary Fund this week reported that about 40% of jobs around the world could be affected by the rise of AI.

Gates doesn’t necessarily disagree with that notion, but he believes history shows with every new technology comes fear and then new opportunity.

“As we had [with] agricultural productivity in 1900, people were like ‘Hey, what are people going to do?’ In fact, a lot of new things, a lot of new job categories were created and we’re way better off than when everybody was doing farm work,” Gates said. “This will be like that.”

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Tuesday, Gates predicted that AI will make everyone’s lives easier, specifically pointing to helping doctors do their paperwork, which is “part of the job they don’t like, we can make that very efficient.”

Since there’s isn’t a need for “much new hardware,” Gates said accessing AI will be over “the phone or the PC you already have connected over the internet connection you already have.”

He also said that the improvements with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 were “dramatic” because it can “essentially read and write” thus it’s “almost like having a white collar worker to be a tutor, to give health advice, to help write code, to help with technical support calls.” He said that incorporating that technology into the education or medical sectors will be “fantastic.”

Microsoft has a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI. Gates remains one of Microsoft’s largest shareholders.

“The goal of the Gates Foundation is to make sure that the delay between benefitting people in poor countries versus getting to rich countries will make that very short,” Gates told Zakaria at Davos for the World Economic Forum. “After all, the shortages of doctors and teachers is way more acute in Africa then it is in the West.”

The IMF, in its report this week, had a much less optimistic view. The group said AI would deepen inequality without intervention from politicians.

Giving away his wealth
Gates is worth $140 billion, making him the fourth-richest person on Earth, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. But he likely would still be the world’s richest person if he hadn’t committed to giving away all of his money.

He told CNN that he doesn’t worry about losing his wealth.

“I have more than enough money for my own consumption,” Gates said when Zakaria asked how philanthropic efforts are going. “I’m getting myself to go down the list, and I’ll be proud when I fall off altogether.”

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/16/tech/bill-gates-ai-gps-interview/index.html

Samsung is announcing new phones this week, and they’re going to be the most AI phones that ever AI’ed. That’s not a guess, although it would be an easy one coming off the heels of “Put a ChatGPT on it” CES 2024. No, Samsung is telling us in the loudest ways possible — including putting it on the Sphere, which is the 2024 equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops. But what exactly does AI on a phone look like? So far, it has amounted to a handful of tech demos. This week’s Galaxy Unpacked event is an opportunity to show us the potential of AI on a mobile device. And unlike a washing machine with ChatGPT preinstalled, AI could be really useful on our phones.

AI showed up in a big way in 2023, but as a tool on our mobile devices, it’s been kind of a no-show so far. That’s just been the reality of our current technology; the massive language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT simply can’t run on our phones. You can download a ChatGPT app that runs queries in the cloud, but it can’t tell you whether an important email just came in. Things are slowly changing: the Pixel 8 Pro arrived in October, capable of running Google’s foundation models on-device, with some AI-powered updates promised later. But so far, only a couple of them have arrived, and they’re a little underwhelming.

A December software update added the ability to use AI to summarize Recorder transcripts — a feature I immediately put to use because I stan the Pixel Recorder app. But it can’t handle long recordings; anything over 10 minutes seems to be off-limits. That ruled out most of my recordings. Video Boost arrived in the same update, billed as Night Sight for videos. It’s fine, but the effects aren’t as dramatic as Night Sight is for still photos, and you might have to wait an hour or two for your video while it’s processed in the cloud.

Still, there’s something more promising in the works. At that Pixel launch event late last year, Google announced Assistant with Bard, its ChatGPT-style AI chatbot. Bard hasn’t been the very most impressive AI out of the gate, but it’s been steadily gaining useful capabilities — transforming it into an assistant that’s capable of carrying out much more complex tasks than setting a timer would be a step in the right direction. And judging by Samsung’s Unpacked teaser visuals, Bard might have something to do with this week’s announcements.

Could the Galaxy S24 series launch with some version of Bard? Where would Bixby be in all of this? Remember Bixby? It would seem unusual for Google to launch its AI showpiece with a competitor’s phone, but then again, Samsung sells more Android phones than Google by a wide margin. The AI era might turn these frenemies into even closer collaborators.

There’s clearly a lot more that AI can be doing on our phones, and the clearest vision of this future so far didn’t come from Google or Samsung. It actually wasn’t a phone at all — it was the Rabbit R1, CES 2024’s breakaway hit. It’s a little Teenage Engineering-designed gadget that acts as an AI assistant for your phone. You grant it access to your apps and accounts and then ask it to do things like book a flight or order a pizza. Rather than opening apps and tapping through menus, it will allegedly do the grunt work for you. The dream!

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24040562/samsung-unpacked-galaxy-ai-s24

A CLONED monkey has lived for more than two years in a first for wacky scientists.

The rhesus macaque, grown by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the longest lived primate to have been made with DNA from adult cells.

But critics say the process is still too risky to take us anywhere near human clones.

The lab in Shanghai used the same method that created the first ever animal clone, Dolly the sheep, in 1996.

The technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, takes DNA from something like a skin cell from a normal grown monkey.

This is then injected into an embryo that has had its own DNA removed, which is carried to term by a surrogate.

Most attempts to clone monkeys this way fail.

Experiment chief Dr Qiang Sun, who created the first successful monkey clones in 2018, said he managed to develop a healthier placenta that improved the latest creature’s development.

He claims the team has “improved the efficiency” of cloning monkeys which they hope can one day be used for lab research.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Dr Sun called the success “remarkable” and said: “This is a promising strategy for primate cloning.”

But the success rate is poor with only one live birth from 113 attempts.

Dr Lluís Montoliu, of the Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology, was not part of the research but said: “This cloning demonstrates two things.

“First, it is possible to clone primates.

“Second, but no less important, it is extremely difficult to succeed with these experiments, with such low efficiencies once again ruling out human cloning.”

Animal cloning is controversial because it is so difficult and can cause animal suffering.

Source: https://www.the-sun.com/health/10109190/rhesus-monkey-clone-survives-two-years-china-experiment/

While OpenAI has softened its stance on military use, it still maintains a ban on AI applications for weapons development.

In a significant policy shift, OpenAI, spearheaded by Sam Altman, has opened the door to applications of its AI technologies for military and warfare purposes. The alteration involves the removal of language explicitly prohibiting the deployment of OpenAI’s technology for military uses from its usage policy

OpenAI justified the revision by aiming to establish a set of universal principles that are easy to remember and apply. A company spokesperson told Business Today, “Our policy does not allow our tools to be used to harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property. There are, however, national security use cases that align with our mission.”

In a significant policy shift, OpenAI, spearheaded by Sam Altman, has opened the door to applications of its AI technologies for military and warfare purposes. The alteration involves the removal of language explicitly prohibiting the deployment of OpenAI’s technology for military uses from its usage policy

Source: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/chatgpt-maker-openai-revises-ai-usage-policy-to-allow-military-and-warfare-applications-413146-2024-01-13

The box-shaped robot has now been in space for more than five days and is currently 242,000 miles (390,000 kilometers) from Earth.

A private US lunar lander that has been leaking fuel throughout its journey is now headed for Earth and will likely burn up in the atmosphere, the company said Saturday.

Astrobotic has been posting regular updates on the Peregrine lander’s status since the start of its ill-fated voyage, which began when it blasted off on a brand new Vulcan rocket built by United Launch Alliance on January 8.

Shortly after it separated from the rocket, the spaceship experienced an onboard explosion and it soon became clear it would not make a soft lunar touchdown because of the amount of the propellant it was losing — though Astrobotic’s team were able to power up science experiments they were carrying for NASA and other space agencies, and gather spaceflight data.

“Our latest assessment now shows the spacecraft is on a path towards Earth, where it will likely burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere,” the Pittsburgh-based company posted on X.

“The team is currently assessing options and we will update as soon as we are able.”

The box-shaped robot has now been in space for more than five days and is currently 242,000 miles (390,000 kilometers) from our planet, Astrobotic added.

Space watchers have been following Peregrine’s trajectory closely and many had hoped it might still make a “hard landing” on the Moon, as other failed landers have done before — though it’s now clear that even that reduced goal won’t be achieved.

In addition to science hardware, the spaceship is carrying cargo for private clients of Astrobotic, including a sports drink can, a physical Bitcoin, as well as human and animal ashes and DNA.

Astrobotic is the latest private entity to have failed in a soft landing, following an Israeli nonprofit and a Japanese company.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/failed-us-private-moon-lander-headed-for-earth-likely-to-burn-up-in-atmosphere-101705199017798.html

Machines are going to do more and more jobs that were once done by hand, including those that involve nuclear weapons.

According to the hype, artificial intelligence is changing everything. The truth is more complicated, but that doesn’t mean that companies and governments aren’t rushing to embrace the new technology. It’s even being used to update an old and destructive technology: nuclear weapons.

America is modernizing its force, Russia is building new kinds of nuclear weapons, and China is increasing its nuclear stockpile. At the same time, all three countries are looking to AI to outsource the dangerous and deadly work of apocalyptic destruction.

But what, exactly, does that look like? When it comes to nukes and AI, it’s time to embrace the horrors of uncertainty. This week’s guest is Edward Geist, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. His latest book is Deterrence Under Uncertainty: Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Warfare.

It’s a conversation that’s both fascinating and frightening with one major theme: we don’t know nearly enough. “One lamentable parallel between nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence is that both topics elicit an astonishing degree of magical thinking from otherwise intelligent people, including some with genuine expertise,” Geist wrote in his book.

Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/epv8yk/the-future-of-nukes-involves-ai-and-nobody-knows-what-happens-next

Apple and Microsoft are neck and neck – as AI investment starts paying off.

Two tech giants are battling it out for the title of the world’s most valuable company.

Microsoft had overtaken Apple for the first time since 2021 to become the world’s most valuable firm by market capitalisation – which measures the value and number of a company’s shares.

Money latest:
‘Huge announcement’ on car finance could see millions get payout

Microsoft surpassed Apple at numerous points throughout Thursday’s trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) when its value reached $2.87trn (£2.25trn) and Apple shares fell by 1%.

But Apple reclaimed the top spot as the trading day wore on.

This latest movement comes on the back of a major investment in artificial intelligence (AI) by Microsoft.

It’s the largest backer of OpenAI, the company behind the game-changing generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

AI is also being embedded into Microsoft products such as its Bing search engine.

At the same time, Apple has faced concern over demand for iPhone sales, especially in the key China market.

The long-time rivals have traded places as the world’s most valuable firms before. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft was most valuable when the remote working boom boosted demand for its software.

At the same time, Apple suffered from supply chain difficulties and COVID-related restrictions at its factories in China. It had warned about the delayed delivery of models as a result.

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/microsoft-briefly-overtakes-rival-apple-as-worlds-most-valuable-company-13046295

There is a belief that each fingerprint on one person’s hand is completely unique but that is now being challenged by research from Columbia University.

A team at the US university trained an AI tool to examine 60,000 fingerprints to see if it could work out which ones belonged to the same individual.

The researchers claim the technology could identify, with 75-90% accuracy, whether prints from different fingers came from one person.

But they are not sure how it works.

“We don’t know for sure how the AI does it,” admitted Prof Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University who supervised the study.

Forensics
The researchers think the AI tool was analysing the fingerprints in a different way to traditional methods – focusing on the orientation of the ridges in the centre of a finger rather than the way in which the individual ridges end and fork which is known as minutiae.

“It is clear that it isn’t using traditional markers that forensics have been using for decades,” said Prof Lipson. “It seems like it is using something like the curvature and the angle of the swirls in the centre.”

Prof Lipson said both he and Gabe Guo, an undergraduate student, were both surprised by the outcome.

“We were very sceptical… we had to check and double check,” he said.

That may not be news to others in the field.

Graham Williams, professor of forensic science at Hull University, said the idea of unique fingerprints had never been set in stone.

“We don’t actually know that fingerprints are unique,” he said. “All we can say is that as far as we are aware, no two people have yet to demonstrate the same fingerprints.”

Crime scenes
The results of Columbia University’s study could have the potential to impact both biometrics – using one particular finger to unlock a device or provide identification – and forensic science.

If, for example, an unidentified thumb print is found at crime scene A, and an unidentified index finger print at crime scene B, the two could not currently be forensically connected to the same person – but the AI tool could be able to identify this.

The Columbia University team, none of whom have forensic backgrounds, admitted that more research was needed.

AI tools are typically trained on vast amounts of data and many more fingerprints would be required to develop this technology further.

Additionally, all the fingerprints used to develop the model were complete prints and of good quality, whereas often in the real world partial or poor prints are more likely to be found.

“Our tool is not good enough for deciding evidence in court cases but it is good for generating leads in forensics investigations,” claimed Mr Guo.

But Dr Sarah Fieldhouse, associate professor of forensic science at Staffordshire University, said she did not think the study would have “significant impact” on criminal casework at this stage.

She said there were questions around whether the markers the AI tool was focusing on remained the same depending on how the skin twisted as it came into contact with the print surface, and also whether they remained the same over the course of a lifetime, like traditional markers do.

But this could be tricky to answer as the researchers are uncertain about exactly what the AI is doing, as is the case with many AI-driven tools.

The Columbia University study has been peer-reviewed and will be published in the journal Science Advances on Friday.

But a pair of twins in Cheshire might be ahead of everyone. Their grandmother Carol told the BBC her two grandchildren can open each other’s iPhones using their own fingers.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67944537

A recent dip in Apple’s (AAPL.O) stock over worries about iPhone sales has left the Silicon Valley tech heavyweight in danger of being overtaken by Microsoft (MSFT.O) as the world’s most valuable company.

Fresh worries about smartphone demand have pushed Apple’s shares down 4% so far in 2024 after rallying 48% last year. Microsoft is up about 2% year to date after surging 57% in 2023.

Apple dipped 0.4% on Wednesday, while Microsoft added 1.6%, further eroding the iPhone maker’s lead. Apple’s stock market value is now at $2.866 trillion, compared to Microsoft’s $2.837 trillion value.

Apple’s market capitalization peaked at $3.081 trillion on Dec. 14, while Microsoft’s value reached as much as $2.844 trillion on Nov. 28.

IPhone sales in China dropped 30% in the first week of 2024, Jefferies analysts said in a client note this week, adding to signs of growing competitive pressures from Huawei [RIC:RIC:HWT.UL] and other domestic rivals.

Sales of Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset start on Feb. 2 in the United States, marking Apple’s biggest product launch since the iPhone in 2007. However, UBS in a report on Monday estimated that Vision Pro sales would be “relatively immaterial” to Apple’s earnings per share in 2024.

A handful of times since 2018, Microsoft has briefly taken the lead over Apple as the most valuable company, most recently in 2021, when concerns about supply chain shortages related to the COVID-19 pandemic hit the iPhone maker’s stock price.

Both tech stocks look relatively expensive in terms of price to their expected earnings, a common method of valuing publicly listed companies. Apple is trading at a forward PE of 28, well above its average of 19 over the past 10 years, according to LSEG data. Microsoft is trading around 31 times forward earnings, above its 10-year average of 24.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-challenges-apple-worlds-most-valuable-company-2024-01-10/

The U.S. securities regulator on Wednesday approved the first U.S.-listed exchange traded funds (ETFs) to track bitcoin, in a watershed for the world’s largest cryptocurrency and the broader crypto industry.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it approved 11 applications, including from BlackRock (BLK.N), Ark Investments/21Shares (ABTC.S), Fidelity, Invesco (IVZ.N) and VanEck, despite warnings from some officials and investor advocates that the products carried risks.

Most of the products are expected to begin trading Thursday, issuers said, kicking off a fierce competition for market share.

A decade in the making, the ETFs are a game-changer for bitcoin, offering investors exposure to the world’s largest cryptocurrency without directly holding it. They provide a major boost for a crypto industry beset by scandals.

“It’s a huge positive for the institutionalization of bitcoin as an asset class,” said Andrew Bond, managing director and senior fintech analyst at Rosenblatt Securities.

Standard Chartered analysts this week said the ETFs could draw $50 billion to $100 billion this year alone. Other analysts have said inflows will be closer to $55 billion over five years.

The market capitalization of bitcoin stood at more than $913 billion as of Wednesday, according to CoinGecko. As of December 2022, total net assets of U.S. ETFs stood at $6.5 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute.

Bitcoin was last up 3% at $47,300. The cryptocurrency has soared more than 70% in recent months in anticipation of an ETF, and hit its highest level since March 2022 this week.

Success in the battle for inflows will mostly depend on fees and liquidity, analysts say. Some issuers slashed their proposed fees in new filings this week, including BlackRock and Ark/21Shares. Those fees range from 0.2% to 1.5%, with many firms offering to waive fees entirely for a certain period of time. For short-term speculators looking to buy in and out of the products, liquidity could be more important.

Companies expect a flurry of online advertising and other marketing. Some issuers, including Bitwise and VanEck, have already released ads touting bitcoin as an investment.

“It is pretty unprecedented, so we’ll see how it works. I’ve never been in a situation where 10 of the same ETF was launched on the same day,” said Steven McClurg, chief investment officer at Valkyrie, whose ETF was among those approved on Wednesday.

The approvals come a day after an unauthorized person published a fake post on the SEC’s account on social media platform X, saying the agency had approved the products for trading. The agency quickly disavowed and deleted the post.

On Wednesday it said it is coordinating with law enforcement and the SEC’s own internal watchdog to investigate the incident.

That incident, and a confused announcement on Wednesday afternoon in which the SEC appeared to publish the formal regulatory approval and then remove it from its website, did not dampen the crypto industry celebrations.

“We believed that bitcoin could change the world, and we were and remain excited at the prospect of democratizing access to this asset,” said Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein.

Douglas Yones, head of exchange traded products at the New York Stock Exchange, where some products will be listed, said the approval was also a “milestone” for the ETF industry.

Cynthia Lo Bessette, head of digital asset management at Fidelity, said the new products should provide “increased choice for investors who want to engage with” crypto.

Some regulatory experts believe the bitcoin ETFs could also pave the way for other innovative crypto products. Several issuers, for example, have filed for ETFs tracking either, the second-largest cryptocurrency.

“Once the dam has been breached, it’s going to be really hard for the SEC to continue its ‘just say no to crypto’ approach,” said Jim Angel, associate professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business.

‘SPECULATIVE, VOLATILE’
Cryptocurrencies were created as an alternative to fiat currencies — currencies established by and backed by a government such as the U.S. dollar and the euro — but cryptocurrencies are largely used as speculative investments due to their volatility.

The green light marks a U-turn for the SEC, which had rejected bitcoin ETFs due to worries they could be easily manipulated. SEC Chair Gary Gensler is a fierce crypto skeptic.

In a highly unusual move, however, Gensler, a Democrat, joined the SEC’s two Republican commissioners in voting to approve the products, while the agency’s two Democratic commissioners voted against. One, Caroline Crenshaw, cited investor protection worries.

Hopes the SEC would finally approve bitcoin ETFs surged last year after a federal appeals court ruled that the agency was wrong to reject an application from Grayscale Investments to convert its existing Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETF.

In a statement on Wednesday, Gensler said that in light of the court ruling, approving the products was “the most sustainable path forward,” but added the agency did not endorse bitcoin, calling it a “speculative, volatile asset” also used to fund crime.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/bitcoin-etf-hopefuls-still-expect-sec-approval-despite-social-media-hack-2024-01-10/

On Jan. 29, Prime Video will make its ad tier the default for its tens of millions of subscribers, a move that could unravel how advertisers deal with TV broadcasters and scare off rivals with its massive scale.

Mark your calendar: On Jan. 29, Amazon will unleash what one top advertising executive calls a “tornado” that will “upend” the streaming video landscape. The company will flip a switch and turn on ads for all of its Prime Video viewers. Users will have the option to pay $3 a month to remove the ads, but as the executive quips: “Almost no one will do that, are you kidding me?”

After all, people are paying Amazon for the fast shipping. Reacher and Thursday Night Football are thrown in for free. It’s a move that has marketers salivating and a few legacy media executives anxiously waiting to see what happens.

The move will instantly turn Amazon into a streaming-ad juggernaut, and the largest ad-supported subscription streaming platform in the marketplace with tens of millions of users, leapfrogging the likes of Netflix in the process.

Amazon, run by Andy Jassy, has always been coy about just how many Prime subscribers it has (the last official number, in 2021, was “more than 200 million”), but no one disputes that its reach is almost unrivaled. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that there are about 168 million Prime subs in the U.S. alone, as of 2023.

If just half those subs watch Prime Video content, it would be comparable to Netflix’s penetration in the U.S. (77 million) and significantly more subs than the likes of Hulu, Peacock or Paramount+.

Data from Nielsen reinforces that: While Netflix and YouTube take up the lion’s share of viewing time, Prime Video is extremely competitive. The latest Nielsen Gauge reported that 3.4 percent of TV viewing in November was Prime Video, compared to 2.7 percent for Hulu, 7.4 percent for Netflix and 9 percent for YouTube.

The Gauge certainly suggests that if Hulu has just shy of 50 million subscribers, as Disney has reported, then Amazon is at least in the same ballpark in terms of Prime subs that watch video content.

Most Netflix users, however, are not subscribing to the ad tier (the company said in November it had only 15 million “active users” of the tier), while some Hulu subcribers also opt out of ads.

That scale, in both subscriber reach and real viewership, has analysts thinking that Amazon will be able to quickly scoop up billions of ad dollars. Bank of America’s Justin Post estimated in a Jan. 3 note that the company will ultimately generate $3 billion in new ad revenue from the switch, and nearly $5 billion when accounting for users who opt to pay not to see ads. LightShed’s Rich Greenfield estimates that the company will hit $2 billion in ad revenue this year. Both analysts assume that the overwhelming majority of users will opt not to pay extra to remove the ads.

It’s that instant scale that has marketers excited and competitors concerned. Prime Video with ads will be premium video, including dramas, comedies and library fare, as well as live sports like NFL and NASCAR — the content and reach of TV, with the targetability of a tech company. It’s a sweeping change for the platform. (And, in turn, division leader Mike Hopkins sent a Jan. 10 memo to staff stating that Prime Video and MGM Studios “identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content,” resulting in the losses of hundreds of jobs.)

Kevin Krim, CEO of the ad measurement firm EDO, estimates that Amazon could see a CPM (the cost per thousand consumers who see an ad) of about $50, below what Netflix sought when it got into advertising a little over a year ago, but still “a big premium to linear TV.”

And advertising is also a zero-sum game. While ad spend has grown over time as the economy has expanded, when a marketer or agency decides to commit budget to a new player, it is usually at the expense of someone else.

This time around, a likely victim is linear TV, with S&P Global’s Naveen Sarma writing Jan. 3 that “we believe advertisers have permanently left legacy platforms, including national TV.”

One high-level TV ad executive says they are beginning to plan out 2024 with an expectation that some of their inventory will be poached by Amazon.

Indeed, declining audiences in linear TV have been a concern of ad executives for years, which is why every legacy media company has invested so heavily in streaming video — and why many of those legacy companies are all in on ad-supported streaming, supplementing them with their strongest linear assets, be they broadcast networks or the increasingly small number of scaled cable channels.

“Yes, linear is declining. Not all linear is declining equally,” Disney ad sales chief Rita Ferro said during an interview on LinkedIn on Jan. 4. “And I do foresee a shift in how we use that — I call it real estate space, if you will — on our broadcast network. What is the right content for the right experience at the right time across all those platforms? And I do foresee that that will drive growth.”

The investment in streaming video by legacy companies (think Paramount+, Peacock, Max, Hulu and Disney+) should help to offset the decline in linear (Disney+ and Peacock, for example, are seeing robust ad growth), but multiple sources say that Amazon’s foray into the space complicates things.

The one big advantage that these companies have over the likes of Amazon and Netflix is their experience selling ads. For big-budgeted marketers, big media is a familiar, tested partner.

“We’ve had a couple-year head start,” NBCUniversal ad sales chairman Mark Marshall says, noting that Peacock launched with an ad tier. “We’re not trying to retrofit our platform into supporting advertising. I think we’ve built it from within for advertisers, so I think we already have a strategic feel of what it should be.”

TV will not be the only loser, of course. Krim notes that “anything that’s not video is competing with video… I think the net losers here are actually going to be anything that’s not video-first, which includes a bunch of regular social media text ads or non-video ads.”

Executives at multiple companies have said that they make more per subscriber on their ad tiers than on their ad-free tiers, with the ad dollars more than making up for the lower sub fees.

But while other services have tried to entice viewers into trying their ad tiers, Amazon is ripping off the Band-Aid, betting that few users will care. And if it works, a top holding company exec predicts that others will follow.

Streaming video has been competitive for years, but it is entering a new era where the revenue needs to justify the costs. If Netflix was the lodestar for the first round of the streaming wars, YouTube appears to be the target for round two.

In its latest quarter, YouTube had just under $8 billion in advertising revenue, putting it on track for about $30 billion in ad revenue in 2023. That’s just advertising revenue, and does not include subscription fees for services like YouTube TV or YouTube Premium.

It’s an enormous number, one that has to have major appeal for the likes of Disney, Netflix and, yes, Amazon. If the past few years were about seeking subscriber scale, the next five may be defined by who can build the biggest streaming ad business. And Amazon is about to speed past some of its rivals and eat linear TV in the process.

Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/amazon-pay-tv-bundle-1235783792/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE.N) will buy networking gear maker Juniper Networks (JNPR.N) for $14 billion in an all-cash deal, in an attempt to spruce up the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) offerings.

HPE offered $40 per share to Juniper shareholders, the companies said on Tuesday. That represents a 32.4% premium to the stock’s close on Monday, when the news of the deal first emerged.

The acquisition comes at a time when the AI gold rush has led companies to pour billions of dollars into upgrading and developing new wares and is expected to double HPE’s networking business.

HPE, grappling with sluggish demand in its traditional server business, is looking to tap into Juniper’s offerings such as network security and AI-enabled enterprise networking operations (AIOps).

Weak demand from inflation-hit wireless carriers and cable operators, as well as stiff competition from Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) and Nvidia (NVDA.O) in the networking space has been a drag on Juniper.

Shares of Juniper were up 0.5% in extended trading after the bell, while those of HPE were largely flat.

The deal is expected to be accretive to HPE’s non-GAAP earnings and free cash flow in the first year post completion, the companies said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/hpe-acquire-juniper-networks-14-bln-deal-2024-01-09/

NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon this decade amid a renewed international push for lunar exploration, is facing some lengthy delays, the space agency has announced.

The Artemis III mission, planned to hit the the crucial milestone of landing humans on the moon for the first time since the Apollo program, will not take off until at least September 2026, NASA officials said at a news conference Tuesday. The journey had previously been slated for 2025.

The primary reasons for the delay include SpaceX’s outlook for developing Starship, the gargantuan rocket and spacecraft system that is expected to ferry astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s south pole. Two Starship test flights in 2023 ended in explosions.

SpaceX has a long road ahead in developing its lunar lander. Even after Starship demonstrates the ability to make it safely to Earth’s orbit, the company must hash out how to get the vehicle enough propellant to travel out to the moon, a feat that is expected to involve at least 10 refueling flights, according to Jessica Jensen, SpaceX’s vice president of customer operations and integration.

“We must be realistic. … We’re looking at our Starship progress and need for propellant transfer, the need for numerous landings,” NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free told reporters Tuesday.

Jensen said SpaceX could be ready — and receive the necessary regulatory approvals — for its third Starship test flight by February.

NASA officials added that they are also expecting delays in engineering the spacesuits astronauts will wear while on the moon’s surface. Both SpaceX’s Starship development and the spacesuits were factors that government watchdogs, including NASA’s inspector general, have cited as potential factors that could cause delays for the Artemis III mission.

Additionally, as CNN first reported, NASA’s Artemis II mission — which aims to carry a four-person crew on a trip to fly by the moon — will no longer hit its target launch date of November this year. The agency announced Tuesday the new target date for Artemis II is September 2025.

That delay is linked in part to issues with the Orion crew capsule that will be home to the astronauts during the mission. The space agency previously disclosed that the spacecraft’s heat shield, which keeps Orion from burning up as the vehicle reenters the Earth’s atmosphere, became charred and eroded in an unexpected way during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, according to Amit Kshatriya, the deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Moon to Mars Program.

There is also still much work to do on the Orion crew capsule’s life support system and valves that failed during testing, Kshatriya said. NASA officials indicated that they expect the lift support systems to take the longest to prepare for flight.

A new space race
NASA is still targeting 2028 for the launch of its Artemis IV mission, which will aim to send astronauts to a forthcoming space station that will orbit the moon, called Gateway.

The altered timeline and mission shuffling marks a major realignment of expectations for the Artemis program, which is NASA’s current flagship human space exploration effort.

The Artemis program’s underlying goal is to establish a permanent human presence on the moon as rival nations, including China, chase similar ambitions.

China has already led a robotic return to the moon in the 21st century, launching the first uncrewed lander ever to touch down on the moon’s far side, and plans to put its own astronauts on the lunar surface by the end of the decade.

Source:https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/09/world/nasa-artemis-moon-landing-delay-scn/index.html

The first U.S. moon landing attempt in more than 50 years appeared to be doomed after a private company’s spacecraft developed a “critical” fuel leak just hours after Monday’s launch.

Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology managed to orient its lander toward the sun so the solar panel could collect sunlight and charge its battery, as a special team assessed the status of what was termed “a failure in the propulsion system.”

It soon became apparent, however, that there was “a critical loss of fuel,” further dimming hope for what had been a planned moon landing on Feb. 23.

Late Monday, the company said the leak was continuing and estimated that the lander would start losing solar power in about 40 hours.

The trouble was reported about seven hours after Monday’s predawn liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket provided the lift for Astrobotic’s lander, named Peregrine, putting it on a long, roundabout path to the moon.

A propulsion system problem “threatens the ability of the spacecraft to soft land on the moon,” the company said. The lander is equipped with engines and thrusters for maneuvering, not only during the cruise to the moon but for lunar descent.

Astrobotic released a photo from a lander-mounted camera, which the company said showed a “disturbance” in a section of thermal insulation. That aligns with what is known so far of the problem, the company said.

Astrobotic was aiming to be the first private business to successfully land on the moon, something only four countries have accomplished. A second lander from a Houston company is due to launch next month. NASA gave the two companies millions to build and fly their own lunar landers.

The space agency wants the privately owned landers to scope out the place before astronauts arrive while delivering tech and science experiments for the space agency, other countries and universities as well as odds and ends for other customers. Astrobotic’s contract with NASA for the Peregrine lander was $108 million and it has more in the pipeline.

Before the flight, NASA’s Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, noted that while using private companies to make deliveries to the moon will be cheaper and quicker than going the usual government route, there will be added risk. He stressed that the space agency was willing to accept that risk, noting Monday: “Each success and setback are opportunities to learn and grow.”

The last time the U.S. launched a moon-landing mission was in December 1972. Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt became the 11th and 12th men to walk on the moon, closing out an era that has remained NASA’s pinnacle.

The space agency’s new Artemis program — named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology — looks to return astronauts to the moon’s surface within the next few years. First will be a lunar fly-around with four astronauts, possibly before the end of the year.

Highlighting Monday’s moonshot was the long-delayed initial test flight of the Vulcan rocket. The 202-foot (61-meter) rocket is essentially an upgraded version of ULA’s hugely successful workhorse Atlas V, which is being phased out along with the company’s Delta IV. Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, provided the Vulcan’s two main engines.

ULA declared success once the lander was free of the rocket’s upper stage, nearly an hour into the flight and before the spacecraft’s propulsion system malfunctioned and prevented the solar panel from properly pointing toward the sun.

Landing on the moon has long been a series of hits and misses. The Soviet Union and the U.S. racked up a string of successful moon landings in the 1960s and 70s, before putting touchdowns on pause. China joined the elite club in 2013 and India in 2023. But last year also saw landers from Russia and a private Japanese company slam into the moon. An Israeli nonprofit crashed in 2019.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/moon-landing-launch-private-nasa-0987b31b201b78c3935f1bfbf9a7cade

The Aditya-L1 spacecraft, which has been gliding through space for more than four months, successfully entered the final orbit, its desired destination on Saturday afternoon. India’s first-ever solar observatory will now make observations of the Sun for the next five years.

Praising the country’s scientists on the “extraordinary feat”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the country will “continue to pursue new frontiers of science for the benefit of humanity”.

“India creates yet another landmark. India’s first solar observatory Aditya-L1 reaches it destination. It is a testament to the relentless dedication of our scientists in realising among the most complex and intricate space missions. I join the nation in applauding this extraordinary feat. We will continue to pursue new frontiers of science for the benefit of humanity,” the prime minister posted on X.

ISRO said it has successfully placed Adiyta-L1 into its destination orbit Lagrange Point 1 of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the planet. It is about 1 percent of the total distance between the Earth and the Sun.

A satellite in a halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without any occultations/eclipses, ISRO officials said, adding, this will provide a greater advantage in observing solar activities and their effect on space weather in real time.

A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C57) launched the Aditya-L1 spacecraft from the second launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, on September 2, 2023. After a flight duration of 63 minutes and 20 seconds, it was successfully injected into an elliptical orbit of 235×19500 km around the Earth then. The spacecraft underwent a series of manoeuvres thereafter, and headed towards Sun-Earth L1, having escaped the Earth’s sphere of influence.

The spacecraft carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle and magnetic field detectors. “Using the special vantage point L1, four payloads directly view the Sun and the remaining three payloads carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at the Lagrange point L1, thus providing important scientific studies of the propagatory effect of solar dynamics in the interplanetary medium,” as per the space agency.

ALL EYES ON THE MAIN PAYLOAD
ISRO will now wait for a few more days to switch on all the payloads to ensure a stable orbit with an unobstructed view of the Sun. All eyes are on Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), which will be switched on for the first time since the mission took off. Built by scientists from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, it is the main payload aboard Aditya L1.

“We will wait till January-end to switch on VELC, so we can safely capture the faint light of the Sun’s outer layer — Corona — by blocking the light from the main disk. That is the main goal. We have not opened its aperture because we did not want the mirrors to get affected by the molecular dust or disturbance when thrusters are fired during orbital insertion,” said Professor R Ramesh from IIA Bengaluru.

The team has integrated an internal occulter in the payload — a shield that will separate out the light from the Sun’s disk and discard it. The remaining light from the Corona will then be studied. The instruments inside VELC are kept at 22 degress Celsius.

All seven instruments onboard will study different solar regions to seek answers to questions that have intrigued scientists for years – the birth of solar storms/flares, impact on space weather, vast temperature difference between the solar surface and its outer layer and several more.

“As Aditya L1 is far from the Sun, it gives VELC a unique vantage point to observe the Corona from an extended area, from where these solar storms actually originate,” adds the senior scientist.

NOW, FULL DISK IMAGE OF THE SUN POSSIBLE
The ISRO has a headstart now. It has already established a downlink with the satellite while it was in transit and collected data from the three payloads that were switched on. For Indian astrophysicists, it is the big moment that they all have been waiting for. For the first time, they will be able to capture the full disk image of the Sun using an indigenously built scientific instrument.

“All instruments onboard will need to work in tandem to help us do the science that we envisaged. For the first time, we will have a full disk image of the Sun captured by the SUIT instrument onboard (Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope). It will strengthen our research to understand the activity on the solar surface and its atmosphere, especially how it influences the space weather, and then predict it accordingly,” said Professor Dibyendu Nandi from IISER, Kolkata.

Source: https://www.news18.com/india/aditya-l1-now-the-closest-indian-spacecraft-near-the-sun-l-final-orbit-insertion-today-8729041.html

He’s the creator of Facebook and one of the world’s richest men – but is Mark Zuckerberg a force for good? One man has been recording everything he says in public, in an archive known as “The Zuckerberg Files”, and tells Sky News what he’s learnt.

How much do we really know about Mark Zuckerberg?

The creator of Facebook. One of the world’s richest men. A 39-year-old father-of-three. But is he a force for good?

One man has made it his mission to try to help us answer that question.

For more than a decade, US university professor Dr Michael Zimmer has been recording “every single thing” the Facebook founder says in public, in an archive known as “The Zuckerberg Files”.

Covering a period from 2004 to the present day, it features more than 1,500 transcripts of Zuckerberg’s remarks, including Facebook posts, media interviews and hundreds of videos of his public appearances.

With growing concerns over Facebook users’ privacy and how their data is used, Dr Zimmer says he wanted to take a “closer look” at Zuckerberg’s language and views.

“The privacy concerns around Facebook, and the amount of data Meta collects across its platforms, are real and important for users to understand,” he tells Sky News.

“I don’t rush to suggest people delete their accounts, as there can be real benefits being on the platforms.

“But it’s important for users to explore the privacy settings available to understand how visible their content is, what kind of details are being collected and shared, and so on.

“Facebook has got better at giving users the ability to manage their privacy, but they could certainly do more.”

Zuckerberg’s posts on his Facebook page suggest he has his own concerns about privacy, Dr Zimmer says.

“More recently he’s been posting more about his family, including pictures of his children – but interestingly we rarely see his children’s faces,” Dr Zimmer adds.

“So I’m assuming he wants to make sure his kids’ faces don’t get put online for privacy reasons, or any kind of face recognition, for their own safety.

“But, of course, his platform has built tools to scan our pictures and our faces.”

Twenty years after it was created, Facebook is now irrevocably linked with concerns about data collection, online safety and the deterioration of democracy itself.

Now, a new Sky documentary delves into how Zuckerberg built his Meta empire (which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), what drives him and how he’s changed his public persona over the years.

One of four children and the only boy, Zuckerberg was known as the “prince” by his mother, according to the programme.

“He was anointed even within the family,” says David Kirkpatrick, technology journalist and author of The Facebook Effect. “That shaped his worldview tremendously.”

It was at Harvard University where the “prince” became a celebrity, when he created FaceMash – a hot-or-not website where users compared photos of their fellow students.

“It was sexist, it was juvenile. It did get him in trouble,” Mr Kirkpatrick said.

But it almost made him famous. The short-lived FaceMash may have got Zuckerberg hauled before a disciplinary committee, but it also racked up 22,000 hits in its first day.

“By the time he launched Facebook, he was already like a famous innovator so people wanted to know what he was going to do next,” Mr Kirkpatrick adds.

Zuckerberg created the first version of Facebook in his dorm room – and infamously described the early users who trusted him with their data as “dumb f****”, the documentary says.

He left Harvard early with some friends and headed to Palo Alto, California – Silicon Valley – to work on TheFacebook (as it was known) full time.

Zuckerberg was often seen lying on the floor coding, wearing flip-flops.

Poking – an innocuous Facebook function that was popular for a while – was something he thought up when he was drunk, Zuckerberg says in an early interview.

The rise of Facebook was meteoric. It hit one billion users. President Barack Obama visited its headquarters. It was clear that this social media giant had changed the world forever – but for good or for bad?

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/should-you-delete-your-facebook-account-heres-what-the-man-who-records-all-zuckerbergs-remarks-thinks-13042612

The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.

The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company’s devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active.

Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.

Senior leaders in the Justice Department’s antitrust division are reviewing the results of the investigation so far, said two of the people. The agency’s officials have met with Apple multiple times, including in December, to discuss the investigation. No final decision has been made about whether a lawsuit should be filed or what it should include, and Apple has not had a final meeting with the Justice Department in which it can make its case to the government before a lawsuit is filed.

The Justice Department is closing in on what would be the most consequential federal antitrust lawsuit challenging Apple, which is the most valuable tech company in the world. If the lawsuit is filed, American regulators will have sued four of the biggest tech companies for monopolistic business practices in less than five years. The Justice Department is currently facing off against Google in two antitrust cases, focused on its search and ad tech businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon and Meta for stifling competition.

The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products. Rivals have said that they have been denied access to key Apple features, like Siri virtual assistant, prompting them to argue the practices are anticompetitive.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment for this article. Apple also declined to comment.

The company has previously said that its practices do not violate antitrust law. In defending its business practices against critics in the past, Apple said that its “approach has always been to grow the pie” and “create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every ‘crazy one’ with a big idea.”

The company prides itself on the way the iPhone integrates hardware and software to create a seamless customer experience. In 2020, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said during testimony before a Congressional antitrust committee that the company redefined mobile phones with “its effortless user experience, its simplicity of design and a high-quality ecosystem.” He added that Apple competed against Samsung, LG, Google and other smartphone makers, which offer a different approach.

“Apple does not have a dominant market share in any market where we do business,” Mr. Cook said at the time. “That is not just true for iPhone; it is true for any product category. “

The case would add to the growing regulatory pressure both domestically and abroad cutting into Apple’s business, currently valued at $2.83 trillion.

This year, European regulators are expected to force Apple to accommodate app stores beyond its own under the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 to rein in tech giants. Similar actions against the App Store have been taken or are under consideration in South Korea and Japan.

Additionally, the European Commission said in 2021 that Apple had violated its antitrust laws by imposing app store fees on competitors to its Apple Music product. The commission’s investigation into the issue is continuing.

The resolution of the Justice Department’s investigation could be affected by the details of how Apple complies with European regulations, said two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was ongoing.

Apple is facing the increased regulatory pressure as its business slows. Last year, the company reported its annual revenue fell 2.8 percent, to $383 billion, its first decline in a fiscal year since 2019, as sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs slowed. Still, the company sold more than 200 million iPhones and accounted for nearly three-quarters of the smartphones sold worldwide that were priced above $600, analysts estimate.

When the Justice Department started its tech investigations in 2019, it prioritized its antitrust review of Google over Apple because it lacked the financial resources and personnel to fully evaluate both companies, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That changed in 2022 after the department’s budget increased.

The investigation has encompassed a wider span of Apple’s business interests than previously reported, said six people with knowledge of the meetings. That includes how Apple has blocked cloud gaming apps, which let users stream a multitude of titles to their phones, from being offered in its App Store.

Investigators spoke with executives at Tile, the Bluetooth tracking service, about Apple’s competing AirTag product and the company’s restrictions to outside parties on access to the iPhone’s location services. Executives at Beeper, a start-up that made iMessage available on Android phones, spoke with investigators about how Apple blocked it from making it possible to offer messaging across competing smartphone operating systems. Investigators also had conversations with banks and payment apps about how Apple prevents them from accessing the tap-to-pay function on iPhones.

Tile and Beeper declined to comment for this article.

They have also looked at how the Apple Watch works better alongside the iPhone than other competing smartwatches. Users of Garmin devices have complained in Apple’s support forums about being unable to use their watches to reply to certain text messages from their iPhones or tweak the notifications they receive from the iPhone that they have connected to their watch.

Apple’s new privacy tool, App Tracking Transparency, which allows iPhone users to explicitly choose whether an app can track them, drew scrutiny because of its curtailing of user data collection by advertisers. Advertising companies have said that the tool is anticompetitive.

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2024/01/05/u-s-moves-closer-to-filing-sweeping-antitrust-case-against-apple/

A team from the University of Oxford has used data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Imaging Spectrograph to show the planets in their true colours.

New images have revealed Neptune and Uranus look more like each other than was previously thought.

Many people will think of Neptune as being a rich blue colour, and Uranus more green.

However, Professor Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford and his team found that the two ice giants, the most distant planets in our solar system, are a similar shade of greenish blue.

Experts suggest the idea that both planets were different colours arose because images of them captured in the 20th century – including by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission in the 1980s – recorded images in separate colours.

The single-colour images were later recombined to create composite colour images, which were not always accurately balanced to achieve a true colour image.

Particularly in the case of Neptune, these composites were often made too blue.

Early images of Neptune from Voyager 2 were strongly contrast-enhanced to better reveal the clouds, bands, and winds that shape what we have come to think the planet looks like, scientists say.

Prof Irwin said: “Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to ‘true’ colour, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue.

“Even though the artificially saturated colour was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time.”

He added: “Applying our model to the original data, we have been able to reconstitute the most accurate representation yet of the colour of both Neptune and Uranus.”

In the new study, the researchers used data from Hubble Space Telescope’s Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

In both the STIS and the MUSE, each pixel is a continuous spectrum of colours, meaning observations from them can be processed to determine the true apparent colour of Uranus and Neptune.

The researchers used the data to re-balance the composite colour images recorded by the Voyager 2 camera, and also by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.

However, the study also found that Neptune has a slight hint of additional blue, which the model reveals to be due to a thinner haze layer on that planet.

The study also provides an answer to the long-standing mystery of why Uranus’s colour changes slightly during its 84-year orbit of the sun.

According to the findings, this is because of how thick certain gases are at the planet’s north and south poles, and how they appear when these poles are closest to the sun.

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/new-images-reveal-neptune-and-uranus-are-not-the-colours-we-thought-they-were-13042392

Copilot key first change since addition of Windows button in 1990s

Microsoft is adding a new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot button to some Windows keyboards to empower users to take part more easily in what the company called “the AI transformation.”

Beginning this month, some personal computers with the Windows 11 operating system will have redesigned keyboards with a “Copilot key” that launches Microsoft’s AI companion, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, said in a blog post Thursday.

The new key marks the first major redesign to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades, “making 2024 the year of the AI PC,” according to Mehdi.

“Nearly 30 years ago, we introduced the Windows key to the PC keyboard that enabled people all over the world to interact with Windows,” the executive said. “We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the entry point into the world of AI on the PC.”

The Copilot button will be unveiled at the CES technology trade show in Las Vegas later this month, though Microsoft has not said which computer makers are adding the Copilot button.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

The company said the key is expected to become available to users later this month on some of its own line of devices, including upcoming Surface devices.

Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-adds-new-ai-copilot-button-windows-keyboards-devices-first-change-30-years

The Aditya L-1 mission is a collaboration of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) with several other institutes in the country. It is the first space-based observatory-class Indian solar mission to study the Sun.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is all set to place the Aditya L1 spacecraft, India’s first mission to study the Sun, into its final orbit tomorrow – January 6 at 4 pm. The spacecraft, which was launched on September 2, would be injected into the ‘halo orbit’ around the Lagrange Point 1 (L1),.

“Aditya L1 has already reached the L1 point and the manoeuvre (on January 6) will put it in the desired orbit. Without getting into the orbit, the spacecraft will continue to travel towards the Sun,” an ISRO official told The Indian Express.

Nigar Shaji, the Project Director for the Aditya L-1 mission said at the U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, “The Indian solar observatory will have an uninterrupted and continuous view of the Sun and will help us understand space weather. It will act like a forecasting and warning platform for solar storms.”

Source: https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/isro-set-to-place-aditya-l1-indias-maiden-solar-mission-in-final-orbit-tomorrow-details-article-106557065

Musk bought the social media giant formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is worth 71% less now than it was when Elon Musk bought it in late 2022, according to Fidelity.

The investment group made the valuation on Monday, the second time it dropped the value of X in 2023, Axios reports. Musk had purchased the social media giant for $44 billion.

Fidelity was part of the investment group that helped Musk take over Twitter in a deal consisting of $33.5 billion in equity, with the remainder financed with debt to convert it into a privately held company after the deal closed in October 2022.

Twitter and Fidelity did not immediately respond to requests for comment from FOX Business.

Musk had been deeply critical of Twitter prior to his acquisition and renaming of the company, arguing that it posed a threat to democracy and civilization itself. He argued the platform had been propagating a left-wing “mind virus” due to the basic bias of the company’s leadership and employee base.

Musk fired thousands upon thousands of employees in the opening months of his leadership at X, and he has maintained a cavalier attitude toward advertisers and threats to pull away from the platform.

Musk told advertisers leaving the platform to “go f— yourself” in late November.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company,” Musk said. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”

In response to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who earlier discussed Disney pulling advertising from the platform, Musk didn’t hold back.

“Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f— yourself,” Musk said, adding: “Go f— yourself, is that clear? Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel, don’t advertise.”

Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/x-now-worth-71-less-than-when-musk-bought-it-fidelity-estimates

Since its launch in 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has inched closer to the sun with each passing year, shedding light on key solar processes. By the end of 2024, it will have set a new record by grazing our star from a distance of just over 6 million kilometres, delving deep into its scorching outer layers.

One of the most audacious missions in the history of space exploration, the Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to have flown through the sun’s outer atmosphere, known to scientists as the corona. It is set to break new ground in late December by covering 96% of the distance separating our planet from its fiery star.

In doing so, Parker will hit speeds of around 700,000 km/h (or 435,000 mph), enough to fly from New York to Tokyo in one minute – making it the fastest human-made craft in history. It will achieve such velocity by swinging around Venus, using the planet’s gravity to tighten its orbit around the sun and acquire extra speed.

“This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the Moon landing of 1969,” said Parker project scientist Dr Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University, in an interview with the BBC. “We are basically almost landing on a star.”

Into the furnace
Parker’s mission is to make repeated passes of the sun, drawing ever closer to the star as it travels through its outer atmosphere – which, paradoxically, is 300 times hotter than its actual surface. That means weathering unimaginable conditions, including temperatures of close to 1,400 degrees Celsius and solar winds charged with high-energy particles.

The trick for Parker is to make rapid dives into this hellscape, relying on its blistering speed and a thick heat shield made of carbon composite. The shield protects an array of instruments that measure charged particles and magnetic fluctuations, capturing both images and sounds.

In 2020, recordings made close to the star provided the first sound clips of the solar wind – a stream of high-energy particles that flows continuously from the sun.

Forecasting solar storms
The mission’s aim is to gain a better understanding of solar activity and to shed light on the many mysteries surrounding the corona, where temperatures can reach a million degrees Celsius and above – compared with just 6,000C at the sun’s surface. Scientists hope data collected by Parker will help understand why the sun’s outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface.

The corona is also where the solar wind is generated and sometimes whipped up into solar “flares” and “storms”, potentially disrupting our planet’s magnetic field, degrading communications and posing health risks to astronauts. Ultimately, Parker’s findings could pave the way for a space weather service capable of forecasting and tracking such events.

Source: https://www.france24.com/en/technology/20240101-nasa-s-parker-mission-poised-for-solar-landing-in-2024

This marks a significant step in democratizing access to advanced AI tools, bringing the power of GPT-4 to mobile users for the first time.

Microsoft’s innovative AI writing assistant, Copilot, has crossed the platform divide, officially landing on iPhones and iPads. This marks a significant step in democratizing access to advanced AI tools, bringing the power of GPT-4 to mobile users for the first time.

From the Cloud to Your Pocket:

Previously available only as a web application, Copilot now grants iPhone and iPad users seamless access to its impressive capabilities. Whether you’re a freelancer crafting emails, a student tackling essays, or simply someone who enjoys creative writing, Copilot now sits nestled conveniently in your pocket, ready to assist at any moment.

Beyond Basic Grammar Checks:

Say goodbye to clunky writing riddled with typos and grammatical errors. Copilot goes far beyond the realm of basic spellcheck. It leverages the power of GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI’s powerful language model, to offer a range of features that elevate your writing:

• Brainstorming and idea generation: Struggling for your next sentence? Copilot can conjure up creative prompts, provide outlines for your content, and even complete your thoughts based on your initial ideas.
• Contextual writing and research: Need to reference facts or statistics? Copilot can seamlessly weave accurate information into your writing, drawing from its vast knowledge base and ensuring factual accuracy.
• Different writing styles and tones: Whether you need a formal essay, a witty marketing tagline, or even a poem in Shakespearean verse, Copilot adapts its style to your needs, offering a diverse range of writing voices.
• Multilingual support: Need to write in a language beyond your native tongue? Copilot can translate your ideas and craft fluent content in several languages, expanding your reach and accessibility.

A Free Entry into the AI Writing Era:

Perhaps the most enticing aspect of Copilot’s iOS debut is its freemium model. While a premium subscription unlocks advanced features like longer text generation and plagiarism detection, the core functionalities, including brainstorming, content suggestion, and basic stylistic adjustments, are readily available at no cost. This allows anyone, regardless of budget, to experiment with the potential of AI writing and discover how it can enhance their communication and creativity.

The Future of Mobile Writing:

With Copilot’s arrival on iOS, the landscape of mobile writing is poised for a transformative shift. By offering a powerful and accessible AI assistant, Microsoft democratizes access to cutting-edge technology, empowering users to create compelling content with far greater ease and efficiency. As the technology evolves and user feedback shapes its development, we can expect even more groundbreaking features and personalized writing experiences in the future.

Source : https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/microsoft-copilot-lands-on-ios-with-free-gpt-4-access-for-all-users-article-106416639

India becomes only the second country in the globe after the US to launch an advanced astronomy observatory to study black holes and neutron stars.

Lift-off normal

🚀PSLV-C58 vehicle placed the satellite precisely into the intended orbit of 650 km with 6-degree inclination🎯.

The POEM-3 is being scripted …
#XPoSat

XPoSat (X-ray Polarimeter Satellite) is India’s first dedicated polarimetry mission to study various dynamics of bright astronomical X-ray sources in extreme conditions. The spacecraft will carry two scientific payloads in a low earth orbit. The primary payload POLIX (Polarimeter Instrument in X-rays) will measure the polarimetry parameters (degree and angle of polarization) in medium X-ray energy range of 8-30 keV photons of astronomical origin. The XSPECT (X-ray Spectroscopy and Timing) payload will give spectroscopic information in the energy range of 0.8-15 keV.

The emission mechanism from various astronomical sources such as blackhole, neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, pulsar wind nebulae etc. originates from complex physical processes and are challenging to understand. While the spectroscopic and timing information by various space based observatories provide a wealth of information, the exact nature of the emission from such sources still poses deeper challenges to astronomers. The polarimetry measurements add two more dimension to our understanding, the degree of polarization and the angle of polarization and thus is an excellent diagnostic tool to understand the emission processes from astronomical sources. The polarimetric observations along with spectroscopic measurements are expected to break the degeneracy of various theoretical models of astronomical emission processes. This would be the major direction of research from XPoSat by Indian science community.

XPoSat payloads:

POLIX
POLIX is an X-ray Polarimeter for astronomical observations in the energy band of 8-30 keV. The payload is being developed by Ramam Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore in collaboration with U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC). The instrument is made of a collimator, a scatterer and four X-ray proportional counter detectors that surrounds the scatterer. The scatterer is made of low atomic mass material which causes anisotropic Thomson scattering of incoming polarised X-rays. The collimator restricts the field of view to 3 degree x 3 degree so as to have only one bright source in the field of view for most observations. POLIX is expected to observer about 40 bright astronomical sources of different categories during the planned lifetime of XPoSat mission of about 5 years. This is the first payload in the medium X-ray energy band dedicated for polarimetry measurements.

XSPECT

XSPECT is an X-ray SPECtroscopy and Timing payload onboard XPoSat, which can provide fast timing and good spectroscopic resolution in soft X-rays. Taking advantage of the long duration observations required by POLIX to measure X-ray polarization, XSPECT can provide long-term monitoring of spectral state changes in continuum emission, changes in their line flux and profile, simultaneous long term temporal monitoring of soft X-ray emission in the X-ray energy range 0.8-15 keV. An array of Swept Charge Devices (SCDs) provide an effective area >30 cm2 at 6 keV with energy resolution better than 200 eV at 6 keV. Passive collimators are used to reduce the background by narrowing the field of view of XSPECT. XSPECT would observe several types of sources viz X-ray pulsars, blackhole binaries, low-magnetic field neutron star (NS) in LMXBs, AGNs and Magnetars.

Source : https://x.com/isro/status/1741671127737577505?s=46&t=PAuXOCXyz619xtEZK52CjA

Deepfakes are manipulated videos or other digital representations that use artificial intelligence to create cogent videos or audio of individuals they never did or said, posing a risk of spreading misinformation and damaging their reputation.

From politics to films and even war, the year 2023 has demonstrated that not everything one sees or hears on the internet may be real.

With the ever-evolving Artificial Intelligence technology rapidly becoming a part of people’s lives, a sharp rise in deepfakes has raised concerns in the country about its potential to influence electoral politics, especially during the Lok Sabha polls slated to be held next year.

Deepfakes are manipulated videos or other digital representations that use artificial intelligence to create cogent videos or audio of individuals they never did or said, posing a risk of spreading misinformation and damaging their reputation.

According to the ‘2023 State of Deepfakes Report’ by ‘Home Security Heroes’ — a US-based web security services company — deepfake videos saw a five-times increase since 2019.

In 2023, India witnessed scores of troubling instances related to deepfake videos, like the one involving actor Rashmika Mandanna, whose face was superimposed on that of a British-Indian social media influencer.

The incident sparked a nationwide debate around the implications of deepfakes and raised alarms about the invasion of privacy and the potential to cause harm. Four people were arrested for making and uploading the deepfake video on social media.

It was not just her, other film stars such as Alia Bhatt, Kajol, Aishwarya Rai and Katrina Kaif were also targeted with deepfake videos.

A couple of months ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged the use of artificial intelligence for creating deepfakes, saying this can precipitate a big crisis. He urged the media to spread awareness about its misuse and impact.

Modi said he recently suggested to ChatGPT professionals that as products like cigarettes come with health warnings, deepfakes too should carry disclosures.

Supreme Court Advocate and chairman of the International Commission on Cyber Security Law Pavan Duggal said, “It is a new emerging technology but is very quickly becoming a part of people’s lives. More and more people are going to use deepfakes, not just by cybercriminals but also in all kinds of human activities, including election processes.” “You don’t need to be a Rashmika Mandana, Katrina Kaif or Alia Bhatt. We will soon start realising that there will be deepfakes on normal users of the internet,” he said.

Duggal expressed fear that since one can now create deepfakes at the drop of a hat using online tools, a lot of which are available for free, “we are going to see far more poisoning of the data stream in the entire cyber eco-system”.

“Already, we are seeing so many deepfake videos put on pornographic websites. It is going to become a huge challenge,” he added.

Globally, deepfakes have been used to shape narratives around conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Gaza. In India, the worrying factor is their potential usage in elections.

During the recently concluded Assembly elections, deepfake videos targeted not only individual political leaders but also attempted to influence public narratives. Deepfakes targeting public figures like YS Sharmila and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan emerged as potential threats to electoral politics.

With the general elections scheduled next year, the gravity of the situation has captured the attention of lawmakers and technology experts.

“For a country like ours, the largest democracy in the world, deepfakes and the misinformation they represent is certainly a very problematic issue to the conducting of safe, free, and fair elections,” said Rajeev Chandrashekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology.

Amid growing concerns over deepfakes, the government directed all social media platforms to comply with IT rules, as companies have been mandated to inform users in clear terms about prohibited content, and cautioned that violations will attract legal consequences.

The IT Ministry will closely observe the compliance of intermediaries (social media and digital platforms) in the coming weeks and decide on further amendments to the IT Rules or the law if and when needed, an official release said.

Source: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/india/ai-powered-deepfakes-bare-fangs-in-2023-raise-concern-about-impact-on-privacy-electoral-politics-11978231.html

Joe Kiani has taken on Apple in a patent dispute that has cost his company millions of dollars to pursue. So far he is winning, but the fight isn’t over.

Masimo MASI -0.88%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Joe Kiani bet the future of the company he spent three decades building in an expensive legal battle with the world’s most valuable company. So far, he is winning, but it isn’t over.

His company, which pioneered a better method for measuring blood-oxygen levels, has spent around $100 million fighting Apple AAPL -0.54%decrease; red down pointing triangle in a dispute that temporarily halted Apple Watch sales.

Sales have resumed while a court weighs the company’s request to stay the ban during an appeal. Kiani has vowed to fight on and said he won’t settle with Apple unless the tech giant pays for his technology and agrees to change how it interacts with smaller companies.

Apple has denied allegations that it stole Masimo’s technology and has accused the company of copying its technology.

Kiani has prevailed in previous battles over his company’s intellectual property and believes he will win this one as well. An Iranian immigrant, Kiani has a combination of pugnaciousness and idealism that friends and associates said leads him to fixate on what he thinks is fair.

“Justice isn’t just blind but very slow,” Kiani, 58 years old, said in an interview. “It’s painful. It’s an ugly thing to go through. It’s like war.”

Some have seen his aggressive use of the U.S. patent system as exploitation that stymies the innovation of others. In 2006, he prevailed in a seven-year patent spat with Nellcor, a company that was then a dominant provider of a rival pulse oximeter device. In 2016, he beat Royal Philips in another patent-infringement case.

Apple might be Kiani’s biggest war yet, one that likely won’t be settled for years.

The U.S. International Trade Commission in October ruled that Apple violated Masimo’s patents and ordered a ban on some Apple Watches shipped to the U.S., which went into effect Dec. 26. Apple on Wednesday won a reprieve to resume sales. In addition to Apple’s appeal, there are several related lawsuits working their way through the court system.

Before taking on Apple, Masimo employees and friends of Kiani warned him on the risks of going forward. “People were telling me I’m crazy and I can’t go against Apple,” said Kiani. “They have unlimited resources.”

A number of smaller companies have over the years made similar allegations against Apple over taking their ideas and violating their patents, The Wall Street Journal reported in April. When these companies attempt to claim patent infringements against Apple, the tech giant responds with an aggressive legal strategy through the U.S. patent system.

“No one is standing up to them,” Kiani said. “If I can do it, it might change Apple for the better.”

An Apple spokeswoman said previously about Masimo’s claims: “We deeply respect intellectual property and innovation and do not take or use confidential information from other companies. We will continue to protect the innovations we advance on behalf of our customers against false claims.”

Born in Iran, Kiani moved with his family to Alabama when he was 9 in order for his father to study engineering. The family brought $10,000 and lived for a time in public housing.

Kiani, who now has three children and counts himself as a lover of Persian poetry and Pink Floyd, excelled in math and was placed several grades ahead of his age. As a result, he was smaller than the rest of his classmates, making him a target. “I learned that you can’t walk away from bullies,” he said. “You have to punch back.”

When Kiani was 14, his parents had to move back to Iran, leaving him and his sister alone. He graduated early from high school and by 1987 had earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from San Diego State University, he said. He founded Masimo in 1989, when he was 24, after the startup he had joined opted not to pursue his design for an improved pulse oximeter that didn’t produce erroneous false alarms when patients moved.

He next took on Nellcor, the leading pulse oximeter provider. In 1994, Nellcor offered to license Masimo’s technology. The money would have been enough for Kiani to retire at a young age, said Steve Jensen, Masimo’s longtime lawyer. Kiani walked away from the deal when Nellcor wouldn’t promise to quickly introduce his technology to patients, Kiani and Jensen said.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/tech/joe-kiani-entrepreneur-apple-warning-52eb09a9?st=5p369vyao9q9j2p

Just days after introducing a Copilot app on Android, Microsoft has rolled out an app for its AI chatbot on iOS and iPadOS. Both versions of the app are now available to download from the Apple App Store.

The app gives you access to Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT mobile app. In addition to letting you ask questions, draft emails, and summarize text, you can also create images through an integration with the text-to-image generator DALL-E3.

And, unlike the free version of ChatGPT which runs GPT-3.5, Copilot lets you access GPT-4, the latest large language model (LLM) from OpenAI, without having to pay for a subscription.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/29/24019288/microsoft-copilot-app-available-iphone-ipad-ai

Two years ago a Tesla worker left blood splattered across the floor after a robotic arm in the factory sunk it’s metallic claw into his back and arms. But now Elon Musk has hit back at the media for the way it was reported

Elon Musk has spoken out after reports suggested that a Tesla engineer was the victim of a vicious attack by a robot in the factory.

The alleged attack happened in 2021 in the Giga Texas factory near Austin, Texas, but the claims only surfaced in recent months. It was said that blood was left splattered on the floor after the robot arm – which is meant to move aluminium car parts – dug into the worker while he was programming software for other robots.

But Musk denies the reports, stating the attack was not carried out by one of the humanoid Optimus robots as was suggested in some reports. He described it as “truly shameful” for the media to bring up the reports from years back, adding that it was actually a different robot which attacked the worker – not an Optimus model.

“Truly shameful of the media to dredge up an injury from two years ago due to a simple industrial Kuka robot arm (found in all factories) and imply that it is due to Optimus now,” wrote Musk, responding to someone who shared an article online. Another person who musk responded to in the thread said: “‘Attacks’ implies it made a decision. That robot did exactly as it was programmed to do. Apparently, the worker thought it was off when it wasn’t.”

It is reported that the engineer believed the robot was switched off while programming the software – but that it hadn’t been correctly shut down. One witness to the incident quickly hit the emergency stop button when the robotic arm sunk into the worker, while another witness said the engineer “fell a couple of feet down a chute designed to collect scrap aluminium, leaving a trail of blood behind him”, according to the Sun. The injury was reportedly first revealed in 2021 when an incident report was filed with federal regulators.

Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/elon-musk-breaks-silence-claims-31765828

Google has been accused of tracking its user data on the Incognito mode, and has settled a hefty lawsuit.

Google’s parent company Alphabet decided to settle a hefty lawsuit after it was alleged that the tech company is spying on the private user data of consumers while they were browsing in the ‘Incognito’ mode, reported Reuters.

A class action lawsuit was filed against Google for secretly tracking the internet use of millions of people who thought they were doing their browsing privately. However, Google said that it has reached a settlement and the lawsuit was put on hold by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in a court in California.

While the exact terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, the class action sought that Google pay at least $5 billion, which comes up to over ₹41,000 crore. Google’s lawyers said that have agreed to a binding term sheet through mediation, and expected to present a formal settlement for court approval by February 24, 2024.

The case against Google saw allegations of tracking the user data of people using the Incognito mode for browsing without their knowledge, through Google Analytics, cookies and apps.

Incognito mode is the “private” browsing mode set up by Google, which states that no cookies will be able to track your browsing history in this mode.

Google had access to ‘private data’, says lawsuit
The person who filed the class action said that Google had been accessing his private data through Incognito mode to target his likes and dislikes. Google tried to get the lawsuit dismissed but the same was rejected by the judge.

The lawsuit said that the company’s actions turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” by letting the company learn about their friends, hobbies, favourite foods, shopping habits, and “potentially embarrassing things” they seek out online.

After listening to the arguments, Judge Rogers said it was an open question whether Google had made a legally binding promise not to collect users’ data when they browsed in private mode. The judge cited Google’s privacy policy and other statements by the company that suggested limits on what information it might collect.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/google-settles-rs-41-000-crore-lawsuit-after-spying-on-private-browsing-data-in-incognito-mode-101703821365263.html

You can once again buy the latest Apple Watches straight from Apple. The Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 will be available again in some physical Apple stores starting today, with wider availability expected by Saturday. Online sales will resume tomorrow by 3PM ET, Apple spokesperson Nikki Rothberg told The Verge.

The restarting of sales comes hours after a federal appeals court paused a sales and import ban that covered both devices. Apple was banned from selling both products in the US after the US International Trade Commission found that the company had violated patents from the medical device maker Masimo.

The appeals court said that Apple could continue selling its watches temporarily, while the company waited to hear back on whether proposed changes to its watches would avoid the patent issues. US Customs and Border Protection is scheduled to rule on the changes on January 12th. Failing that, the court is considering whether to put the ban on hold until it can rule on the patent dispute, which could potentially delay the ban for months longer.

“Apple’s teams have worked tirelessly over many years to develop technology that empowers users with industry-leading health, wellness and safety features and we are pleased the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has stayed the exclusion order while it considers our request to stay the order pending our full appeal,” Rothberg said in an emailed statement.

Apple pulled sales of the Series 9 and Ultra 2 from its online and physical stores ahead of the ban going into effect on December 26th. The ban covers devices that include a blood oxygen saturation sensor. Apple has included one on flagship watches since late 2020, with the Series 6. Only the lower-priced Apple Watch SE doesn’t include one and has been able to remain on sale.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/27/24016684/apple-watch-on-sale-again-import-sales-bans-paused

Israel’s government agreed to give Intel (INTC.O) a $3.2 billion grant for a new $25 billion chip plant it plans to build in southern Israel, both sides said on Tuesday, in what is the largest investment ever by a company in Israel.

The news comes as Israel remains locked in a war with Palestinian militant group Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. It also is a big show of support by a major U.S. company and a generous offer by Israel’s government at a time when Washington has increased pressure on Israel to take further steps to minimise civilian harm in Gaza.

Shares of Intel, which has a bit less than 10% of its global workforce in Israel, opened up 2.73% at $49.28 on Nasdaq.

The expansion plan for its Kiryat Gat site where it has an existing chip plant that is 42 km (26 miles) from Hamas-controlled Gaza is an “important part of Intel’s efforts to foster a more resilient global supply chain, alongside the company’s ongoing and planned manufacturing investments in Europe and the United States,” Intel said in a statement.

Under CEO Pat Gelsinger, Intel has invested billions in building factories across three continents to restore its dominance in chip-making and better compete with rivals AMD (AMD.O), Nvidia (NVDA.O) and Samsung (005930.KS). The new Israeli plant is the latest investment by the U.S. chipmaker in recent years.

“Support from the Israel government will … ensure that Israel remains a global center of semiconductor technology and talent,” Intel vice president Daniel Benatar said.

Intel had previously received around $2 billion in the past 50 years in Israeli grants in other facilities there.

Ofir Yosefi, deputy director general of Israel’s Investments Authority, said Intel chose a higher grant and tax rate over an offer for a lower grant and lower tax rate.

He told Reuters the process took months since a grant of such magnitude needed a review and independent analysis that it was economically viable. It was determined Israel would reap much higher fiscal and economic benefits, he added.

“This investment, at a time when Israel wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said.

Intel, whose investment will be over five years, will pay a corporate tax rate of 7.5% instead of 5% previously. The normal tax rate is 23%, but under Israel’s law to encourage investment in development areas, companies receive large benefits.

In Germany, Intel plans to spend more than 30 billion euros ($33 billion) to develop two chip-making plants in Magdeburg, as part of a multi-billion-dollar investment drive across Europe to build chip capacity. Berlin has pledged big subsidies to attract Germany’s biggest-ever foreign investment.

In 2022, Intel said it would invest up to $100 billion to build potentially the world’s largest chip-making complex in Ohio, and rivals Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co or TSMC also have announced big investment plans in the U.S.

In addition to the grant that amounts to 12.8% of the total investment, the chipmaker also committed to buy 60 billion shekels ($16.6 billion) worth of goods and services from Israeli suppliers over the next decade, while the new facility is expected to create several thousand jobs.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-get-32-billion-government-grant-new-25-billion-israel-chip-plant-2023-12-26/

Space debris as small as a paint flake can fly around the Earth at a mind-boggling speed of 15,000 miles per hour. This can be very dangerous for astronauts and the rest of us on Earth. With that in mind, West Virginia University researchers are working to detect and identify this high-speed debris because, as of now, there is no way of tracking these deadly projectiles orbiting the planet.

Researchers say there are more than 100 million objects larger than one millimeter orbiting Earth. But the shocking part is that less than one percent of these objects, which can cause severe damage, are currently being tracked. This lack of monitoring could wreak havoc in areas like banking, communications, and GPS — all of which heavily depend on space assets.

“It’s not about the size, it’s about the energy,” says Piyush Mehta, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, in a university release. “It may be the size of a grain of salt but because it’s traveling so quickly, it might be comparable to a truck moving at 70 miles an hour. You don’t want to be in its path.”

Sources of this high-velocity debris can range from collisions between two space objects to the explosion of old satellites.

The initiative is divided into two distinct phases spanning two years each. The first aims at detection and characterization of debris, while the second focuses on developing technologies and algorithms to continuously track them.

“The debris population is a rapidly growing threat to satellites in orbit now, future launches and the overall expansion of the space ecosystem,” says Alexis Truitt, SINTRA program manager. “New, innovative solutions are necessary to protect our space investments.”

Source: https://studyfinds.org/space-debris-earth/

Tesla, the company known for its electric cars, solar panels and batteries, has also been working hard on developing humanoid robots that can perform various tasks and interact with humans.

The company has recently unveiled its latest version of its robot, called Optimus Gen 2, which is lighter, faster, smoother and more capable than its predecessor.

What is Optimus Gen 2?
Optimus Gen 2 is the second generation of Tesla’s humanoid robot. It is designed to be a general-purpose machine that can assist humans in various domains, such as manufacturing, construction, healthcare and entertainment.

The humanoid robot by the numbers
The robot stands at 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 121 lbs, which is 22 lbs lighter than the previous version. It can run at a speed of 5 mph, which is 30% faster than before. It has 35 degrees of freedom, which means it can move its joints in various directions and angles. It also has a more human-like appearance and movement, thanks to its new hands, feet, neck and body.

The robot’s hands have 11 degrees of freedom and are equipped with tactile sensors and faster actuators, which allow it to manipulate objects with more precision and dexterity.

The robot’s feet have a more natural shape and have force/torque sensors and articulated toes, which enable it to balance better and walk more smoothly.

The robot’s neck has two degrees of freedom and can tilt and rotate its head, which gives it more expressiveness and flexibility. The robot’s body has integrated electronics and wiring, which make it more streamlined and robust. It also has a new white color scheme.

Why is Optimus Gen 2 important?
Optimus Gen 2 is a remarkable achievement for Tesla and the field of robotics in general. The robot demonstrates the rapid progress and innovation that Tesla has made in developing humanoid machines that can rival or surpass human capabilities. The robot also shows the potential of humanoid robots to become a part of our society and economy, as they can perform tasks that are dangerous, dull, or difficult for humans.

Tesla’s edge over the competition
Tesla is not the only company that is working on humanoid robots. However, Tesla has an advantage over its competitors in terms of mass production and scalability, as it can leverage its expertise and infrastructure in manufacturing electric vehicles and batteries.

Tesla also reportedly has a vision of creating a network of robots that can communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans, using its Autopilot and Neuralink technologies.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/tech/next-generation-teslas-humanoid-robot-makes-debut

Scientists are exploring whether they might save Earth with a plot from a sci-fi disaster movie.

A study released this month investigated whether a nuke could be shot “millions of miles” into space to prevent a catastrophic asteroid from wrecking the planet.

Researchers with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) developed a modeling tool that could assess that possibility on the heels of a 2022 mission from NASA that successfully misdirected a giant space rock.

The new tool, detailed in the Planetary Science Journal, helps scientists understand if another option could be at their disposal after NASA deployed a kinetic impactor, in this case a spacecraft, to knock the 2022 asteroid off course during the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

“If we have enough warning time, we could potentially launch a nuclear device, sending it millions of miles away to an asteroid that is headed toward Earth,” LLNL physicist Mary Burkey, who was head of the research team in a statement.

Nuclear devices have a higher percentage of energy density per unit than the kinetic impactor used by the space agency, which would make it a more effective method against asteroids, Burkey noted.

When the device makes contact with the asteroid, there are two possible scenarios.

“We would then detonate the device and either deflect the asteroid, keeping it intact but providing a controlled push away from Earth, or we could disrupt the asteroid, breaking it up into small, fast-moving fragments that would also miss the planet,” Burkey noted.

Sophisticated multiphysics simulations operated by the LLNL cover a wide array of factors that would help figure out if a nuclear deflection mission would be a success, she said.

If a real-life threat against Earth materializes, the modeling would help decision-makers determine how to proceed against an asteroid, LLNL’s planetary defense project lead Megan Bruck Syal said.

“While the probability of a large asteroid impact during our lifetime is low, the potential consequences could be devastating,” Bruck Syal said in a statement.

Source: https://nypost.com/2023/12/24/news/scientists-exploring-if-deploying-nuke-could-stop-catastrophic-asteroid/

Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) plan to end support for Windows 10 operating system could result in about 240 million personal computers (PCs) being disposed, potentially adding to landfill waste, Canalys Research said.

The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars.

While many PCs could remain functional for years post the end of OS support, Canalys warned demand for devices without security updates could be low.

Microsoft announced a plan to provide security updates for Windows 10 devices until October 2028 for an undisclosed annual price.

If the pricing structure for extended Windows 10 support mirrors past trends, migrating to newer PCs could be more cost-effective, increasing the number of older PCs heading to scrap, Canalys said.

Microsoft aims to discontinue support for Windows 10 by October 2025. The next generation of the OS, anticipated to bring advanced artificial intelligence technology to PCs, could potentially boost the sluggish PC market.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the environmental impact of disposal of Windows 11-incompatible devices.

Hard drives used in personal computers and data storage servers are recycled to gather materials for use in electric vehicle motors and even renewable power generation.

“Turning end-of-life computers into the magnets that power sustainable technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines will help meet the rising global demand for electricity,” said Noveon Magnetics Chief Commercial Officer Peter Afiuny.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-ending-support-windows-10-could-send-240-mln-pcs-landfills-report-2023-12-21/

“India will have its own space station during the Amrit Kaal in the next 25 years,” said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman S Somanath while speaking at the Bharatiya Vigyan Sammelan organised by Vijnana Bharati, an NGO working to popularise science, in Ahmedabad.

According to an Indian Express report, Somanath said on Friday that it is targeting to launch the first module for the space station, called ‘Bharatiya Space Station’, by 2028.

“By 2028, we will launch the first module, that is the target. In another seven years, that is by 2035, we will build further modules and make the space station fully operational,” the ISRO chief said.

He added that the ISRO is developing a launch vehicle to carry heavier loads to have the space station ready by 2035.

“This is because, for the 2028 launch (of the first module), we do not have a powerful rocket. We have a rocket called LVM-3, which can only take 10 tonnes, so the first module will be an eight-tonne mass module, which we will launch by 2028,” Somanath was quoted as saying.

The ISRO chief said a new rocket is being developed, which will be able to “carry a load of 20 of 1,215 tonnes” because “they cannot be launched in the current rocket (which can only take 10 tonnes).”

Somanath said the Indian space organisation will seek approval for it and it will take about seven years to develop it.

“The 2028 launch will be a robotic module, a satellite, where we can dock, conduct experiments and come back. A human being going (to the space station) can happen only after 2035. This is the plan as of today,” he was quoted as saying.

“By 2023, we should be able to send an ISS into space with human beings,” he was quoted by the Times of India as saying. “A human being going (to the space station) can happen only after 2035. This is the plan as of today,” he reportedly said.

Meanwhile, the ISRO announced a major update in India’s first solar mission, Aditya-L1. The space agency said that the Aditya-L1 spacecraft is expected to reach its destination on January 6.

Source: https://www.livemint.com/science/news/isro-aims-to-launch-first-module-of-indian-space-station-2028-says-chief-somanath-reports-11703348153721.html

Apple is probably the only tech company that has not been public about its work in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) but that could change in the coming months, as the brand seems intent on getting everyone’s attention towards its work in this area. Reports talk about multiple research papers that highlight the work Apple is doing or at least planning in the AI arena.

The details in the papers suggest Apple wants to bring on-device AI technology that could be a big game changer for the industry. In fact, Apple might be working internally to make large language models (LLMs) run on iPhones and iPads, something that could be made possible thanks to the A-series and M-series chips, respectively.

The biggest weapon needed to develop AI is data and Apple doesn’t have it available in abundance, so it is understandable that the company is seeking hardware advancements to make AI push the envelope for its customers. Having a capable AI model also enables Apple to build a new-gen Siri that is as efficient and resourceful as Google Assistant or Alexa.

Source: https://www.news18.com/tech/apples-ai-push-for-iphones-could-get-rivals-attention-know-more-8714728.html

Humane Ai Pin, the world’s first wearable computer powered by Ai, will start shipping in March 2024. Ahead of its release, check what this amazing wearable gadget features.

On November 10, Humane, a 2018-founded startup known for working with AI technology, unveiled its first product called Ai Pin, a clothing-based wearable gadget. The OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-backed company presented the device as a new technology that does not require a user to spend time interacting with it and instead gets the information needed quickly so they can focus on the moment. With a displayless design, which goes against the ethos of most consumer tech products, the company focuses on voice and laser ink technology to show and tell the information through an AI chatbot. The company has now revealed that the product will be shipped to consumers starting in March 2024.

Announcing it through its official X account, Humane said, “We are thrilled to announce that Ai Pin will start shipping in March 2024. All of us here at Humane can’t wait for you to experience your Ai Pin, the world’s first wearable computer powered by Ai. We’re incredibly grateful for the enthusiasm and support, especially from our earliest supporters”.

The company also revealed that it will first send the products to those who placed priority orders. The order of shipping will be determined on the basis of when the purchase was made. The first-shipped units will go to the orders received first.

If you’re still interested in placing an order, the Ai Pin, with the battery booster, will cost $699. Additionally, there is a $24 monthly fee for a Humane subscription which will give you cellular connectivity, a number, and data coverage. For now, this service is only being provided by T-Mobile in the USA.

What is the Ai Pin?

The Ai Pin is powered by an unnamed Snapdragon chipset and an AI engine which is likely to be GPT-4, although the company does not mention the name. It, however, does mention OpenAI and Microsoft in its press release, saying, “Humane’s unique collaborations with Microsoft and OpenAI give Ai Pin access to some of the world’s most powerful AI models and platforms and set the foundation for new capabilities to be added as the technology evolves”. The connection with OpenAI is an obvious one given that Sam Altman is the largest shareholder with a 14 percent stake in the company.

How does the Ai Pin work?

The Ai Pin, with its host of sensors, camera, speaker, microphone, and laser ink display, can function as an abstract smartphone with limited usage. Additionally, the device is also privacy-focused. Despite having a camera pointed towards the world, the company claims that it is not listening unless it is active, and in fact, it does not even listen for wake words.

The features mentioned by the company include the following. It can draft and send messages and emails without you having to type. You can simply speak to the device and it will use the prompt to suggest a draft using its laser ink display. You can simply hold your palm out and see the display there. If you’re not happy, you can add more prompts to change them.

Source: https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/waiting-for-the-amazing-humane-ai-pin-know-when-you-will-get-world-s-first-wearable-computer-powered-by-ai-71703325764797.html

Our galaxy is being pulled toward something gigantic that we cannot see, say astronomers – after discovering that 400 galaxies, including our own, are being pulled in the same direction.

Scientists studying the space and the millions of galaxies within it have made a startling and rather unsettling discovery. A mysterious and absolutely massive gravitational anomaly is pulling us and our galactic neighbours toward itself at the rate of 600 km/s or 1.3 million miles per hour – and scientists call the force THE GREAT ATTRACTOR.

Astronomers mapping the observable universe — looking at 400 elliptical galaxies — noticed that they (the galaxies) are moving towards something we cannot see, as it is in the “Zone of Avoidance”, or the area of sky obscured by our own galaxy’s galactic plane and the cosmic dust within it, reports IFL Science.

Whatever it was, to move a large number of galaxies requires a lot of mass. We can’t see it, but we are being dragged towards something gigantic.

How is the distance between galaxies measured?

In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble – also called a “pioneer of the distant stars,” – noticed that distant galaxies looked redder than those nearby. Moreover, the further away they are, the redder they tend to look. This observation, known as redshift, allowed us to measure the distances to galaxies too distant to determine by other means.

Hubble brought the discovery that how ‘redshifted’ a galaxy is, is directly proportional to its distance, giving us a way to measure distant galaxies, leading to the discovery that the majority are moving away from us (and giving support to the idea of an expanding universe). Moreover, the further away they are, the redder they tend to look. This observation revealed that in the expanding universe all its components flying apart from each other unless they are close enough that gravity holds them together.

Source: https://www.timesnownews.com/world/houston-we-are-being-dragged-toward-something-gigantic-astronomers-raise-alarm-article-106154535

Researchers have developed an algorithm that uses the story of a person’s life to predict their future and it is accurate about 78 per cent of the time

Can a doom calculator really predict when you’ll die? Shockingly, a tool developed by whizz-kid scientists claims it can with 78% accuracy.

Through clever tech called “life2vec”, it’s like they take the story of your life and map out what might come next. These brainy folk from America and Denmark have used loads of data on people’s lives – their jobs, where they live, any accidents they’ve had, if they’ve ever been pregnant – on over six million people.

They now have a model that understands everyday language and can guess at things like if someone might die young or how much they could earn in their lifetime.

The study shows being a boy, having mental health problems or working skilled jobs can mean shorter lifespans, while earning lots of money or leading other people can add years to your life. The system, life2vec, treats each part of your life story like bits in a sentence to guess what’s coming up based on whats already happened.

Scientists have developed a new AI system called life2vec that uses data from 2008 to 2016 to predict simple questions like “death within four years?” for any given person. Scarily enough, it correctly guessed who would die by 2020 over three-quarters of the time.

Sune Lehmann, the lead researcher, says that the system isn’t open to the public or companies, to meet GDPR standards and keep private information safe: “We are actively working on ways to share some of the results more openly, but this requires further research to be done in a way that can guarantee the privacy of the people in the study.”

The report was published in Nature Computational Science. Sune Lehmann, a professor at Denmark Technical University, explained how life2vec works. He said it’s similar to language models like ChatGPT: it learns from a vast amount of pre-existing written data, except life2vec is taught using data from people’s lives.

Sentences like “In September 2012, Francisco received twenty thousand Danish kroner as a guard at a castle in Elsinore” or “During her third year at secondary boarding school, Hermione followed five elective classes.” were given different tokens by the scientists. These pieces of data were all mapped out in relation to each other.

These categories cover a wide range of human experiences with different codes. For example, a forearm fracture is represented as S52, income is represented by 100 different digital tokens and “postpartum hemorrhage” is O72. Some of these relationships are intuitive profession and income certain jobs make more money.

Source: https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/scientists-create-ai-claim-predicts-248160

Apple rules the iPhone’s App Store with an iron fist — sideloading outside it is not allowed. Google lets anyone install any app on an Android phone. But guess which one of these two companies has an illegal monopoly, according to the courts?

As you probably already know, Google is the one that lost its fight against Epic Games this week. It’s a fight that Apple previously (mostly) won in a similar trial in 2021, beating claims that it had violated antitrust laws by charging mandatory in-app transaction fees and kicking Epic’s game Fortnite off the App Store. Google tried a similar move, but in its case, a jury found it had maintained an unlawful monopoly with the Play store; a judge is scheduled to consider remedies next month.

Listening to the verdict live in the courtroom, I couldn’t believe my ears at first. Readers in our comments and around the internet felt the same. How could Epic have possibly won against the company that gives away its open-source operating system for free, especially after losing to that company’s more locked-down competitor?

Here’s my set of theories — which I spent half an hour discussing on The Vergecast this week.

1. Logistically, Epic v. Google is a fresh roll of the die.
The court made it clear from day one: Epic v. Google is a different case from Epic v. Apple, with different evidence, in front of a different judge. Nothing in the Apple case is directly relevant to the Google case — in fact, the judge barred both sides from even bringing it up. Google’s lawyers never got to argue to the jury that Apple won. Besides, Apple hasn’t quite won yet: we’re waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether it’ll hear a final appeal. (I won’t be covering the Apple case more than the brief outline I’m giving you here, since I’m ethically bound.) Google has also said it plans to appeal the decision in its case.

Precedent obviously plays a role in the legal system, with judges following the guidance of things like Supreme Court rulings. But as Nilay Patel points out on The Vergecast, we shouldn’t think of it as a deterministic algorithm — a new case is a fresh roll of the die.

2. Google controls its ecosystem with third-party business deals, meaning unfair-looking documents are in more hands.
Apple sells the iPhone. It’s Apple’s way or the highway, and has almost always been.

Google doesn’t sell the Samsung Galaxy phone lineup and didn’t sell the Motorola Droid. It builds the Google ecosystem within Android by sharing a cut of its advertising and app store profits if phone makers agree to prominently carry its apps (like Chrome, Gmail, and Play), use its APIs, and issue timely security patches. Epic’s lawyers could present details about these agreements and argue they showed Google using its power in one layer of the phone market to shut down competition in another.

As we learned in this trial, Google also tried to offer major app and game developers deals to keep them from bypassing the Google Play Store — like Project Hug, which gave top game developers up to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credits, co-marketing, and support. Paradoxically, the fact that Google allowed some competition created a paper trail of discussions about how much of a potential threat that competition was, including forecasts of a “contagion effect” if game developers like Epic defected from Play.

Apple did face some awkward disclosures in its case too, like an internal email referring to iMessage as a “serious lock-in” factor for iOS. But the Epic v. Apple trial included long digressions about topics like app store moderation, giving lots of airtime to Apple’s non-monopolistic rationales for a walled garden. While Epic argued that these rationales were merely a pretext for running a monopoly, the ruling ended up treating them as valid concerns, albeit with some skepticism. In an antitrust trial, intentions matter — and over the course of its many negotiations, Google wrote a lot of intentions down.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told me it’s unfortunate that the more open company is getting penalized for that openness:

I think Apple is… it’s a little bit unfortunate that in a lot of ways Apple’s restrictions on competition are absolute. Thou shalt not have a competing store on iOS and thou shalt not use a competing payment method. And I think Apple should be receiving at least as harsh antitrust scrutiny as Google.

3. Some of those deals looked seriously unfair!
Putting aside Project Hug for a sec, Spotify pays Google nothing to get almost all the benefits of the Google Play store, we learned in court. I repeat: Spotify pays 0 percent when it uses its own in-app payment system — while a competing subscription service might pay 11 percent of its revenue if it’s even allowed to use its own payments system at all. “If you’re a smaller developer than Spotify, you get screwed,” Sweeney told me after the verdict.

Google offered Netflix a sweetheart deal to pay just 10 percent of its earnings via Google Play too, at a time when 15 percent was the norm. (Netflix refused and decided not to stop offering in-app purchase on Google’s store entirely.) This trial destroyed any notion that Google treats developers fairly and equally.

And while Apple has offered developers sweetheart deals too…

4. This case was in front of a jury, not a bench trial.
That meant Epic could spin a tale of good and evil, while Google was left explaining away complicated business deals.

Epic showed the jury document after unfair-looking document where Google allegedly “bribed” or “blocked” its partners from becoming competitors with special deals, ones which at least disincentivized them from building, joining, or carrying alternative app stores, I’d argue.

While a judge might have well decided those deals aren’t out of the norm, the jury may have seen how the sausage is made for the very first time — and the jury was ultimately in charge.

5. That jury saw Google had something to hide.
Not only did Google have to explain that offering a game developer, say, $90 million in incentives wasn’t necessarily a bribe, the Google executives behind those deals had to explain they weren’t doing it to keep those companies from building rival app stores. Google employee after Google employee said they were doing it so Android phones could compete with the iPhone.

But Google’s own internal emails and strategic plans clearly showed that those execs wanted to block rival app stores, and the jury was here for it.

The jury was also in the room for two rounds of weirdness with the Spotify numbers in particular, which Google tried hard not to reveal in open court. At one point, a Google VP admitted that if deal terms “were to become known, other developers would come to us to do the same, and … negotiate it down, and that would play out badly for us.”

6. That jury saw that Google intentionally deleted evidence, too.
Judge James Donato literally said these exact words to the jury just hours before they reached a verdict:

You have seen evidence that Google Chat communications were deleted with the intent to prevent their use in litigation. You may infer that the deleted Chat messages contained evidence that would have been unfavorable to Google in this case.

Can you imagine being a juror in this case, getting told that Google probably deleted even more unfair deals and potentially damning evidence than what you’ve already seen? That’s exactly what happened over and over during this trial, with Epic grilling practically every Google witness — right up to Google CEO Sundar Pichai — about why they didn’t preserve all of their business communications as required by law.

It turned out that Google had set all one-on-one chats to automatically delete themselves after 24 hours by default, and employees all the way up to the CEO intentionally used that to make certain conversations disappear.

Not only did the jury see this, at least one juror decided that Sundar Pichai wasn’t credible on the stand, and that the deleted chats were a factor in their decision to give Epic the win.

7. Maybe the biggest reason: market definition.
It would be hard to argue Google has a monopoly on phones, or a monopoly on apps. It doesn’t sell those directly, for one thing, and you can buy an iPhone instead.

Google wanted to argue the “relevant antitrust market” was phones and app stores in general — or better yet, mobile transactions. That could have been a pathway to an easy win.

In fact, market definition was arguably the deciding factor in the Apple case, when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers singlehandedly decided the proper market definition was “digital mobile gaming transactions,” a market where Apple’s 30 percent cut looked relatively fair, since Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo nominally charge the same rate.

But in this case, the jury got to choose the relevant market for themselves — it was a write-in option on the verdict form — and the judge was publicly skeptical of Google’s market definitions, casting serious doubt on the idea that “digital transactions” made sense as an antitrust market at all.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-win-fortnite-trial-monopoly

Google will be paying 75 million USD to Canadian media companies for distributing their content and the print media is set to get nearly two-thirds of that amount each year.

The print media of Canada will receive nearly two-thirds of an annual payment of 75 million USD from Google in exchange for the distribution of their content. After months of negotiation, Ottawa and Google announced a ‘historic’ agreement at the end of November according to which the tech giant will pay Canadian media companies compensation for the loss of advertising revenue, as reported by news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP). The agreement will come into effect from Tuesday.

A Canadian federal officer told journalists on Friday, “The share that television and radio will receive is capped at 30 per cent, that of CBC/Radio-Canada (the Canadian public broadcaster) at seven per cent, which leaves the remaining 63 per cent for the written press,” as reported by AFP.

The official added that the prime reason for the print media getting the majority payout is because it is ‘really dependent’ on the online platforms to get its content distributed.

Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said, “Canada has accomplished something historic.”

Onge stated that the newsrooms are experiencing a crisis that affects journalism which is a foundation of its democracy. Many media outlets are struggling financially and several have even announced layoff plans recently.

The annual compensation for news organizations, which is required by the Online News Act, will be distributed to outlets on the basis of the number of full-time journalists they hired in the last calendar year who were producing original news content, reported CBC.

Source: https://news.abplive.com/technology/google-to-pay-two-thirds-of-75-million-usd-to-canadian-print-media-for-distributing-their-content-1650332

A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth.

The sun spit out the huge flare along with a massive radio burst on Thursday, causing two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was the biggest flare since 2017, and the radio burst was extensive, affecting even the higher frequencies.

The combination resulted in one of the largest solar radio events ever recorded, Shawn Dahl of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said Friday.

Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, according to the space weather forecasting center. Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, that might be directed at Earth. This could result in a geomagnetic storm, Dahl said, which in turn could disrupt high-frequency radio signals at the higher latitudes and trigger northern lights, or auroras, in the coming days.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/solar-flare-sun-nasa-eb3389b4e41955c3292b9c917a5667dc

A STRANGE theory claims ChatGPT is now seasonally depressed and behaving lazier during this time of year.

Several users have expressed their concerns about the bot online and experts have waded in with theories.

According to Futurism and Ars Technica, it might not just be humans who suffer from seasonal depression.

Since late November, users are said to have noticed ChatGPT becoming lazier.

The artificial intelligence apparently provided simple results or refused to do tasks.

Even OpenAI has admitted that there’s something wrong with its chatbot.

It wrote on X: “We’ve heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier!

“We haven’t updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn’t intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we’re looking into fixing it.”

Users were quick to repost OpenAI and make the seasonal depression link.

One person wrote on X: “Not chat GPT having seasonal depression.”

Another said: “Part of me wonders if #ChatGPT gets seasonal depression too?

“I mean, aren’t we all feeling a little lazier now that the sun is setting at 4pm?”

While one person wrote: “Did ChatGPT get seasonal depression” and added a crying emoji.

Source: https://www.the-sun.com/tech/9853403/chatgpt-season-depression-ai/

For the past two weeks, I’ve been using a new camera to secretly snap photos and record videos of strangers in parks, on trains, inside stores and at restaurants. (I promise it was all in the name of journalism.) I wasn’t hiding the camera, but I was wearing it, and no one noticed.

I was testing the recently released $300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses that Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking empire made in collaboration with the iconic eyewear maker. The high-tech glasses include a camera for shooting photos and videos, and an array of speakers and microphones for listening to music and talking on the phone.

The glasses, Meta says, can help you “live in the moment” while sharing what you see with the world. You can livestream a concert on Instagram while watching the performance, for instance, as opposed to holding up a phone. That’s a humble goal, but it is part of a broader ambition in Silicon Valley to shift computing away from smartphone and computer screens and toward our faces.

Meta, Apple and Magic Leap have all been hyping mixed-reality headsets that use cameras to allow their software to interact with objects in the real world. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram demonstrating how the smart glasses could use A.I. to scan a shirt and help him pick out a pair of matching pants. Wearable face computers, the companies say, could eventually change the way we live and work. For Apple, which is preparing to release its first high-tech goggles, the $3,500 Vision Pro headset, next year, a pair of smart glasses that look nice and accomplish interesting tasks are the end goal.

For the past seven years, headsets have remained unpopular, largely because they are bulky and aesthetically off-putting. The minimalist design of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses represent how smart glasses might look one day if they succeed (though past lightweight wearables, such as the Google Glass from a decade ago and the Spectacles sunglasses released by Snap in 2016, were flops). Sleek, lightweight and satisfyingly hip, the Meta glasses blend effortlessly into the quotidian. No one — not even my editor, who was aware I was writing this column — could tell them apart from ordinary glasses, and everyone was blissfully unaware of being photographed.

After wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses practically nonstop this month, I was relieved to remove them. While I was impressed with the comfortable, stylish design of the glasses, I felt bothered by the implications for our privacy. I’m also concerned about how smart glasses may broadly affect our ability to focus. Even when I wasn’t using any of the features, I felt distracted while wearing them. But the main problem is that the glasses don’t do much we can’t already do with phones.

Meta said in a statement that privacy was top of mind when designing the glasses. “We know if we’re going to normalize smart glasses in everyday life, privacy has to come first and be integrated into everything we do,” the company said.

I wore the glasses and took hundreds of photos and videos while doing all sorts of activities in my daily life — working, cooking, hiking, rock climbing, driving a car and riding a scooter — to assess how smart glasses might affect us going forward. Here’s how that went.

Always Distracted
My first test with the glasses was to wear them at my bouldering gym, recording how I maneuvered through routes in real-time and sharing the videos with my climbing pals.

I was surprised to find that my climbing, overall, was worse than normal. When recording a climbing attempt, I fumbled with my footwork and fell. This was disappointing because I had successfully climbed the same route before. Perhaps the pressure to record and broadcast a smooth climb made me do worse. After removing the glasses, I completed the route.

This feeling of distraction persisted in other aspects of my daily life. I had problems concentrating while driving a car or riding a scooter. Not only was I constantly bracing myself for opportunities to shoot video, but the reflection from other car headlights emitted a harsh, blue strobe effect through the eyeglass lenses. Meta’s safety manual for the Ray-Bans advises people to stay focused while driving, but it doesn’t mention the glare from headlights.

While doing work on a computer, the glasses felt unnecessary because there was rarely anything worth photographing at my desk, but a part of my mind constantly felt preoccupied by the possibility.

Ben Long, a photography teacher in San Francisco, said he was skeptical about the premise of the Meta glasses helping people remain present.

“If you’ve got the camera with you, you’re immediately not in the moment,” he said. “Now you’re wondering, Is this something I can present and record?”

Privacy Eroded
To inform people that they are being photographed, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses include a tiny LED light embedded in the right frame to indicate when the device is recording. When a photo is snapped, it flashes momentarily. When a video is recording, it is continuously illuminated.

As I shot 200 photos and videos with the glasses in public, including on BART trains, on hiking trails and in parks, no one looked at the LED light or confronted me about it. And why would they? It would be rude to comment on a stranger’s glasses, let alone stare at them.

The issue of widespread surveillance isn’t particularly new. The ubiquity of smartphones, doorbell cameras and dashcams makes it likely that you are being recorded anywhere you go. But Chris Gilliard, an independent privacy scholar who has studied the effects of surveillance technologies, said that cameras hidden inside smart glasses would most likely enable bad actors — like the people shooting sneaky photos of others at the gym — to do more harm.

“What these things do is they don’t make possible something that was impossible,” he said. “They make easy something that was less easy.”

Albert Aydin, a Meta spokesman, said the company took privacy seriously and designed safety measures, including a tamper-detection technology, to prevent users from covering up the LED light with tape.

In other mundane situations, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses affected me in strange ways. While I was about to cross a driveway in my neighborhood, I saw a car begin to reverse into it. My immediate reaction was to press the record button in case I needed to capture the driver acting irresponsibly. But he yielded appropriately and I crossed, feeling sheepish.

Slice of Life Moments
Although the Ray-Ban Meta glasses didn’t make me feel more present or more safe, they were good at capturing a particular type of photo — the slice-of-life moments I wouldn’t normally record because my hands would be preoccupied.

With the glasses, I shot video of my corgi, Max, barking mightily to go out for a walk as I tied my shoes — a side of him that his Instagram followers don’t normally see. I recorded video of my dogs and wife as we hiked a trail, which would normally be difficult to do with a smartphone while keeping my hands steady. While slicing some leftover meat to make lunch, I recorded my Labrador, Mochi, watching me with hungry eyes.

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/13/how-metas-new-face-camera-heralds-a-new-age-of-surveillance/

Apple (AAPL.O) has said it now requires a judge’s order to hand over information about its customers’ push notification to law enforcement, putting the iPhone maker’s policy in line with rival Google and raising the hurdle officials must clear to get app data about users.

The new policy was not formally announced but appeared sometime over the past few days on Apple’s publicly available law enforcement guidelines. It follows the revelation from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that officials were requesting such data from Apple as well as from Google, the unit of Alphabet (GOOGL.O) that makes the operating system for Android phones.

Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible “dings” or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple’s servers.

In a letter first disclosed by Reuters last week, Wyden said the practice gave the two companies unique insight into traffic flowing from those apps to users, putting them “in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps.”

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-now-requires-judges-consent-hand-over-push-notification-data-2023-12-12/

Ukraine’s biggest mobile network operator said it hoped to restore operations by Wednesday after coming under what appeared to be the largest cyberattack since Russia launched its war on the country in February 2022.

Tuesday’s attack on Kyivstar, which has more than half of Ukraine’s population as mobile subscribers, knocked out services, damaged IT infrastructure and put millions of people in danger of not receiving alerts of potential Russian air assaults.

It also disrupted the air raid alert systems themselves in parts of Kyiv.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer Oleksandr Komarov said the attack was “a result of” the war with Russia.

“War is also happening in cyberspace. Unfortunately, we have been hit as a result of this war,” he told national television.

“(The attack) significantly damaged (our) infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy’s access.”

Komarov did not say which Russian body he believed to be responsible, but said personal data of users had not been compromised.

Russian hacktivist group Killnet claimed responsibility for the attack via a statement on the Telegram messaging app, but did not provide evidence.

A source close to Kyivstar said the Ukrainian military was not affected by the outage.

Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency told Reuters one of the possibilities it was investigating was that of a cyber-attack conducted by Russian security services.

Russia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kyivstar, which has 24.3 million mobile subscribers, as well as more than 1.1 million home internet subscribers, said late on Tuesday that fixed-line services were partially restored and it was working to restore other services by Wednesday.

“This isn’t the first attempt to breach the perimeter of the country’s telecom operator, but unfortunately, this attempt has been successful,” Komarov told Forbes Ukraine.

STATE ACTOR
A source close to Ukraine’s cyber defence agency also said that Russia was suspected to be the source of the attack, but no specific group had been identified.

“It’s definitely a state actor,” said the source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, adding that data cable interception showed “a lot of Russian controlled traffic directed at these networks”.

“There’s no ransom. It’s all destruction. So it’s not a financially motivated attack,” said the source.

Komarov told Forbes Ukraine that Kyivstar’s “working hypothesis” was that the goal of the attack was destruction and disruption.

“Perhaps it was aimed at disrupting the president’s visit to the United States, perhaps to aggravate energy blackouts, or impact the morale of Ukrainians,” he said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was in Washington on Tuesday, pleading for more U.S. military support to fight Russia.

Ukrainian officials said air raid alert systems in more than 75 settlements in Kyiv region, which surrounds the capital, were affected by the cyberattack and they would announce aerial danger through loudspeakers until repair works done.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/ukraines-biggest-mobile-operator-suffers-massive-hacker-attack-statement-2023-12-12/

WhatsApp for iOS will enable the user to pin messages in groups and set the timeline accordingly. Also, the company has added a connection health for video call feature to check on the real-time quality.

WhatsApp, a Meta-owned instant messaging platform has started rolling out two new and important features for iOS users. The new pin messages and check connection health for video calls will enable the Apple devices.

As per the WABetaInfo report, the official changelog accompanying WhatsApp’s 23.25.79 update on iOS, the users will now be able to pin messages in groups. This feature could be used for all the current members so that they could check their connection health during a video call.

About the Pin Messages

The ‘pin messages’ feature will enable the users to get precise control over the duration- which means a message will remain prominently displayed in their chats. The iOS users could use three different durations to set the Pin message in the group- 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days according to their preference.

iOS users will also get the flexibility for dismissing a pinned message at any time- even before the chosen duration, the report stated.

Connection health

Users can further get started with checking connection health during a video call by simply long-pressing their tile to reveal the real-time VC feedback based on the quality of their video call connection.

The report says, “If you don’t have one of these features, note that some accounts may receive them over the coming weeks, as indicated in the official changelog.”

Source: https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news/whatsapp-for-ios-gets-two-new-features-details-here-2023-12-11-906849

Your Google search history for 2023 has arrived.

Well, actually, the world’s. On Monday, the California-based tech giant released its “Year in Search,” a roundup of 2023’s top global queries, ranging from unforgettable pop culture moments (hello, Barbenheimer ), to the loss of beloved figures and tragic news carrying worldwide repercussions.

The ongoing Israel-Hamas war topped news trends in 2023, per Google’s global data, followed by queries related to the Titanic-bound submersible that imploded in June, as well as February’s devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

Damar Hamlin was Google’s top trending person on search this year. A safety with the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, Hamlin experienced a near-death cardiac arrest on the field during a January game, but has since completed a celebrated comeback. Actor Jeremy Renner, who survived a serious snowplow accident at the start of 2023, followed. Meanwhile, the late Matthew Perry and Tina Turner led search trends among notable individuals who passed away.

In the world of entertainment, “Barbie” dominated Google search’s movie trends this year — followed by Barbenheimer co-pilot “Oppenheimer” and Indian thriller “Jawan.” In TV, “The Last of Us,” “Wednesday” and “Ginny and Georgia” were the top three trending shows in 2023.

Yoasobi’s “アイドル (Idol)” was Google’s top trending song on search. Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” — which soared in the charts after controversy this summer — and Shakira and Bizarrap’s “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” followed.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Google’s 2023 global search trends. Bibimbap was the top trending recipe. Inter Miami CF, the new home of Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi, led Google’s sports teams trends. And in the U.S. specifically, many consumers spent 2023 asking why eggs, Taylor Swift tickets and sriracha bottles were so expensive — while “rizz” (recently named Oxford’s word of the year ) was a frontrunner for trending slang definition inquires.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/google-search-trends-2023-top-queries-9f6b2bdf38a26bef731fb7f62131ccc4

Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.

After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive.

Google affairs and public policy vp Wilson White said the company plans to appeal the verdict, and that “The trial made clear that we compete fiercely with Apple and its App Store, as well as app stores on Android devices and gaming consoles.” You can read theirfull statement further down.

In a post on its company blog, Epic Games said, “Today’s verdict is a win for all app developers and consumers around the world. It proves that Google’s app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation.”

It’s a historic victory, particularly because Epic mostly lost its fight against Apple two years ago when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers decided that fight had nothing to do with apps.

But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case. It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down. It showed that Google was running scared of Epic specifically. And it was all decided by a jury, unlike the Apple ruling.

Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be. Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes. Both parties will meet with Judge Donato in the second week of January to discuss potential remedies.

Judge Donato has already stated that he will not grant Epic’s additional request for an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution,” as Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein put it on November 28th.

“We don’t do don’t-break-the-law injunctions… if you have a problem, you can come back,” Donato said. He also said he did not intend to decide what percentage fee Google should charge for its products.

Although Epic didn’t sue for damages, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney suggested Epic stood to make hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars if it doesn’t have to pay Google’s fee.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23994174/epic-google-trial-jury-verdict-monopoly-google-play

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 17, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.

This week, I’ve been watching A Murder at the End of the World and (finally!) Barbie, reading about Gary Gensler’s war on crypto, robot trucks, and Taylor Swift’s world takeover, playing Puzzmo’s Really Bad Chess, and catching up on all the super-popular TikToks I missed this year.

I also have for you a new Mastodon app, a bunch of new AI tools, a whole new Fortnite universe, an espresso maker, and much more. And I have some thoughts about messaging. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What apps are you into right now? What have you read or watched or eaten or played or built recently? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The wallpaper: This changes depending on my Focus mode, but my current Work Focus has the Apple Astronomy wallpaper for Jupiter, which looks cool and was my favorite planet as a kid. Everyone had a favorite planet as a kid, right?

The apps: I love useful widgets, so I always have a large one taking up a good chunk of my screen. It’s a widget stack, so I can flick through things like my calendar, to-do list, Siri Suggestions, and weather. This is the homescreen I use for my Work Focus mode, so a lot of the time, the stack is showing Fantastical, which I love because it blends both calendar appointments and to-dos from my Todoist list in one view, while giving me a quick date and month calendar overview. Below that are Slack, Reeder for RSS, Artifact, and Apple News, the latter three of which I use to keep up with news throughout the day.

You’ll see that I have two to-do list apps here because, for a while, I was trying to see if I could make Apple Reminders work for me. I can’t, and I always fall back on Todoist, my one true to-do list app love. I should probably remove Reminders at this point, but I haven’t figured out another app to put there yet, and I like the symmetry of two full app rows. My home row is super boring, but Outlook remains the best email app on the iPhone, fight me.

The phone: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5.

The wallpaper: Something I found in the Backdrops app, the best wallpaper app for Android, that I thought looked cool. I don’t really get to see it all that often, though, because I crap my homescreen up with so much stuff, but oh well.

The apps: The Fold 5 lets me set different layouts for its inner and outer screens, and you bet your ass I take advantage of that. The outer screen is optimized for stuff I access most often while on the go, and once again, widgets and widget stacks play a big role here. The top widget stack has: calendar, to-do list, battery, Samsung’s version of Siri Suggestions (which works about as well as Apple’s version, read into that however you’d like), and the Alexa shopping list we use for groceries.

Below that is another widget stack with media widgets for Pocket Casts, Apple Music, Sonos, and my Galaxy Buds 2 Pro controls. Then a third widget below that is for the Samsung Weather app, which has a handy insights thing that came in the One UI 6 / Android 14 update. I’ve got some folders for music apps, smart home controls, and news apps like Artifact and Google News. FocusReader is my RSS app of choice on Android that I plug my Feedly account into, and I obsessively check the Play Store for app updates throughout the day, so there’s a shortcut to take me right to it next to the weather widget. Then there’s the ubiquitous Google Search widget that can now launch apps — so that’s mostly what I use it for — and my kind of boring home row with a folder for multiple messaging apps since Beeper Mini came out. Outlook is the best email app on Android, and Samsung Internet is the best browser on Android, fight me twice.

The inner screen is optimized for the things I do on a bigger screen, so there are a lot more apps and folders. I’ve got a books folder and a read-later folder for all the reading apps I use on my Fold, which is one of the primary things I do with it, plus social media time wasters like Megalodon for Mastodon, Threads, and Instagram. The calendar widget is a stack, of course, and I’m experimenting with the big battery widget, which is more useful when I have my earbuds connected and can see their status in it, too. Home row is boring again, but I took the phone app out of it because I don’t really take calls with the Fold open.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23993867/google-gemini-chatgpt-beeper-imessage-lego-fortnite-installer-newsletter

Around noon on Nov. 17, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, logged into a video call from a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. He was in the city for its inaugural Formula 1 race, which had drawn 315,000 visitors including Rihanna and Kylie Minogue.

Mr. Altman, who had parlayed the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot into personal stardom beyond the tech world, had a meeting lined up that day with Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of the artificial intelligence start-up. But when the call started, Mr. Altman saw that Dr. Sutskever was not alone — he was virtually flanked by OpenAI’s three independent board members.

Instantly, Mr. Altman knew something was wrong.

Unbeknownst to Mr. Altman, Dr. Sutskever and the three board members had been whispering behind his back for months. They believed Mr. Altman had been dishonest and should no longer lead a company that was driving the A.I. race. On a hush-hush 15-minute video call the previous afternoon, the board members had voted one by one to push Mr. Altman out of OpenAI.

Now they were delivering the news. Shocked that he was being fired from a start-up he had helped found, Mr. Altman widened his eyes and then asked, “How can I help?” The board members urged him to support an interim chief executive. He assured them that he would.

Within hours, Mr. Altman changed his mind and declared war on OpenAI’s board.

His ouster was the culmination of years of simmering tensions at OpenAI that pit those alarmed by A.I.’s power against others who saw the technology as a once-in-a-lifetime profit and prestige bonanza. As divisions deepened, the organization’s leaders sniped and turned on one another. That led to a boardroom brawl that ultimately showed who has the upper hand in A.I.’s future development: Silicon Valley’s tech elite and deep-pocketed corporate interests.

The drama embroiled Microsoft, which had committed $13 billion to OpenAI and weighed in to protect its investment. Many top Silicon Valley executives and investors, including the chief executive of Airbnb, also mobilized to support Mr. Altman.

Some fought back from Mr. Altman’s $27 million mansion in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, lobbying through social media and voicing their displeasure in private text threads, according to interviews with more than 25 people with knowledge of the events. Many of their conversations and the details of their confrontations have not been previously reported.

At the center of the storm was Mr. Altman, a 38-year-old multimillionaire. A vegetarian who raises cattle and a tech leader with little engineering training, he is driven by a hunger for power more than by money, a longtime mentor said. And even as Mr. Altman became A.I.’s public face, charming heads of state with predictions of the technology’s positive effects, he privately angered those who believed he ignored its potential dangers.

OpenAI’s chaos has raised new questions about the people and companies behind the A.I. revolution. If the world’s premier A.I. start-up can so easily plunge into crisis over backbiting behavior and slippery ideas of wrongdoing, can it be trusted to advance a technology that may have untold effects on billions of people?

“OpenAI’s aura of invulnerability has been shaken,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor who helped found the A.I. labs at Google and the Chinese tech giant Baidu.

An Incendiary Mix
From the moment it was created in 2015, OpenAI was primed to combust.

The San Francisco lab was founded by Elon Musk, Mr. Altman, Dr. Sutskever and nine others. Its goal was to build A.I. systems to benefit all of humanity. Unlike most tech start-ups, it was established as a nonprofit with a board that was responsible for making sure it fulfilled that mission.

The board was stacked with people who had competing A.I. philosophies. On one side were those who worried about A.I.’s dangers, like Mr. Musk, who left OpenAI in a huff in 2018. On the other were Mr. Altman and those focused more on the technology’s potential benefits.

In 2019, Mr. Altman — who had extensive contacts in Silicon Valley as president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator — became OpenAI’s chief executive. He would own just a tiny stake in the start-up.

“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does,” said Paul Graham, a founder of Y Combinator and Mr. Altman’s mentor. “The other is that he likes power.”

Mr. Altman quickly changed OpenAI’s direction by creating a for-profit subsidiary and raising $1 billion from Microsoft, spurring questions about how that would work with the board’s mission of safe A.I.

Earlier this year, departures shrank OpenAI’s board to six people from nine. Three — Mr. Altman, Dr. Sutskever and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president — were founders of the lab. The others were independent members.

Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, was part of the effective altruist community that believes A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Adam D’Angelo had long worked with A.I. as the chief executive of the question-and-answer website Quora. Tasha McCauley, an adjunct scientist at the RAND Corporation, had worked on tech and A.I. policy and governance issues and taught at Singularity University, which was named for the moment when machines can no longer be controlled by their creators.

They were united by a concern that A.I. could become more intelligent than humans.

Tensions Mount
After OpenAI introduced ChatGPT last year, the board became jumpier.

As millions of people used the chatbot to write love letters and brainstorm college essays, Mr. Altman embraced the spotlight. He appeared with Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, at tech events. He met President Biden and embarked on a 21-city global tour, hobnobbing with leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

Yet as Mr. Altman raised OpenAI’s profile, some board members worried that ChatGPT’s success was antithetical to creating safe A.I., two people familiar with their thinking said.

Their concerns were compounded when they clashed with Mr. Altman in recent months over who should fill the board’s three open seats.

In September, Mr. Altman met investors in the Middle East to discuss an A.I. chip project. The board was concerned that he wasn’t sharing all his plans with it, three people familiar with the matter said.

Dr. Sutskever, 37, who helped pioneer modern A.I., was especially disgruntled. He had become fearful that the technology could wipe out humanity. He also believed that Mr. Altman was bad-mouthing the board to OpenAI executives, two people with knowledge of the situation said. Other employees have also complained to the board about Mr. Altman’s behavior.

In October, Mr. Altman promoted another OpenAI researcher to the same level as Dr. Sutskever, who saw it as a slight. Dr. Sutskever told several board members that he might quit, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The board interpreted the move as an ultimatum to choose between him and Mr. Altman, the people said.

Dr. Sutskever’s lawyer said it was “categorically false” that he had threatened to quit.

Another conflict erupted in October when Ms. Toner published a paper, “Decoding Intentions: Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals,” at her Georgetown think tank. In it, she and her co-authors praised Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, for delaying a product release and avoiding the “frantic corner-cutting that the release of ChatGPT appeared to spur.”

Mr. Altman was displeased, especially since the Federal Trade Commission had begun investigating OpenAI’s data collection. He called Ms. Toner, saying her paper “could cause problems.”

The paper was merely academic, Ms. Toner said, offering to write an apology to OpenAI’s board. Mr. Altman accepted. He later emailed OpenAI’s executives, telling them that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote.

Mr. Altman called other board members and said Ms. McCauley wanted Ms. Toner removed from the board, people with knowledge of the conversations said. When board members later asked Ms. McCauley if that was true, she said that was “absolutely false.”

“This significantly differs from Sam’s recollection of these conversations,” an OpenAI spokeswoman said, adding that the company was looking forward to an independent review of what transpired.

Some board members believed that Mr. Altman was trying to pit them against each other. Last month, they decided to act.

Dialing in from Washington, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, they voted on Nov. 16 to dismiss Mr. Altman. OpenAI’s outside lawyer advised them to limit what they said publicly about the removal.

Fearing that if Mr. Altman got wind of their plan he would marshal his network against them, they acted quickly and secretly.

What Did Sam Do?
When news broke of Mr. Altman’s firing on Nov. 17, a text landed in a private WhatsApp group of more than 100 chief executives of Silicon Valley companies, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Dropbox’s Drew Houston.

“Sam is out,” the text said.

The thread immediately blew up with questions: What did Sam do?

That same query was being asked at Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor. As Mr. Altman was being fired, Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, got a call from Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer. She told him that in a matter of minutes, OpenAI’s board would announce that it had canned Mr. Altman and that she was the interim chief.

Mr. Scott immediately asked someone at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to get Mr. Nadella, the chief executive, out of a meeting he was having with top lieutenants. Shocked, Mr. Nadella called Ms. Murati about the OpenAI board’s reasoning, three people with knowledge of the call said. In a statement, OpenAI’s board had said only that Mr. Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications” with the board. Ms. Murati didn’t have answers.

Mr. Nadella then phoned Mr. D’Angelo, OpenAI’s lead independent director. What could Mr. Altman have done, Mr. Nadella asked, to cause the board to act so abruptly? Was there anything nefarious?

“No,” Mr. D’Angelo replied, speaking in generalities. Mr. Nadella remained confused.

Turning the Tables
Shortly after Mr. Altman’s removal from OpenAI, a friend reached out to him. It was Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive.

Mr. Chesky asked Mr. Altman what he could do to help. Mr. Altman, who was still in Las Vegas, said he wanted to talk.

The two men had met in 2009 at Y Combinator. When they spoke on Nov. 17, Mr. Chesky peppered Mr. Altman with questions about why OpenAI’s board had terminated him. Mr. Altman said he was as uncertain as everyone else.

At the same time, OpenAI’s employees were demanding details. The board dialed into a call that afternoon to talk to about 15 OpenAI executives, who crowded into a conference room at the company’s offices in a former mayonnaise factory in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.

The board members said that Mr. Altman had lied to the board, but that they couldn’t elaborate for legal reasons.

“This is a coup,” one employee shouted.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, accused the board of violating its fiduciary responsibilities. “It cannot be your duty to allow the company to die,” he said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.

Ms. Toner replied, “The destruction of the company could be consistent with the board’s mission.”

OpenAI’s executives insisted that the board resign that night or they would all leave. Mr. Brockman, 35, OpenAI’s president, had already quit.

The support gave Mr. Altman ammunition. He flirted with creating a new start-up, but Mr. Chesky and Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor and friend, urged Mr. Altman to reconsider.

“You should be willing to fight back at least a little more,” Mr. Chesky told him.

Mr. Altman decided to take back what he felt was his.

Pressuring the Board
After flying back from Las Vegas, Mr. Altman awoke on Nov. 18 in his San Francisco home, with sweeping views of Alcatraz Island. Just before 8 a.m., his phone rang. It was Mr. D’Angelo and Ms. McCauley.

The board members were rattled by the meeting with OpenAI executives the day before. Customers were considering shifting to rival platforms. Google was already trying to poach top talent, two people with knowledge of the efforts said.

Mr. D’Angelo and Ms. McCauley asked Mr. Altman to help stabilize the company.

That day, more than two dozen supporters showed up at Mr. Altman’s house to lobby OpenAI’s board to reinstate him. They set up laptops on his kitchen’s white marble countertops and spread out across his living room. Ms. Murati joined them and told the board that she could no longer be interim chief executive.

To capitalize on the board’s vulnerability, Mr. Altman posted on X: “i love openai employees so much.” Ms. Murati and dozens of employees replied with emojis of colored hearts.

Yet even as the board considered bringing Mr. Altman back, it wanted concessions. That included bringing on new members who could control Mr. Altman. The board encouraged the addition of Bret Taylor, Twitter’s former chairman, who quickly won everyone’s approval and agreed to help the parties negotiate. As insurance, the board also sought another interim chief executive in case talks with Mr. Altman broke down.

By then, Mr. Altman had gathered more allies. Mr. Nadella, now confident that Mr. Altman was not guilty of malfeasance, threw Microsoft’s weight behind him.

In a call with Mr. Altman that day, Mr. Nadella proposed another idea. What if Mr. Altman joined Microsoft? The $2.8 trillion company had the computing power for anything that he wanted to build.

Mr. Altman now had two options: negotiating a return to OpenAI on his terms or taking OpenAI’s talent with him to Microsoft.

The Board Stands Firm
By Nov. 19, Mr. Altman was so confident that he would be reappointed chief executive that he and his allies gave the board a deadline: Resign by 10 a.m. or everyone would leave.

Mr. Altman went to OpenAI’s office so he could be there when his return was announced. Mr. Brockman also showed up with his wife, Anna. (The couple had married at OpenAI’s office in a 2019 ceremony officiated by Dr. Sutskever. The ring bearer was a robotic hand.)

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/09/inside-openais-crisis-over-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence/

SPACE FORCE has been gearing up for the X-37B model plane to take it’s highest test flight to date.

The X-37B model plane has been dubbed a secret space plane and is set to launch using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on December 10.

The first five launches of the space shuttle were done using an Atlas V rocket, but has since switched to the Falcon system for trips six and now seven.

The Falcon Heavy has three Falcon 9 cores, with 27 engines in all generating five million pounds of thrust.

With the amplitude of this power, it is expected that X-37B will be taking its highest flight yet.

It is believed that there are two of these planes in existence.

Built by Boeing, the X-37B is similar to previous space shuttles in many mechanical and functional manners, but has a key difference.

This new model is considerably smaller, so small that it could fit in the payload bay of an older modeled space shuttle.

December 10 will mark the seventh launch for the space plane (OTV-7), its first having been in 2010.

OTV-7 of the X-37B is set to launch at 8:14 pm EST from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

With six successful launches, the X-37B has spent nearly 3,774 total days in space; 908 days being the longest consecutive day trip.

“This seventh flight of the X-37B continues to demonstrate the innovative spirit of the United States Space Force,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.

Official statements have revealed that “test new orbital regimes,” are planned to be tested as well.

Previous launches have had different focuses, including providing an “opportunity to launch a spacecraft designed and operated by cadets at U.S. Air Force Academy.”

Source: https://www.the-sun.com/tech/9823593/x-37b-orbital-test-vehicle-space-plane/

A team at Google has proposed using artificial intelligence technology to create a “bird’s-eye” view of users’ lives using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches.

Dubbed “Project Ellmann,” after biographer and literary critic Richard David Ellmann, the idea would be to use LLMs like Gemini to ingest search results, spot patterns in a user’s photos, create a chatbot and “answer previously impossible questions,” according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. Ellmann’s aim, it states, is to be “Your Life Story Teller.”

It’s unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post.

Project Ellman is just one of many ways Google is proposing to create or improve its products with AI technology. On Wednesday, Google launched its latest “most capable” and advanced AI model yet, Gemini, which in some cases outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4. The company is planning to license Gemini to a wide range of customers through Google Cloud for them to use in their own applications. One of Gemini’s standout features is that it’s multimodal, meaning it can process and understand information beyond text, including images, video and audio.

A product manager for Google
Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird’s-eye approach to one’s life story a reality.

Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user’s photos more deeply than “just pixels with labels and metadata,” the presentation states. It proposes to be able to identify a series of moments like university years, Bay Area years and years as a parent.

“We can’t answer tough questions or tell good stories without a bird’s-eye view of your life,” one description reads alongside a photo of a small boy playing with a dog in the dirt.

“We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment,” a presentation slide reads. “When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear.”

The presentation said large language models could infer moments like a user’s child’s birth. “This LLM can use knowledge from higher in the tree to infer that this is Jack’s birth, and that he’s James and Gemma’s first and only child.”

“One of the reasons that an LLM is so powerful for this bird’s-eye approach, is that it’s able to take unstructured context from all different elevations across this tree, and use it to improve how it understands other regions of the tree,” a slide reads, alongside an illustration of a user’s various life “moments” and “chapters.”

Presenters gave another example of determining one user had recently been to a class reunion. “It’s exactly 10 years since he graduated and is full of faces not seen in 10 years so it’s probably a reunion,” the team inferred in its presentation.

The team also demonstrated “Ellmann Chat,” with the description: “Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?”

It displayed a sample chat in which a user asks “Do I have a pet?” To which it answers that yes, the user has a dog which wore a red raincoat, then offered the dog’s name and the names of the two family members it’s most often seen with.

Another example for the chat was a user asking when their siblings last visited. Another asked it to list similar towns to where they live because they are thinking of moving. Ellmann offered answers to both.

Ellmann also presented a summary of the user’s eating habits, other slides showed. “You seem to enjoy Italian food. There are several photos of pasta dishes, as well as a photo of a pizza.” It also said that the user seemed to enjoy new food because one of their photos had a menu with a dish it didn’t recognize.

The technology also determined what products the user was considering purchasing, their interests, work and travel plans based on the user’s screenshots, the presentation stated. It also suggested it would be able to know their favorite websites and apps, giving examples Google Docs, Reddit and Instagram.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC: “Google Photos has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we’re excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences. This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users’ privacy and safety as our top priority.”

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/08/google-weighing-project-ellmann-uses-gemini-ai-to-tell-life-stories.html

WhatsApp on Friday (Dec 8), revealed the details of its latest feature: the ability for users to send voice messages that automatically disappear after being listened to.

While the “View Once” feature has been in place for photos and videos since 2021, the messaging platform is now extending this privacy-focused functionality to audio messages.

Notably, these messages cannot be forwarded, saved, or starred.

What does it mean?
In practice, this means heightened privacy for sensitive voice messages, offering users additional reassurance when sharing information like credit card details. But on the different side of the same coin, this also means that the trail of potentially incriminating voice messages will cease to exist, once this functionality becomes part of popular messenger app in the smartphones all over the world.

But WhatsApp said that recipients have a 14-day window to open and view a “View Once” photo, video, or audio message. After this period, the message will expire and disappear from the chat.

For added security, WhatsApp stated that unopened “View Once” media and voice messages can be restored from backups.

Source: https://www.wionews.com/technology/whatsapp-rolls-out-view-once-voice-message-feature-667691

Europe on Friday reached a provisional deal on landmark European Union rules governing the use of artificial intelligence including governments’ use of AI in biometric surveillance and how to regulate AI systems such as ChatGPT.

With the political agreement, the EU moves toward becoming the first major world power to enact laws governing AI. Friday’s deal between EU countries and European Parliament members came after nearly 15 hours of negotiations that followed an almost 24-hour debate the previous day.

The two sides are set to hash out details in the coming days, which could change the shape of the final legislation.

“Europe has positioned itself as a pioneer, understanding the importance of its role as a global standard setter. This is yes, I believe, a historical day,” European Commissioner Thierry Breton told a press conference.

The accord requires foundation models such as ChatGPT and general purpose AI systems (GPAI) to comply with transparency obligations before they are put on the market. These include drawing up technical documentation, complying with EU copyright law and disseminating detailed summaries about the content used for training.

High-impact foundation models with systemic risk will have to conduct model evaluations, assess and mitigate systemic risks, conduct adversarial testing, report to the European Commission on serious incidents, ensure cybersecurity and report on their energy efficiency.

GPAIs with systemic risk may rely on codes of practice to comply with the new regulation.

Governments can only use real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces in cases of victims of certain crimes, prevention of genuine, present, or foreseeable threats, such as terrorist attacks, and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/stalled-eu-ai-act-talks-set-resume-2023-12-08/

The two companies have sought to telegraph their independence, but it’s not clear regulators will buy the argument.

With global regulators examining Microsoft Corp.’s $13 billion investment in OpenAI, the software giant has a simple argument it hopes will resonate with antitrust officials: It doesn’t own a traditional stake in the buzzy startup so can’t be said to control it.

When Microsoft negotiated an additional $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January, it opted for an unusual arrangement, people familiar with the matter said at the time. Rather than buy a chunk of the cutting-edge artificial intelligence lab, it cut a deal to receive almost half of OpenAI’s financial returns until the investment is repaid up to a pre-determined cap, one of the people said. The unorthodox structure was concocted because OpenAI is a capped for-profit company housed inside a non-profit organization.

It’s not clear regulators see a distinction, however. On Friday the UK Competition and Markets Authority said it was gathering information from stakeholders to determine whether the collaboration between the two firms threatens competition in the UK, home of Google’s AI research lab Deepmind. The US Federal Trade Commission is also examining the nature of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and whether it may violate antitrust laws, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The inquiries are preliminary and the agency hasn’t opened a formal investigation, according to the person, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

Microsoft didn’t report the transaction to the agency because the investment in OpenAI doesn’t amount to control of the company under US law, the person said. OpenAI is a non-profit and acquisitions of non-corporate entities aren’t reported under US merger law, regardless of value. Agency officials are analyzing the situation and assessing what its options are.

“While details of our agreement remain confidential, it is important to note that Microsoft does not own any portion of OpenAI and is simply entitled to a share of profit distributions,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. Earlier Friday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said “the only thing that has changed is that Microsoft will now have a non-voting observer on OpenAI’s board.” He described its relationship with OpenAI as “very different” from Google’s outright acquisition of DeepMind in the UK.

“Our partnership with Microsoft empowers us to pursue our research and develop safe and beneficial AI tools for everyone, while remaining independent and operating competitively. Their non-voting board observer does not provide them with governing authority or control over OpenAI’s operations,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in a statement.

From the beginning, Microsoft and OpenAI took pains to telegraph the two companies’ independence. Microsoft hoped to reassure investors and customers that it’s not overly reliant on one partner. OpenAI didn’t want employees, customers and other investors thinking it was merely an outpost of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft. That careful positioning was upended last month with the firing of OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and the startup’s near implosion.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/amid-antitrust-probe-microsoft-says-it-has-no-stake-in-openai-101702089220230.html

‘The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-3 have been completely met.’

The spacecraft that ferried India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander-rover duo to the moon has returned home — sort of.

In a surprise announcement on Monday (Dec. 4), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said it had moved Chandrayaan-3’s propulsion module out of lunar orbit and placed it high above Earth for a bonus mission, where it now survives on leftover fuel. The new experiment will demonstrate technologies that will help Indian scientists bring samples from the moon to Earth someday, ISRO said.

The propulsion module, a box-shaped component of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft powered by solar panels, now circles Earth every two weeks. ISRO has not revealed what it plans to do with the spacecraft when it runs out of fuel.

On Nov. 22, the module reached its closest point to Earth, coming within 95,000 miles (154,000 kilometers) of the planet’s surface, ISRO officials said. That was still high enough up, however, to be safely away from other satellites.

“As per current orbit prediction, there is no threat of close approach with any operational Earth-orbiting satellites,” said ISRO.

Earlier this year, the propulsion module completed its main task when it placed Chandrayaan-3’s robotic lander and rover in a tight orbit around the moon, prior to their historic landing near the south pole in August. The module then moved to a slightly higher orbit around the moon for a science experiment, studying our planet to assist with the search for Earth-like exoplanets.

By the end of one day on the moon — about a month to us Earthlings — the module had 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of fuel left after its primary operations. By then, the primary objectives of the mission had been accomplished, so ISRO decided to bring it back to Earth, the space agency said in the Dec. 4 statement.

In early October, the module was boosted from 93 miles (150 km) above the surface of the moon to a little over 3,100 miles (5,000 km). To gain the momentum required to return to Earth, it whirled around the moon four times before making its way home, said ISRO.

Chandrayaan-3’s robotic explorers notched several huge milestones and collected valuable science data after landing in August at a spot that India calls Shiv Shakti Point. (The moniker is yet to be accepted by the International Astronomical Union, the authority responsible for assigning official names to celestial objects and their landmarks.)

Source: https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-module-returns-earth-orbit

Google (GOOG, GOOGL) on Wednesday debuted its new Gemini generative AI model. The platform serves as Google’s answer to Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI’s GPT-4, and according to DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, it’s the company’s “most capable and general model” yet.

Gemini is what is referred to as a natively multimodal model, meaning it can analyze text, audio, video, images, and code. While other multimodal offerings exist, Google says Gemini stands apart because the model was designed to take all of those mediums into account from the beginning.

Other platforms, the company said, train separate models to tackle things like text, video, and photos and then string them together into a single model.

This difference, according to Hassabis, means that Gemini can better understand multimodal data and produce better results for everything from handwritten content to images and videos.

As part of the announcement, Google released a series of videos demonstrating Gemini’s capabilities. In one video, a presenter showed a program running Gemini with a drawing of a blue duck as well as a rubber blue duck, both of which the AI was able to identify.

In another demonstration, the presenter showed the AI a hand-drawn picture of a roller coaster without a loop and another one with a loop. When the presenter asked which one is likely more fun, the AI said the one with the loop, which is the right answer unless you hate going around loops or on roller coasters in general.

Another example showed how parents can use Gemini to help their children with their homework. Not only is the AI able to read a student’s written answers to math questions, but it is also able to tell if they are correct or not and explain where the student went wrong and why.

On the coding front, Google said Gemini is one of the leading models for coding around, claiming that the AI can understand programming languages such as Python, Java, C++, and Go.

Google is rolling out three different versions of Gemini: Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro, and Gemini Nano. Gemini Ultra is the top-of-the-line data center version of the AI model meant for what Google says are highly complex tasks. Gemini Pro is the mid-range version of the model, while Nano is the version designed to run on devices such as Google’s Pixel 8 Pro.

The company says the smartphone will use Gemini Nano to power Summarize in its Recorder app, which will allow it to understand content in a recording and provide a bulleted summary. The model will also power Smart Reply in Gboard starting with WhatsApp and eventually come to other apps later next year.

Source: https://www.aol.com/google-debuts-powerful-gemini-generative-150025064.html

Hackers have been able to gain access to personal information from about 6.9 million users of genetic testing company 23andMe, using customers’ old passwords.

In some cases this included family trees, birth years and geographic locations, the company said.

After weeks of speculation the firm has put a number on the breach, with more than half of its customers affected.

The stolen data does not include DNA records.

23andMe is a giant of the growing ancestor-tracing industry. It offers genetic testing from DNA, with ancestry breakdown and personalised health insights.

The biotechnology company, which is based in South San Francisco, was not hacked itself but cyber-criminals logged into about 14,000 individual accounts, or 0.1% of customers, by using email and password details previously exposed in other hacks.

As was first reported by Tech Crunch, the company has acknowledged that by accessing those accounts, hackers were then able to find their way into “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry”.

The criminals downloaded not just the data from those accounts but the private information of all other users they had links to across the sprawling family trees on the website.

The stolen data includes information like names, how each person is linked and in some cases birth years, locations, pictures, addresses and the percentage of DNA shared with relatives.

As first reported by TechCrunch, the hackers were able to access the family tree profile information of about 1.4 million other customers participating in the DNA relatives feature, including display names and relationship labels.

One batch of data was advertised on a hacking forum as a list of people with Jewish ancestry, sparking concerns of targeted attacks.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67624182

Our brains don’t look that special when looking at their relative size compared to our closest animal relatives. To understand human intelligence, scientists are now looking deeper.

Arthur Keith was one of those misbegotten researchers who have turned out to be wrong in many of the things they said. A prominent anatomist and anthropologist in the early 20th Century, he was a proponent of scientific racism and opposed racial mixing. At least partly because of his racial views, he was convinced humans originated in Europe, not Africa as is now universally accepted. And he was a strong supporter of Piltdown Man, a notorious hoax involving fake fossils.

Keith also described a notion that became known as the cerebral Rubicon. Noting that humans have larger brains than other primates, he argued that human intelligence only became possible once our brains reached a particular threshold size. For Homo, the genus to which we belong, he thought the minimum volume was around 600-750 cubic cm (37-46 cubic inches). For our species Homo sapiens, it was 900 cubic cm (55 cubic inches). Any smaller, the argument went, and the brain wouldn’t have enough computational power to support human reasoning.

It’s certainly true that Homo sapiens, as a species, have large brains. But what this means is increasingly murky. Evidence from palaeoanthropology suggests that some species, such as the “hobbits” Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi, performed complex behaviours despite having fairly small brains. These reports are contentious. However, there is also gathering evidence from genetics and neuroscience that brain size is far from the be-all-and-end-all of intelligence.

Instead, changes to the brain’s wiring diagram, to the shapes of neurons, and even to when and where certain genes are turned on, are all equally if not more important. Size, as we might have guessed, isn’t everything.

Small-brained smarts

It’s certainly true that the human brain is unusually large. This remains true even if you look at brain size relative to the size of our bodies. “Humans are by far the primates with the largest brain,” says neuroscientist Martijn van den Heuvel of the Free University Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

It’s also true that if you look at the last six million years of human evolution, there is a trend towards increasing brain size. Early hominins like Sahelanthropus and Australopithecus have relatively small brains, but the first Homo species have bigger ones, and Homo sapiens brains are bigger still.

However, when you look more closely at the details, the story isn’t so simple. Two species stand out for their unusually small brains: Homo floresiensis, also known as the real-life “hobbit”, and Homo naledi. Both are 21st-Century discoveries.

H. floresiensis was first described in 2004. They were just 1m (3ft) tall and lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia within the last few hundred thousand years. They died out at least 50,000 years ago. The first specimen had a brain measuring just 380 cubic cm (23 cubic inches) or perhaps 426 cubic cm (26 cubic inches), putting her on a par with chimpanzees.

There is solid evidence that H. floresiensis made and used stone tools, much as other Homo species did. Early studies also reported evidence of burning, suggesting the hobbits had control of fire. However, later re-analyses suggested the fires were all lit more recently than 41,000 years ago – suggesting they were made by modern humans, not the hobbits. Nevertheless, the stone tools alone are evidence that hobbits behaved in ways that chimpanzees cannot.

A decade later, researchers in South Africa described Homo naledi. The remains were found deep in the Rising Star cave system, which only experienced cavers can reach. Like the hobbits, H. naledi had small brains – but they also lived recently, between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Lead researcher Lee Berger and his colleagues have described soot marks on the cave ceilings, which they interpret as evidence H. naledi had control of fire. It’s thought that they may have lit torches to navigate in the darkness of the deep caves.

In 2021, Berger’s team described the skull of a H. naledi child, which seemed to have been placed on a shelf-like formation in an extremely inaccessible chamber. They interpreted this as a deliberate burial. In July, they released a follow-up claiming that several skeletons had been interred in the floor of the cave, adding to the evidence for funerary behaviour.

This latest study caused a furore among palaeoanthropologists, partly because Berger announced his results before the paper had gone through the usual scientific process of peer review – including in a high-profile Netflix documentary called Unknown: Cave of Bones. When other researchers did peer review the study, some were extremely critical, saying the study “does not meet the standards of our field” and that “there is a significant amount of missing information”.

Connection patterns found in humans but not chimpanzees were often associated with a higher risk of schizophrenia
The debate over the behaviours and capabilities of H. floresiensis and H. naledi, along with their implications for the role of brain size, will likely continue for years to come. Meanwhile, another set of researchers have tackled human brain evolution in a different way: instead of examining fossilised bones, they study actual brains.

Anatomy of the mind

The first thing to note is that, although on average humans have unusually large brains, size does vary. “There are patients that have smaller brain size,” says neurobiologist Debra Silver at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. People with microcephaly – where their head is abnormally small – often have intellectual disabilities and other symptoms. Nevertheless, says Silver, “they’re still human”. There are also cases where people are missing large chunks of their brains, and show relatively few ill effects

Clearly, something else is going on. One possibility is the brain’s wiring diagram or “connectome”. The human brain contains around 86 billion specialised cells called neurons, which connect to each other and send signals back and forth. Many neuroscientists suspect that changes to the pattern of connections are more important for the development of human cognition than anything as crude as the brain’s volume.

“Even small changes in connectivity, especially in long range connectivity, it really leads to profound cognitive and behavioural changes,” says neuroscientist Nenad Sestan at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

In particular, some parts of the human brain receive inputs from many other regions. This allows them to integrate multiple pieces of information, and make decisions accordingly. The prefrontal cortex, at the outermost front of the brain, is one such region. Sestan calls it “the CEO of the brain”.

“A little bit more of this integrative circuitry is really beneficial for human cognitive abilities,” agrees van den Heuvel. In a study published in May, his team showed that human and chimpanzee brains share many patterns of connectivity, but humans have stronger connectivity between regions involved in language.

These integrated areas of the brain have also been associated with psychiatric disorders. For example, in 2019 van den Heuvel’s team showed that connection patterns found in humans but not chimpanzees were often associated with a higher risk of schizophrenia. This suggests humans have made an evolutionary trade-off: greater intelligence in exchange for a higher risk of poor mental health.

Evidence like this suggests the connectome is important. But what about the neurons themselves: are human neurons different to chimpanzees’?

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231204-human-intelligence-its-how-your-brain-is-wired-rather-than-size-that-matters

The Earth’s magnetic field plays a big role in protecting people from hazardous radiation and geomagnetic activity that could affect satellite communication and the operation of power grids. And it moves.

Scientists have studied and tracked the motion of the magnetic poles for centuries. The historical movement of these poles indicates a change in the global geometry of the Earth’s magnetic field. It may even indicate the beginning of a field reversal – a “flip” between the north and south magnetic poles.

I’m a physicist who studies the interaction between the planets and space. While the north magnetic pole moving a little bit isn’t a big deal, a reversal could have a big impact on Earth’s climate and our modern technology. But these reversals don’t happen instantaneously. Instead, they occur over thousands of years.

Magnetic field generation
So how are magnetic fields like the one around Earth generated?

Magnetic fields are generated by moving electric charges. A material that enables charges to easily move in it is called a conductor. Metal is one example of a conductor – people use it to transfer electric currents from one place to the other. The electric current itself is simply negative charges called electrons moving through the metal. This current generates a magnetic field.

Layers of conducting material can be found in the Earth’s liquid iron core. Currents of charges move throughout the core, and the liquid iron is also moving and circulating in the core. These movements generate the magnetic field.

Earth isn’t the only planet with a magnetic field – gas giant planets like Jupiter have a conducting metallic hydrogen layer that generates their magnetic fields.

The movement of these conducting layers inside planets results in two types of fields. Larger motions, such as large-scale rotations with the planet, lead to a symmetric magnetic field with a north and a south pole – similar to a toy magnet.

These conducting layers may have some local irregular motions due to local turbulence or smaller flows that do not follow the large-scale pattern. These irregularities will manifest in some small anomalies in the planet’s magnetic field or places where the field deviates from being a perfect dipole field.

These small-scale deviations in the magnetic field can actually lead to changes in the large-scale field over time and potentially even a complete reversal of the polarity of the dipole field, where the north becomes south and vice versa. The designations of “north” and “south” on the magnetic field refer to their opposite polarities – they’re not related to geographic north and south.

The Earth’s magnetosphere, a protective bubble
The Earth’s magnetic field creates a magnetic “bubble” called the magnetosphere above the uppermost part of the atmosphere, the ionosphere layer.

The magnetosphere plays a major role in protecting people. It shields and deflects damaging, high-energy, cosmic-ray radiation, which is created in star explosions and moves constantly through the universe. The magnetosphere also interacts with solar wind, which is a flow of magnetized gas sent out from the Sun.

The magnetosphere and ionosphere’s interaction with magnetized solar wind creates what scientists call space weather. Usually, the solar wind is mild and there’s little to no space weather.

However, there are times when the Sun sheds large magnetized clouds of gas called coronal mass ejections into space. If these coronal mass ejections make it to Earth, their interaction with the magnetosphere can generate geomagnetic storms. Geomagnetic storms can create auroras, which happen when a stream of energized particles hits the atmosphere and lights up.

During space weather events, there’s more hazardous radiation near the Earth. This radiation can potentially harm satellites and astronauts. Space weather can also damage large conducting systems, such as major pipelines and power grids, by overloading currents in these systems.

Source: https://studyfinds.org/earths-magnetic-field-flip/

Spotify had posted an operating profit of €32 million in Q3 2023, marking the company’s first profitable quarter in two years.

Audio streaming service Spotify is reducing its total headcount by around 17 percent across the company, CEO Daniel Ek said in a note to employees on December 4, in its latest efforts to rein in costs and become “both productive and efficient”

This is atleast the third round of job cuts at the company, and the latest round of layoffs is expected to impact about 1,500 people. This announcement comes after Spotify had posted an operating profit of €32 million in Q3 2023, its first profitable quarter in two years.

“I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance. We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives” Ek said in the note.

“Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities” he said.

Spotify had previously cut around 600 jobs (6 percent of its global workforce) in January 2023 and around 200 jobs (2 percent of its workforce) in June 2023. The company had also merged its Parcast and Gimlet podcasting studios into a single Spotify Studios unit.

In the note, Ek said that the company’s cost structure is still too big for where they need to be, despite their efforts to reduce costs in the past year. The company was “more productive but less efficient by most metrics” he said.

“While we have done some work to mitigate this challenge and become more efficient in 2023, we still have a ways to go before we are both productive and efficient” Ek said “Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact”

Ek mentioned that more people need to be focused on delivering for its key stakeholders – creators and consumers.

Going forward, Spotify plans to opt for a leaner structure that will allow the firm to reinvest its profits back into its business in a more strategic manner, Ek said.

“We’re still committed to investing and making bold bets, but now, with a more focused approach, ensuring Spotify’s continued profitability and ability to innovate” he said.

Source: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/audio-streaming-service-spotify-to-cut-17-of-global-workforce-11851791.html

Bill Nelson, the Administrator of NASA, congratulated India for accomplishing Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully, a feat that no other nation has achieved.

India is being hailed globally to for having become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the South Pole of the moon. During his visit to India, Bill Nelson, the Administrator of NASA, congratulated India for accomplishing a feat that no other nation has achieved through the Chandrayaan-3 mission. He acknowledged India’s significant contribution to lunar exploration, emphasizing the nation’s success where others have faced challenges.

What did NASA chief Bill Nelson say?

Speaking to news agency ANI, Nelson praised India’s lunar exploration milestone, stating, “You deserve every bit of praise for this accomplishment. It’s very significant.” The successful moon landing marks a pivotal moment in space exploration, showcasing India’s capabilities in advancing space technology.

Nelson further discussed the collaborative efforts between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in the NISAR mission.

NISAR mission

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission is a joint endeavor aimed at observing Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses. This collaborative mission seeks to provide crucial information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater, ultimately contributing to the understanding of climate change.

Highlighting the significance of the NISAR mission, Nelson explained, “We will have a complete 3D composite model of what is exactly happening to the Earth.” The mission, scheduled for launch in 2024, will utilize the expertise of both agencies. NASA will provide the L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payload system, while ISRO will contribute the S-Band SAR payload. The mission’s primary objective is to measure Earth’s changing landscapes on a global scale, observing land and ice-covered surfaces with remarkable regularity.

Source: https://tech.hindustantimes.com/wearables/news/nasa-chief-bill-nelson-heaps-praise-on-isro-over-chandrayaan-3-mission-success-71701507993116.html

Apple discovered security gaps in WebKit, the company’s web browser engine

Tech giant Apple has released another update for iOS, just weeks after dropping the landmark 17.1.1.

iOS 17.1.2 was made available to the public on Nov. 30 and aims to patch two possible security exploits documented in 17.1.1.

“This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users,” Apple said in the rollout of the new version.

The company is urging its customers to download the update as soon as possible.

Apple was expected to release iOS 17.2 later this month with new features and minor bug fixes, but security issues proved too pressing.

Security notes were published to accompany the update, noting two fixes for WebKit, Apple’s web browser engine.

The notes state that “processing web content” may “disclose sensitive information” and “may lead to arbitrary code execution.”

iOS 17.1.2 can be downloaded via the Software Update function on the iPhone’s settings app.

No new features are included in the update.

Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/apple-releases-urgent-ios-update-due-security-exploits

Chairman of Reliance Industries and president of Pandit Deendayal Energy University (PDEU) Mukesh Ambani, on Saturday, said from a $3.5 trillion economy today, India will become a $40 trillion economy by 2047 and to fuel this growth, the country will need enormous amounts of clean energy.

In his recorded message to the graduating students of the PDEU at Gandhinagar, he said India’s energy requirement is set to double by the end of this decade.

ISRO chairman Dr. S. Somnath was the chief guest on the occasion.

As India races to build a robust energy infrastructure to meet its energy goals, it faces three crucial questions. Describing it as “Energy Trilemma”, Ambani said this is about ensuring that every citizen and every economic activity in India has access to adequate, most affordable energy, rapidly transitioning from fossil fuel-based energy to clean and green energy and de-risking the expanding needs of its fast-growing economy from a volatile external environment.

Ambani said he is confident that India is capable of developing smart and sustainable solutions to address this trilemma because it has extremely talented young minds who have vowed to fight the climate crisis.

Asking the students to be fearless, he said courage is the ship that can safely sail you across the stormiest of seas. “You will commit mistakes. But let that not worry or deter you. The one who succeeds in life is the one who corrects his mistakes and continues on his mission boldly.”

He asked the students to dream big and be ambitious, be curious and hungry for new knowledge.

As many as 714 students got degree certificates at the convocation ceremony.

Ambani said Reliance Foundation has already paid over Rs 130 crore out of a total commitment of Rs 150 crore to build world-class infrastructure and transform PDEU.
In his address, Somnath focused on how India has become the undisputed world leader in space. He took pride in saying despite a very small budget for the space sector, India has made its own rocket launchers, and by 2025 the plan is to send men to space and get them back safely.

Source: https://www.theweek.in/news/biz-tech/2023/12/02/mukesh-ambani-highlights-need-for-clean-energy-to-make-india-a-dollar40-trillion-economy-by-2047.html

City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn’t know it at the time.

The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosário revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy.

Rosário told The Associated Press that he asked OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to craft a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen. He then presented it to his 35 peers on the council without making a single change or even letting them know about its unprecedented origin.

“If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosário told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23.

“It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence,” he added.

The arrival of ChatGPT on the marketplace just a year ago has sparked a global debate on the impacts of potentially revolutionary AI-powered chatbots. While some see it as a promising tool, it has also caused concerns and anxiety about the unintended or undesired impacts of a machine handling tasks currently performed by humans.

Porto Alegre, with a population of 1.3 million, is the second-largest city in Brazil’s south. The city’s council president, Hamilton Sossmeier, found out that Rosário had enlisted ChatGPT to write the proposal when the councilman bragged about the achievement on social media on Wednesday. Sossmeier initially told local media he thought it was a “dangerous precedent.”

The AI large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT work by repeatedly trying to guess the next word in a sentence and are prone to making up false information, a phenomenon sometimes called hallucination.

All chatbots sometimes introduce false information when summarizing a document, ranging from about 3% of the time for the most advanced GPT model to a rate of about 27% for one of Google’s models, according to recently published research by the tech company Vectara.

In an article published on the website of Harvard Law School’s Center of Legal Profession earlier this year, Andrew Perlman, dean at Suffolk University Law School, wrote that ChatGPT “may portend an even more momentous shift than the advent of the internet,” but also warned of its potential shortcomings.

“It may not always be able to account for the nuances and complexities of the law. Because ChatGPT is a machine learning system, it may not have the same level of understanding and judgment as a human lawyer when it comes to interpreting legal principles and precedent. This could lead to problems in situations where a more in-depth legal analysis is required,” Perlman wrote.

Porto Alegre’s Rosário wasn’t the first lawmaker in the world to test ChatGPT’s abilities. Others have done so in a more limited capacity or with less successful outcomes.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/brazil-artificial-intelligence-porto-alegre-5afd1240afe7b6ac202bb0bbc45e08d4

Astronomers have discovered a rare in-sync solar system with six planets moving like a grand cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since their birth billions of years ago.

The find, announced Wednesday, can help explain how solar systems across the Milky Way galaxy came to be. This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

A pair of planet-hunting satellites — NASA’s Tess and the European Space Agency’s Cheops — teamed up for the observations.

None of the planets in perfect synchrony are within the star’s so-called habitable zone, which means little if any likelihood of life, at least as we know it.

“Here we have a golden target” for comparison, said Adrien Leleu of the University of Geneva, who was part of an international team that published the results in the journal Nature.

This star, known as HD 110067, may have even more planets. The six found so far are roughly two to three times the size of Earth, but with densities closer to the gas giants in our own solar system. Their orbits range from nine to 54 days, putting them closer to their star than Venus is to the sun and making them exceedingly hot.

As gas planets, they’re believed to have solid cores made of rock, metal or ice, enveloped by thick layers of hydrogen, according to the scientists. More observations are needed to determine what’s in their atmospheres.

This solar system is unique because all six planets move similar to a perfectly synchronized symphony, scientists said. In technical terms, it’s known as resonance that’s “precise, very orderly,” said co-author Enric Palle of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.

The innermost planet completes three orbits for every two by its closest neighbor. It’s the same for the second- and third-closest planets, and the third- and fourth-closest planets.

The two outermost planets complete an orbit in 41 and 54.7 days, resulting in four orbits for every three. The innermost planet, meanwhile, completes six orbits in exactly the time the outermost completes one.

All solar systems, including our own, are thought to have started out like this one, according to the scientists. But it’s estimated only 1-in-100 systems have retained that synchrony, and ours isn’t one of them. Giant planets can throw things off-kilter. So can meteor bombardments, close encounters with neighboring stars and other disturbances.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/six-planets-solar-system-nasa-esa-3d67e5a1ba7cbea101d756fc6e47f33d

A Chinese tech company called Insta360 claims to be the first to send a 360-degree action camera into space. The firm released a captivating series of images showing Earth as never seen before.

These breathtaking pictures were snapped by cameras attached to a satellite launched 500 kilometers into outer space. The equipment blasted off on January 16, 2023 and is now orbiting the planet, capturing incredible 360-degree views of the stars, the Milky Way, and Earth.

Insta360 says they have achieved “the first fully exposed camera in space,” a feat which required a lot of preparation to get X2 ready for the harsh environment.

Engineers identified three obstacles to overcome before sending the 360-action camera into space. The two Insta360 X2 cameras had to be modified to withstand extreme heat and cold, radiation, and the extreme shock and vibration of rocket launch.

The project began in July 2021. It took 12 months to modify the action cameras, including six months of research and development. The solar-powered satellite was initially scheduled to launch in 2022, but had to be postponed due to COVID-19.

One year later, Insta360 X2 was able to take off. The company worked with partners Media Storm and SAR satellite company Spacety to fulfill the mission.

“The project runs on hard work, but a fair bit of luck, too. Space can be unpredictable, and there is no backup hardware or software if the camera runs into any issues,” they write on their blog. “Luckily, both cameras and their sensors are still fully functioning and offer an incredible look at outer space. This is the first time ever a 360 action camera has reached space, breaking new ground for Insta360.”

Source: https://www.spacechatter.com/2023/11/29/insta360-camera-earth-images/

The court documents also state that Meta “routinely” collected children’s personal data and information without any parental permission.

Social media giant Meta that owns popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram is now in the dock with recent court documents revealing that Meta knowingly took advantage of weaknesses in the brains of young users to make its social media platforms more addictive for kids. Not just that, the documents also state that Meta “routinely” collected children’s personal data and information without any parental permission.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have accessed the unredacted version of a legal complaint filed in a US court by a coalition of 33 US States that shows that the social media giant sought to engineer its products to capitalise on the areas of youth psychology that render teens “predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behaviour”. The complaint further says that Meta has intentionally built Facebook and Instagram with addictive features that harm young users.

AN OPEN SECRET
The complaint states that, “Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an ‘open secret’ that is routinely documented, rigorously analysed, confirmed and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.”

The reports by the international publications cite internal Meta communications and employee chats along with presentations made by Meta employees and emails sent by them, which reveal that Meta was not only in the know but also intentionally designed its products to make them addictive for teenagers and young adults.

According to The Wall Street Journal report, an internal presentation by Meta from 2020 stated how “Teens are insatiable when it comes to ‘feel good’ dopamine effects,” and according to the unredacted filing, the presentation described the company’s existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. “And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit,” the presentation stated.

‘TWEENS LIE ABOUT AGE’

According to the complaint filed by the States, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in an internal company chat in November 2021 that, “Tweens want access to Instagram, and they lie about their age to get it now.” But just a month later, in a Senate testimony, Mosseri said, “If a child is under the age of 13, they are not permitted on Instagram.”

Concerns about well-being, particularly among younger teens, were acknowledged internally within Meta. Instagram’s head of policy highlighted that various stakeholders, including researchers, experts, and parents, believe that Instagram is inherently unsuitable for younger teens due to their differing cognitive and emotional abilities compared to older teens.

Karina Newton, the Head of Policy at Instagram, in May 2021 sent an email that stated, “It’s not ‘regulators’ or ‘critics’ who think Instagram is unhealthy for young teens — it’s everyone from researchers and academic experts to parents. The blueprint of the app is inherently not designed for an age group that don’t have the same cognitive and emotional skills that older teens do.”

Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/law/story/meta-designed-instagram-to-be-addictive-for-underage-users-33-us-states-claim-before-court-2468237-2023-11-27

Google says it’s investigating Google Drive users’ reports claiming that their personal files have unexpectedly vanished from the cloud service. The company acknowledged the issue today in a new Google community support thread and believes it involves a “limited subset” of Google Drive for desktop app users. Google notes it’s a sync issue for Google Drive desktop versions 84.0.0.0 through 84.0.4.0.

One of the users, who lost all of their Google Drive data going back to May, discovered the unwelcome surprise last week and took their grievances to Google’s community support site, as reported by The Register. Google’s support team, as the user explains, walked them through a data recovery process, including attempting to backup and restore a DriveFS folder, but to no avail.

Currently, the thread has 192 users who clicked the “I have the same question” button and has a handful of panicked commenters with very similar issues. One user noted that their “IT guy” couldn’t find any traces of the files, and another noted that Google asked for an export of their drive diagnostic data.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/27/23978591/google-drive-desktop-data-loss-bug-files-missing-investigation

Have a Google account you haven’t used in a while? If you want to keep it from disappearing, you should sign in before the end of the week.

Under Google’s updated inactive-account policy, which the tech giant announced back in May, accounts that haven’t been used in at least two years could be deleted. Accounts deemed inactive will be erased in a phased-approach beginning Friday.

If you have an account that’s at risk for deletion, you should receive multiple notices from Google sent to the email affiliated with that account and its recovery address (if one exits). But if you’re still catching up on this new policy — and want to ensure that your content on Google Drive, Docs, Gmail and more is saved — here’s what you need to know.

WHY IS GOOGLE DELETING INACTIVE ACCOUNTS?
In May’s announcement, Google attributed its inactive-account update to security issues.

Accounts that haven’t been used for a long time are more likely to be compromised, the company said, noting that “forgotten or unattended accounts” typically have old passwords, often lack two-factor authentication and receive fewer security checks. As a result, these accounts could be hijacked and used for spam or other malicious content, as well as identity theft.

HOW CAN I PREVENT MY ACCOUNT FROM BEING DELETED?
The easiest way to keep your Google account active (and thus prevent it from being deleted) is to sign in at least once every two years.

Other actions that fulfill account activity requirements include sending or scrolling through emails, using Google search and watching YouTube videos (YouTube is owned by Google) all while signed into your Google account. Existing subscriptions set up through your Google account, including profiles for third-party apps and publications, can also account for activity.

Preserving content on Google Photos requires a specific sign-in. As previously announced by Google, Photos content may be similarly deleted after two years of inactivity — meaning you should open the application every so often to keep images from going into the trash.

ARE THERE ANY EXCEPTIONS TO THIS POLICY?
Only personal Google accounts that haven’t been used for two years or more will be impacted under this inactive-account update. Accounts made for organizations, like schools or companies, will not be affected, Google says.

Per Google’s online policy, other exceptions include Google accounts that manage active minor accounts, accounts containing a gift card balance as well as those that have been used to purchase Google products, apps or subscriptions that are ongoing.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/google-deletes-inactive-accounts-save-data-edfc98aa9db0607e78c826f4e3918637

MinorG1-class geomagnetic storms are possible late on November 25th through 26th when two CMEs might graze Earth’s magnetic field.

In the past week, the sun has shown increased activity, with a surge in sunspots and the launch of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) on a daily basis. Earth is continuously experiencing solar storms and there is a possibility of another one approaching today, as per Newsweek. According to NASA, one of these coronal mass ejections (CMEs) may be on a collision course with Earth.
When a CME hits the Earth, it can cause a geomagnetic storm, which is a disturbance of the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere by the solar plasma.

Huw Morgan, head of the Solar Physics group at Aberystwyth University in the UK told Newsweek. “When a large plasma storm erupts from the sun, and that storm carries a magnetic field which is oriented in an opposite direction to Earth’s magnetic field, we have a ‘perfect storm,’ and a larger geomagnetic storm.”

Minor G1-class geomagnetic storms are possible late on November 25th through 26th when two CMEs might graze Earth’s magnetic field,Spaceweather.com explained. Both CMEs were hurled into space by magnetic filaments erupting from the sun earlier this week.

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/science/nasa-warns-solar-storm-might-hit-earth-today-amid-increased-sun-activity-4604995

When it comes to the science of reaching goals, there are two schools of thought. This sentence is informed by both.

As a small-business owner, I’ve had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way.

One of those lessons came after I was forced to acknowledge something about myself when it came to my goals, both personal and professional.

Once I set a goal, things would start off great: meeting a deadline for a project. Making an adjustment to my diet. Hitting a set number of baskets during basketball practice. I’d stick to my routine, and I’d start seeing results.

That is, until I would make a very big mistake …

I’d tell someone about my goal.

Suddenly, those same goals that I was conscientiously working toward would go up in smoke. I started flaking. I was inconsistent. If I did reach the goal, it took me much longer than I originally set out for myself.

I’d had enough. I needed to use my emotional intelligence–my ability to understand and manage emotions–to help me start sticking to what I had set out to do. To help me do this, I started using a simple, research-backed sentence as a “mental prompt,” to help me get better at reaching my goals.

The sentence goes like this:

Keep your goals to yourself–or share wisely.

Why is this sentence so helpful? Let’s dive into the science that led to this sentence, and how it can help you stay true to your goals and accomplish more in business and life. (If you find value in this lesson, you might be interested in my free course, which teaches you how to build emotional intelligence in yourself and your team.)

Be careful with sharing your goals

When it comes to science-backed research, there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to sharing your goals.

The first was summed up years ago in a popular TED Talk by entrepreneur and author Derek Sivers. Sivers presented research with a surprising revelation: Whenever you tell someone a goal, you actually reduce the chances that you will reach it.

When you have a goal, explains Sivers, you have work to do. Typically, you won’t be satisfied until you’ve actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal, and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that you now experience something called “social reality.”

“The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that [the work] is already done,” says Sivers. “And then, because you’ve felt that satisfaction, you’re less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary.”

So, my experience is proof of that, right? As I shared my goals with my wife, or my brother, or a fellow business owner, I experienced this feeling of:

Oh, yeah. Look at me. I’m just this amazing specimen of hard work and self-control, aren’t I?

Until, of course, I wasn’t.

Source : https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/emotional-intelligence-how-to-reach-goal-be-successful.html

Agenda includes 1st global stock-taking of climate action on Paris Agreement goals

The annual United Nations climate summit will start next week in Dubai — a yearly meeting where countries of the world negotiate how, in the words of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to “prevent dangerous [human] interference with the climate system.”

But after nearly three decades of these meetings, do they achieve anything for the climate?

And what would make this one, COP28, a success? Here’s a closer look.

What is COP28?
COP stands for Conference of the Parties, where the parties are 197 states and one regional economic organization that have signed the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parent agreement of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The first COP was in 1995; this is the 28th annual meeting in the COP series. It will take place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.

In addition to government representatives, the meetings can be attended by accredited “observer” non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations and media. This year’s conference is expected to draw more than 70,000 delegates.

Alongside the conference, as usual, there will be an area called the “green zone,” featuring climate-related exhibits and events that are open to businesses and the general public.

This week on Cross Country Checkup, we want to know if extreme weather events have changed your shopping habits. Can we buy our way out of a climate crisis? Fill out the details on this form and send us your stories.
What’s the point of COP meetings?
While all the parties signed on to the 1992 framework that aimed to “protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind,” the framework didn’t say how that would be done.

That’s what COP summits have been working on ever since.

Is today’s weather normal? Search for your town or city to compare it to previous years
According to the UN, the goal of the annual meetings is to determine “ambition and responsibilities, and identify and assess climate measures.” In other words, countries are supposed to agree on what to do next to cut the greenhouses gases that are causing climate change.

They also need to adapt to and limit the damage from changes that are already happening, such as hotter weather and more flooding, droughts and wildfires, especially in poorer and more vulnerable parts of the world.

What would it take for Canada to hit its climate targets?
Rishi Bhandary, assistant director of the Global Economic Governance Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Centre, noted that one thing that’s particular to COP is that decisions made there require consensus — not a majority vote: “You really need to take every country along.”

What’s the focus of this particular meeting?
The specific topics that are the focus at each COP are decided ahead of time, Bhandary said. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made note of some in a speech on this past Monday, and other organizations have also listed them as things to watch.

Global stocktake
Every five years, the parties that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement are supposed to “take stock” of the world’s progress, including cutting emissions to keep global warming below 2 C above pre-industrial temperatures while “pursuing efforts” to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C.

This year’s global stocktake is the first of its kind.

It’s something that many people are keeping an eye on, including Jennifer Allan, who reports on climate negotiations for the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

The stocktake is supposed to look at “where are we, in terms of reducing emissions and building resilience to climate change and supporting developing countries,” she said. Technical fact-finding for the stocktake has taken place over the past year and a half. “Now it’s the political outcome.”

The goal is to help countries prioritize their climate actions going forward and shape their next climate plan (known as a “nationally determined contribution” or NDC), which needs to be updated every five years.

Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/cop-28-explainer-1.7037668

Astronomers have detected a massive group of sunspots being referred to as a “sunspot archipelago.” The group is made up of at least six different sunspots, and astronomers warn it could spell trouble for Earth if it bombards us with solar storms.

Scientists say that the group of sunspots is one of the largest and most densely populated sunspot regions that we have seen on the sun’s nearside to Earth in the past decade. So far the sunspots have already begun to release barrages of solar energy, which some astronomers warn could bombard Earth with solar storms.

The first part of the newly discovered sunspot archipelago is scientifically known as AR3490, and it rotated onto the sun’s nearside on November 18. The dark patch was quickly followed by another group named AR3491. Scientists were already aware that both sunspot groups existed and were tracking them using helioseismic tremors – which appear as ripples on the Sun’s surface.

After their first appearance, astronomers say the sunspots split up, giving birth to several new patches, including AR3492, AR3495, AR3496, and AR3497. This “sunspot archipelago” spans roughly 125,000 miles across the Sun’s surface and is more than 15 times wider than Earth. Additionally, we’ve already seen at least 16 C-class and 3M-class solar flares emitted from the region within the last four days or so.

Source: https://bgr.com/science/a-huge-sunspot-15-times-wider-than-earth-could-bombard-us-with-solar-storms-soon/

Space scientists seeking to understand the enigmatic origins of powerful cosmic rays have detected an extremely rare, ultra-high-energy particle that they believe traveled to Earth from beyond the Milky Way galaxy.

The energy of this subatomic particle, invisible to the naked eye, is equivalent to dropping a brick on your toe from waist height, according to the authors of new research published Thursday in the journal Science. It rivals the single most energetic cosmic ray ever observed, the “Oh-My-God” particle that was detected in 1991, the study found.

Cosmic rays are charged particles that travel through space and rain down on Earth constantly. Low-energy cosmic rays can emanate from the sun, but extremely high-energy ones are exceptional. They are thought to travel to Earth from other galaxies and extragalactic sources.

“If you hold out your hand, one (cosmic ray) goes through the palm of your hand every second, but those are really low-energy things,” said study coauthor John Matthews, a research professor at the University of Utah.

“When you get out to these really high-energy (cosmic rays), it’s more like one per square kilometer per century. It’s never going through your hand.”

Despite years of research, the exact origins of these high-energy particles still aren’t clear. They are thought to be related to the most energetic phenomena in the universe, such as those involving black holes, gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei, but the biggest discovered so far appear to originate from voids or empty space — where no violent celestial events have taken place.

Tracking high-energy cosmic rays
The recently discovered particle, nicknamed the Amaterasu particle after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, was spotted by a cosmic ray observatory in Utah’s West Desert known as the Telescope Array.

The Telescope Array, which started operating in 2008, is made up of 507 ping-pong table-size surface detectors covering 700 square kilometers (270 square miles).
It has observed more than 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays but none bigger than the Amaterasu particle, which struck the atmosphere above Utah on May 27, 2021, raining secondary particles to the ground where they were picked up by the detectors, according to the study.

“You can look …(at) how many particles hit each detector and that tells you what the energy of the primary cosmic ray was,” Matthews said.

The event triggered 23 of the surface detectors, with a calculated energy of about 244 exa-electron volts. The “Oh My God particle” detected more than 30 years ago was 320 exa-electron volts.

For reference, 1 exa-electron volt equals 1 billion gigaelectron-volts, and 1 gigaelectron volt is 1 billion electron volts. That would make the Amaterasu particle 244,000,000,000,000,000,000 electron volts. By comparison, the typical energy of an electron in the polar aurora is 40,000 electron volts, according to NASA.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/23/americas/powerful-cosmic-ray-amaterasu-particle-detected-scn/index.html

A group of Los Angeles residents heading home from Las Vegas got stranded in the desert after Google Maps reportedly led them on an off-road adventure to avoid traffic caused by a dust storm.

The bumpy ride for Shelby Easler, her brother and their significant others began Sunday when Easler said they were advised by the navigation system to take a quicker off-road route instead of Interstate 15, which was experiencing delays from the storm.

But the Californians wound up getting stuck on the dirt road and had to call a tow truck to pick them up, according to a report.

“We ironically thought it would be a safer option, and it did say it would be 50 minutes faster,” Easler messaged SFGATE over Instagram.

“It was our first time driving to/from Vegas, so we didn’t know that you can really only take the I-15 back and forth.”

In a Tiktok video posted by Easler this week, it showed a line of cars battling the rough road with paved thoroughfares nowhere in sight.

A photo of the navigation appeared to show them cutting across a path with terrain.

“The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere,” she told the outlet. “He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around.”

The group called for help, but the California Highway Patrol wasn’t able to respond as it was dealing with the dust storm emergency, according to TikTok video.

Authorities needed to shut down Interstate 15 both ways at the California-Nevada border as a result of the stormy conditions, SFGate reported.

Eventually, Easler and company called a tow truck that bailed them out, though they were stuck leaving the car in Vegas with considerable damage.

“In the future,” she told SFGate, “I’ll stick to the road I know and double-check somewhere else if the route seems sketchy.”

Googled confirmed to The Post that it was investigating.

“During unpredictable conditions, we work as quickly as possible to update routing based on information from local authorities and sudden changes to driving patterns. We’re investigating the issue that happened over the weekend, and can confirm that we’re routing drivers through Interstate 15 since it’s been reopened,” a Google spokesperson said.

Source: https://nypost.com/2023/11/23/news/google-maps-takes-travelers-on-a-shortcut-home-that-instead-strands-them-in-nevada-desert/

OpenAI has introduced a voice feature for ChatGPT, the large language model-based chatbot launched last year, in a bid to enhance the user engagement. The feature is now accessible to both the free and paid versions of the app.

How does it work?
It simply works like a conventional voice feature, let’s say, in the Google Search. But the fundamental difference is its ability to comprehend the speech better with much precision, when it comes to various pronunciation types.

To activate the ChatGPT voice feature, users simply need to download the app, locate the headphones icon, and tap to initiate the prompt for results.

Former OpenAI President Greg Brockman said that the update is transformative in that a revamped ChatGPT with voice feature will lead to a more engaging and convenient interaction with Artificial Intelligence.

ChatGPT’s voice feature boasts five distinct voices, crafted in collaboration with professional voice actors, according to an official readout.

The feature is powered by OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition system, and thereby gives a comparatively seamless conversion of spoken words into prompts.

What makes ChatGPT’s voice feature different?
OpenAI has used an advanced text-to-speech model which generates human-like audio from text inputs and speech samples.

The breakthrough not only unlocks creative applications but also enhances accessibility for diverse user needs.

The integration of voice capabilities enables ChatGPT to understand spoken commands and respond conversationally, resulting in natural and dynamic interactions. The major leap forward extends the AI’s utility in assistance, facilitates communication for individuals with disabilities, and improves user experiences across applications.

OpenAI’s announcement video related to ChatGPT’s new feature coincided with tensions surrounding CEO Sam Altman’s reinstatement and board decisions were subtly revealed, adding an intriguing layer to the narrative.

Source: https://www.wionews.com/technology/chatgpt-releases-voice-feature-in-another-step-towards-human-like-ai-chatbot-responses-662005

The experiment was made possible by the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) tool which was travelling onboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.

In a groundbreaking achievement, Earth has received laser-beamed communication from a distance of 16 million kilometres, or 10 million miles. As per NASA, that’s 40 times farther than the distance between the Earth and the moon, making it the longest demonstration of optical communications.
The experiment was made possible by the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) tool which was travelling onboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. It set off on October 13 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and it’s since been successful in sending a laser-beamed message back to Earth. On November 14. the Psyche spacecraft established a communication link with the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. DSOC’s near-infrared photons took about 50 seconds to travel from Psyche to Earth during the test.

Notably, the successful establishment of the comms link is known as the ‘first light’.

”Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap,” said Trudy Kortes, who is director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA Headquarters.

Abi Biswas, project technologist for DSOC at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “Receiving first light is a tremendous achievement. The deep space laser photons from DSOC’s flight transceiver aboard Psyche were successfully detected by ground equipment. We could also convey data, implying that we may interchange ‘bits of light’ from and to deep space.”

The primary purpose of the Psyche spacecraft is to explore and study the unique metallic asteroid Psyche, providing insights into the history of planet formation and core dynamics. The experiment is planned to last two years, sending and receiving laser signals from increasingly distant locations on its way to its final destination. The spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid in 2029 and will then proceed to orbit.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement: ”The Psyche mission could provide humanity with new information about planet formation while testing technology that can be used on future NASA missions. As Asteroid Autumn continues, so does NASA’s commitment to exploring the unknown and inspiring the world through discovery.”

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/science/historic-breakthrough-earth-receives-first-laser-message-from-16-million-km-from-deep-space-4598320

Asked if he was worried about the future of internet where a scammer seems to be around every corner, Dr Vint Cerf said, “The red flag of suspicion should be flying”.

Internet becoming an increasingly unsafe place where people can lose money and more, ‘Father of Internet’ Vint Cerf told NDTV today that he has often advocated an “Internet Driver’s license”, which could be something like a driving license.
Asked if he was worried about the future of internet where a scammer seems to be around every corner, he said, “The red flag of suspicion should be flying”.

“If you get a request for money or some other kind of help, and it has an urgency built into it and everything else. The red flag of suspicions should be flying. You should be asking questions about where did this come from,” Dr Cerf, who is also the Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, told NDTV in an exclusive interview.

“You probably have heard the term phishing… People send these emails and try to get people to click on links that either will take them to a place they shouldn’t be, maybe it downloads malware, which makes it even worse… they look like they are a legitimate party, but they just copy the web pages from the legitimate party… they are taking your money someplace else,” he said.

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/need-internet-drivers-license-father-of-internet-vint-cerf-on-online-safety-4598141

Taiwan again reported Chinese military activity around the island on Wednesday, with 11 aircraft crossing the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait as the island’s election campaign kicked into high gear.

Democratically-governed Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, has complained for the past four years of regular Chinese military patrols and drills near the island, as Beijing seeks to pressure Taipei over its sovereignty claims.

Taiwan holds presidential and parliamentary polls on Jan. 13 and candidates have to register with the election commission this week in order to take part.

The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which Beijing views as separatists, registered its presidential ticket on Tuesday, though the opposition is mired in disagreement about a potential joint bid.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said that starting early Wednesday afternoon it had detected J-10 and J-16 fighters as well as H-6 bombers and early warning aircraft carrying out overseas missions.

Eleven of those aircraft crossed the Taiwan Strait’s median line flying in airspace to the centre and southwest of the island, working with Chinese warships to carry out “joint combat readiness patrols”, the ministry added.

The strait’s median line had previously served as an unofficial barrier between the two sides and which Chinese planes now regularly fly over.

Taiwan sent its own forces to monitor, the ministry said.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/technology/amid-foxconn-probe-china-tells-taiwan-firms-play-positive-role-ties-2023-10-25

Investors reportedly concerned they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in the tech startup.

Sources said investors are working with legal advisers to study their options. It was not immediately clear if these investors will sue OpenAI.

Investors worry they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft owns 49 percent of the for-profit operating company, according to sources familiar with the matter. Other investors and employees control 49 percent, with 2 percent owned by OpenAI’s nonprofit parent, according to Semafor.

OpenAI’s board fired Altman on Friday after a “breakdown of communications”, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

By Monday, most of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees threatened to resign unless the company replaced the board.

Venture capital investors usually hold board seats or voting power in their portfolio companies but OpenAI is controlled by its nonprofit parent company OpenAI Nonprofit, which according to OpenAI’s website was created to benefit “humanity, not OpenAI investors”.

As a result, employees have more leverage in pressuring the board than the venture capitalists who helped fund the company, said Minor Myers, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.

“There is nobody exactly who is in the seat of an injured investor,” he said.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/11/21/openai-investors-considering-suing-board-after-ceo-altmans-firing-sources

OpenAI named ex-Twitch boss Emmett Shear as interim CEO, while outgoing chief Sam Altman moved to backer Microsoft (MSFT.O), in a surprise turn of events that clouded the future of the startup at the heart of the artificial-intelligence boom.

The appointments, settled late on Sunday, followed Altman’s abrupt ousting just days earlier as CEO of the ChatGPT maker and ended speculation that he could return.

By Monday, close to all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees threatened to quit in a letter demanding the resignation of the board and reinstatement of Altman and former President Greg Brockman, according to a copy viewed by Reuters and a person familiar with the matter. The document was signed by employees including OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, the board member who fired Altman.

“I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” Sutskever said in a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday.

Hours later, Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sought to quell fears of a collapse at OpenAI. Altman wrote on X that his top priority “remains to ensure openai continues to thrive” and said he was “committed to fully providing continuity of operations.

Nadella during a CNBC interview said he was open to people staying at OpenAI or coming to Microsoft. He noted, however, that governance at the ChatGPT maker needed to change no matter where Altman ended up.

Microsoft has rushed in to attract some of the biggest names that left OpenAI, including co-founder Brockman, to keep key talent out of the hands of rivals including Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) while seeking to stabilize the startup in which it invested billions of dollars.

OpenAI’s newly appointed interim head moved quickly to dismiss speculation that its board ousted Altman due to a dispute over the safety of powerful AI models. Shear vowed to open an investigation into the firing, consider new governance for OpenAI and continue its path of making available technology like its viral chatbot.

“I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models,” Shear said.

The startup dismissed Altman on Friday after a “breakdown of communications,” according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

The organization that governs OpenAI is a nonprofit. Its four-person board as of Friday consisted of three independent directors holding no equity in OpenAI, as well as Chief Scientist Sutskever.

In the letter calling for the board’s resignation, employees also demanded the appointment of two new independent directors, such as former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, a former United States representative.

“Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI,” the employees said in the letter.

“Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join,” they added.

An OpenAI spokesperson referred Reuters to Altman’s comment on the goal to make the startup thrive.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-execs-invite-altman-brockman-headquarters-sunday-the-information-2023-11-19

Microsoft (MSFT.O) emerged on Monday as the big winner of the upheaval at OpenAI, hiring ousted CEO Sam Altman and other key staff of the startup to avert a potential flight to rivals and help deepen its lead in the artificial intelligence race.

The turmoil at OpenAI since Friday had raised fears about the fallout for Microsoft, which has pumped in billions of dollars and uses the pioneer’s technology for most of its AI offerings such as its Copilot AI assistant.

The move ensured “the golden child of AI” will stay with Microsoft, analysts said, as the company competes with Alphabet (GOOGL.O)-owned Google to dominate the nascent industry.

Microsoft’s shares rose as much as 2% to a record high before paring some of the gains. The company was on track to add nearly $30 billion to its market value at current levels. That was close to the valuation OpenAI commanded in its last fundraise.

Altman will lead a new research team at the software giant following his surprise ouster that shocked the tech industry. He will be joined by Greg Brockman, another OpenAI cofounder, as well as other researchers including Szymon Sidor.

“Microsoft has been able to turn a crisis into an opportunity with the hiring of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson.

“Assuming they will be able to hire many more from the OpenAI team, they will have taken over the key development path for artificial intelligence.”

About 500 employees of the startup also threatened to leave unless the board stepped down and reinstated Altman, as well as Brockman, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.

“Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI,” the employees said on Monday in the letter, adding, “Microsoft has assured us there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”

Source : https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-emerges-big-winner-openai-turmoil-with-altman-board-2023-11-20

Google and WhatsApp have announced a big change where chat, photos and videos on Android will start counting toward your Google Account cloud storage limit from December

WhatsApp users have been warned that backups on Android will soon start counting toward their Google Account storage limit and for many will no longer be free.

The update will start to be rolled out for WhatsApp Beta users next month before being gradually reaching all WhatsApp users on Android within the first few months of 2024. It’s a blow to customers of the widely-used app, which will now only work if you have available storage within your account.

Old chats, photographs and videos will soon disappear unless you have storage or upgrade. Google confirmed “Going forward, WhatsApp backup experience on Android will be in line with how it works on other platforms, with the added benefit of Google’s 15 GB of storage available at no charge.”

Of around three billion WhatsApp users around the world, over two thirds access the app on Android, according to data. The update comes amid a huge overhaul of how Google controls online accounts. Many have taken to social media to complain about the prospect of paying more in the months ahead.

A Google community manager wrote in a blog post earlier this week: “As an important heads up, WhatsApp backups on Android will soon start counting toward your Google Account cloud storage limit, similar to how WhatsApp backups are handled on other mobile platforms.

“WhatsApp backups on Android will continue to work, as long as you have available space within your Google Account storage. If you hit your storage limit, you’ll need to free up space to resume backups by removing items you do not need.” All accounts that have been inactive for more than two years will be deleted next month.

WhatsApp is a hugely popular instant messaging service available to smartphone users, which connects via the 3G or wireless network. In January 2015, it was announced that the WhatsApp service will be available on desktop computers too. Last week, users were told re about to get a brand new voice chat tool which could change the way group chats work forever.

Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/whatsapp-warning-over-fee-keep-31465843

Mira Murati is the new interim Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OpenAI after the ChatGPT maker’s board said on Friday that it had fired CEO and co-founder Sam Altman

Mira Murati is the new interim Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OpenAI after the ChatGPT maker’s board said on Friday that it had fired CEO and co-founder Sam Altman. In a statement, the company said that Murati is uniquely qualified for the role and it “anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.”

OpenAI said on Friday that it “no longer has confidence” in Altman’s ability to continue leading OpenAI and that his departure follows a deliberative review process by the board.

“We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period,” OpenAI said.

Who is Mira Murati, the interim CEO of OpenAI?

Mira Murati, 34, has been elevated to the position of interim CEO of OpenAI recently. Born in 1988 in Albania, Murati is a mechanical engineer by training who built a hybrid race car as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College, according to a report in the New York Times. In her early days, Murati worked as an intern in Goldman Sachs and then moved to Zodiac Aerospace.

She joined OpenAI in 2018 after a stint at Tesla where she played a key role in the development of the Model X car. She also worked in a start up called Leap Motion that developed a computing system to track hand and finger motions. OpenAI promoted her to the role of CTO last year.

According to OpenAI’s description, “A member of OpenAI’s leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI’s evolution into a global AI leader.” She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company’s values, operations, and business, and already leads the company’s research, product, and safety functions, it said.

Murati said she was “honored and humbled” to step into the leadership role at the company, according to a memo she sent to staff reviewed by news agency Bloomberg.

Source: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/top-story/story/who-is-mira-murati-the-new-interim-ceo-of-openai-after-sam-altmans-exit-406194-2023-11-18

SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, failed in space shortly after lifting off on Saturday, cutting short its second test but making it further than an earlier attempt that ended in an explosion.

The two-stage rocketship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica in Texas, helping boost the Starship spacecraft as high as 90 miles (148 km) above ground on a planned 90-minute test mission to space and back.

But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it achieved a crucial maneuver to separate with its core Starship stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching, a SpaceX webcast showed.

Meanwhile, the core Starship stage boosted further toward space, but a few minutes later a company broadcaster said that SpaceX mission control suddenly lost contact with the vehicle.

“We have lost the data from the second stage… we think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX engineer and livestream host John Insprucker said. He added that engineers believe an automated flight termination command was triggered to destroy the rocket, though the reason was unclear.

About eight minutes into the test mission, a camera view tracking the Starship booster appeared to show an explosion that suggested the vehicle failed at that time. The rocket’s altitude was 91 miles (148 km).

The launch was the second attempt to fly Starship mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, following an April attempt that ended in explosive failure about four minutes after lift-off.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial launch sites, confirmed a mishap occurred that “resulted in a loss of the vehicle,” adding no injuries or property damage have been reported.

The agency said it will oversee a SpaceX-led investigation into the testing failure and will need to approve SpaceX’s plan to prevent it from happening again.

The mission’s objective was to get Starship off the ground in Texas and into space just shy of reaching orbit, then plunge through Earth’s atmosphere for a splashdown off Hawaii’s coast. The launch had been scheduled for Friday but was pushed back by a day for a last-minute swap of flight-control hardware.

TESTING FAILURES
Starship’s failure to meet all of its test objectives could pose a setback for SpaceX. The FAA will need to review the company’s failure investigation and review its application for a new launch license. SpaceX officials have complained that such regulatory reviews take too long.

On the other hand, the failure in a program for which SpaceX plans to spend roughly $2 billion this year was in line with the company’s risk-tolerant culture that embraces fast-paced testing and re-testing of prototypes to hasten design and engineering improvements.

“More things were successful than in the previous test, including some new capabilities that were significant,” said Carissa Christensen, CEO of space analytics firm BryceTech.

“There’s not money and patience for unlimited tests, but for a vehicle that is so different and so big, two, three, four, five tests is not excessive,” Christensen said.

At roughly 43 miles (70 km) in altitude, the rocket system executed the crucial maneuver to separate the two stages – something it failed to do in the last test – with the Super Heavy booster intended to plunge into Gulf of Mexico waters while the core Starship booster blasts further to space using its own engines.

But the Super Heavy booster blew up moments later, followed by the Starship stage’s own explosion. SpaceX in a post on social media platform X said “success comes from what we learn,” adding that the core Starship stage’s engines “fired for several minutes on its way to space.”

A fully successful test would have marked a key step toward achieving SpaceX’s ambition producing a large, multi-purpose, spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo back to the moon later this decade for NASA, and ultimately to Mars.

SpaceX’s worker safety culture underpinning its speedy development ethos is facing scrutiny by lawmakers after a Reuters investigation documented hundreds of injuries at the rocket company’s U.S. manufacturing and launch sites.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-starship-launched-test-flight-texas-after-last-one-blew-up-2023-11-18/

An agreement on how artificial intelligence should be regulated in the future has been reached by Germany, France and Italy, according to a joint paper seen by Reuters, which is expected to accelerate negotiations at the European level.

The three governments are in favour of binding voluntary commitments for both large and small AI providers in the European Union.

The European Commission, the European Parliament and the EU Council are currently negotiating how the bloc should position itself in this new field.

The Parliament presented an “AI Act” in June, with the aim of averting safety risks from AI applications and avoiding discriminatory effects, but without slowing down the innovative power of this new technology in Europe.

During the discussions, the European Parliament proposed that the code of conduct should initially only be binding for major AI providers, which are primarily from the U.S.

However, the three EU governments have warned against this apparent competitive advantage for smaller European providers. This could lead to less trust in the security of these smaller providers and therefore fewer customers, they said.

The rules of conduct and transparency should therefore be binding for everyone, they added.

Initially, no sanctions should be imposed, according to the paper.

However, if violations of the code of conduct are identified after a certain period of time, a system of sanctions could be set up. In the future, a European authority would monitor compliance with the standards, the paper said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/germany-france-italy-reach-agreement-future-ai-regulation-2023-11-18/

After a spate of major advertisers said they were halting spending on X over owner Elon Musk’s support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, the tech mogul said he plans to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against a research group that had claimed to find ads on X/Twitter running against pro-Nazi and white nationalist posts.

On Friday, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Lionsgate and Paramount Global they were pausing their ads on X, coming after IBM said it was halting ad spending a day earlier. Apple also is suspending advertising spending on X, per an Axios report.

Several of the X advertisers cited Musk’s endorsement earlier this week of a conspiracy theory that Jewish people “promote hatred against whites” for pulling their ads. But in his late-night legal threat, Musk took aim at watchdog group Media Matters over what he alleged was manipulated research about advertising on the platform.

“The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company,” Musk posted on X late Friday night. He added that the legal action will go after “Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them …”

According to a document posted by Musk, in order to “manipulate the public and advertisers,” Media Matters created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to “misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts. These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform.” (Read the full document below.)

Asked for comment, Media Matters provided a statement from president Angelo Carusone: “Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.”

On Thursday, Media Matters released research finding that five major brands — Apple, IBM, NBCUniversal’s Bravo, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity — had their ads run next to posts that “tout Hitler and his Nazi Party” on X. Then on Friday, Media Matters published a report claiming that it found ads for Amazon, NBA Mexico, NBCUniversal Catalyst, Action Network and Club for Growth next to white nationalist hashtags like “KeepEuropeWhite,” “white pride,” and “WLM” (“White Lives Matter”).

The advertiser exodus Friday came after the White House earlier in the day had condemned Musk for promoting “antisemitic and racist hate.” That came after Musk on Wednesday agreed with an X user who promoted the conspiracy theory that Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” In the now-removed post, the X user said they were “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations” who are facing “hordes of minorities that support flooding their country.”

Here’s the text of the document Musk posted on the issue related to Media Matters:

This week Media Matters for America posted a story that completely misrepresented the real user experience on X, in another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers.

Above everything, including profit, X works to protect the public’s right to free speech. But for speech to be truly free, we must also have the freedom to see or hear things that some people may consider objectionable. We believe that everyone has the right to make up their own minds about what to read, watch, or listen to – because that’s the power of freedom of speech.

Despite our clear and consistent position, X has seen a number of attacks from activist groups like Media Matters and legacy media outlets who seek to undermine freedom of expression on our platform because they perceive it as a threat to their ideological narrative and those of their financial supporters. These groups try to use their influence to attack our revenue streams by deceiving advertisers on X.

Here are the facts on Media Matters’ research:

The company says a review found Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”. He will be replaced as chief executive in the interim by Mira Murati, who is currently chief technology officer for the artificial intelligence company.

The chief executive of OpenAI – the firm behind viral chatbot ChatGPT – has been ousted after the board said it no longer has confidence in him.

Sam Altman is to depart and will be replaced in the interim by Mira Murati, who is currently chief technology officer for the artificial intelligence company.

In a statement on Friday, OpenAI said the move follows a “deliberative review process by the board” which concluded that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”.

The statement said Altman’s behaviour was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.

Posting on social media following the announcement, Altman wrote: “I loved my time at OpenAI.

“It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit.

“Most of all, I loved working with such talented people. (I) will have more to say about what’s next later.”

Altman helped start OpenAI as a non-profit research laboratory in 2015.

But in the past year, he was thrust into the global spotlight as the face of OpenAI after ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/board-of-chatgpt-maker-openai-ousts-co-founder-sam-altman-as-chief-executive-13010604

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have joined a growing list of blue-chip advertisers who are pulling advertising and promotions from the social-media outlet X in the wake of a recent antisemitic remark posted by the venue’s owner, Elon Musk.

A Lionsgate spokesperson said Friday that the entertainment company “has suspended advertising on X because of Elon Musk’s recent antisemitic tweet.” The move comes as Lionsgate is marketing the release of “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” the latest film in its “Hunger Games” franchise. IBM earlier Friday said that it had “immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.”

Disney and Comcast NBCUniversal are both understood to have followed suit on Friday. A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson said Friday that the company had “paused” its presence on X, though it was already believed to be minimal.

Musk on Wednesday indicated on X that he supported a statement posted by another user that suggested “western Jewish populations” were “coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.” Musk reposted the remark and added “you have said the actual truth.”

Axios reported Friday that Apple, one of the industry’s most influential marketers, had also pulled its advertising from X.

Source: https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/x-antisemitic-lionsgate-ibm-disney-1235798567/

OpenAI Shakeup: CEO Sam Altman Ousted Amidst Board Concerns
In a surprising turn of events, the corridors of OpenAI echo with the departure of CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, following a board decision citing inconsistency in Altman’s communication style. As the tech world reels from this shakeup, eyes turn to Mira Murati, the current Chief Technology Officer, who steps into the interim CEO role.

Who is Sam Altman?

As the mastermind behind ChatGPT, Altman’s name reverberates in the tech realm. Yet, beyond the innovation, his concerns about humanity’s future in the AI era were palpable. Altman’s apprehension about the uncharted territories of AI leaps was well-documented. He foresaw both the monumental strides AI could bring and the potential existential risks it might pose.

Altman’s Fear for Humanity

In his visionary musings, Altman stressed the imperative need for regulations and safeguards in the AI domain. He didn’t just foresee progress but also acknowledged the looming shadows that quantum advancements in AI could cast over humanity’s future.

“I really think the world is going to rise to the occasion and everybody wants to do the right thing,” said Altman, expressing hope despite his concerns.
The Dismissal and Fallout

The dismissal of Altman, with accompanying murmurs of Brockman’s exit, sent shockwaves through the tech community. The board’s assertion about communication issues stirred curiosity. However, further details about the internal rift remain cloaked.

The links provided offer a glimpse into Altman’s thoughts and earlier tweets, painting a canvas of his worries and anticipations, adding depth to this unfolding narrative.

OpenAI Chief Says His ‘Worst Fear’ Is That Tech Causes ‘Significant Harm To The World’

OpenAI: Bliss or Boon?

Amidst this upheaval, the question lingers: Is OpenAI a blessing or a double-edged sword? The marvels it has birthed, like ChatGPT, are awe-inspiring. Yet, the concerns highlighted by Altman mirror a debate that rages on: Do the benefits of AI innovation outweigh the potential risks it poses to humanity?

As the tech landscape evolves, OpenAI stands as a testament to human ingenuity, shaping the future while grappling with the weighty responsibility that progress brings.

What’s your take on this OpenAI saga? It’s a whirlwind of advancements and concerns, isn’t it?

Sharing X tweets in past history to understand the flow of events in a better way.

Dismissal X tweets

https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?s=46&t=PAuXOCXyz619xtEZK52CjA

Some of the earlier Sam Altman’s tweets on X

https://x.com/cspan/status/1658504890514120709?s=20

https://x.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174?s=46&t=PAuXOCXyz619xtEZK52CjA

https://x.com/sama/status/1707224676630409572?s=46&t=PAuXOCXyz619xtEZK52CjA

https://x.com/sama/status/1687236201496064000?s=46&t=PAuXOCXyz619xtEZK52CjA

https://x.com/sama/status/1676643268241801216?s=46&t=PAuXOCXyz619xtEZK52CjA

You’re in a prime position to grasp the past sequence of events and delve into whether OpenAI represents a blessing or a potential pitfall.

Source : Agencies

Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp. leader Elon Musk issued a spate of arguably bigoted tweets on Wednesday that spurred a critical backlash online.

First, Musk drew attention to and agreed with an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and then directly accused “Jewish communities,” the nonprofit Anti-Defamation League, and minorities of what he called “anti-white” messaging and views, without giving examples to support his accusations.

Musk, who is the richest person in the world with a net worth around $225 billion according to Bloomberg, leads several companies that collectively employ around 150,000 people worldwide, including SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Co., Neuralink, X Corp. and his latest artificial intelligence startup, xAI.

Musk, who has never reserved his social media posts for business matters alone, drew attention to a tweet that said Jewish people “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

Musk replied to that tweet in emphatic agreement, “You have said the actual truth.”

“This exchange would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide,” wrote Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic.

In response to Musk’s tweet, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter), “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories. #NeverIsNow.”

Among other things, the Jewish-led nonprofit works to fight antisemitic incidents, racist discrimination and hate crimes in the U.S.

After Musk began to face a backlash for endorsing the antisemitic tweet, he took aim more specifically at the ADL.

He wrote, without providing any evidence for these claims, “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”

CNBC reached out to Musk and X Corp. for comments and to clarify which “minority groups” Musk sees as a “primary threat” to the Jewish people and Israel, but received no comment except an apparent auto-response message that said, “Busy now, please check back later.”

In subsequent tweets, after a follower told Musk he was not being fair or truthful, the billionaire replied, “You [sic] right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL.” He added, “And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind. I’m sick of it. Stop now.”

Musk has posted incendiary tweets for a long time and his companies, especially Tesla, have faced lawsuits over alleged civil and workers’ rights violations. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla over alleged racist discrimination and harassment of Black workers this year.

Musk previously threatened to sue the ADL, alleging that they tried to “kill” his social network’s business. He has blamed the ADL, rather than his own business decisions, for a 60% drop in revenue at X and said he had “no choice” but to file a defamation lawsuit against the group. However, no lawsuit has yet materialized.

The ADL declined to offer further comment on Thursday morning.

Hate crimes expert Brian Levin, who is a professor emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, told CNBC that law enforcement is already tracking generational spikes in anti-Jewish hate crime in North America and elsewhere. He said, “Elon Musk piles on by amplifying neo-Nazi type Jew hatred about them being anti-white by invoking immigration, just as the convicted Tree of Life massacre killer did.” As a result, anti-semitic incidents and crimes could spike further.

“Notorious antisemites are celebrating what they see as Musk’s complete conversion to blatant expressions of Jew hatred. When we saw similar rants from Ye last October, anti-Jewish hate crime spiked across the country,” Levin said.

Meredith Benton at Whistle Stop Capital told CNBC the move could affect Musk’s business interests.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/16/elon-musk-calls-antisemitic-tweet-the-actual-truth.html

OpenAI, whose generative AI products initially raised fears of widespread cheating on homework, is now exploring how it can get its popular ChatGPT chatbot into classrooms, according to a senior executive.

OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, said at a conference in San Francisco that the company will form a team to explore educational applications of a technology that has threatened to upend industries, stoked new legislation and become a popular learning tool.

“Most teachers are trying to figure out ways to incorporate (ChatGPT) into the curriculum and into the way they teach,” Lightcap said at the INSEAD Americas Conference last week. “We at OpenAI are trying to help them think through the problem and we probably next year will establish a team with the sole intent of doing that.”

Lightcap’s comments were previously unreported. INSEAD is a global business school.

Backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft (MSFT.O), OpenAI kicked off the generative AI craze last November by releasing its ChatGPT chatbot, which became one of the world’s fastest-growing applications. Trained on reams of data, generative AI can create brand-new humanlike content, helping users spin up term papers, complete science homework and even write entire novels. After ChatGPT’s launch, regulators scrambled to catch up: the European Union revised its AI Act and the U.S. kicked off AI regulation efforts.

The launch – in the middle of the school year – also caught teachers off-guard when they realized it could be used as a cheating and plagiarism tool, which then sparked a backlash and school bans.

“Teachers thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened,” Lightcap said.

But within a few months, teachers started seeing how ChatGPT could be beneficial, he said.

A new team at OpenAI would be an extension of the work the company has already done to integrate its technology into the classroom. ““We see AI as an impactful tool that can assist with learning and education, and we’re encouraged by the ways educators have been ideating on how tools like ChatGPT can be useful,” a spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “We are engaging with educators across the country to inform them of ChatGPT’s capabilities and our ongoing work to improve it.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-explores-how-get-chatgpt-into-classrooms-2023-11-16/

IBM has paused advertising on X after a report found that the tech company’s ads were placed next to antisemitic content on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” an IBM spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

Media Matters for America published a report on Wednesday that said the media watchdog group “recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino has been attempting to win back advertisers that stopped their campaigns after Elon Musk purchased the company last year. Researchers and advocacy groups have documented a rise of controversial content on X, though the company has disputed those claims.

An X spokesperson told CNBC in an email that the accounts that Media Matters said were posting the hateful content would no longer be monetizable. The accompanying content would also be labeled not safe for work, limiting its reach.

X’s advertising system “is not intentionally placing a brand actively next to this type of content, nor is a brand actively trying to support this content with placement,” the spokesperson said. “Groups like Media Matters aggressively search for posts on X and then go to the accounts, and if they see an ad, Media Matter researchers keep hitting refresh to capture as many brands as possible.”

A spokesperson for Comcast, which owns Bravo and is also the parent of CNBC, said it’s investigating the situation.

Apple and Oracle didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

IBM’s decision to halt advertising on X also comes after Musk on Wednesday boosted and drew attention to an antisemitic X post and issued statements that drew backlash from critics. In one post, Musk criticized the Anti-Defamation League, alleging that the nonprofit “unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt responded in a post on X saying, “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories.”

Yaccarino weighed in on Thursday, writing on X that the company’s “point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on.”

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/16/ibm-stops-advertising-on-x-after-report-says-ads-ran-by-nazi-content.html