General Motors will stop producing its two top-selling EVs, the Chevy Bolt and Bolt EUV, by the end of 2023. TechCrunch reports: [General Motors Chair and CEO Mary Barra] told investors during the company’s earnings call that its Orion Michigan factory, which currently assembles the Bolt, will be retooled for electric truck production. The decision comes as GM launches a new slate of EVs such as the GMC Hummer and Cadillac Lyriq that are outfitted with the company’s Ultium architecture that includes a new battery cell design. However, it also puts an end to GM’s highest volume EVs and takes one of the few affordable electric vehicle models off the market. It also means the end of the Chevy Bolt AV, the autonomous vehicle version that GM’s self-driving unit Cruise uses for its robotaxis. GM unveiled the Chevy Bolt in early 2015 and brought it to market in 2016, “at the time presenting one of the few EV options to buyers and directly competing with Tesla,” adds TechCrunch. “Bolt never had the same cachet as Tesla. And while consumers did buy the vehicle, its sales lagged behind the Tesla Model 3.”

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Source: Slashdot – GM Is Killing Off the Chevy Bolt and Bolt EUV

A draft law that aims to criminalize and prosecute those who “create conditions for online piracy” has been approved by Bulgaria’s Council of Ministers. The proposed amendments are Bulgaria’s response to heavy criticism from the United States, most publicly via the USTR’s Special 301 Reports. It’s hoped that prison sentences of up to six years will send a deterrent message. TorrentFreak reports: Last week the Council of Ministers approved draft amendments to the Criminal Code that aim to protect authors, rightsholders, and state revenue. “Crimes against intellectual property should be perceived as acts with a high degree of public danger, not only considering the rights and interests of the individual author, which they affect, but also considering the financial losses for the holders of these rights, which also affects the revenues in the state budget,” the explanatory notes read.

The stated aim of the bill is to solve identified weaknesses by upgrading substantive law to counter computer-related crimes against intellectual property. The text references those who “build or maintain” an information system or provide a service to the information society for the purpose of committing crimes. The notes offer further clarification. “The bill aims to prosecute those who create conditions for online piracy — for example, by building and maintaining torrent tracker sites, web platforms, chat groups in online communication applications for the online exchange of pirated content, and any other activities that may fall within the definition of ‘information society service’ within the meaning of the Electronic Commerce Act (pdf) and which are carried out with the specified criminal purpose.”

The Bulgarian government notes that the amendments are part of its response to criticism in the USTR’s Special 301 Report. [When countries are placed on the USTR’s ‘Watch List’ for failing to combat piracy, most can expect years of pressure punctuated by annual Special 301 Reports declaring more needs to be done. Bulgaria was on the Watch List in 2015 when the USTR reported “incremental progress” in the country’s ability to tackle intellectual property infringement, albeit nowhere near enough to counter unsatisfactory prosecution rates. In 2018 the United States softened its position toward Bulgaria, removing it from the Watch List on the basis that the government would probably deliver.] The fact that Bulgaria has been absent from the ‘Watch List’ for the last five years is down to “specific commitments” made by the authorities, with progress being monitored closely by the United States in respect of Bulgaria’s future status. The draft approved by the Council of Ministers last week envisions sentences of up to six years imprisonment and a fine of up to $5,600. According to the draft, there is no intent to prosecute individual users who simply consume pirated content.

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Source: Slashdot – Bulgaria Approves Draft Law That Turns Pirate Site Operators Into Criminals

Jules Wang from Android Police reports on the cases of two icon pack artists who had their products taken down from the Play Store for supposedly violating the platform’s Repetitive Content policy. Despite both creators’ products being reinstated, they revealed that Google’s opaque application of its rules has caused frustration and hopelessness among developers. From the report: All this heartache stems from Google Play’s Repetitive Content policy. While on its face a well-meaning effort to reduce spammy apps and keep quality up, there’s a core problem with compliance when creators find themselves forced to use apps to distribute content: “If these apps are each small in content volume, developers should consider creating a single app that aggregates all the content.”

If you’ve browsed on the Play Store, you’ll immediately know this guidance isn’t universally followed: many artists like JustNewDesigns will have multiple designs in their portfolio and each of those designs will come in multiple colorways or shapeways — whether they’re changing out an accent in a line design or are implementing some sort of adaptive element.

Not only are there so many apps, but they also look so much alike — artists, many of whom might not consider coding their strong suit, tend to use open-source templates to create the actual app. You’ll likely see them credited to Sarsa Murmu, who runs a GitHub project called CandyBar, or Jahir Fiquitiva, the maintainer of the Blueprint repository. These resources take care of the “packaging” for the assets. They include integration compatibility with various popular launchers, a license scheme to prevent those who sideloaded the app for free from having the icons applied, and all sorts of other functionality. In addition to the icon assets, the apps may also house wallpapers and links to other apps. […] What is Google’s role and what should it be? Wang writes: Artists would have much to gain from a new or revised API. Adding and adapting new icon designs to existing products would be much easier. New designs may be able to take advantage of changes to the Adaptive Icons API as Google lays them out. There would be unease as to how the business model could shift — should publishers charge by the app, through in-app purchases, or both? But as it stands, the biggest benefit with such a change is that it would presumably get Play’s “RoboCops” off their back. Of course, we can’t be sure of that with how Google’s enforcement apparatus operates, but the notion of unfairness lends credibility to those supporting the status quo unless the company is willing to come to the bargaining table.

At the end of the day, Google is certainly within its right to build regulations around apps to respond to emergent scammers and distressing content. Automation is meant to render manageable the sheer volume of content the Play platform sees published on a daily basis. But so long as icon artists sit under threat from a rulebook that can be arbitrarily thrown at them at any time, if nothing changes, we may be on a road leading to the degradation of a core Android tenet that even the most casual tech consumer associates with the platform — user customizability.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Play Has Created a No-Win Situation For the Creators of Icon Packs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The creator of a tool that scrapes the internet for images in order to power artificial intelligence image generators like Stable Diffusion is telling website owners who want him to stop that they have to actively opt out, and that it’s “sad” that they are fighting the inevitable rise of AI. “It is sad that several of you are not understanding the potential of AI and open AI and as a consequence have decided to fight it,” Romain Beaumont, the creator of the image scraping tool img2dataset, said on its GitHub page. “You will have many opportunities in the years to come to benefit from AI. I hope you see that sooner rather than later. As creators you have even more opportunities to benefit from it.”

Img2dataset is a free tool Beaumont shared on GitHub which allows users to automatically download, and resize a list of URLs. The result is an image dataset, the kind that trains image-generating AI models like Open AI’s DALL-E, the open source Stable Diffusion model, and Google’s Imagen. Beaumont is also an open source contributor to LAION-5B, one of the largest image datasets in the world that contains more than 5 billion images and is used by Imagen and Stable Diffusion. Img2dataset will attempt to scrape images from any site unless site owners add https headers like “X-Robots-Tag: noai,” and “X-Robots-Tag: noindex.” That means that the onus is on site owners, many of whom probably don’t even know img2dataset exists, to opt out of img2dataset rather than opt in.
Beaumont defended img2dataset by comparing it to the way Google indexes all websites online in order to power its search engine, which benefits anyone who wants to search the internet.

“I directly benefit from search engines as they drive useful traffic to me,” Eden told Motherboard. “But, more importantly, Google’s bot is respectful and doesn’t hammer my site. And most bots respect the robots.txt directive. Romain’s tool doesn’t. It seems to be deliberately set up to ignore the directives website owners have in place. And, frankly, it doesn’t bring any direct benefit to me.”

Motherboard notes: “A ‘robots.txt’ file tells search engine crawlers like Google which part of a site the crawler can access in order to prevent it from overloading the site with requests.”

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Source: Slashdot – An AI Scraping Tool Is Overwhelming Websites With Traffic

In a blog post today, the Free Software Foundation is calling on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide free/libre tax-filing software for Americans to file their taxes, citing upcoming legislation that allocates funds for the agency to explore a government-operated gratis tax return system. “Many feel they have no other option than to use nonfree software or a Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), giving up their freedom as well as their most private financial information to a third-party company, in order to file taxes,” writes the FSF.

$15 million of the $80 billion that was approved for the IRS by the Inflation Reduction Act includes the promise to further explore an “electronic service to prepare and file tax returns directly with the IRS.” To do so, the IRS intends to “study taxpayer preferences for products. The results of the study will inform if and how the IRS should design such a service.” The FSF writes: Let’s call on the IRS to make a website for filing your tax return which respects your freedom. This is your chance. Write to the new IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel with your message. […] Look up the address of your state’s tax filing institution and send your letter to this address. Post your letter on social media to inspire others to do the same.

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Source: Slashdot – FSF Calls On the IRS To Provide Libre Tax-Filing Software

A group of venture capital firms including Tiger Global and Union Square Ventures on Tuesday set up an alliance aimed at making private tech investing more climate-friendly. From a report: Called the Venture Climate Alliance (VCA), the coalition of more than 20 climate tech and generalist funds seeks to get the VC industry to increase its commitments to climate tech, a branch of technology devoted to finding solutions to the climate crisis. The alliance lays out guidance that its VC members and their portfolio companies must follow to ensure they meet the requirements to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

According to a statement, the VCA’s stated aim is to “ensure that methodology and metrics are at the heart of how we determine what is a good climate investment, and what investment will have the greatest positive effect on the mission to build tech for a regenerative world.” Portfolio companies are given guidance on how they should decarbonize their operations, such as using emission-free data centers, deploying less energy-intensive software in their tech stack, or rebuilding supply chains around low-carbon alternatives, the statement said. Other funds signed up to the VCA include climate VCs World Fund, 2150, and Prelude Venture. Collectively, the investment firms involved manage a combined $62.3 billion in assets, according to Crunchbase figures. […] The U.N. approved the VCA as part of its Race to Zero campaign aimed at mobilizing climate action. The alliance will fall under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group formed during the COP26 climate conference.

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Source: Slashdot – VC Firms Create Billion-plus Climate Tech Alliance With Backing From the UN