During a close flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered a mini moon a mere one-tenth-of-a-mile (220 meters) in size. For comparison, Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. The Associated Press reports: NASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter. Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11. Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It’s also the Amharic name for Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, for which the spacecraft is named.

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Source: Slashdot – NASA Spacecraft Discovers Tiny Moon Around Asteroid

Jeff Foust reports via SpaceNews: A NASA official opened the door to keeping the International Space Station in operation beyond 2030 if commercial space stations are not yet ready to take over by the end of the decade. Speaking at the Beyond Earth Symposium here Nov. 2, Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said it was “not mandatory” to retire the ISS as currently planned at the end of the decade depending on the progress companies are making on commercial stations. “The timeline is flexible,” he said of that transition from the ISS to commercial stations. “It’s not mandatory that we stop flying the ISS in 2030. But, it is our full intention to switch to new platforms when they’re available.” […]

Bowersox acknowledged that schedule depends on the readiness of those commercial stations. “When it happens is going to depend a lot the maturity of the market,” he said, which includes both the status of commercial stations and non-NASA customers for them. He made it clear that NASA does not expect to be the only customer for commercial stations. NASA’s current requirements for those stations anticipate having two astronauts at a time on them, less than the ISS. “We looked at what we thought would be reasonable and what would actually give us a cost savings,” he said of that requirement. “My biggest concern is if we get too far ahead of where the market and NASA has to carry the full cost of the platforms for longer, and we transition too quickly,” he said. That could force NASA to move money from current ISS utilization to support those stations. “If we have a badly managed transition, we could find ourselves getting weak in those areas.”

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Source: Slashdot – NASA Open To Extending ISS Beyond 2030

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth’s rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it’s hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world’s timekeepers.

“Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy,” said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world’s clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: “I get a bazillion emails.”
On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime. The proposal from Levine may face opposition from vested interests and strong opinions in the international community — notably, the Russians and the Vatican. “The head of the IBWM (or BIPM in French) said in November 2022 that Russia opposed the dropping of leap seconds because it wanted to wait until 2040,” reports Ars Technica. “The nation’s satellite positioning system, GLONASS, was built with leap seconds in mind, and reworking the system would seemingly be taxing.”

“There’s also the Vatican, which has concerned itself with astronomy since at least the Gregorian Calendar, and may also oppose the removal of leap seconds. The Rev. Paul Gabor, astrophysicist and vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona, has been quoted and cited as opposing the deeper separation of human and planetary time. Keeping proper time, Gabor wrote his 2017 book The Science of Time, is ‘one of the oldest missions of astronomy.'”

“In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved,” Gabor writes.

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Source: Slashdot – Leap Seconds Could Become Leap Minutes

According to Germany’s Manager Magazin, Volkswagen’s board has approved laying off 2,000 employees in the Cariad software unit as part of the latest restructuring intended to right the digital ship. Autoblog reports: Former group CEO Herbert Diess established Car.Software Organization in 2020, eventually renaming it Cariad and giving the task of creating “a uniform software and technology platform for all Volkswagen Group brands.” VW’s info page on the division says the unit employs roughly 6,000 people around the world, up from roughly 4,500 at the end of 2021. Despite that same page claiming Cariad is building “the leading tech stack for the automotive industry,” the failed stacks brought down the division’s first CEO in less than a year, then brought down VW Group CEO Diess two years later as problems continued. It then probably played a role in bringing down Audi brand CEO Markus Duesmann and much, if not all, of Audi’s Project Trinity when Oliver Blume took over as CEO of the VW Group. It finally took out Cariad’s second CEO, Dirk Hilgenberg, over the summer. And aside from the career killing, Cariad’s woes have proved problematic for every battery-electric car VW Group launch since the ID.3.

Blume put ex-Bentley production manager Peter Bosch in charge in May. Since then, Bosch has been at work on a reorganization plan to get the software division running as it should so that the software runs as it should, and so that vital products like the Audi Q6 E-Tron and Porsche Macan EV can get out the door as envisioned. Manager Magazin reported that Bosch’s plan involves laying off those 2,000 employees over the next 15 months, a step that would rewind back to 2021 staffing levels, but that action needs to be discussed with VW’s Works Council as it concerns labor issues. […] As it awaits its v1.2 VW Group software, Porsche said it’s going to move ahead with Google Built-In as an interim solution. More worryingly, Cariad’s timetable was meant to have v2.0 out by 2025, when products like the electric Cayman and Boxster are expected, but v2.0 has been buried in favor of a redesign from scratch.

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Source: Slashdot – VW Group’s Troubled Cariad Software Division To Lay Off 2,000 Workers

Microsoft has updated its Surface support documentation, committing to supporting some Surface Pcs with six years of firmware updates — up from the four years it originally offered. Windows Central reports: The updated documentation states that any Surface PC shipped after January 1, 2021 will receive six years of firmware updates. Surface devices shipped before that date will remain on four years of firmware updates. This means Surface Pro 7+, Surface Go 3, Surface Laptop 4, Surface Laptop Go 2, Surface Studio 2+, Surface Laptop Studio 1 and newer have all had their support cycles extended by two additional years.

Here’s what the documentation says:
– For devices released before January 1, 2021: Surface devices will receive driver and firmware updates for at least four years from when the device was first released. In cases where the support duration is longer than four years, an updated end-of-servicing date will be published before the date of the last servicing.
– For devices released on and after January 1, 2021: Surface devices will receive driver and firmware updates for at least six years from when the device was first released. In cases where the support duration is longer than six years, an updated end-of-servicing date will be published before the date of the last servicing.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Commits To 6 Years of Firmware Updates For New and Some Older Surface PCs

YouTube’s crackdown on ad blockers is in full swing, leading to a wave of ad blocker uninstalls. 9to5Google reports: As Wired reports, this rollout has led to “hundreds of thousands” of uninstalls, not of YouTube but of ad blockers. The figures apparently come from various ad-blocking companies, where October saw a “record number” of people uninstalling ad blockers. Meanwhile, it also led to a record number of new installs, as many users looked to switch from one blocker to another in an effort to keep blocking ads.

One ad-blocking company, Ghostery, shared that 90% of users who completed a survey when uninstalling their ad blocker cited YouTube’s changes as the reason. AdGuard told Wired that daily uninstalls were up for the entirety of October, spiking to 52,000 in a single day on October 18 as YouTube’s notices started rolling out more widely. It was added that use of the Ghostery blocker is up 30% on Microsoft Edge, as some users have noticed that switching browsers at least temporarily lifts the blocking of their ad blocker. AdGuard, meanwhile, saw its paid subscription rise as some users reportedly saw success with containing to block ads using the tool.

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Source: Slashdot – YouTube Crackdown Leads To ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Ad Blocker Uninstalls

An anonymous reader writes: Artists have spent the past year fighting companies that have been training AI image generators—including popular tools like the impressively photorealistic Midjourney or the ultra-sophisticated DALL-E 3—on their original works without consent or compensation. Now, the United States has promised to finally get serious about addressing their copyright concerns raised by AI, President Joe Biden said in his much-anticipated executive order on AI, which was signed this week. The US Copyright Office had already been seeking public input on AI concerns over the past few months through a comment period ending on November 15. Biden’s executive order has clarified that following this comment period, the Copyright Office will publish the results of its study. And then, within 180 days of that publication—or within 270 days of Biden’s order, “whichever comes later”—the Copyright Office’s director will consult with Biden to “issue recommendations to the President on potential executive actions relating to copyright and AI.”

“The recommendations shall address any copyright and related issues discussed in the United States Copyright Office’s study, including the scope of protection for works produced using AI and the treatment of copyrighted works in AI training,” Biden’s order said. That means that potentially within the next six to nine months (or longer), artists may have answers to some of their biggest legal questions, including a clearer understanding of how to protect their works from being used to train AI models. Currently, artists do not have many options to stop AI image makers—which generate images based on user text prompts—from referencing their works. Even companies like OpenAI, which recently started allowing artists to opt out of having works included in AI training data, only allow artists to opt out of future training data. […] According to The Atlantic, this opt-out process—which requires artists to submit requests for each artwork and could be too cumbersome for many artists to complete—leaves artists stuck with only the option of protecting new works that “they create from here on out.” It seems like it’s too late to protect any work “already claimed by the machines” in 2023, The Atlantic warned. And this issue clearly affects a lot of people. A spokesperson told The Atlantic that Stability AI alone has fielded “over 160 million opt-out requests in upcoming training.” Until federal regulators figure out what rights artists ought to retain as AI technologies rapidly advance, at least one artist—cartoonist and illustrator Sarah Andersen—is advancing a direct copyright infringement claim against Stability AI, maker of Stable Diffusion, another remarkable AI image synthesis tool.

Andersen, whose proposed class action could impact all artists, has about a month to amend her complaint to “plausibly plead that defendants’ AI products allow users to create new works by expressly referencing Andersen’s works by name,” if she wants “the inferences” in her complaint “about how and how much of Andersen’s protected content remains in Stable Diffusion or is used by the AI end-products” to “be stronger,” a judge recommended. In other words, under current copyright laws, Andersen will likely struggle to win her legal battle if she fails to show the court which specific copyrighted images were used to train AI models and demonstrate that those models used those specific images to spit out art that looks exactly like hers. Citing specific examples will matter, one legal expert told TechCrunch, because arguing that AI tools mimic styles likely won’t work—since “style has proven nearly impossible to shield with copyright.” Andersen’s lawyers told Ars that her case is “complex,” but they remain confident that she can win, possibly because, as other experts told The Atlantic, she might be able to show that “generative-AI programs can retain a startling amount of information about an image in their training data—sometimes enough to reproduce it almost perfectly.” But she could fail if the court decides that using data to train AI models is fair use of artists’ works, a legal question that remains unclear.

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Source: Slashdot – Artists May ‘Poison’ AI Models Before Copyright Office Can Issue Guidance

schwit1 shares a report from Fortune: After launching Amazon from a garage in Seattle in 1994, centibilllionaire Jeff Bezos is leaving the Pacific Northwest behind and setting sail for Florida. In an Instagram post, the world’s third wealthiest person — with a net worth estimated at $160 billion — said he wanted to be closer to my parents after they recently moved back to Miami. “My parents have always been my biggest supporters,” he posted to his Instagram account, adding that his spacefaring company Blue Origin is increasingly shifting operations to Cape Canaveral.

Florida also offers a financial benefit to the Amazon founder — it doesn’t charge capital gains tax which, for a man who’s sold some $30 billion in stock since 2002, according to Bloomberg, can be quite substantial. […] But Miami is not the only place where Bezos lives. In addition to his collection of luxury cars and private Gulfstream jets, Bezos owns multiple properties valued recently at a half-billion dollars. Bezos recently bought a large home in Florida, notes schwit1.

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Source: Slashdot – Jeff Bezos Moves To Florida

Long-time Slashdot reader williamyf writes: In the ongoing battle between Red Hat and other “Enterprise Linux — RHEL compatible” distros, today the OpenELA (Open Enterprise Linux Association), a body Consisting of CIQ (stewards of Rocky Linux), Oracle and Suse, released source code for a generic “Enterprise Linux Distro” (Sources available for RHEL 8 and RHEL 9). A Steering committee for the foundation was also formed.

War between Red Hat and what they call “clones” (mostly Oracle; CentOS, Rocky, Alma and others seem to be collateral damage) has been raging on for years. First, in 2011, Red Hat changed the way they distributed kernel patches. Then, in 2014, Red Hat absorbed CentOS. In 2019 Red Hat transformed CentOS to CentOS stream, and shortened support Timetables for CentOS 8, all out of the blue. Then, in 2023, RedHat severely restricted source code access to non-customers.

What will be RedHat’s reaction to this development? My bet is that they will stop to release source code of distro modules under BSD, MIT, APACHE and MPL Licenses for RHEL and in certain Windows for CentOS Stream. What is your bet? Let us know in the comments.

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Source: Slashdot – OpenELA Drops First RHEL, ‘Enterprise Linux’ Compatible Source Code

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ken Mattingly, who orbited the moon and commanded a pair of NASA shuttle missions, but who was remembered as well for the flight he didn’t make — the near-disastrous mission of Apollo 13 — died on Tuesday in Arlington, Va. He was 87. His death was confirmed by Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman. She did not specify the cause or say whether he died at home in Arlington or in a hospital there. Mr. Mattingly, a former Navy jet pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering, joined NASA in 1966. But his first spaceflight didn’t come until April 1972, when the space agency launched Apollo 16, the next-to-last manned mission to the moon. Piloting the spacecraft’s command module in orbit while holding the rank of lieutenant commander, he took extensive photos of the moon’s terrain and conducted experiments while Cmdr.John W. Young of the Navy and Lt. Col. Charles M. Duke Jr. of the Air Force, having descended in the lunar lander, collected rock and soil samples from highlands near the crater known as Descartes.

While the three astronauts were en route back to Earth, Commander Mattingly stepped outside the spacecraft — which he had named Casper for the resemblance, as least in a child’s eye, between an astronaut in a bulky spacesuit and the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Maneuvering along handrails while connected to the spacecraft by a tether, he retrieved two attached canisters of film with photos of the moon that he had taken from inside the capsule for analysis back on Earth. When the Apollo program ended, Commander Mattingly headed the astronaut support office for the shuttle program, designed to ferry astronauts to and from an eventual Earth-orbiting International Space Station. In the summer of 1982, he commanded the fourth and final Earth-orbiting test flight of the shuttle Columbia, which completed 112 orbits. He was also the commander of the first space shuttle flight conducted for the Department of Defense, a classified January 1985 mission aboard Discovery.

All those achievements came after he had been scrubbed at virtually the last moment from the flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970. He was to have orbited the moon in the command module while Cmdr.James A. LovellJr. of the Navy and Fred W. Haise Jr. explored the lunar surface. But NASA removed Commander Mattingly from the crew in the final days before launching, when blood tests determined that he had recently been exposed to German measles from training with Colonel Duke, the backup lunar module pilot, who in turn had contracted it from his proximity to an infected child at a neighborhood party. Commander Mattingly was the only one of the Apollo 13 crewmen who were found to lack antibodies against the illness. His backup, John L. Swigert Jr., became the command module pilot, leaving Commander Mattingly to watch the progress ofthe flight from mission control. […] After his Apollo and space shuttle flights, Mr. Mattingly continued to work for NASA in the 1980s. He retired from the space agency and the Navy as a rear admiral and went on to work for aerospace companies.

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Source: Slashdot – Ken Mattingly, Astronaut Scrubbed From Apollo 13, Is Dead At 87

A top scientist has proposed a new way to reconcile the two different ways that our clocks keep time. Meet — wait for it — the leap minute. From a report: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth’s rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it’s hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world’s timekeepers.

“Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy,” said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world’s clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: “I get a bazillion emails.” On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A Giant Leap for the Leap Second

Some companies that pay for OpenAI’s artificial intelligence have been looking to cut costs with free, open-source alternatives. But these AI customers are realizing that oftentimes open-source tech can actually be more expensive than buying from OpenAI. The Information: Take Andreas Homer and Ebby Amir, co-founders of Cypher, an app that helps people create virtual versions of themselves in the form of a chatbot. Industry excitement this summer about the release of Llama 2, an open-source large language model from Meta Platforms, prompted the duo to test it for their app, leading to a $1,200 bill in August from Google Cloud, Cypher’s cloud provider. Then they tried using GPT-3.5 Turbo, an OpenAI model that underpins services such as ChatGPT, and were surprised to see that it cost around $5 per month to handle the same amount of work.

Baseten, a startup that helps developers use open-source LLMs, says its customers report that using Llama 2 out of the box costs 50% to 100% more than for OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo. The open-source option is cheaper only for companies that want to customize an LLM by training it on their data; in that case, a customized Llama 2 model costs about one-fourth as much as a customized GPT-3.5 Turbo model, Baseten found. Baseten also found that OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4, is about 15 times more expensive than Llama 2, but typically it’s only needed for the most advanced generative AI tasks like code generation rather than the ones most large enterprises want to incorporate.

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Source: Slashdot – Meta’s Free AI Isn’t Cheap To Use, Companies Say

Inhaling polluted air increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, the first study of its kind in India has found. Research conducted in Delhi and the southern city of Chennai found that inhaling air with high amounts of PM2.5 particles led to high blood sugar levels and increased type 2 diabetes incidence. From a report: When inhaled, PM2.5 particles — which are 30 times thinner than a strand of hair — can enter the bloodstream and cause several respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The study [PDF] is part of ongoing research into chronic diseases in India that began in 2010. It is the first to focus on the link between exposure to ambient PM2.5 and type 2 diabetes in India, one of the worst countries in the world for air pollution. The average annual PM2.5 levels in Delhi was 82-100ug/m3 and in Chennai was 30-40ug/m3, according to the study, many times the WHO limits of 5ug/m3. Indiaâ(TM)s national air quality standards are 40ug/m3.

There is also a high burden of non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in India; 11.4% of the population — 101 million people — are living with diabetes, and about 136 million are pre-diabetic, according to a paper published in the Lancet in June. The average diabetes prevalence in the European Union was 6.2% in 2019, and 8.6% in the UK in 2016. The Lancet study found India’s diabetes prevalence to be higher than previous estimations and showed a higher number of diabetics in urban than rural India.

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Source: Slashdot – Air Pollution Raises Risk of Type 2 Diabetes, Says Landmark Indian Study

Apple on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit worth up to $2 billion which accuses the tech giant of hiding defective batteries in millions of iPhones. From a report: The lawsuit was brought by British consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of around 24 million iPhone users in the United Kingdom. Gutmann is seeking damages from Apple on their behalf of up to 1.6 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) plus interest, with the claim’s midpoint range being 853 million pounds. His lawyers argued Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models by “throttling” them with software updates and installed a power management tool which limited performance.

Apple, however, said the lawsuit was “baseless” and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements. The company sought to get the case thrown out of court, but the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) said Gutmann’s case can proceed in a written ruling on Wednesday.

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Source: Slashdot – Mass Lawsuit Against Apple Over iPhone Batteries Can Go Ahead, London Tribunal Rules

An anonymous reader shares a report: The former head of search at Alphabet’s Google told colleagues in February 2019 that his team was “getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company,” according to emails shown at the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust trial against the search giant. Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google’s search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue. But in February 2019, testimony at the antitrust trial revealed Tuesday, Google internally declared a “Code Yellow” amid concerns the company might not meet its goals for search revenue for the quarter.

As part of the emergency, which lasted for seven weeks, engineers from Google’s search and Chrome browser teams were reassigned to figure out why user queries had slowed, according to the documents. Ben Gomes, Google’s former head of search, was called by the company in its defense to show that it had made various advancements in search, particularly in mobile. However, cross examination by Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist revealed the tensions between Gomes’ search team and its advertising counterparts. The questioning sought to undermine Google’s contentions that its search team focuses solely on improving the user experience and has sometimes been pulled into the advertising side, where the Justice Department alleges Google has been able to raise prices without pushback.

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Source: Slashdot – Google’s 2019 ‘Code Yellow’ Blurred Line Between Search, Ads

Microsoft has decided to axe the Windows Insider MVP program, which is now scheduled to be discontinued at the end of the year. From a report: A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: “In an effort to consolidate MVP-style programs across Microsoft, we have decided to retire the Windows Insider MVP Program effective December 31, 2023. All our existing Windows Insider MVPs will be nominated to participate in the Microsoft MVP Program which has similar benefits and opportunities to continue networking with us and interacting with many other Microsoft MVPs globally.”

The Windows Insider MVPs are usually enthusiasts of Microsoft’s wares who are rewarded for their loyalty with access to the engineering teams, complimentary subscriptions to products such as Visual Studio Enterprise and Office 365, as well as the odd paperweight or two. A nomination must come from another MVP or a Microsoft employee to achieve this coveted status. An application is then scrutinized, and if one has demonstrated sufficient passion for all things Microsoft, the nod is given. Microsoft has plenty of Insider programs where users can play with pre-release versions of the company’s software.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Calls Time on Windows Insider MVP Program

One of the world’s top bullion banks is bringing blockchain to the antiquated London gold market. From a report: HSBC has launched a platform that uses distributed ledger technology to tokenize ownership of physical gold held in its London vault, Mark Williamson, global head of FX and commodities partnerships and propositions, said in an interview. The new system creates digital tokens that represent gold bars, which can then be traded through the bank’s single-dealer platform. […] What sets HSBC apart is its clout in the bullion market. It is one of the world’s largest custodians of precious metals and one of four clearers on the London gold market, where over $30 billion of the metal changes hands every day.

Around 698,000 gold bars are stored in vaults in the Greater London area, valued at around $525 billion, according to the London Bullion Market Association. Despite its vast size, London’s gold market still relies heavily on manual record keeping and trades entirely over-the-counter. Using blockchain technology makes the process “quicker and less cumbersome” as clients can more easily track the gold they own through the platform, down to the serial number of each bar, Williamson said. HSBC plans to eventually expand its system to include other precious metals, he added.

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Source: Slashdot – HSBC Takes Stab at Using Blockchain To Modernize London’s Antiquated Gold Market

An anonymous reader shares a report: Not all Google searches make Google money. Google often says that it only shows ads on about 20 percent of queries, the ones it calls “commercial queries.” This week, during the US v. Google antitrust trial, we got a rare glimpse at a closely guarded secret: which search terms make the most money. The list is only for the week of September 22nd, 2018, and it is the list of top queries ordered by revenue and nothing else. Still, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before, and the list was only made public after long deliberations from Judge Amit Mehta, who has, over the course of the trial, begun to push both sides to be more public with information and data like this.

Okay, here are the top 20 queries for that week ordered by revenue: iphone 8, iphone 8 plus, auto insurance, car insurance, cheap flights, car insurance quotes, direct tv, online colleges, at&t, hulu, iphone, uber, spectrum, comcast, xfinity, insurance quotes, free credit report, cheap car insurance, aarp, and lifelock.

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Source: Slashdot – A Rare Look at Google’s Most Lucrative Search Queries

Twenty-eight countries including the US, UK and China have agreed to work together to ensure artificial intelligence is used in a “human-centric, trustworthy and responsible” way, in the first global commitment of its kind. From a report: The pledge forms part of a communique signed by major powers including Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia, at the inaugural AI Safety Summit. The two-day event, hosted and convened by British prime minister Rishi Sunak at Bletchley Park, started on Wednesday. Called the Bletchley Declaration, the document recognises the “potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm” to be caused by advanced AI models, but adds such risks are “best addressed through international co-operation.” Other signatories include the EU, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya and Nigeria.

The communique represents the first global statement on the need to regulate the development of AI, but at the summit there are expected to be disagreements about how far such controls should go. Country representatives attending the event include Hadassa Getzstain, Israeli chief of staff at the ministry of innovation, science and technology, and Wu Zhaohui, Chinese vice minister for technology. Gina Raimondo, US commerce secretary, gave an opening speech at the summit and announced a US safety institute to evaluate the risks of AI. This comes on the heels of a sweeping executive order by President Joe Biden, announced on Monday, and intended to curb the risks posed by the technology.

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Source: Slashdot – US, China and 26 Other Nations Agree To Co-operate Over AI Development

LinkedIn, the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, on Wednesday said it now has more than 1 billion members and is adding more AI features for paying users. From a report: Crossing the billion-users mark puts LinkedIn — where members maintain a resume-like profile of their education, work experience and professional skills — in the top-tier of social media networks that include rivals such as Meta Platforms. About 80% of recent members are signing up from outside of the United States, the company has said.

LinkedIn has a free tier of membership but also offers subscriptions. Members of its $39.99-a-month tier will get new AI features that can tell a user, who may be plowing through dozens of job postings, whether they’re a good candidate based on the information in their profile. The system can also recommend profile changes to make the user more competitive for a job.

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Source: Slashdot – LinkedIn Hits 1 Billion Users, Adds AI Features for Job Seekers