OpenAI is rolling out new beta features for ChatGPT Plus members right now. Subscribers have reported that the update includes the ability to upload files and work with them, as well as multimodal support. From a report: Basically, users won’t have to select modes like Browse with Bing from the GPT-4 dropdown — it will instead guess what they want based on context. The new features bring a dash of the office features offered by its ChatGPT Enterprise plan to the standalone individual chatbot subscription. I don’t seem to have the multimodal update on my own Plus plan, but I was able to test out the Advanced Data Analysis feature, which seems to work about as expected. Once the file is fed to ChatGPT, it takes a few moments to digest the file before it’s ready to work with it, and then the chatbot can do things like summarize data, answer questions, or generate data visualizations based on prompts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ChatGPT Plus Members Can Upload and Analyze Files in the Latest Beta

The UK government confirmed plans to regulate cryptoasset activities more strictly, bringing them under the same regime as traditional financial services. From a report: The government intends to proceed with legislation in 2024 to implement the changes, according to a Treasury announcement on Monday, responding to a consultation it launched earlier this year. The plans include a mandate for crypto exchanges to write detailed requirements on admission standards and disclosures for token issuers when listing new assets. This could include information about a token’s underlying code, known vulnerabilities and risks.

The UK’s push to regulate crypto is part of a wider effort by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to attract more digital-asset businesses and investment to the country, while at the same time protecting consumers. Crypto firms have long complained that a lack of clear rules has made it hard for them to operate in the UK. “We must make the UK a place where cryptoasset firms have the clarity needed to invest and innovate, and where customers have the protections necessary for confidently using these technologies,” said City Minister Andrew Griffith. “The UK is the obvious choice for starting and scaling a cryptoasset business.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – UK Confirms Plans To Bring Crypto Under Stricter Regulation

Meta, in a blog post: To comply with evolving European regulations, we are introducing a new subscription option in the EU, EEA and Switzerland. In November, we will be offering people who use Facebook or Instagram and reside in these regions the choice to continue using these personalised services for free with ads, or subscribe to stop seeing ads. While people are subscribed, their information will not be used for ads.

People in these countries will be able to subscribe for a fee to use our products without ads. Depending on where you purchase it will cost $10.5/month on the web or $13.75/month on iOS and Android. Regardless of where you purchase, the subscription will apply to all linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in a user’s Accounts Center. As is the case for many online subscriptions, the iOS and Android pricing take into account the fees that Apple and Google charge through respective purchasing policies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Facebook and Instagram To Offer Subscription for No Ads in Europe

President Joe Biden signed a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence Monday, setting the stage for some industry regulations and funding for the U.S. government to further invest in the technology. From a report: The order is broad, and its focuses range from civil rights and industry regulations to a government hiring spree. In a media call previewing the order Sunday, a senior White House official, who asked to not be named as part of the terms of the call, said AI has so many facets that effective regulations have to cast a wide net. “AI policy is like running into a decathlon, and there’s 10 different events here,” the official said. “And we don’t have the luxury of just picking ‘we’re just going to do safety’ or “we’re just going to do equity’ or ‘we’re just going to do privacy.’ You have to do all of these things.”

The official also called for “significant bipartisan legislation” to further advance the country’s interests with AI. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a private forum in September with industry leaders but has yet to introduce significant AI legislation. Some of the order builds on a previous nonbinding agreement that seven of the top U.S. tech companies developing AI agreed to in July, like hiring outside experts to probe their systems for weaknesses and sharing their critical findings. The order leverages the Defense Production Act to legally require those companies to share safety test results with the federal government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Biden Signs Executive Order To Oversee and Invest in AI

The Wall Street Journal reports that more than three million Americans have now had a total of $127 billion in student loans flagged for cancellation. (Which for 3 million would average out to over $40,000 apiece).

Interestingly, the article notes this happened despite a set back for forgiveness in America’s highest court this June:

The high court ruled that the Biden administration couldn’t cancel hundreds of billions of dollars for tens millions of student-loan holders, reasoning that the authority for such a broad-based policy doesn’t exist under the law. While that closed one path, Biden tapped a variety of different tools that no previous president had ever used to this extent. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has arranged to cancel loans equal to around 30% of the total projected cost of its blocked mass cancellation plan.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 7 Billion in US Student Loans Now Flagged for Cancellation – About 30% of Planned Amount

Wikipedia defines LIGO as “a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves.” (It stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — that is, measuring the interference caused by superimposed waves.)

Now Science Alert reports:
A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO’s interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier.
For LIGO, it’s a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60% more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous run, which was around one or two detections every week or so… “Now that we have surpassed this quantum limit, we can do a lot more astronomy,” says physicist Lee McCuller of Caltech…

LIGO’s sensitivity was already absolutely jaw-dropping. The interferometer works by detecting ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions of billions to light-years away. These cause gravitational waves, like ripples in a pond. We can’t feel them; but they can be detected in miniscule deviations in the path of light down a long, long tunnel. These deviations are incredibly small, down to trillions of times smaller than a human hair. But once you get into subatomic scales — the quantum realm — LIGO’s abilities are hobbled. That’s because, on those unimaginably small scales, particles randomly pop in and out of space, creating a constant background hiss of quantum noise that’s louder than any signal.

Frequency-dependent squeezing is a way of amplifying the signals to be ‘louder’ than the quantum noise… If you pinch a property of light, such as amplitude (or power), other properties, such as frequency, can be measured more accurately… [T]he light can be squeezed in multiple ways to amplify the frequency of the gravitational waves the scientists are looking for… “We’ve known for a while how to write down the equations to make this work, but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It’s like science fiction,” says physicist Rana Adhikari of Caltech…

This means we’re likely to see a significant uptick in the number of black hole and neutron star collisions we observe out there in the wider Universe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – LIGO Surpasses the Quantum Limit

“More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years,” writes Stack Overflow’s senior analyst for market research and insights — citing the results of their latest survey of developers in 107 different countries.

“More than 1,000 developers responded to this year’s survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking.”

New insights from these survey results show that new tech talent and late-career developers are both more likely to be looking. New developers have increasingly switched jobs compared to early- and mid-career developers in the last three years… Interest in looking for a new job drops as developers get older for new to mid-career (44 and younger) respondents (86% to 74%), but picks back up for those 55 to 64 (88%). Late-career developers acknowledge curiosity about other companies as their second top reason to look for a new job this year behind “better salary,” which all age groups rank as their top reason. Curiosity grew in importance for late-career developers since last year more than all other age groups (32% vs. 22%) and is more important to this group than reasons other groups ranked higher such as working with new technology and growth opportunities…

In our 2023 Developer Survey, we started asking about AI and the sentiment around it in our developer community; results were very similar when we checked in again through this pulse survey (70% are using AI or planning to). Developers may also feel less enthusiastic about learning opportunities now that AI tools are rapidly developing to help many be more productive in their jobs (30% cite this as the top benefit).

Other interesting findings from the survey:
Compared to the 2023 Developer Survey, 8% of developers have exited the technology industry and are increasingly filling roles in manufacturing and supply chain companies (11% vs. 7%) Technology is the industry most developers currently work in (46%), followed by manufacturing/supply chain (14%) and financial services (13%)
New tech talent is onboarding at as many jobs by 24 as those up to 10 years their senior and this rapid experience cycle could rival the knowledge and experience of those they report to.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 79% of Developers are At Least Considering a New Job, Survey Finds

Are face masks effective in stopping virus transmissions? CBS News re-visited the question Sunday on its news show 60 Minutes by sending their chief medical correspondent to interview Linsey Marr, a professor who specializes in aerosol science at Virginia Tech University.
Here’s a transcript from an excerpt posted on YouTube:

60 Minutes: Is there any doubt in your mind that masks prevent the person who’s wearing it from getting Covid — or at least, are helpful?

Professor Marr: I would say they are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get Covid. Because it’s reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you.

It’s not going to guarantee that it’s going to protect you, because are masks are not 100% effective — we talk about N-95’s being 95% efficient at filtering out particles, if they’re properly fitted and everything, and so that’s in an ideal world. But even so, if you — instead of breathing in 100 virsues, I’m breathing in 20, because my mask was 80% effective? That’s a huge reduction, and that greatly reduces the chance that I’m going to become infected.

On the CBS News web site, they highlight this excerpt from the interview:
Early in the pandemic, some guidance from health professionals suggested that wearing a mask might actually lead to infection: A person might encounter a contaminated mask and then touch their eyes, nose, or mouth. But research in the ensuing years has shown that fear to be misplaced. “There wasn’t any evidence really that that happens,” Marr said.

Marr said her team aerosolized the coronavirus, pulled it through a mask, and then examined how much virus survived on the mask. The study reported some viral particle remained on some cloth masks, but no virus survived on the N95s or surgical masks. Marr’s team also touched artificial skin to masks and looked at how many virus particles transferred to the artificial skin. No infectious virus transferred.
“I hope the study kind of shows that it’s something we don’t need to worry about as much as we were told,” Marr said.

CBS gave their video interview the headline “Face mask effectiveness: What we know now” — and asked professor Marr for a definitive answer:

60 Minutes: There was a lot of controversy over whether or not masks worked at all. Were you able to show that they worked scientifically?

Professor Marr: We were able to show that they block particles that are the same size as those that carry the virus… What happens is the virus is being carried in the air, and it’s not just going straight through those holes. It has to weave around all these layers of fibers in there. As the air is going around the curves, the virus may crash into one of those fibers, and so then it’s trapped, or maybe it comes up close to the fiber and brushes against it. And the really small particles, like the virus by itself if it were by itself, would be small enough that it undergoes these random motions, because it’s getting bounced around by the gas molecules, and it ends up crashing into the fibers of the mask too.

So there was accumulating evidence — and there had been kind of a handful of papers before that, too, showing the same thing. That masks — even cloth masks — do something.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Are Face Masks Effective? CBS News Explains What We Know

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: In 1994 the TV show Friends premiered, and its first season’s high ratings made it the 8th most-popular show. The next year Microsoft released Windows 95 — and filmed a promotional video for it with 25-year-old Matthew Perry and 26-year-old Jennifer Aniston.

“They’ll be taking you on an adventure in computing that takes place in the office of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates,” explains the video’s narrator, adding “Along the way, they meet a wacky bunch of propellor-heads…. And are introduced the top 25 features of Windows 95!”

It’s a journey back in time. (At one point the video refers to Windows as the operating system “with tens of millions of users.”) Their 30-minute segment — billed as “the world’s first cyber sitcom” — appears in an hour-long video introducing revolutionary features like the new “Start” button. Also demonstrated in Excel are the new minimize and maximize “features” in “the upper right-side of the window”. And the two actors marvel at the ability to type a filename that was longer than eight characters…

Watch for reminders that The Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide was filmed nearly three decades ago. When the desktop appears after waking from screensaver mode, Perry notes that there’s “no messy DOS build-up.” And later the video reminds viewers that Windows 95 is compatible “with DOS games like Flight Simulator.” There’s also a brand new feature called “Windows Explorer” (which is described as “File Manager on steroids”), as well as a new “Find” option, and a brand new icon named “My Computer”. And near the end they pay a visit to the Microsoft Network — which was mostly a “walled garden” online service — described in the video as “your on-ramp to the information superhighway”.

The video even explains how Windows 95 “uses the right mouse button for what Microsoft calls power users.”

And by the end of it, Jennifer Anniston finds herself playing Space Cadet 3D pinball.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – When Matthew Perry Met Windows 95

The seven industrial countries known as the “G7” — America, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Britain — will agree on a code of conduct Monday for companies developing advanced AI systems, reports Reuters.

The news comes “as governments seek to mitigate the risks and potential misuse of the technology,” Reuters reports — citing a G7 document.

The 11-point code “aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI worldwide and will provide voluntary guidance for actions by organizations developing the most advanced AI systems, including the most advanced foundation models and generative AI systems”, the G7 document said. It “is meant to help seize the benefits and address the risks and challenges brought by these technologies”.

The code urges companies to take appropriate measures to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks across the AI lifecycle, as well as tackle incidents and patterns of misuse after AI products have been placed on the market. Companies should post public reports on the capabilities, limitations and the use and misuse of AI systems, and also invest in robust security controls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – G7 Nations Will Announce an ‘AI Code of Conduct’ for Companies Building AI

“The work started on Wayland,” the Linux Mint project announced in their monthly newsletter.

An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux about an upcoming new option in the Ubuntu-based distro:

Linux Mint 21.3 [planned for Christmas of 2023] will be the first Linux Mint release to offer a Wayland session, but in an experimental state. The default session will still be the X11 one, but users who want to try Wayland can do so by selecting the “Cinnamon on Wayland” session from the login screen.
“The Wayland session won’t be as stable as the default one. It will lack features and it will come with its own limitations. We won’t recommend it but you’ll be able to give it a shot if you want to and it’ll be there for interested people if they want to give us feedback,” said Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre.

I said that “2024 is the year of the Wayland desktop”, but Clement Lefebvre doesn’t think Linux Mint needs Wayland support before 2026… By that time, I believe Xfce will also be fully Wayland compatible so that Linux Mint can fully switch to Wayland by default.

The newsletter says the 2026 target “leaves us two years to identify and to fix all the issues. It’s something we’ll continue to work on.
“Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we’ll consider switching defaults. We’ll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. We’ll be ready and compatible with both.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Linux Mint Gets ‘Experimental’ Wayland Support in December

The Washington Post’s editorial board looks at America’s “net neutrality” debate.

But first they note that America’s communications-regulating FCC has “limited authority to regulate unless broadband is considered a ‘common carrier’ under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.”

The FCC under President Barack Obama moved to reclassify broadband so it could regulate broadband companies; the FCC under President Donald Trump reversed the change. Dismayed advocates warned the world that, without the protections in place, the internet would break. You’ll never guess what happened next: nothing. Or, at least, almost nothing. The internet did not break, and internet service providers for the most part did not block and they did not throttle.

All the same, today’s FCC, under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, has just moved to re-reclassify broadband. The interesting part is that her strongest argument doesn’t have much to do with net neutrality, but with some of the other benefits the country could see from having a federal watchdog keeping an eye on the broadband business… Broadband is an essential service… Yet there isn’t a single government agency with sufficient authority to oversee this vital tool. Asserting federal authority over broadband would empower regulation of any blocking, throttling or anti-competitive paid traffic prioritization that they might engage in. But it could also help ensure the safety and security of U.S. networks.

The FCC has, on national security grounds, removed authorization for companies affiliated with adversary states, such as China’s Huawei, from participating in U.S. telecommunications markets. The agency can do this for phone carriers. But it can’t do it for broadband, because it isn’t allowed to. Or consider public safety during a crisis. The FCC doesn’t have the ability to access the data it needs to know when and where there are broadband outages — much less the ability to do anything about those outages if they are identified. Similarly, it can’t impose requirements for network resiliency to help prevent those outages from occurring in the first place — during, say, a natural disaster or a cyberattack.

The agency has ample power to police the types of services that are becoming less relevant in American life, such as landline telephones, and little power to police those that are becoming more important every day.
The FCC acknowledges this power would also allow them to prohibit “throttling” of content. But the Post’s editorial also makes the argument that here in 2023 that’s “unlikely to have any major effect on the broadband industry in either direction… Substantial consequences have only become less likely as high-speed bandwidth has become less limited.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – America’s Net Neutrality Question: Should the FCC Define the Internet as a ‘Common Carrier’?

“Scientists recently fired up the world’s smallest particle accelerator for the first time,” reports Space.com.

“The tiny technological triumph, which is around the size of a small coin, could open the door to a wide range of applications, including using the teensy particle accelerators inside human patients.”

The new machine, known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator (NEA), consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual “pillars.” Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars. The main acceleration tube is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeter) long, which is 54 million times shorter than the 16.8-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring that makes up CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland — the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator… The inside of the tiny tunnel is only around 225 nanometers wide. For context, human hairs are 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick, according to the National Nanotechnology Institute.

In a new study, published Oct. 18 in the journal Nature, researchers from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany used the tiny contraption to accelerate electrons from an energy value of 28.4âkiloelectron volts to 40.7âkeV, which is an increase of around 43%. It is the first time that a nanophotonic electron accelerator, which was first proposed in 2015, has been successfully fired, the researchers wrote in a statement…

“For the first time, we really can speak about a particle accelerator on a [micro]chip,” study co-author Roy Shiloh, a physicist at FAU, said in the statement.

What they accomplished “was demonstrated almost simultaneously by colleagues at Stanford University,” according to the researchers’ statement. “Their results are currently under review, but can be viewed on a repository. The two teams are working together on the realization of the ‘Accelerator on a chip’ in a project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation” in 2015.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – For the First Time, Scientists Have Fired Up the World’s Smallest Particle Accelerators

Long-time Slashdot reader CJSHayward shares “an attempt at Python virtual shell.”

The home-brewed project “mixes your native shell with Python with the goal of letting you use your regular shell but also use Python as effectively a shell scripting language, as an alternative to your shell’s built-in scripting language… I invite you to explore and improve it!”

From the web site:

The Python Virtual Shell (pvsh or ‘p’ on the command line) lets you mix zsh / bash / etc. built-in shell scripting with slightly modified Python scripting. It’s kind of like Brython [a Python implementation for client-side web programming], but for the Linux / Unix / Mac command line…

The core concept is that all Python code is indented with tabs, with an extra tab at the beginning to mark Python code, and all shell commands (including some shell builtins) have zero tabs of indentation. They can be mixed line-by-line, offering an opportunity to use built-in zsh, bash, etc. scripting or Python scripting as desired.

The Python is an incomplete implementation; it doesn’t support breaking a line into multiple lines. Nonetheless, this offers a tool to fuse shell- and Python-based interactions from the Linux / Unix / Mac command line.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Experimental Project Attempts a Python Virtual Shell for Linux

ZDNet reports an interesting static from Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. “We have over 1 million paid Copilot users in more than 37,000 organizations that subscribe to Copilot for business, with significant traction outside the United States.”

And Microsoft’s quarterly results also “showed early signs that the company’s investments in generative AI were beginning to bolster sales, most notably reversing what had been slowing growth of the company’s important cloud computing product,” reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)

The company had $56.5 billion in sales in the three months that ended in September, up 13% from a year earlier. Profit hit $22.3 billion, up 27%. The results beat analyst expectations and Microsoft’s own estimates.

Microsoft had told investors that A.I. wouldn’t start producing meaningful results until after the start of 2024, when more products became widely available. The company and its competitors are racing to put generative A.I. into nearly every product they offer. Microsoft is seen by many companies as a leading A.I. provider, thanks to its partnership with — and $13 billion investment in — the start-up OpenAI, which introduced the chatbot ChatGPT almost a year ago. Microsoft’s flagship cloud computing product, Azure, grew 29%, up from 26% in the previous quarter. About three percentage points of Azure’s growth came from generative A.I. products, including the access Microsoft provides to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, more than the company had told investors to expect.

More than 18,000 organizations are using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI services, Satya Nadella, the company’s chief executive, said in a call with investors. He said that included customers who had not used Azure before. “Azure again took share as organizations took their workloads to our cloud,” Mr. Nadella said… The company said that sales could increase as much as 8.7% in the current quarter, exceeding investor expectations, and that it was investing in building data centers to support the demand for A.I. and cloud computing…

Microsoft’s personal computing business grew just 3%, to $13.7 billion, reflecting how consumer behaviors have shifted since the laptop-buying binges of the pandemic. The revenue of the Windows operating system installed on new computers was up 4%. Gaming provided a consumer bright spot, with Xbox content and services up 13%.

Next month Microsoft integrates its Copilot AI product into its Excel/Word/Teams “productivity suite” — but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 40% of Fortune 100 companies have already been testing the feature during its “limited preview”, and “so far, so good.”

Yet the article notes it isn’t all good news for Microsoft. Investment bank UBS has told investors that while Microsoft integrated an AI-powered chatbot into its Bing search engine, there is “no evidence” that Bing has actually gained any search market share.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Microsoft’s AI Investment is Stabilizing Its Cloud Business

Bloomberg reports that Comcast’s stock price took its biggest drop in over a year on Thursday, “after reporting drops in broadband and cable subscribers, and predicting more losses to come.”

Cord-cutting and increasing competition have eroded Comcast’s traditional customer base. The company, which owns Xfinity, the NBCUniversal media empire and SkyTV, lost 490,000 cable-TV customers in the third quarter, better than analysts expected but part of an ongoing trend as consumers switch to streaming services like Netflix. It also lost 18,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter, with nearly all of those residential customers. Analysts had predicted Comcast would instead gain 10,900 residential broadband customers.

Shares fell as much as 8% on the news Thursday, their biggest intraday decline since July 2022.

“Growth has halted for Comcast — the largest US broadband provider, with 32 million homes,” said Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst Geetha Ranganathan. “The company derives 80% of profit from cable, where, even after a pandemic-demand surge, broadband has been hurt by fierce competition and low-move activity among customers.” Comcast expects “somewhat higher subscriber losses” in the fourth quarter due to pullback on promotional offers that targeted lower-end customers, Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said on a call with investors. Revenue per customer climbed, however, in part because of price increases and promotions of higher-rate plans.

Broadband is becoming increasingly competitive as mobile providers move into the market with improved wireless internet offerings. In the past week, the Big Three — T-Mobile US Inc., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. — all reported subscriber gains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Comcast and Xfinity Lose Customers – Thanks to Cord-Cutters and Competition from Wireless Internet Carriers

The SF Standard reports that a San Francisco man whose car was stolen in the middle of the night “managed to track down the vehicle using his car insurance app and retrieve the stolen vehicle the following morning within half an hour of noticing it was gone.”

Harris realized he could track his phone using his app from MetroMile, a San Francisco-based digital pay-per-mile car insurance company that tracks a car’s location and charges a rate based on how much it’s driven. “I opened the app and found it was in Mission Bay,” he said, adding that the person who stole it drove it all night before parking. “I rode my bike down there and picked it up….”

Before picking up his car, Harris didn’t consult with the San Francisco Police Department and said officers were confused about why he wanted to report a stolen car that was already back in his possession. He said his driver’s side window had been smashed, but there wasn’t any other damage, just a mess of marijuana paraphernalia and blunt wraps inside… “If a vehicle owner locates their stolen vehicle prior to the police locating it, we highly recommend that they alert us to the vehicle’s location and do not move the car prior to reporting it recovered,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters wrote in an email. “Additionally, if they locate the vehicle occupied, they should not approach the vehicle or suspects and should call law enforcement immediately.”

There were 274 motor vehicle theft reports in the Western Addition neighborhood, which includes Alamo Square, in the 12 months leading up to Oct. 21 compared with 219 during the same period the previous year, according to police data. Citywide, the problem has also gotten worse in recent years. The number of car thefts has risen from 60 incidents per 10,000 residents in 2019 to 101 incidents this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How a Cellphone App Helped a California Man Retrieve His Stolen Car

To explore America’s “transition to a post-quantum world,” the Washington Post interviewed U.S. federal official Nick Polk, who is focused on national security issues including quantum computing and is also a senior advisor to a White House federal chief information security officer):

The Washington Post: The U.S. is in the early stages of a major shift focused on bolstering government network defenses, pushing federal agencies to adopt a new encryption standard known as post-quantum cryptography that aims to prevent systems from being vulnerable to advanced decryption techniques enabled by quantum computers in the near future…

Nick Polk: We’ve been using asymmetric encryption for a very long time now, and it’s been ubiquitous since about 2014, when the U.S. government and some of the large tech companies decided that they’re going to make it a default on most web browsers… Interestingly enough, regarding the post-quantum cryptographic standards being developed, the only thing that’s quantum about them is that it has “quantum” in the name. It’s really just a different type of math that’s much more difficult for a quantum computer to be able to reverse-engineer. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking at different mathematical models to cover all their bases. The interesting thing is that these post-quantum standards are actually being used to protect classical computers that we have now, like laptops…

Given the breadth of the U.S. government and the amount of computing power we use, we really see ourselves and our role as a steward of the tech ecosystem. One of the things that came out of [this week’s Inside Quantum Technology conference in New York City] was that we are very quickly moving along with the private sector to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. I think you’re gonna see very shortly a lot of very sensitive private sector industries start to migrate or start to advertise that they’re going to migrate. Banks are a perfect example. That means meeting with vendors regularly, and testing their algorithms to ensure that we can accurately and effectively implement them on federal systems…
The administration and national security memorandum set 2035 as our deadline as a government to migrate our [national security] systems to post-quantum cryptography. That’s supposed to time with the development of operational quantum computers. We need to ensure that we start now, so that we don’t end up not meeting the deadline before computers are operational… This is a prioritized migration for the U.S. government. We’re going to start with our most critical systems — that includes what we call high-value assets, and high-impact systems. So for example, we’re gonna prioritize systems that have personal health information.

That’s our biggest emphasis — both when we talk to private industry and when we encourage agencies when they talk to their contractors and vendors — to really think about where your most sensitive data is and then prioritize those systems for migration.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How the US is Preparing For a Post-Quantum World

The creator economy is probably bigger than you think. The Washington Post reports it’s “now a global industry valued at $250 billion, with tens of millions of workers, hundreds of millions of customers and its own trade association and work-credentialing programs.”

Millions have ditched traditional career paths to work as online creators and content-makers, using their computers and phones to amass followers and build businesses whose influence now rivals the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics… In the United States, the video giant YouTube estimated that roughly 390,000 full-time jobs last year were supported by its creators’ work — four times the number of people employed by General Motors, America’s biggest automaker…
This spring, analysts at Goldman Sachs said that 50 million people now work as creators around the world. The analysts expect the industry’s “total addressable market,” an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027. For comparison, the global revenue from video games, now at about $227 billion, is expected to climb to roughly $312 billion by 2027, analysts at the financial giant PwC estimated in June. YouTube’s report estimated that its creators contributed $35 billion to [U.S.] gross domestic product last year, a figure that would rank the group’s combined output ahead of U.S. furniture manufacturing but behind rail transportation, according to industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis….
Payments from advertisers to creators in the United States have more than doubled since 2019, to $5 billion, estimates from the market research firm Insider Intelligence show… Megan Pollock, a branding executive at Panasonic North America, said that the company now devotes about 10 percent of its marketing budget to creators and that she expects further increases amid a long-term shift away from traditional ad campaigns.
Other interesting details from the article:

Last month people watched 53 million hours of video a day just on Twitch. But 74% of that went to the top 10,000 streamers (according to data from the analytics firm StreamElements).

“Creators’ incomes are determined by giant tech and advertising companies that can change the rules in an instant, and a single mistake can unravel their careers.”

When America’s youth are asked what they want to be when they grow up, “Influencer” is now one of the most popular answers — ranking higher than “astronaut” and “professional athlete”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Tens of Millions Now Work in the 0B ‘Creator Economy’

Bloomberg thinks they’ve identified the source of the advanced chips in Huawei’s newest smartphone, citing to “people familiar with the matter”.
In a suggestion that export restrictions on Europe’s most valuable tech company may have come too late to stem China’s advances in chipmaking, ASML’s so-called immersion deep ultraviolet machines were used in combination with tools from other companies to make the Huawei Technologies Co. chip, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing information that’s not public. ASML declined to comment.

There is no suggestion that their sales violated export restrictions… ASML has never been able to sell its EUV machines to China because of export restrictions. But less advanced DUV models can be retooled with deposition and etching gear to produce 7-nanometer and possibly even more advanced chips, according to industry analysts. The process is much more expensive than using EUV, making it very difficult to scale production in a competitive market environment. In China, however, the government is willing to shoulder a significant portion of chipmaking costs.

Chinese companies have been legally stockpiling DUV gear for years — especially after the U.S. introduced its initial export controls last year before getting Japan and the Netherlands on board… According to an investor presentation published by the company last week, ASML experienced a jump in business from China this year as chipmakers there boosted orders ahead of the export controls taking full effect in 2024. China accounted for 46% of ASML’s sales in the third quarter, compared with 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in the three months ending in March.

Another article from Bloomberg includes this prediction:
The U.S. won’t be able to stop Huawei and SMIC from making progress in chip technology, Burn J. Lin, a former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. vice president, told Bloomberg News. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp should be able to advance to the next generation at 5 nanometers with machines from ASML Holding NV that it already operates, said Lin, who at TSMC championed the lithography technology that transformed chipmaking.

The end result is that Huawei’s profit “more than doubled during the quarter it revealed its biggest achievement in chip technology,” the article reports, “adding to signs the Chinese tech leader is steadying a business rocked by US sanctions.”

The Shenzhen company reported a 118% surge in net profit to 26.4 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) in the September quarter, and a slight rise in sales to 145.7 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg News calculations from nine-month results released Friday. Those numbers included initial sales of the vastly popular Mate 60 Pro, which began shipping in late August… The gadget sold out almost instantly, spurring expectations it could rejuvenate Huawei’s fortunes and potentially cut into Apple Inc.’s lead in China, given signs of a disappointing debut for the iPhone 15…

A resurgent Huawei would pose problems not just for Apple but also local brands from Xiaomi Corp. to Oppo and Vivo, all of which are fighting for sales in a shrinking market.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Huawei’s Profit Doubles With Made-in-China Chip Breakthrough