An anonymous reader shares a report: When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. For years, that is what WhatsApp’s two billion users — many of them in Brazil, India and other countries around the world — got. They chatted with friends and family unencumbered by advertising and other features found on social media. Now that is set to change.
On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device’s default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages.
[…] In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp’s original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption, a method of keeping texts, photos, videos and phone calls inaccessible by third parties. Both left the company seven years ago. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, has focused on WhatsApp’s growth and user privacy while also melding the app into the company’s other products, including Instagram and Messenger.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anne Wojcicki has been declared the winner of a bankruptcy auction for 23andMe, the genetics testing start-up she founded, prevailing over a rival bid from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
TTAM Research Institute, a non-profit public benefit company also founded by Wojcicki, won the auction with a $305 million bid for the 23andMe assets, which will not come with any company liabilities attached.
23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March after rejecting several go-private offers from Wojcicki in recent years. Regeneron was declared the winning bidder in May after the company accepted a $256 million bid in a previous auction.
While your phone is usually going to be well protected from thieves thanks to whatever you’ve set up on the lock screen—whether a fingerprint, a face scan, or a PIN—there might still be times when someone else has access to your device, including everything on it you’d rather they not see. But if you have a Samsung Galaxy, there’s a good way to safeguard your most sensitive apps and files, even if the phone itself is unlocked.
Maybe your phone gets stolen by a thief who’s spied on you entering your PIN. Maybe a friend is simply swiping through the photos of your last vacation. Whatever the scenario, Galaxy phones come equipped with a digital vault called the Secure Folder, where you can hide specific programs, photos, and files behind an extra layer of security. This way, anyone who does get into your phone won’t be able to find what you’ve stashed away. All the data inside your Secure Folder is encrypted too, via Samsung’s powerful Knox technology.
With One UI 8, now in beta testing, this Secure Folder is more useful than ever. You can now hide the Secure Folder shortcut itself—so anyone snooping can’t see it’s there, let alone see anything inside it—and protect it with different biometrics from the ones you use to get into your phone.
So, for example, you could let your kids into your phone to play games using a fingerprint scan, but they’d still be barred from the Secure Folder. What’s more, apps can now be completely hidden inside the folder, whereas previously there would be one instance of these apps locked away, and one instance in the regular app drawer.
To get started with the Secure Folder on your Galaxy phone, you first need to have a Samsung account and be signed into it on your phone. Assuming that’s taken care of, open Settings and then navigate to Security and privacy > More security settings > Secure Folder. Agree to the terms of the feature and the required permissions to proceed.
You’re then asked to choose a lock type for the Secure Folder: PIN, Password, Pattern, or whatever biometric options you have on your handset. Select any of these options and follow the instructions on screen to set them up; this is how the folder will keep out anyone who isn’t you.
The next screen lets you choose whether or not Secure Folder apps can run in the background when the folder is closed. For maximum security, make sure apps are closed when the Secure Folder is, which will prevent them from sending notifications or appearing in share dialogs when you’re not actually in the folder.
With that done, your Secure Folder appears on screen and is ready to go. You’ll see there are some Samsung apps in there right away, like Contacts and Gallery: These are separate from the versions of those apps outside the Secure Folder, so you can use them like an entirely different contacts list and an entirely different gallery of photos and videos.
Tap the padlock icon to close out of the Secure Folder and go back to the rest of your phone. You can get back in by following the new shortcut that will appear on your home screen and in the app drawer. To make changes to how the Secure Folder is configured, head back to Security and privacy > More security settings > Secure Folder in Settings (accessing this page will now require an identity check, like the folder itself).
With the Secure Folder active, the settings screen changes to let you manage notifications, app options, and even Galaxy AI features. It’s a bit like having a separate, sequestered phone on the same device, with its own selection of settings to match. If you ever want to remove the Secure Folder and its contents, choose More settings > Uninstall.
Once you’re inside the Secure Folder, you can tap the + (plus) button to add apps to it. Choose an app from your phone or find one on the Play Store or Galaxy Store. If you download a new app, it’ll only show up in the Secure Folder; if you pick an app already on your phone, you’ll get a new instance of it inside the folder.
If you add an app already on your phone to your Secure Folder and no longer want it to appear outside of the Secure Folder, you need to uninstall the original instance. Find it in the app drawer, long press on its icon, then choose Uninstall. You can also do this for some of the Samsung apps that get put in your Secure Folder to begin with.
Remember that the Secure Folder is a completely separate space, so you’ll need to sign into your various app accounts again from within it—you can even use different accounts for the apps inside the Secure Folder, if you want. The same goes for the Google Play Store: You’ll be asked to sign in with a Google account, which doesn’t have to be the same Google account you’re using for the rest of your phone.
To add files to your Secure Folder, tap the three dots to the top right of the app panel, then pick Add files. You’ll be able to select files, and choose whether to copy them or move them to the Secure Folder: If you choose the copy option, the original versions of the files will stay in place outside of the folder.
Files that you move or copy over will show up inside the relevant app (Gallery for photos, for example) as well as the My Files app within your Secure Folder. You can manage these files just as you would normally, and you still have all the sharing options available if you need to send them somewhere else.
Tap on the three dots and choose Customize to change the color and icon used for the Secure Folder. If you have upgraded to One UI 8, in the same menu you can find the new Hide Secure Folder option. Enabling this hides the folder from the home screen and app drawer, so the only way to get to it will be via the tile on the Quick Settings panel (swipe down from the top right of the display to find it).
SEOUL, South Korea—Drive enough electric vehicles from enough different manufacturers and something becomes clear: the Korean automakers know what they’re doing. From small cars like the Niro all the way to three-row SUVs, the EVs coming out of Kia (and its sibling Hyundai) are as efficient as anything out there, usually with a distinctive style. It’s fair to say they’re at the front of the pack, at least as far as EVs offered to North America.
And soon, there will be a new one to consider. It’s the Kia EV4, a small electric sedan that uses a new version of the E-GMP platform that has so impressed us in cars like the EV6. Originally designed for midsize and larger vehicles and operating at 800 V, the E-GMP powertrain is very capable but also relatively expensive to make. Now Kia has taken what it learned with the 800 V experience and applied it to the new 400 V version that’s suitable for smaller and cheaper EVs.
Kia told Ars that while the development know-how carried over to the new lower-voltage components, the battery, motors, and power electronics are all new. The car arrives in the US in Q4 of this year and will feature a native NACS charging port. There’s only one motor being offered for now, which generates 201 hp (150 kW) and 209 lb-ft (283 Nm) and drives the front wheels. But there are two choices of battery: the standard 58.3 kWh, which Kia reckons should achieve an EPA range of 235 miles (378 km); and an 81.4 kWh long-range pack, that should be sufficient for 330 miles (531 km) on North American roads. In time, expect a twin-motor, all-wheel drive option, as well as a more powerful EV4 GT.
This week’s trip into the cultural subconscious of younger people is bleaker than usual. The memes are more chaotic, the Pokémon cards are harder to get, and the ex-boyfriends are somehow worse than usual. From the unexplainable “Dark Mango psychology” to TikTok’s parade of horribles, this week’s youth culture has the distinct energy of an evil amusement park. Let’s descend into the gloom, together.
To understand Generation Alpha’s “dark mango psychology” memes, you have to go to some weird places and make peace with brain rot: Gen-A’s self-referential, exclusively online style of meme-making resists logical explanation, but I’m going to try to anyway, god help me.
In late May, TikTok user @rip_mango20 posted, “Dark Mango psychology explained,” the first video on the subject. In it, a distorted voice asks “Have you ever played Blox Fruits with your life on the line while having a bunch of mangos in your mouth? Well this is called dark mango psychology…” it goes on like that, but no psychology is ever actually explained. You can watch the video here:
If this clip had a few hundred views, you could dismiss it as a self-conscious, “aren’t I so wacky?’ thing, but it’s been viewed millions of times, so it means something to someone. Anyway, here’s my best stab at an explanation, with help from knowyourmeme.com:
The character featured in the video is a variation of “trollface,” a online icon that’s been around since 2008. Blox Fruit is a mini-game within Gen A’s favorite game/gaming platform Roblox. The line “Have you ever played X with your life on the line,” is a reference to an anime called Blue Lock, in which the question is asked about a game of soccer. “Mango” is a reference to this video, that features a “phonk” song about mango, based on audio ripped from this video. “Phonk” is a musical subgenre featuring heavily distorted, lo-fi instruments playing a slower-tempo variation of EDM music. (It is unlistenable.) For reasons that resist explanation, this video caught on among the brain-rotted, who started remixing the original post, adding other nonsense words like “mustard” and “jellybean” (references to even more obscure brain-rot memes) and using the phrase “dark mango psychology” to describe something like—chaotic energy? It’s hard to tell. I’m sure there are layers of meaning here that are understandable only by people under 15 years old, but I’ve done my level best. Perhaps this is something you and I aren’t meant to understand and we should just wait for it to go away.
Let’s talk about memes made about people—specifically, memes about toxic men, a reliable source of bitter online comedy. The new trend on TikTok is called “Man of the Year,” and it is not a celebration of men behaving awesomely. Instead, women are sharing evidence of the abuse, manipulation, and general grossness visited upon them by ex-boyfriends, accompanied by a few bars of Lorde’s “Man of the Year.” It’s a simple idea, but these are some powerful videos.
Man of the year candidates include this guy, who remixed his girlfriend crying into a truly terrible EDM song:
Or this young gentleman who abandoned both his girl and his child:
There’s even a famous man of the year, Justin Bieber:
And the number of cruel texts is just way too high.
In other news from the frontlines of the gender wars, singer Sabrina Carpenter dropped some photos and the name of her upcoming album, and it’s pure provocation. What might be the cover of Man’s Best Friend looks like this:
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The cover is Carpenter playing against her type, taking her bubblegum pink pop princess image somewhere darker and more provocative. I’m sure causing buzz is the point, and it’s clearly working. Top Instagram comments include: “Sabrina this is not the slay you think it is… :/,” “Love sabrina – but this picture – why is the man in there like that? its not a very empowering image for women. i think its a mistake.” and “Explain to me again how this isn’t centering men? How this isn’t catering to the male gaze?” I think Madonna in her prime would have literally killed these kids.
It’s quaint that anyone can still get worked up over pop stars creating imagery designed to inflame cultural ire and/or sell records, but I think the online critics are wringing their hands for no reason. We won’t really know until the album comes out in August to provide context, but judging by the single, “Manchild,” about idiotic dudes who can’t take care of themselves, and by the fact that Carpenter is a smart person, it seems the intention is to mock the “male gaze,” and the statement is like, “can you believe that these numbskulls see us this way/want us to be this way?”
Also, Spinal Tap did it first:
Gen Z is bad at going to bars. Apparently, younger people refuse to leave bar tabs open. This could be because they’re more budget-conscious than preceding generations. Or it could be just ignorance. “These kids never learned the proper way to be a barfly,” a bartender told the New York Times.
The bartender has a point, but I do not blame Gen Z for their poor drinking etiquette (if that’s what this is.) If it’s born of money consciousness, I get it: Have you seen how much cocktails cost in 2025? if it’s ignorance, I get that too. Going to bars can be confusing if you’re new to them. They’re loud, busy, chaotic, and ruled by a set of practices and assumptions that no one is taught, and that don’t have any precedent in other kinds of transactions. Particularly the bar tab: It’s not like we hand over our cards and just leave them with any other kinds of shopkeepers.
I love that Gen Z is educating each other, though, and expressing their feelings through TikTok videos like this:
Even this week’s viral video is dark and dystopian, but it’s also educational. Before I saw this week’s viral video I didn’t even know Pokémon scalpers existed.
As you can see, Leo is a little kid who loves Pokémon, and he wants that special edition Pikachu with the kind of pure desire only a pre-teen can have. So he and his mom and dad have spent 151 days trying to beat the scalpers to their local sales kiosks so the little guy can get his packs. But they never beat the scalpers, and Leo never gets his Pikachu.
In economic terms, the scalpers are expending resources (time, money, Red Bull) to gain an uncompensated transfer of wealth from others without creating new value. It’s classic rent-seeking behavior: manipulating a market to extract profits rather than producing anything of value. As Adam Smith, the father of economics, put it, scalpers are trying to “reap where they never sowed”—though Smith probably didn’t foresee a future where the invisible hand of the market would slap a Pikachu card out of a child’s hands and give it to a grown man who smells funny and doesn’t shave. Leo not getting his Pikachu is a negative externality—a cost borne by someone who isn’t party to the transaction. His tears are not priced into the secondary market, which is disturbingly efficient at delivering disappointment.
Look, I get that it’s not the worst thing happening in this wicked world—I hope this is the worst thing that ever happens to Leo, honestly—but maybe capitalism could take some time off for kids who like Pokémon?
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Right now, this Logitech Combo Touch Keyboard Case for the iPad Pro 11″ is 61% off—its lowest price to date. This is Logitech’s thinnest keyboard case yet, and it connects instantly via the Smart Connector, meaning no Bluetooth pairing or charging required. The iPad itself powers the keyboard, which attaches magnetically and also supports magnetic charging for an Apple Pencil. There are 16 levels of backlighting to give you visibility in low light; an adjustable kickstand; and a detachable, click-anywhere trackpad.
Reviewers call this case a game-changer for digital art, studying, and working. It’s also a helpful accessory for anyone traveling who doesn’t want to be weighed down by a laptop but wants a full keyboard. It’s worth noting that at 1.27 lbs, it’s heavier and larger than some Apple tablet cases and the pricier Magic Keyboard, but it offers more protection and durability. Additionally, it works best on flat surfaces—if you work on your lap or in a bed, it won’t be ideal. The quality of the kickstand is debated in Amazon reviews; some people call it flimsy, while others describe it as flexible yet secure and stable once positioned.
While there are cheaper third-party keyboard cases on the market, Logitech is a trusted name with a reputation for responsive, high-quality tech accessories. It’s also a major perk that the iPad powers the keyboard. If you’re an iPad 11 Pro owner who wants laptop-style functionality without buying a new computer (and you don’t mind a slightly bulky footprint), the Logitech Combo Touch Keyboard Case is a strong option at $140 off.
Once upon a time Facebook was filled with posts about the minutiae of your day and album after album of photos of just about every experience you had. By now, a lot of this media is likely hidden with the “only me” setting. But, regardless of how much you use Facebook these days, it’s probably home to a lot of memories you want to hold on to — or at least have the opportunity to laugh at later.
The good news is that you can download your Facebook information. You can access things such as your posts, photos you’re tagged in, groups you belong to, friendships and your search history. You can also see apps that you’ve connected to through Facebook and your interactions with ads. However, you won’t see content you’ve deleted and some information might not be available for your entire time on Facebook — depending on when and how the platform stored specific media.
So, how do you download your Facebook information from Meta? You can start by clicking on your profile picture and then selecting the “settings and privacy” tab. From there you can click onto “settings” and then choose “download your information.” Then click “continue,” followed by “download or transfer information.”
You will be prompted to choose which profiles you want to save information from and then click “next” to reach the “how much information you want to download” option. Now you have the option to click “specific types of information” to narrow down what you want and to get a copy of your data logs. The only decision left is whether you want to download the information to you device or to a specific place.
You should see a “pending” status once you’ve submitted your request, and you’ll have four days to download everything after it processes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/how-to-download-your-information-from-facebook-121403031.html?src=rss
“Walmart is bringing drone deliveries to three more states,” reports CNBC:
On Thursday, the big-box retailer said it plans to launch the speedier delivery option at 100 stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa within the coming year. With the expansion, Walmart’s drone deliveries will be available in a total of five states: [parts of northwest] Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and [the Dallas-Fort Worth area of] Texas… The drone operator will have an up to a six-mile range from stores.
Walmart tells CNBC the most frequently delivered items include ice cream, fresh fruit, and pet food, as well as “urgent items, such as hamburger buns for a cookout, eggs to make brownies or Tylenol or cold medicine needed when sick.” It’s all part of Walmart’s effort to compete with Amazon:
With more than 4,600 Walmart stores across the U.S., the retailer has used its large footprint to get online orders to customers faster. It has an Express Delivery service that drops purchases at customers’ doors in as fast as 30 minutes, along with InHome, a subscription-based service, that puts items directly into people’s fridges. The company began same-day prescription deliveries last fall and has expanded the service across the country…. Walmart stores have an assortment of over 150,000 items in a location. Over 50% of those can be delivered by drone, said Greg Cathey [Walmart’s senior VP for U.S. transformation and innovation]… Walmart’s drone delivery count so far is modest. The company did not share the specific count, but said it has racked up a total of more than 150,000 drone deliveries since 2021.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When Nintendo launched the Switch in 2017, the sheer novelty of the new hardware brought the company a lot of renewed attention. After the market disaster of the Wii U’s homebound “second screen” tablet, Nintendo exploited advances in system-on-a-chip miniaturization to create something of a minimum viable HD-capable system that could work as both a lightweight handheld and a slightly underpowered TV-based console. That unique combination, and Nintendo’s usual selection of first-party system sellers, set the console apart from what the rest of the gaming market was offering at the time.
Eight years later, the Switch 2 launched into a transformed gaming hardware market that the original Switch played a large role in shaping, one full of portable gaming consoles that can optionally be connected to a TV. That includes full-featured handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and its many imitators, but also streaming-focused Android-based gaming handhelds and retro-focused emulation machines on the cheaper end. Even Microsoft is preparing to get in on the act, streamlining the Windows gaming experience for an Asus-powered handheld gaming PC that hides the Windows desktop.
Mario is excited! Are you?
Credit:
Kyle Orland
Those market changes make the Switch 2 a lot less of a novelty than its predecessor. As its name implies, it is essentially a direct sequel to the original Switch hardware, with improvements to the physical hardware and internal architecture. Rather than shaking things up with a new concept, Nintendo seems to be saying, “Hey, you liked the Switch? Here’s the same thing, but moreso.”
KDE isn’t the only organization reaching out to ” as Microsoft prepares to end support for Windows 10.
“Now, The Document Foundation, maker of LibreOffice, has also joined in to support the Endof10 initiative,” reports the tech blog Neowin:
The foundation writes: “You don’t have to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem.”
It further adds the “real costs” of upgrading to Windows 11 as it writes:
“The move to Windows 11 isn’t just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete…. The end of Windows 10 does not mark the end of choice, but the beginning of a new era. If you are tired of mandatory updates, invasive changes, and being bound by the commercial choices of a single supplier, it is time for a change. Linux and LibreOffice are ready — 2025 is the right year to choose digital freedom!”
The first words on LibreOffice’s announcement? “The countdown has begun….”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Spain’s newspaper El Pais found an entire fake album on YouTube titled Rumba Congo (1973). And they cite a study from France’s International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers that estimated revenue from AI-generated music will rise to $4 billion in 2028, generating 20% of all streaming platforms’ revenue:
One of the major problems with this trend is the lack of transparency. María Teresa Llano, an associate professor at the University of Sussex who studies the intersection of creativity, art and AI, emphasizes this aspect: “There’s no way for people to know if something is AI or not….” On Spotify Community — a forum for the service’s users — a petition is circulating that calls for clear labeling of AI-generated music, as well as an option for users to block these types of songs from appearing on their feeds. In some of these forums, the rejection of AI-generated music is palpable.
Llano mentions the feelings of deception or betrayal that listeners may experience, but asserts that this is a personal matter. There will be those who feel this way, as well as those who admire what the technology is capable of… One of the keys to tackling the problem is to include a warning on AI-generated songs. YouTube states that content creators must “disclose to viewers when realistic content […] is made with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI.” Users will see this if they glance at the description. But this is only when using the app, because on a computer, they will have to scroll down to the very end of the description to get the warning….
The professor from the University of Sussex explains one of the intangibles that justifies the labeling of content: “In the arts, we can establish a connection with the artist; we can learn about their life and what influenced them to better understand their career. With artificial intelligence, that connection no longer exists.”
YouTube says they may label AI-generated content if they become aware of it, and may also remove it altogether, according to the article. But Spotify “hasn’t shared any policy for labeling AI-powered content…”
In an interview with Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s co-president and chief product & technology officer, he emphasized that AI “increases people’s creativity” because more people can be creative, thanks to the fact that “you don’t need to have fine motor skills on the piano.” He also made a distinction between music generated entirely with AI and music in which the technology is only partially used. But the only limit he mentioned for moderating artificial music was copyright infringement… something that has been a red line for any streaming service for many years now. And such a violation is very difficult to legally prove when artificial intelligence is involved.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:
Amazon’s hard-line stance on getting disabled employees to return to the office has sparked a backlash, with workers alleging the company is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as their rights to collectively bargain. At least two Amazon employees have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the National Labor Relations Board, federal agencies that regulate working conditions. One of the workers said they provided the EEOC with a list of 18 “similarly situated” employees to emphasize that their experience isn’t isolated and to help federal regulators with a possible investigation.
Disabled workers frustrated with how Amazon is handling their requests for accommodations — including exemptions to a mandate that they report to the office five days a week — are also venting their displeasure on internal chat rooms and have encouraged colleagues to answer surveys about the policies. Amazon has been deleting such posts and warning that they violate rules governing internal communications. One employee said they were terminated and another said they were told to find a different position after advocating for disabled workers on employee message boards. Both filed complaints with the EEOC and NLRB.
Amazon has told employees with disabilities they must now submit to a “multilevel leader review,” Bloomberg reported in October, “and could be required to return to the office for monthlong trials to determine if accommodations meet their needs.” (They received calls from “accommodation consultants” who also reviewed medical documentation, after which “another Amazon manager must sign off. If they don’t, the request goes to a third manager…”)
Bloomberg’s new article remembers how several employees told them in November. “that they believed the system was designed to deny work-from-home accommodations and prompt employees with disabilities to quit, which some have done. Amazon denied the system was designed to encourage people to resign.”
Since then, workers have mobilized against the policy. One employee repeatedly posted an online survey seeking colleagues’ reactions, defying the company’s demands to stop. The survey ultimately generated feedback from more than 200 workers even though Amazon kept deleting it, and the results reflected strong opposition to Amazon’s treatment of disabled workers. More than 71% of disabled Amazon employees surveyed said the company had denied or failed to meet most of their accommodation requests, while half indicated they faced “hostile” work environments after disclosing their disabilities and requesting accommodations.
One respondent said they sought permission to work from home after suffering multiple strokes that prevented them from driving. Amazon suggested moving closer to the office and taking mass transit, the person said in the survey. Another respondent said they couldn’t drive for longer than 15-minute intervals due to chronic pain. Amazon’s recommendation was to pull over and stretch during their commute, which the employee said was unsafe since they drive on a busy freeway… Amazon didn’t dispute the accounts and said it considered a range of solutions to disability accommodations, including changes to an employee’s commute.
Amazon is also “using AI to parse accommodation requests, read doctors’ notes and make recommendations based on keywords,” according to the article — another policy that’s also generated internal opposition (and formed a “key element” of the complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).
“The dispute could affect thousands of Amazon workers. An internal Slack channel for employees with disabilities has 13,000 members, one of the people said…”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In Tokyo Mitsubishi is deploying “an innovative new battery swap network for electric cars” in a multi-year test program reports the EV news site Electrek.
But it’s not just for electric cars. Along with the 14 modular battery swapping stations, Mitsubishi is also deploying “more than 150 battery-swappable commercial electric vehicles” from truck maker Fuso:
A truck like the Mitsubishi eCanter typically requires a full night of AC charging to top off its batteries, and at least an hour or two on DC charging in Japan, according to Fuso. This joint pilot by Mitsubishi, Mitsubishi Fuso Trucks, and [EV battery swap specialist] Ample aims to circumvent this issue of forced downtime with its swappable batteries, supporting vehicle uptime by delivering a full charge within minutes.
The move is meant to encourage the transport industry’s EV shift while creating a depository of stored energy that can be deployed to the grid in the event of a natural disaster — something Mitsubishi in Japan has been working on for years.
The article’s author also adds their own opinion about battery-swapping technology. “When you see how simple it is to add hundreds of miles of driving in just 100 seconds — quicker, in many cases, than pumping a tank of liquid fuel into an ICE-powered car — you might come around, yourself.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Timothy B. Lee has written for the Washington Post, Vox.com, and Ars Technica — and now writes a Substack blog called “Understanding AI.”
This week he visits recent research by computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University that found that Llama 3.1 70BÂ(released in July 2024) has memorized 42% of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time…
The paper was published last month by a team of computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University. They studied whether five popular open-weight models — three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI — were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs. Many of the books are still under copyright… Llama 3.1 70B — a mid-sized model Meta released in July 2024 — is far more likely to reproduce Harry Potter text than any of the other four models….
Interestingly, Llama 1 65B, a similar-sized model released in February 2023, had memorized only 4.4 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This suggests that despite the potential legal liability, Meta did not do much to prevent memorization as it trained Llama 3. At least for this book, the problem got much worse between Llama 1 and Llama 3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was one of dozens of books tested by the researchers. They found that Llama 3.1 70B was far more likely to reproduce popular books — such as The Hobbit and George Orwell’s 1984 — than obscure ones. And for most books, Llama 3.1 70B memorized more than any of the other models…
For AI industry critics, the big takeaway is that — at least for some models and some books — memorization is not a fringe phenomenon. On the other hand, the study only found significant memorization of a few popular books. For example, the researchers found that Llama 3.1 70B only memorized 0.13 percent of Sandman Slim, a 2009 novel by author Richard Kadrey. That’s a tiny fraction of the 42 percent figure for Harry Potter… To certify a class of plaintiffs, a court must find that the plaintiffs are in largely similar legal and factual situations. Divergent results like these could cast doubt on whether it makes sense to lump J.K. Rowling, Richard Kadrey, and thousands of other authors together in a single mass lawsuit. And that could work in Meta’s favor, since most authors lack the resources to file individual lawsuits.
Why is it happening? “Maybe Meta had trouble finding 15 trillion distinct tokens, so it trained on the Books3 dataset multiple times. Or maybe Meta added third-party sources — such as online Harry Potter fan forums, consumer book reviews, or student book reports — that included quotes from Harry Potter and other popular books…”
“Or there could be another explanation entirely. Maybe Meta made subtle changes in its training recipe that accidentally worsened the memorization problem.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta and AWS have used Rust, and Netflix uses Go,reports the programming news site InfoQ. But using another language, Apple recently “migrated its global Password Monitoring service from Java to Swift, achieving a 40% increase in throughput, and significantly reducing memory usage.”
This freed up nearly 50% of their previously allocated Kubernetes capacity, according to the article, and even “improved startup time, and simplified concurrency.”
In a recent post, Apple engineers detailed how the rewrite helped the service scale to billions of requests per day while improving responsiveness and maintainability… “Swift allowed us to write smaller, less verbose, and more expressive codebases (close to 85% reduction in lines of code) that are highly readable while prioritizing safety and efficiency.”
Apple’s Password Monitoring service, part of the broader Password app’s ecosystem, is responsible for securely checking whether a user’s saved credentials have appeared in known data breaches, without revealing any private information to Apple. It handles billions of requests daily, performing cryptographic comparisons using privacy-preserving protocols. This workload demands high computational throughput, tight latency bounds, and elastic scaling across regions… Apple’s previous Java implementation struggled to meet the service’s growing performance and scalability needs. Garbage collection caused unpredictable pause times under load, degrading latency consistency. Startup overhead — from JVM initialization, class loading, and just-in-time compilation, slowed the system’s ability to scale in real time. Additionally, the service’s memory footprint, often reaching tens of gigabytes per instance, reduced infrastructure efficiency and raised operational costs.
Originally developed as a client-side language for Apple platforms, Swift has since expanded into server-side use cases…. Swift’s deterministic memory management, based on reference counting rather than garbage collection (GC), eliminated latency spikes caused by GC pauses. This consistency proved critical for a low-latency system at scale. After tuning, Apple reported sub-millisecond 99.9th percentile latencies and a dramatic drop in memory usage: Swift instances consumed hundreds of megabytes, compared to tens of gigabytes with Java.
“While this isn’t a sign that Java and similar languages are in decline,” concludes InfoQ’s article, “there is growing evidence that at the uppermost end of performance requirements, some are finding that general-purpose runtimes no longer suffice.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There’s no shortage of reasons to stay off the Meta ecosystem, which includes Facebook and Instagram, but there are some places where WhatsApp remains the main form of text-based communication. The app is a great alternative to SMS, since it offers end-to-end encryption and was one of the go-to methods to send uncompressed photos and videos between iPhone and Android users before Apple adopted RCS. Even though Facebook, which later rebranded to Meta, acquired WhatsApp in 2014, it doesn’t require a Facebook or Instagram account to get on WhatsApp — just a working phone number.
To start, you need to download WhatsApp on your smartphone. Once you open the app, you can start the registration process by entering a working phone number. After entering your phone number, you’ll receive a unique six-digit code that will complete the registration process. From there, you can sort through your contacts on your attached smartphone to build out your WhatsApp network, but you won’t have to involve Facebook or Instagram at any point.
Alternatively, you can request a voice call to deliver the code instead. Either way, once you complete the registration process, you have a WhatsApp account that’s not tied to a Facebook or Instagram account.
If you change your mind and want more crossover between your Meta apps, you can go into the app’s Settings panel to change that. In Settings, you can find the Accounts Center option with the Meta badge on it. Once you hit it, you’ll see options to “Add Facebook account” and “Add Instagram account.” Linking these accounts means Meta can offer more personalized experiences across the platforms because of the personal data that’s now interconnected.
You can always remove your WhatsApp account from Meta’s Account Center by going back into the same Settings panel. However, any previously combined info will stay combined, but Meta will stop combining any personal data after you remove the account.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/how-to-set-up-a-whatsapp-account-without-facebook-or-instagram-210024705.html?src=rss
