Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes:
A group of U.S. consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday proposed legislation to address the growing epidemic of “zombie” Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have had software support cut off by their manufacturer, Fight To Repair News reports.

The Connected Consumer Product End of Life Disclosure Act is a collaboration between Consumer Reports, US PIRG, the Secure Resilient Future Foundation (SRFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology. It requires manufacturers of connected consumer products to disclose for how long they will provide technical support, security updates, or bug fixes for the software and hardware that are necessary for the product to operate securely.

The groups proposed legal requirements that manufacturers “must notify consumers when their devices are nearing the end of life and provide guidance on how to handle the device’s end of life,” while end-of-life notifications “must include details about features that will be lost, and potential vulnerabilities and security risks that may arise.” And when an ISP-provided device (like a router) reaches its end of life, the ISP must remove them.

“The organizations are working with legislators at the state and federal level to get the model legislation introduced,” according to Fight To Repair News.

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Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman “recently told Entrepreneur magazine that almost five years of remote work has ‘been fantastic for us,'” writes the Seattle Times.

Zillow shifted to allowing people to work fully remote during the pandemic. It’s been a recruiting and retention tool for Zillow as they “now see four times the number of job applicants for every job we have versus what we did before the pandemic,” Wacksman said.

While Zillow still lists its corporate headquarters as Seattle, the company bills itself as “cloud-headquartered,” with remote workers and satellite offices. Wacksman’s comments are backed by serious real estate moves the company has made over the past five years. An annual report detailing Zillow’s financial results for 2024 shows its Seattle headquarters and offices across the country are shrinking. In 2019, Zillow had 386,275 square feet of office space in Seattle after steadily gobbling up floors of the Russell Investments Center downtown over the prior five years. The company reported it had 113,470 square feet in Seattle at the end of 2024… The company has drastically cut costs by shedding offices. Zillow’s total leasing costs reached $54 million in 2022 and dropped to $34 million last year… It expects those costs to decrease even further, to $18 million by 2029. Zillow is also taking advantage of subleasing some of its office space and expects $26 million in sublease income between 2025 and 2030…
Zillow’s financial results from last year suggest the workforce has been productive while logging in from home. The company reported Tuesday that it beat Wall Street expectations for the last three months of 2024 with a quarterly revenue of $554 million. Wacksman said in a news release Tuesday that 2024 was a “remarkable year for Zillow,” as it reached its goal of double-digit revenue growth.

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Evan Feinman, who directed the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program meant to bring high-speed internet access to rural areas, exited the role on Friday after he was not reappointed for a new term, according to ProPublica’s Craig Silverman. In an email sent to staffers, which Silverman shared screenshots of on Bluesky, Feinman warned against changes proposed by the new administration that could “benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill” in order to line Elon Musk’s pockets.

BEAD was established in 2021, and the new Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recently announced that the Commerce Department would be overhauling the program, which he said has “not connected a single person to the internet” due to the previous administration’s handling of it. In a statement, Lutnick called for a “tech-neutral stance,” which would do away with the preference for faster fiber connections and open the door for a shift toward satellite internet like that offered by Elon Musk’s Starlink. Lutnick also slammed “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations.”

In the email shared on Sunday, Feinman urged colleagues to speak up in favor of removing “needless requirements,” but warned against a shift away from fiber. The bottom line is, he wrote:

The new administration seems to want to make changes that ignore the clear direction laid out by Congress, reduce the number of American homes and businesses that get fiber connections, and increase the number that get satellite connections. The degree of that shift remains unknown, but regardless of size, it will be a disservice to rural and small-town America. Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/director-of-rural-broadband-program-exits-with-a-warning-about-shift-to-worse-satellite-internet-223204374.html?src=rss

Intel’s stock jumped nearly 19% this week. “However, in the past year through Wednesday’s close, Intel stock had fallen 53%,” notes Investor’s Business Daily:

The appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as CEO is a “good start” but Intel has significant challenges, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a client note. Those challenges include delays in its server chip product line, a very competitive PC chip market, lack of a compelling AI chip offering, and over $10 billion in losses in its foundry business over the past 12 months. There is “no quick fix” for those issues, he said.

“There are things you can do,” a Columbia business school associate professor tells the Wall Street Journal in a video interview, “but it’s going to be incremental, and it’s going to be extremely risky… They will try to be competitive in the foundry manufacturing space,” but “It takes very aggressive investments.”

Meanwhile, TSMC is exploring a joint venture where they’d operate Intel’s factories, even pitching the idea to AMD, Nvidia, Broadcam, and Qualcomm, according to Reuters. (They add that Intel “reported a 2024 net loss of $18.8 billion, its first since 1986,” and talked to multiple sources “familiar with” talks about Intel’s future).
Multiple companies have expressed interest in buying parts of Intel, but two of the four sources said the U.S. company has rejected discussions about selling its chip design house separately from the foundry division. Qualcomm has exited earlier discussions to buy all or part of Intel, according to those people and a separate source. Intel board members have backed a deal and held negotiations with TSMC, while some executives are firmly opposed, according to two sources.

“They say Lip-Bu Tan is the best hope to fix Intel — if Intel can be fixed at all,” writes the Wall Street Journal:
He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a startup mindset and an obsession with AI…and basketball. He also comes with tricky China business relationships, underscoring Silicon Valley’s inability to sever itself from one of America’s top adversaries… [Intel’s] stock has lost two-thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom…
Manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that Intel can’t currently sustain, say industry leaders and analysts. Former board members have called for a split-up. But a deal to sell all or part of Intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future, according to bankers. A variety of early-stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries and TSMC in recent months have failed to go anywhere, and so far seem unlikely to progress. The company has already hinted at a more likely outcome: bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the manufacturing business…
Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies — he founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of chip design company Cadence Design Systems for 13 years — provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days: by cutting expenses, moving quickly and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company. “In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog,” Tan said in a note to Intel employees on Wednesday. “And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace….”

Many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at Intel, which already shed about 15,000 jobs last year. “He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today,” said Reed Hundt, a former Intel board member who has known Tan since the 1990s.

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If you’re looking to boost your online protection, the suite of tools offered by NordVPN might catch your interest.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Wall Street Journal K-12 education reporter Matt Barnum has a heads-up for parents: There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat. Barnum writes: “A high-school senior from New Jersey doesn’t want the world to know that she cheated her way through English, math and history classes last year. Yet her experience, which the 17-year-old told The Wall Street Journal with her parent’s permission, shows how generative AI has rooted in America’s education system, allowing a generation of students to outsource their schoolwork to software with access to the world’s knowledge. […] The New Jersey student told the Journal why she used AI for dozens of assignments last year: Work was boring or difficult. She wanted a better grade. A few times, she procrastinated and ran out of time to complete assignments. The student turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, to help spawn ideas and review concepts, which many teachers allow. More often, though, AI completed her work. Gemini solved math homework problems, she said, and aced a take-home test. ChatGPT did calculations for a science lab. It produced a tricky section of a history term paper, which she rewrote to avoid detection. The student was caught only once.” Not surprisingly, AI companies play up the idea that AI will radically improve learning, while educators are more skeptical. “This is a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for,” said Marc Watkins, assistant director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi.

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If ever a game presents me with an opportunity to perform completely absurd aerial tricks, you best believe I will be flipping as much as possible. In Jump Truck, a 3D solo racing game for Playdate by Tabortop Games, flips can work either to your benefit or detriment as you try to score the fastest finish time for each of a series of race tracks. Throwing in some flips may help to shave several seconds off your final time, but it could also send your truck hurtling into the abyss. It’s a delicate balance that I’ve been having a real hoot pushing to its limit.

Jump Truck features seven levels made up of straightaways, tight turns, long winding roads, ramps and short platforms with abrupt dropoffs to navigate at high speeds on your way to the floating vortex that serves as the finish line. You need to find the shortcuts to get the gold, and successfully making use of those often requires clearing huge gaps. That’s where flipping really comes in handy. Frontflips will give you more speed and help you cross greater distances in the air, while backflips will slow you down so you don’t overshoot your landing. You can flip using either the D-pad or the crank, but the latter can be pretty hard to coordinate if you want to seamlessly resume driving and steering.

There are a bunch of silly achievements to unlock as you progress (or die over and over), like the “Soar Like an Eagle” award for spending a quarter of your time flying through the air on any given level. Jump Truck seems like it’d be the type of game that only holds your attention for a little while at a time, but I keep getting sucked into it for much longer than I expect to, thanks to the challenge of trying to hit certain shortcuts. It’s unexpectedly addicting.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-playdate-game-jump-truck-is-a-flippin-good-time-203140598.html?src=rss

Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce tackle grief and the rotting dead in The Shrouds.

America’s Vice President “expressed confidence Friday that a deal to sell TikTok and keep the social media app running in the U.S. would largely be in place by an April deadline,” reports NBC News. (Specifically the Vice President said “There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.”)

The article adds that TikTok owner ByteDance “has not publicly confirmed negotiations with any potential U.S. buyer, nor has it confirmed its willingness to sell TikTok to a U.S. bidder.” But ByteDance “favors” a deal with Oracle, according to an X.com post on Thursday from tech-publication The Information.

And today Politico adds that Oracle “is accelerating talks with the White House on a deal to run TikTok, though significant concerns remain about what role the app’s Chinese founders will play in its ongoing U.S. operation, according to three people familiar with the discussions.”

[Oracle’s discussions are happening] amid ongoing warnings from congressional Republicans and other China hawks that any new ownership deal — if it keeps TikTok’s underlying technology in Chinese hands — could be only a surface-level fix to the security concerns that led to last year’s sweeping bipartisan ban of the app. Key lawmakers, including concerned Republicans, are bringing in Oracle this week to discuss the possible deal and rising national security concerns, according to four people familiar with the meetings. One of the three people familiar with the discussions with Oracle said the deal would essentially require the U.S. government to depend on Oracle to oversee the data of American users and ensure the Chinese government doesn’t have a backdoor to it — a promise the person warned would be impossible to keep.
“If the Oracle deal moves forward, you still have this [algorithm] controlled by the Chinese….”

The data security company HaystackID, which serves as independent security inspectors for TikTok U.S., said in February that it has found no indications of internal or external malicious activity — nor has it identified any protected U.S. user data that has been shared with China.

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Well, he is the black-and-white Spider-Man, so why wouldn’t his show also be in complete black-and-white?

After Meta convinced an arbitrator to temporarily prevent a whistleblower from promoting their book about the company, the book climbed to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. And the book’s publisher Macmillan released a defiant statement that “The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan… We will absolutely continue to support and promote it.” (They added that they were “appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.”)
Saturday the controversy was even covered by Rolling Stone:

[Whistleblower Sarah] Wynn-Williams is a diplomat, policy expert, and international lawyer, with previous roles including serving as the Chief Negotiator for the United Nations on biosafety liability, according to her bio on the World Economic Forum…
Since the book’s announcement, Meta has forcefully responded to the book’s allegations in a statement… “Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work. Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books.”
But the negative coverage continues, with the Observer Sunday highlighting it as their Book of the Week. “This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant organisation describes a ‘diabolical cult’ able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world’s vulnerable…”
Though ironically Wynn-Williams started their career with optimism about Facebook’s role in the app internet.org.
. “Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg’s company could make a difference — but in a good way — to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project…
What internet.org involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams’s eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg’s initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves “delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world”. But Facebook’s impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country’s Muslim minority. “Myanmar,” she writes with a lapsed believer’s rue, “would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived.” And what is true of Myanmar, you can’t help but reflect, applies globally…

“Myanmar is where Wynn-Williams thinks the ‘carelessness’ of Facebook is most egregious,” writes the Sunday Times:

In 2018, UN human rights experts said Facebook had helped spread hate speech against Rohingya Muslims, about 25,000 of whom were slaughtered by the Burmese military and nationalists. Facebook is so ubiquitous in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams points out, that people think it is the entire internet. “It’s no surprise that the worst outcome happened in the place that had the most extreme take-up of Facebook.” Meta admits it was “too slow to act” on abuse in its Myanmar services….
After Wynn-Williams left Facebook, she worked on an international AI initiative, and says she wants the world to learn from the mistakes we made with social media, so that we fare better in the next technological revolution. “AI is being integrated into weapons,” she explains. “We can’t just blindly wander into this next era. You think social media has turned out with some issues? This is on another level.”

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