The International Civil Aviation Organization plans to eliminate boarding passes and check-ins within three years through a new “digital travel credential” system. Passengers will store passport data on their phones and use facial recognition to move through airports, while airlines will automatically detect arrivals via biometric scanning.

The system will dynamically update “journey passes” for flight changes and delays, potentially streamlining connections. “The last upgrade of great scale was the adoption of e-ticketing in the early 2000s,” said Valerie Viale from travel technology company Amadeus, who noted passenger data will be deleted within 15 seconds at each checkpoint to address privacy concerns.

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The Social Security Administration is planning to stop issuing press releases and move all of its official communications to X, according to Wired. The change is happening amidst cuts at the department directed by DOGE, the organization created by Elon Musk, the CEO of X.

“We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and service changes,” SSA regional manager Linda Kerr-Davis reportedly told staff in a meeting. “Instead, the agency will be using X to communicate to the press and the public.”

Like any other government organization, the SSA uses press releases to inform the public and update employees about any changes they should be aware of. That could be simpler things, like correcting the record on how the SSA’s death record works, to more vital updates like changes being made to how the SSA does identity verification.

The SSA using X for official announcements will do little to dissuade anyone who sees Elon Musk’s presence in government as a way to benefit him and his companies. X is not most retirees’ preferred social media app, nor is it reasonable to expect them to know how to make an account. Moving official communication there makes it more likely elderly people will miss important updates.

That fits with DOGE’s other moves, though. The department reportedly cut jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has butted heads with Musk’s Tesla, and has a plan to deploy a custom government chatbot.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/the-social-security-administration-is-reportedly-moving-all-official-communication-to-x-223201698.html?src=rss

Fedora has proposed a major change for its upcoming version 43 release that aims to achieve 99% package reproducibility, addressing growing concerns about supply-chain security. According to the change proposal announced March 31, Fedora has already reached 90% reproducibility through infrastructure changes including “clamping” file modification times and implementing a Rust-based “add-determinism” tool that standardizes metadata. The remaining 10% will require individual package maintainer involvement, treating reproducibility failures as bugs.

The effort will use a public instance of rebuilderd to independently verify that binary packages can be reproduced from source code. Unlike Debian’s bit-by-bit reproducibility definition, Fedora allows differences in package signatures and some metadata while requiring identical payloads. The initiative follows similar efforts by Debian and openSUSE, and comes amid heightened focus on supply-chain security after the recent XZ backdoor incident.

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There are few areas where AI has seen more robust deployment than the field of software development. From “vibe” coding to GitHub Copilot to startups building quick-and-dirty applications with support from LLMs, AI is already deeply integrated.

However, those claiming we’re mere months away from AI agents replacing most programmers should adjust their expectations because models aren’t good enough at the debugging part, and debugging occupies most of a developer’s time. That’s the suggestion of Microsoft Research, which built a new tool called debug-gym to test and improve how AI models can debug software.

Debug-gym (available on GitHub and detailed in a blog post) is an environment that allows AI models to try and debug any existing code repository with access to debugging tools that aren’t historically part of the process for these models. Microsoft found that without this approach, models are quite notably bad at debugging tasks. With the approach, they’re better but still a far cry from what an experienced human developer can do.

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Germany will get a new “super-high-tech ministry” responsible for research, technology, and aerospace, according to the coalition agreement published by the incoming government this week. From a report: The announcement is one of several nods to science in the 144-page agreement, unveiled on 9 April following weeks of negotiations between the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) — who together won the most seats in February’s federal elections — and the center-left Social Democrats. The agreement is expected to be formally approved by the three parties by early May, paving the way for CDU leader Friedrich Merz to be elected chancellor.

[…] The new agreement lists a number of scientific priorities for the new government, including support for artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, biotechnology, microchip development and production, and fusion energy. “Our goal is that the world’s first fusion reactor should be realized in Germany,” the text states. It also mentions personalized medicine, oceans research, and sustainability research as “strategic” areas. But the agreement does not include any budget estimates, and observers caution it is unclear where the money for new programs would come from. The agreement does affirm current commitments to increase the budgets of the country’s main research organizations by 3% per year through 2030.

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Debate around how much taxes US-based streaming services should pay internationally, among other factors, could result in people paying more for subscriptions to services like Netflix and Disney+.

On April 10, the United Kingdom’s Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) Committee reignited calls for a streaming tax on subscription revenue acquired through UK residents. The recommendation came alongside the committee’s 120-page report [PDF] that makes numerous recommendations for how to support and grow Britain’s film and high-end television (HETV) industry.

For the US, the recommendation garnering the most attention is one calling for a 5 percent levy on UK subscriber revenue from streaming video on demand services, such as Netflix. That’s because if streaming services face higher taxes in the UK, costs could be passed onto consumers, resulting in more streaming price hikes. The CMS committee wants money from the levy to support HETV production in the UK and wrote in its report:

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The ubiquitous but often overlooked Wi-Fi router lies at the heart of one of Washington’s biggest national security dilemmas — and a rift between two brothers on opposite sides of the Pacific. From a report: US investigators are probing the China ties of TP-Link, the new American incarnation of a consumer Wi-Fi behemoth, following its rapid growth and a spate of cyber attacks by Chinese state-sponsored actors targeting many router brands. The inquiry is testing whether TP-Link’s corporate makeover represents enough of a divorce from China to spare it from a ban in a crucial market.

While TP-Link’s recent restructuring split the company into separate US- and China-headquartered businesses, a Bloomberg News investigation found that the resulting American venture still has substantial operations in mainland China. If US officials conclude TP-Link’s China connections pose an “unacceptable risk,” they could use a powerful new authority to ban the company from the US. Such an outcome could also unravel plans by the owner of its US business, Jeffrey Chao, to start fresh in California following an estrangement from his older brother, who started the router business with him in Shenzhen nearly three decades ago.

In an interview — the first Jeffrey Chao said he has ever given — he told Bloomberg he’s quitting China. He opened a new headquarters in Irvine last year and said he will invest $700 million in the US to build a factory and jumpstart research and development on highly secure routers while awaiting the green card he said he applied for in January. He has also traded his perch in a Hong Kong skyscraper for a 1980s-era split-level near his office, joined a neighborhood evangelical church, and is now eyeing a Cadillac Escalade for road trips, he said, burnishing his American credentials. “I know the current relationship between the US and China is complex,” Chao said in the interview last month. “I have chosen the US.”

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Tequila Works, the Spanish developer that created games like Rime and Gylt and published games like The Sexy Brutale, is auctioning off its intellectual property (via VGC). The studio filed for insolvency in 2024 after “prolonged market conditions” made it financially-difficult to stay above water.

The games and IP rights available to bid on at auction site Escrapalia include Tequila Works’ first game Deadlight, Rime and its horror adventure game Gylt. The company is also auctioning off in-development projects, including “The Ancient Mariner,” “Dungeon Tour” and “Brawler Crawler.” 

Prior to it filing for insolvency and Tequila Works’ founders stepping down, the studio released Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story, one of the games on the short-lived Riot Forge publishing label. Riot announced it was shutting down Riot Forge in January 2024. The label published League of Legends spin-off games in variety of different genres, including turn-based RPG Ruined King, 2D action RPGThe Mageseeker, and more.

Back in 2022, Tencent acquired a controlling stake in Tequila Works, a connection that made sense given the Chinese company also owns Riot. Contraction across the games industry, the failure of Riot Forge games to connect with a larger audience and Tequila Work’s Gylt starting life as a Google Stadia-exclusive all likely contributed to the studio’s current position.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-rights-for-tequila-workss-games-are-up-for-auction-after-insolvency-filing-193627934.html?src=rss

China responded to President Trump’s tariffs on Friday, raising its own tariffs on American goods to 125%, from 84%. The New York Times: The announcement by China’s State Council came after Trump administration officials clarified on Thursday that China was now facing a minimum tariff rate of 145% on all exports to United States. China said its new tariffs will take effect on Saturday. China said it plans to ignore any further increases announced by Washington from here. Bloomberg: In a statement following China’s retaliatory move, the Commerce Ministry said Washington’s repeated use of excessively high tariffs has become little more than a numbers game — economically meaningless and revealing its use of tariffs as a tool for bullying and coercion. “It’s become a joke,” the ministry said. CNN: The trade war between the world’s two economic superpowers has tanked international markets and fueled fears of a global recession.

“There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation,” [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping told Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing on Friday, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

“For over 70 years, China’s development has relied on self-reliance and hard work — never on handouts from others, and it is not afraid of any unjust suppression,” Xi added.

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The Food and Drug Administration says it would begin phasing out animal testing requirements for antibody therapies and other drugs and move toward AI-based models and other tools it deems “human-relevant.” Axios: The FDA said it would launch a pilot program over the next year allowing select developers of monoclonal antibodies to use a primarily non-animal-based testing strategy. Commissioner Marty Makary in a statement said the shift would improve drug safety, lower research and development costs and address ethical concerns about animal experimentation.

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Some of the best AI models today still struggle to resolve software bugs that wouldn’t trip up experienced devs. TechCrunch: A new study from Microsoft Research, Microsoft’s R&D division, reveals that models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s o3-mini, fail to debug many issues in a software development benchmark called SWE-bench Lite. The results are a sobering reminder that, despite bold pronouncements from companies like OpenAI, AI is still no match for human experts in domains such as coding.

The study’s co-authors tested nine different models as the backbone for a “single prompt-based agent” that had access to a number of debugging tools, including a Python debugger. They tasked this agent with solving a curated set of 300 software debugging tasks from SWE-bench Lite.

According to the co-authors, even when equipped with stronger and more recent models, their agent rarely completed more than half of the debugging tasks successfully. Claude 3.7 Sonnet had the highest average success rate (48.4%), followed by OpenAI’s o1 (30.2%), and o3-mini (22.1%).

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