An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI’s board of directors is reportedly in talks with Sam Altman, ex-Y Combinator president and an OpenAI co-founder, to return to OpenAI as CEO as soon as this week. That’s according to Bloomberg, which in a brief this morning — citing sources close to the matter — said that discussions are happening between Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, one current member of the OpenAI board, and Altman — and possibly other board members as well. Per Bloomberg, the board member (or members) and Altman are discussing a number of possible scenarios that could play out. In one, Altman would return as a director on a transitional board. In another — or perhaps the same — former Salesforce Inc. co-CEO Bret Taylor could serve as a director on a new board. (Taylor’s name was floated as a potential future OpenAI board member in some reporting over the weekend.)

Investors are also in on the talks, Bloomberg reports, with Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital aggressively pushing for Altman’s return. The hope is to resolve the management crisis before Thanksgiving, so as to give OpenAI employees less uncertainty around the state of the company — and stem the broader bleeding. Were Altman to return to OpenAI, he’d presumably renege on his acceptance of Microsoft’s offer to head up a new AI research lab at the tech giant with Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s former president, who resigned in protest with Altman on Friday. Altman is said to have demanded “significant” managerial and governance changes at OpenAI as a condition of returning, a demand which many OpenAI backers — including Microsoft — share.

Today’s developments follow a memo sent by OpenAI VP of global affairs Anna Makanju late Monday indicating that OpenAI’s management had been in “intense discussions” with the board, Altman and interim CEO Emmett Shear, who took over from OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, to attempt to re-unify the company. Shear has reportedly been left in the dark for the most part, indicating to Bloomberg sources that he doesn’t plan to stick around if the board can’t clearly communicate its reasoning for Altman’s abrupt dismissal. Shear previously said in a note to employees Sunday that his first order of business would be to “hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – OpenAI’s Board May Be Coming Around To Sam Altman Returning

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent years, lots of American companies have gotten behind a potential climate solution called carbon capture and storage, and the Biden administration has backed it with billions of dollars in tax incentives and direct investments. The idea is to trap planet-heating carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of factories and power plants and transport it to sites where it is injected underground and stored. But the idea is controversial, in large part because the captured carbon dioxide would be shipped to storage sites via thousands of miles of new pipelines. Communities nationwide are pushing back against these pipeline projects and underground sites, arguing they don’t want the pollution running through their land.

Now the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to change a rule to allow storing this carbon dioxide pollution under the country’s national forests and grasslands. “Authorizing carbon capture and storage on NFS lands would support the Administration’s goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below the 2005 levels by 2030,” the proposed rule change says. But environmental groups and researchers have concerns. Carbon dioxide pollution will still need to be transported to the forests via industrial pipeline for storage, says June Sekera, a research fellow with Boston University. “To get the CO2 to the injection site in the midst of our national forest, they’ve got to build huge pipelines,” Sekera says. “All this huge industrial infrastructure that’s going to go right through.” Sekera says building those CO2 pipelines may require clearing a lot of trees.

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Source: Slashdot – Forest Service Plans Carbon Dioxide Storage on Federal Lands

The chief executive of Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange, plans to step down and plead guilty to violating criminal U.S. anti-money laundering requirements, in a deal that may preserve the company’s ability to continue operating, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Changpeng Zhao is scheduled to appear in Seattle federal court Tuesday afternoon and enter his plea, the people said. Binance, which Zhao owns, will also plead guilty to a criminal charge and agree to pay fines totaling $4.3 billion, which includes amounts to settle civil allegations made by regulators, the people said. The deal would end long-running investigations of Binance. […] The deal would allow Zhao to retain his majority ownership of Binance, although he won’t be able to have an executive role at the company. He would face sentencing at a later date.

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Source: Slashdot – Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Agrees To Step Down, Plead Guilty

An anonymous reader writes: Christopher Nolan made headlines earlier this month when he took a playful jab at streaming platforms while discussing the upcoming home release of “Oppenheimer.” The atomic bomb drama, which grossed a staggering $950 million in theaters worldwide, is hitting Blu-ray and other digital platforms this month. Nolan said at a recent “Oppenheimer” screening that it’s important to own the film on Blu-ray so that “no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.” He told The Washington Post in a follow-up interview: “It was a joke when I said it. But nothing’s a joke when it’s transcribed onto the internet. There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version they do get taken down, they come and go,” the director added.

Streamers have become notoriously known in the last year for pulling original titles from their platforms in order to license them out elsewhere and open up potential revenue streams. When such titles are streaming-only offerings, their removal makes it impossible to view the films elsewhere. Such was the case this year with the Disney+ movie “Crater,” for instance. The streaming-only family adventure was pulled from Disney+ in June and could not be viewed anywhere until it was reissued as a digital release months later in September. For Nolan, owning physical media is the only way to combat such streaming trends. Guillermo del Toro agrees, having shared Nolan’s recent quotes on X (formerly Twitter) and adding his own commentary on the issue. “Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility,” del Toro wrote to his followers. “If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love…you are the custodian of those films for generations to come.”

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Source: Slashdot – Christopher Nolan Says Streaming-Only Content Is a ‘Danger’

Computer science teachers around the globe have been left scrambling to find an alternative IDE for their students, after Replit announced it was shuttering its Teams for Education plan. From a report: “To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu … Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs,” a statement from Replit, shared with educators and brought to our attention on Monday by Reg readers, declared last week. The platform provided a collaborative integrated development environment (IDE) tailored toward classrooms. It allowed students to work together on projects at the same time, similar to Google Docs, as well as automating code evaluation to streamline assessments carried out by teachers.

The decision has sparked frustration among many educators who’d invested heavily in the platform since Replit made the plan available for free in early 2022. “Computer science teachers in the last 48 hours have had to scramble to try to find alternatives as soon as possible and it will be the students that suffer,” a teacher based in Asia-Pacific told The Register. “Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers.” In a Xeet last week, CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the pain the decision to shut down Teams for Education was likely to cause, but said the current system had become economically nonviable.

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Source: Slashdot – CS Teachers Panic as Replit Pulls the Plug on Educational IDE

Using fake names, sham LinkedIn profiles, counterfeit work papers and mock interview scripts, North Korean IT workers seeking employment in Western tech companies are deploying sophisticated subterfuge to get hired. From a report: Landing a job outside North Korea to secretly earn hard currency for the isolated country demands highly-developed strategies to convince Western hiring managers, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, an interview with a former North Korean IT worker and cybersecurity researchers. North Korea has dispatched thousands of IT workers overseas, an effort that has accelerated in the last four years, to bring in millions to finance Pyongyang’s nuclear missile programme, according to the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations.

“People are free to express ideas and opinions,” reads one interview script used by North Korean software developers that offers suggestions for how to describe a “good corporate culture” when asked. Expressing one’s thoughts freely could be met with imprisonment in North Korea. The scripts totalling 30 pages, were unearthed by researchers at Palo Alto Networks, a U.S. cybersecurity firm which discovered a cache of internal documents online that detail the workings of North Korea’s remote IT workforce. The documents contain dozens of fraudulent resumes, online profiles, interview notes, and forged identities that North Korean workers used to apply for jobs in software development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – North Koreans Use Fake Names, Scripts To Land Remote IT Work For Cash

Sunbird, the app that brings iMessage to Android, has temporarily shut down the service over “security concerns.” From a report: In a notice to users, Sunbird says it has “decided to pause Sunbird usage for now” while it investigates reports that its messages aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted. Sunbird launched in 2022 as a messaging app that attempts to put the blue versus green bubble battle to rest. It has only been available to those who sign up for its waitlist, touting numerous privacy features, like end-to-end encryption, no message data collection, and no ads.

Last week, Sunbird partnered with Nothing, the phone brand owned by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, on the launch of Nothing Chats. The Sunbird-powered messaging service is supposed to let owners of the Phone 2 send texts via iMessage, but it was pulled from the Google Play Store just one day after its launch. At the time, Nothing said it had to fix “several bugs” within the app. However, its removal from the Play Store came around the same time a post from Texts.blog revealed that messages sent via Sunbird may not be end-to-end encrypted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Sunbird is Shutting Down Its iMessage App for Android

An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an “artificial” five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404 Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with Firefox at all. […] Mozilla, which makes Firefox, told 404 Media that it does not believe this is a Firefox-specific issue. Enough people have posted about it, however, that it is clearly happening for some users and not others.

In a statement to 404 Media, Google did not provide specifics but also did not deny implementing an artificial wait time. “To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience, the spokesperson said. “Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users

Epic Games Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney testified that Google’s Android operating system is a “fake open platform” in a high-stakes antitrust lawsuit over claims that the technology giant thwarts app market competition. From a report: Sweeney, who founded the company that makes the blockbuster Fortnite, took the witness stand Monday in San Francisco federal court to reinforce his claims that Google Play policies are unlawful and allow Alphabet to maintain a monopoly in the Android mobile-app distribution market. The court fight started in 2020 when Epic marketed Fortnite on Android and sidestepped the Google Play billing system and the 30% revenue cut it was taking from app developers.

“We very much wanted to avoid that and do business directly with our customers,” Sweeney told jurors. Google denies abusing its market power. The jury trial started two weeks ago and is expected to wrap up in early December. If Epic prevails, Google could be forced to allow competing app marketplaces and payment methods on its app store, threatening billions of dollars in revenue generated by Google Play. Sweeney previously testified in a 2021 trial in a similar antitrust suit targeting Apple’s App Store policies as unfair and self-serving. Epic mostly lost that fight, which was decided by a federal judge in Oakland, California, after a trial. An appeals court upheld the judge’s ruling and Epic is now asking the US Supreme Court to review it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Epic Games’ Sweeney Takes Aim at Android’s ‘Fake Open Platform’

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments, according to new testimony in the Epic v. Google trial. On the stand, Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison confirmed Spotify paid a 0 percent commission when users chose to buy subscriptions through Spotify’s own system. If the users picked Google as their payment processor, Spotify handed over 4 percent — dramatically less than Google’s more common 15 percent fee. Google fought to keep the Spotify numbers private during its antitrust fight with Epic, saying they could damage negotiations with other app developers who might want more generous rates.

Google’s User Choice Billing program, launched in 2022, is typically described as shaving about 4 percent off Google’s Play Store commission if developers use their own payment system, bringing down Google’s 15 percent subscription service fee to more like 11 percent. That often ends up saving developers little or no money since they must foot the cost of payment processing themselves. And in court, Google has focused on benefits like greater flexibility rather than cost savings. […] Harrison says Spotify’s “unprecedented” popularity was great enough to justify a “bespoke” deal. “If we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones,” Harrison testified. As part of the deal, both parties also agreed to commit $50 million apiece to a “success fund.”

Google acknowledged Harrison’s testimony in a statement to The Verge. “A small number of developers that invest more directly in Android and Play may have different service fees as part of a broader partnership that includes substantial financial investments and product integrations across different form factors,” says spokesperson Dan Jackson. “These key investment partnerships allow us to bring more users to Android and Play by continuously improving the experience for all users and create new opportunities for all developers.” Google would not name other developers that have gotten the company to agree to more generous rates. During the trial, we learned that Google offered Netflix a special discounted rate of just 10 percent, but Netflix refused. Netflix no longer offers an in-app purchase option on Android and no longer pays Google anything to distribute its app as a result.

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Source: Slashdot – A Secret Google Deal Let Spotify Completely Bypass Android’s App Store Fees

Mononymous writes: FreeBSD 14 has been officially released. You can get it from FreeBSD.org, or via freebsd-update and source update methods for existing systems. Some highlights:

– OpenSSH version 9.5p1

– OpenSSL version 3.0.12, a major upgrade from OpenSSL 1.1.1t in FreeBSD 13.2

– OpenZFS release 2.2
– The bhyve hypervisor now supports TPM and GPU passthrough

This version will now create user home directories in /home by default, instead of the traditional /usr/home. More information on the release and changes can be found via the release announcement page.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – FreeBSD 14 Released

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing a cutting-edge therapy called exa-cel that could potentially cure people of sickle cell disease, a painful and deadly disease with no universally successful treatment. “If approved, exa-cel, made by Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and the Swiss company CRISPR Therapeutics, would be the first FDA-approved treatment that uses genetic modification called CRISPR,” reports CNN. From the report: CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a technology researchers use to selectively modify DNA, the carrier of genetic information that the body uses to function and develop. […] The new exa-cel treatment under FDA consideration can use the patient’s own stem cells. Doctors would alter them with CRISPR to fix the genetic problems that cause sickle cell, and then the altered stem cells are given back to the patient in a one-time infusion.

In company studies, the treatment was considered safe, and it had a “highly positive benefit-risk for patients with severe sickle cell disease,” Dr. Stephanie Krogmeier, vice president for global regulatory affairs with Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, told the panel. Thirty-nine of the 40 people tested with the treatment did not have a single vaso-occlusive crisis, which means the misshapen red blood cells block normal circulation and can cause moderate to severe pain. It’s the top reason patients with sickle cell go to the emergency room or are hospitalized. Before the treatment, patients experienced about four of these painful crises a year, resulting in about two weeks in the hospital.

The FDA sought the independent panel’s advice, in part, because this would be the first time the FDA would approve a treatment that uses CRISPR technology, but Dr. Fyodor Urnov, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, reminded the committee CRISPR has been around for 30 years and, in that time, scientists have learned a lot about how to use it safely. “The technology is, in fact, ready for primetime,” Urnov said. With this kind of genetic editing, scientists could inadvertently make a change to a patient’s DNA that is off-target, and the therapy could harm the patient. […] The FDA is expected to make an approval decision by December 8.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – FDA Considers First CRISPR Gene Editing Treatment That May Cure Sickle Cell

According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI’s board of directors approached rival Anthropic’s CEO about replacing Sam Altman and potentially merging the two AI startups. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declined on both fronts. Reuters reports: The news, reported earlier by The Information on Monday, follows various reported calls to find Altman’s successor days after OpenAI’s board ousted him. […] The co-founders of Anthropic, who were also executives at OpenAI until 2020, had broken from their employer over disagreements regarding how to ensure AI’s safe development and governance. Anthropic has won investments from Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com. Its Claude AI models have vied for prominence with OpenAI’s GPT series.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – OpenAI’s Board Approached Anthropic CEO About Top Job and Merger

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality. According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure — a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, “there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades’ worth of Americans’ call records for law enforcement purposes,” notes Wired. “Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T’s voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance.”

“The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time.” It’s unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access To Trillions of US

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality. According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure — a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, “there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades’ worth of Americans’ call records for law enforcement purposes,” notes Wired. “Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T’s voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance.”

“The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time.” It’s unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access To Trillions of US Phone Records

Earlier this month, the entire Optus mobile network went offline nationwide following a “routine software upgrade.” According to Reuters, “More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout […], triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure.” Now, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned in the wake of the outage. From the report: She said it “had been an honour to serve” but that “now was an appropriate time to step down.” During Friday’s Senate hearing into the outage, Ms Bayer Rosmarin rebuffed suggestions she was under pressure to step down. “On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded,” she said in a statement on Monday. “I was also able to communicate Optus’s commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced in the interim by chief financial officer Michael Venter. Yuen Kuan Moon, the chief executive of Optus’s Singaporean parent company Singtel Group, said the company understood her decision to resign. Mr Yuen said Singtel recognised “the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence as the team works through the impact and consequences of the recent outage and continues to improve.” He said Optus’s priority was about “setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers.” Singtel said Optus had also created a new chief operating officer position, which would be carried out by former Optus Business Managing Director Peter Kaliaropoulos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Optus CEO Resigns After Nationwide Outage Left Millions Without Mobile and Internet Services

Last week, Android smartphone manufacturer “Nothing” announced that it’s bringing iMessage to its newest phone through a new “Nothing Chats” app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. After launching Friday, the app was shut down within 24 hours and the Sunbird app, which Nothing Chat is a clone of, was put “on pause.” The reason? It’s a security nightmare. Ars Technica reports: The initial sales pitch for this app — that it would log you into iMessage on Android if you handed over your Apple username and password — was a huge security red flag that meant Sunbird would need an ultra-secure infrastructure to avoid disaster. Instead, the app turned out to be about as unsecure as you could possibly be. Here’s Nothing’s statement: “We’ve removed the Nothing Chats beta from the Play Store and will be delaying the launch until further notice to work with Sunbird to fix several bugs. We apologize for the delay and will do right by our users.”

How bad are the security issues? Both 9to5Google and Text.com (which is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress) uncovered shockingly bad security practices. Not only was the app not end-to-end encrypted, as claimed numerous times by Nothing and Sunbird, but Sunbird actually logged and stored messages in plain text on both the error reporting software Sentry and in a Firebase store. Authentication tokens were sent over unencrypted HTTP so this token could be intercepted and used to read your messages. […]

Despite being the cause of this huge catastrophe, Sunbird has been bizarrely quiet during this whole mess. The app’s X (formerly Twitter) page still doesn’t say anything about the shutdown of Nothing Chats or Sunbird. Maybe that’s for the best because some of Sunbird’s early responses to the security concerns raised on Friday do not seem like they came from a competent developer. […] Nothing has always seemed like an Android manufacturer that was more hype than substance, but we can now add “negligent” to that list. The company latched on to Sunbird, reskinned its app, created a promo website and YouTube video, and coordinated a media release with popular YouTubers, all without doing the slightest bit of due diligence on Sunbird’s apps or its security claims. It’s unbelievable that these two companies made it this far — the launch of Nothing Chats required a systemic security failure across two entire companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Nothing’s iMessage App Was a Security Catastrophe, Taken Down In 24 Hours

In an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the governance structure of OpenAI needs to change after the AI company’s sudden firing of CEO Sam Altman. “At this point, I think it’s very clear that something has to change around the governance,” Nadella said. He added that Microsoft would have “a good dialogue with their board on that.”

Unlike traditional private company boards, OpenAI’s board consists mostly of outsiders and isn’t tasked with maximizing shareholder value. “[N]one of them hold equity in OpenAI,” notes The Verge. “Instead, their stated mission is to ensure the creation of ‘broadly beneficial’ artificial general intelligence, or AGI.” From the report: In his first press interview since Altman’s ouster, Nadella dismissed concerns of long-term damage at OpenAI and said that the critical artificial intelligence research continues as does the partnership with Microsoft. But his comments didn’t clear up confusion surrounding where Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who was the company’s chairman, will ultimately end up. Early Monday morning Nadella said that Altman, Brockman and their colleagues would join Microsoft as part of a new AI research group. That post followed news that ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear had been named OpenAI interim head as Altman looked to depart. Over the course of Monday, it became less evident that Altman and Brockman would actually be joining Microsoft.

Hundreds of OpenAI employees signed a letter to the company’s board demanding that they resign or else the staffers may choose to leave and join their former boss at Microsoft. Nadella said it’s the choice of OpenAI employees whether they stay in their current roles or move to Microsoft, adding that his company has what it needs to keep innovating on its own. “I’m open to both options,” he said. Nadella told Fortt that Microsoft respects OpenAI’s nonprofit roots and shares its belief that AI needs to be developed and rolled out in a safe manner. “We want to make sure that we’re dealing with not only the benefits of technology, but the unintended consequences of the technology from day one, as opposed to waiting for things to happen,” Nadella said. Stay tuned: Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher is releasing a 30 minute interview with Nadella in which he says, among other things, that he felt he should have been informed earlier as a partner of OpenAI and that will change in the future. “Also lots of deets about new hire [Sam Altman], safety in AGI and even India’s loss to Australia in that cricket match,” says Swisher in a post on X.

Further reading: Some investors in OpenAI are considering suing the board. “Sources said investors are working with legal advisors to study their options,” reports Reuters. “Investors worry that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft CEO Nadella Says OpenAI Governance Needs To Change

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Commercial air crews are reporting something “unthinkable” in the skies above the Middle East: novel “spoofing” attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September. In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it’s only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.

OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it’s not just GPS — fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure. According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September.

While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously “unthinkable,” according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a “fundamental flaw in avionics design.” The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the “brain” of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was “highly significant.” “This immediately sounds unthinkable,” OPSGROUP said in its public post about the incidents. “The IRS (Inertial Reference System) should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed. The idea that we could lose all on-board nav capability, and have to ask [air traffic control] for our position and request a heading, makes little sense at first glance” especially for state of the art aircraft with the latest avionics. However, multiple reports confirm that this has happened.” […] There is currently no solution to this problem, with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause. According to OPSGROUP’s November update, “The industry has been slow to come to terms with the issue, leaving flight crews alone to find ways of detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing.” If air crews do realize that something is amiss, Humphreys said, their only recourse is to depend on air traffic control.

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Source: Slashdot – Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple plans to ditch Qualcomm and build its own custom modem that could launch around 2026. MacRumors reports: Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple’s custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity. Gurman says Apple will “probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad — and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company’s system-on-a-chip.”

Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem. Gurman’s latest newsletter also said some of Apple’s other ongoing in-house chip projects include camera sensors, batteries, a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip that will eventually replace parts from Broadcom, Micro-LED displays for Apple devices, and a non-invasive glucose monitoring system.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Plans To Equip MacBooks With In-House Cellular Modems