An international group of law enforcement agencies have seized the dark web leak site of the notorious ransomware gang known as ALPHV, or BlackCat. From a report: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against ALPHV Blackcat Ransomware,” a message on the gang’s dark web leak site now reads, seen by TechCrunch. According to the splash, the takedown operation also involved law enforcement agencies from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Australia.

In a later announcement confirming the disruption, the U.S. Department of Justice said that the international takedown effort, led by the FBI, enabled U.S. authorities to gain visibility into the ransomware group’s computer to seize “several websites” that ALPHV operated. The FBI also released a decryption tool that has already enabled more than 500 ALPHV ransomware victims to restore their systems. (The government’s search warrant puts the number at 400 victims.) The FBI said it worked with dozens of victims in the United States, saving them from paying ransom demands totaling approximately $68 million.

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Source: Slashdot – Authorities Claim Seizure of Notorious ALPHV Ransomware Gang’s Dark Web Leak Site

India consumes more groundwater. That’s testing India’s ability to feed itself and much of the world. From a report: The South Asian nation is already the world’s largest guzzler of groundwater. Cheap power has encouraged routine overreliance on finite riches. India overwhelmingly grows some of the thirstiest crops: rice, wheat and sugar cane. Over the last half century, farm productivity has leapt forward, but so, too, has water usage — up 500% over that period, according to the World Bank. Erratic monsoons and brutal heat waves are only making the problem more acute. Farmers are digging deeper wells because existing ones are no longer refilling. Some regions may run out of groundwater entirely — Punjab, a major wheat producer, could go dry within the next 15 or so years, according to a former state official. States in southern India are battling over water rights in areas where rampant urban development has drained thousands of lakes.

The government is not blind to the crisis. But with a national election on the horizon next year, there’s little to gain in pushing actively for change among farmers, one of the most important voting blocs in the country. Any long-term solution will involve tinkering with farm subsidies or the minimum price set for water-intensive crops. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party is all too aware that farmers from India’s grain-growing northern regions dominated months of protests against proposed agrarian reforms from late 2020. Modi was forced to withdraw the proposals. For now, it’s clear the water math does not add up.

Modi has promised piped water to all Indian households by 2024. Yet nearly half of India’s 1.4 billion residents already face high-to-extreme water stress, and the world’s most populous nation is expected to add more than 200 million more people by 2050. Agriculture, meanwhile, accounts for 90% of water use, helping to explain why Indian officials say the clearest strategy for preserving supplies is modernizing the industry. The government has tried to convince farmers to adopt different irrigation technologies, return to traditional rain harvesting and plant less thirsty crops like millets, pulses and oilseeds. Nothing has yet made a substantial difference, in a country where subsidies supporting wheat and rice persist, and farming is dominated by smallholders.

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Source: Slashdot – India’s Flooded Farmlands Mask a Water Crisis Deep Underground

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Former Amazon security engineer Shakeeb Ahmed pleaded guilty this week to hacking and stealing over $12.3 million from two cryptocurrency exchanges in July 2022. The two affected companies are Nirvana Finance, a decentralized crypto exchange, and an unnamed exchange on the Solana blockchain platform that Ahmed hacked using his blockchain audit and smart contract reverse engineering skills. He first targeted the undisclosed crypto exchange by manipulating a smart contract to introduce false pricing data, generating roughly $9 million worth of inflated fees. Ahmed later withdrew the funds and offered to return all but $1.5 million on the condition that the exchange refrained from involving law enforcement.

Although not explicitly named by the Justice Department, the details of the attack match those of a July 2022 breach impacting the Crema Finance decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. Shortly after this first hack, Ahmed exploited a Nirvana Finance DeFi protocol smart contract loophole to take a flash loan of ANA cryptocurrency tokens at a low price and sell it back at a higher rate, yielding him approximately $3.6 million. Despite being offered a $300,000 bounty to return the stolen crypto assets, Ahmed kept everything he stole (representing all the funds owned by Nirvana Finance) after demanding $1.4 million and not reaching an agreement, forcing the exchange to shut down.

Seeking to conceal his actions and obscure the digital trail of the stolen funds, Ahmed used several cryptocurrency mixers (including Samourai Whirlpool), the Solana and Ethereum blockchains, and foreign exchanges to convert the millions he stole into Monero, a cryptocurrency known for its enhanced privacy and anonymity. Wary of being apprehended, Ahmed actively sought ways to elude detection and extradition. His online searches revealed his interest in strategies to flee the United States, thwart asset seizures, and secure citizenship in different nations, clearly showcasing Ahmed’s intention to sidestep legal repercussions for his actions. […] Ahmed entered a guilty plea for a single computer fraud charge, an offense with a maximum imprisonment term of five years. Additionally, he committed to compensating his victims with a sum totaling $5,071,074.23.

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Source: Slashdot – Ex-Amazon Engineer Pleads Guilty To Hacking Crypto Exchanges

In a notice on Monday, Xfinity notified customers of a “data security incident” that resulted in the theft of customer information, including usernames, passwords, contact information, and more. The Verge reports: Xfinity traces the breach to a security vulnerability disclosed by cloud computing company Citrix, which began alerting customers of a flaw in software Xfinity and other companies use on October 10th. While Xfinity says it patched the security hole, it later uncovered suspicious activity on its internal systems “that was concluded to be a result of this vulnerability.”

The hack resulted in the theft of customer usernames and hashed passwords, according to Xfinity’s notice. Meanwhile, “some customers” may have had their names, contact information, last four digits of their social security numbers, dates of birth, and / or secret questions and answers exposed. Xfinity has notified federal law enforcement about the incident and says “data analysis is continuing.”

We still don’t know how many users were affected by the breach. Xfinity will automatically ask customers to change their passwords the next time they log in to their accounts, and it’s also encouraging users to turn on two-factor authentication. You can find the full notice, including contact information for the company’s incident response team, on Xfinity’s website (PDF).

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Source: Slashdot – Xfinity Discloses Data Breach But Doesn’t Say How Many Users Affected

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent “live” to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA’s Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet’s greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There’s also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. “Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL’s DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology — everyone loves Taters.”

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Source: Slashdot – NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space Via Laser

Alphabet will pay $700 million and alter its Google Play policies to settle claims that the app store unlawfully dominates the Android mobile applications market, resolving antitrust complaints brought by attorneys general of about three dozen states and consumers. From a report: The deal disclosed in a court filing late Monday calls for tweaks to Google Play policies designed to reduce barriers to competition in the markets for app distribution and payment processing. The lawsuits that were grouped together in federal court in California had threatened billions of dollars in revenue generated by the sale and distribution of apps through Google Play. Google will also make a series of changes to its business practices as part of the settlement. In a blog post, the Android-maker said: Streamlining sideloading while prioritizing security: Unlike on iOS, Android users have the option to sideload apps, meaning they can download directly from a developer’s website without going through an app store like Google Play. While we maintain it is critical to our safety efforts to inform users that sideloading on mobile could come with unique risks, as part of our settlement we will be further simplifying the sideloading process and updating the language that informs users about these potential risks of downloading apps directly from the web for the first time.
Expanding user choice billing to more people: App and game developers will be able to implement an alternative billing option alongside Google Play’s billing system for their U.S. users who can then choose which option to use when making in-app purchases. We have been piloting user choice billing in the U.S. for over a year and will now expand this option further.
Expanding open communication on pricing: We have always given developers more ways to interact with their customers than iOS and other operating systems. For example, Google Play allows developers to communicate freely with their customers outside the app about subscription offers or lower-cost options available on a rival app store or the developer’s website. This openness has spurred competition and benefited consumers and developers. As part of user choice billing, which we’re expanding with today’s settlement announcement, developers are also able to show different pricing options within the app when a user makes a digital purchase.

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Source: Slashdot – Alphabet, States Reach 0 Million Deal in Google Play Feud

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: IBM said on Monday that it would buy Software AG’s enterprise integration platforms for 2.13 billion euros ($2.33 billion) to bolster its artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud offerings. IBM will acquire Software AG’s StreamSets and webMethods platforms with available cash on hand, it said. The two units formed Software AG’s so-called “Super Ipaas” business, which was launched in October.

The platforms provide application integration, application programming interface (API) management, and data integration among other uses. Software AG is majority owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, which currently owns 93.3% of shares in the German software company, following a takeover pursuit spanning several months. That deal valued the whole business at 2.6 billion euros ($2.84 billion). The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2024. “The opportunity to bring the StreamSets and webMethods teams together with IBM to innovate in building the future of hybrid cloud and next-generation AI solutions for the enterprise is uniquely compelling,” Christian Lucas, chairman of the supervisory board of Software AG said in a statement.

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Source: Slashdot – IBM To Buy Software AG’s Enterprise Integration Platforms For .3 Billion

A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, posing a risk to the nearby Svartsengi Power Plant and the town of Grindavik. “We are looking at a worst-case scenario,” said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. “The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure.” The New York Times reports: Thousands of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. In November, with homes and roads being damaged, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a town of more than 3,000 people near the volcano. More recently, the Meteorological Office warned of a “significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days.”

Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland’s tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains “entirely random.” The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma.

The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland’s best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. “Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik,” reported Reuters in mid November.

“A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik.”

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Source: Slashdot – Volcano Erupts in Iceland Near Power Plant, in ‘Worst-Case Scenario’

Ernesto Van der Sar reports via TorrentFreak: Internet Archive has filed its opening brief in its appeal of a court ruling which found its digital lending program copyright-infringing. The Archive believes the decision should be reversed on the grounds that its lending activities amount to fair use. Founder Brewster Kahle believes the legal battle is vital for the future of all libraries in the United States and around the world. [ “This lawsuit is about more than the Internet Archive; it is about the role of all libraries in our digital age,” says IA founder Brewster Kahle. “This lawsuit is an attack on a well-established practice used by hundreds of libraries to provide public access to their collections. The disastrous lower court decision in this case holds implications far beyond our organization, shaping the future of all libraries in the United States and unfortunately, around the world.”]

Whether IA has a fair use defense depends on how the four relevant factors are weighed. According to the lower court, these favor the publishers but the library vehemently disagrees. On the contrary, it believes that its service promotes the creation and sharing of knowledge, which is a core purpose of copyright. “This Court should reverse and hold that IA’s controlled digital lending is fair use. This practice, like traditional library lending, furthers copyright’s goal of promoting public availability of knowledge without harming authors or publishers,” the brief reads. A fair use analysis has to weigh the interests of both sides. The lower court did so, but IA argues that it reached the wrong conclusions, failing to properly account for the “tremendous public benefits” controlled digital lending offers.

One of the key fair use factors at stake is whether IA’s lending program affects (i.e., threatens) the traditional ebook lending market. IA uses expert witnesses to argue that there’s no financial harm and further argues that its service is substantially different from the ebook licensing market. IA offers access to digital copies of books, which is similar to licensed libraries. However, the non-profit organization argues that its lending program is not a substitute as it offers a fundamentally different service. “For example, libraries cannot use ebook licenses to build permanent collections. But they can use licensing to easily change the selection of ebooks they offer to adapt to changing interests,” IA writes.

The licensing models make these libraries more flexible. However, they have to rely on the books offered by commercial aggregators and can’t add these digital copies to their archives. “Controlled digital lending, by contrast, allows libraries to lend only books from their own permanent collections. They can preserve and lend older editions, maintaining an accurate historical record of books as they were printed. “They can also provide access that does not depend on what Publishers choose to make available. But libraries must own a copy of each book they lend, so they cannot easily swap one book for another when interest or trends change,” IA adds. A copy of the Internet Archive’s opening brief, filed at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, is available here (pdf)

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Source: Slashdot – Internet Archive: Digital Lending Is Fair Use, Not Copyright Infringement

Ron Amadeo reports via Ars Technica: Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google’s cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn’t enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.

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Source: Slashdot – Google’s Stadia Controller Salvage Operation Will Run For Another Year

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Trevor Milton, the disgraced founder and former CEO of electric truck startup Nikola, was sentenced Monday to four years in prison for securities fraud. The sentence, by Judge Edgardo Ramos in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, caps a multi-year saga that at one point sent Nikola stock soaring 83% only to come crashing down months later over accusations of fraud and canceled contracts. The sentencing hearing comes after four separate delays, during which Milton has remained free under a $100 million bond.

In his ruling, Ramos said he would impose a sentence of 48 months on each count, served concurrently, and a fine of $1 million. Milton is expected to appeal the sentence, which Ramos acknowledged. Milton sobbed as he pled with Judge Ramos for leniency in a long and often confusing statement ahead of the sentencing. At one point, Milton said he stepped down from the CEO post at Nikola not because of fraud allegations, but to support his wife. “I stepped down because my wife was suffering live threatening sickness,” he said in his statement, which reporter Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press shared on social media post X. She suffered medical malpractice, someone else’s plasma. So I stepped down for that — not because I was a fraud. The truth matters. I chose my wife over money or power.”

During the sentencing hearing, defense attorneys said that Milton wasn’t trying to defraud investors or intending to harm anyone. Instead, they argued he simply wanted to be loved and praised like Elon Musk. Prosecutors pushed back and said he lied repeatedly and targeted retail investors. Federal prosecutors recommended an 11-year sentence, but Milton faced a maximum term of 60 years in prison. The government also sought a $5 million fine, forfeiture of a ranch in Utah and an undetermined amount of restitution to investors. Restitution will be determined after Monday’s sentencing hearing. Timeline of events:

June, 2016: Nikola Motor Receives Over 7,000 Preorders Worth Over $2.3 Billion For Its Electric Truck
December, 2016: Nikola Motor Company Reveals Hydrogen Fuel Cell Truck With Range of 1,200 Miles
February, 2020: Nikola Motors Unveils Hybrid Fuel-Cell Concept Truck With 600-Mile Range
June, 2020: Nikola Founder Exaggerated the Capability of His Debut Truck
September, 2020: Nikola Motors Accused of Massive Fraud, Ocean of Lies
September, 2020: Nikola Admits Prototype Was Rolling Downhill In Promo Video
September, 2020: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Steps Down as Chairman in Battle With Short Seller
October, 2020: Nikola Stock Falls 14 Percent After CEO Downplays Badger Truck Plans
November, 2020: Nikola Stock Plunges As Company Cancels Badger Pickup Truck
July, 2021: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Indicted on Three Counts of Fraud
December, 2021: EV Startup Nikola Agrees To $125 Million Settlement
September, 2022: Nikola Founder Lied To Investors About Tech, Prosecutor Says in Fraud Trial

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Source: Slashdot – Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Sentenced To 4 Years For Securities Fraud

Flipboard, the social media magazine and news app, announced that it is starting to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, a technology developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that makes social networks interoperable, “connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system,” reports The Verge. From the report: Right now, only 25 accounts have been federated with ActivityPub, but by March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to follow any fediverse account from within the Flipboard app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts. It’ll be the biggest thing in the fediverse — at least until Threads shows up for real.

“Basically, we’re in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub,” says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “I think Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer service that existed in a walled garden that switches over to ActivityPub.”

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Source: Slashdot – Flipboard Is Pivoting To ActivityPub and the Fediverse

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple said on Monday that it would pause sales of its flagship smartwatches online starting Thursday and at retail locations on Christmas Eve. Two months ago, Apple lost a patent case over the technology its smartwatches use to detect people’s pulse rate. The company was ordered to stop selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 after Christmas, which could set off a run on sales of the watches in the final week of holiday shopping.
The move by Apple follows a ruling by the International Trade Commission in October that found several Apple Watches infringe on patents held by Masimo, a medical technology company in Irvine, Calif.

In court, Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities — whichmeasures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body — that were patented by Masimo. To avoid a complete ban on sales, Apple had two months to cut a deal with Masimo to license its technology, or it could appeal to the Biden administration to reverse the ruling. But Joe Kiani, the chief executive of Masimo, said in an interview that Apple had not engaged in licensing negotiations. Instead, he said that Apple had appealed to President Biden to veto the I.T.C. ruling, which Mr. Kiani knows because the administration contacted Masimo about Apple’s request. “They’re trying to make the agency look like it’s helping patent trolls,” Mr. Kiani said of the I.T.C.

Mr. Kiani said that he was willing to sell Apple a chip that Masimo had designed to provide pulse oximeter readings on the Apple Watch. The chip is currently in a Masimo medical watch, called the W1, that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The device uses algorithms to process red and near-infrared light to determine how oxygen-rich is the blood in arteries. “If they don’t want to use our chip, I’ll work with them to make their product good,” Mr. Kiani said. “Once it’s good enough, I’m happy to give them a license.”
Apple introduced its first watch with pulse oximetry in 2020. It has included the technology, which it calls “blood oxygen,” in subsequent models. But unlike Masimo’s W1 device, Apple hasn’t had its watches cleared by the F.D.A. for use as a medical device for pulse oximetry. “The Apple Watch accounts for nearly $20 billion of the company’s $383.29 billion in annual sales,” notes the NYT. The company is the largest smartwatch seller in the world, accounting for about a third of all smartwatch sales.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple To Pause Selling New Versions of Its Watch After Losing Patent Dispute

Travel website Expedia wants to get people to start their travel search on its site with AI instead of using an external search engine. From a report: Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels. The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site. It’s a long-term plan to shift the balance of power on the web — albeit one that’s still in its earliest stages for the company.

Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia, says the goal is to get users started on their trips in one place. Expedia hopes to produce recommendations trained with its library of flight and hotel information and informed by users’ travel preferences. “By being able to train large language models on our data, this rich 70 petabytes’ worth of data we’ve gathered over the years, we can eventually recommend places to go and stay and do and continue to refine and personalize that,” Naidu tells The Verge in an interview. According to Naidu, when people plan trips, they often start by going to a search engine to look for a destination. Only then do they visit services like Expedia to start booking travel and accommodation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with going to Google and typing “best vacation that isn’t cold and not that far from New York,” but Naidu believes there’s value in streamlining the travel planning process even more.

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Source: Slashdot – Expedia Wants To Use AI To Cut Google Out of Its Trip-Planning Business

Hackers stole the sensitive personal information of more than 14.6 million Mr. Cooper customers, the mortgage and loan giant has confirmed. From a report: In a filing with Maine’s attorney general’s office, Mr. Cooper said the hackers stole customer names, addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers, as well as customer Social Security numbers and bank account numbers. Mr. Cooper previously said that customer banking information was stored by a third-party company and believed to be unaffected. Mr. Cooper said in a separate filing with federal regulators on Friday that hackers obtained personal data on “substantially all of our current and former customers.”

The number of affected victims is significantly higher than the four million existing customers that Mr. Cooper claims on its website, likely because of the historical data that the company stores on mortgage holders. Mr. Cooper said in its data breach notification letter to affected victims that the stolen data includes personal information on those whose mortgage was previously acquired or serviced by the company when it was known as Nationstar Mortgage, prior to its rebranding as Mr. Cooper. The company said affected customers may include those whose mortgages were serviced by a sister brand.

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Source: Slashdot – Mr. Cooper Hackers Stole Personal Data on 14 Million Customers

OpenAI, the AI company behind ChatGPT, laid out its plans for staying ahead of what it thinks could be serious dangers of the tech it develops, such as allowing bad actors to learn how to build chemical and biological weapons. From a report: OpenAI’s “Preparedness” team, led by MIT AI professor Aleksander Madry, will hire AI researchers, computer scientists, national security experts and policy professionals to monitor its tech, continually test it and warn the company if it believes any of its AI capabilities are becoming dangerous. The team sits between OpenAI’s “Safety Systems” team, which works on existing problems like infusing racist biases into AI, and the company’s “Superalignment” team, which researches how to make sure AI doesn’t harm humans in an imagined future where the tech has outstripped human intelligence completely.

[…] Madry, a veteran AI researcher who directs MIT’s Center for Deployable Machine Learning and co-leads the MIT AI Policy Forum, joined OpenAI earlier this year. He was one of a small group of OpenAI leaders who quit when Altman was fired by the company’s board in November. Madry returned to the company when Altman was reinstated five days later. OpenAI, which is governed by a nonprofit board whose mission is to advance AI and make it helpful for all humans, is in the midst of selecting new board members after three of the four board members who fired Altman stepped down as part of his return. Despite the leadership “turbulence,” Madry said he believes OpenAI’s board takes seriously the risks of AI that he is researching. “I realized if I really want to shape how AI is impacting society, why not go to a company that is actually doing it?”

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Source: Slashdot – OpenAI Lays Out Plan For Dealing With Dangers of AI

AI allowed Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. From a report: Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party used artificial intelligence to make a four-minute message from the 71-year-old, headlining a “virtual rally” hosted on social media overnight on Sunday into Monday despite internet disruptions that monitor NetBlocks said were consistent with previous attempts to censor Khan.

PTI said Khan sent a shorthand script through lawyers that was fleshed out into his rhetorical style. The text was then dubbed into audio using a tool from the AI firm ElevenLabs, which boasts the ability to create a “voice clone” from existing speech samples. “My fellow Pakistanis, I would first like to praise the social media team for this historic attempt,” the voice mimicking Khan said. “Maybe you all are wondering how I am doing in jail,” the stilted voice adds. “Today, my determination for real freedom is very strong.” The audio was broadcast at the end of a five-hour live-stream of speeches by PTI supporters on Facebook, X and YouTube, and was overlaid with historic footage of Khan and still images.

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Source: Slashdot – Imran Khan Deploys AI Clone To Campaign From Behind Bars in Pakistan

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has written to U.S. President Joe Biden, warning European technology regulation are unfairly targeting U.S. companies and not including many Chinese or EU firms, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Monday. From the report: Under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), five major U.S. tech companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft — were designated “gatekeeper” service providers. From March 2024, these companies — as well as TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance — will be required to make their messaging apps work with rivals and let users choose which ones they want pre-installed on their devices.

In a letter seen by Reuters, 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives warned the new rules could damage American economic and security interests and called on Biden to secure commitments from the EU the rules will be enforced fairly. “Securing our leadership in this sector is imperative for our economy and American workers,” the letter said. “The designation of leading U.S. companies as ‘gatekeepers’ threatens to upend the U.S. economy, diminish our global leadership in the digital sphere, and jeopardize the security of consumers.”

The letter questioned why Chinese companies Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent had avoided designation and why European companies had avoided any scrutiny. “The EU inexplicably failed to designate any European retailers, content-sharing platforms, payment firms, and telcos,” it said. Signatories of the letter — including Representative Lou Correa, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, — called on Biden to seek assurances from EU lawmakers the DMA will not be unfairly used to target U.S. companies.

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Source: Slashdot – US Lawmakers Warn Biden To Probe EU Targeting of Tech Firms

Following a tumultuous few weeks for Beeper, which has been trying to provide an iMessage-compatible Android app, a group of US lawmakers are pushing for the DOJ to investigate Apple for “potentially anticompetitive conduct” over its attempts to disable Beeper’s services. From a report: Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) as well as Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Ken Buck (R-CO) said in a letter to the DOJ that Beeper’s Android messaging app, Beeper Mini, was a threat to Apple’s leverage by “creating [a] more competitive mobile applications market, which in turn [creates] a more competitive mobile device market.”

In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky and 16-year-old developer James Gill talked about the fight to keep Beeper Mini alive. Migicovsky told CBS News that Beeper is trying to provide a service people want and reiterated his belief that Apple has a monopoly over its iMessage service. The company created Beeper Mini after being contacted by Gill, who said he reverse-engineered the software by “poking at it” using a “real Mac and a real iPhone.” […] The lawmakers’ letter also pointed to a Department of Commerce report calling Apple a “gatekeeper,” mirroring language used in the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) that went into force earlier this year, regulating the “core” services of several tech platforms (though, notably, iMessage may not be included in this). They went on to cite Migicovsky’s December 2021 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony that “the dominant messaging services would use their position to impose barriers to interoperability” and keep companies like Beeper from offering certain services. “Given Apple’s recent actions, that concern appears prescient,” they added.

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Source: Slashdot – Lawmakers Push DOJ To Investigate Apple Following Beeper Shutdowns

Southwest Airlines is still paying for its meltdown during the 2022 holidays that stranded millions of travelers — and the tab is growing. From a report: The U.S. Transportation Department has ordered Southwest to pay a $140 million civil penalty, part of a broader consent order after the airline’s operational failures a year ago. That penalty is by far the largest the DOT has ever levied for consumer protection violations, according to a statement from the department. “This is not just about Southwest,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday. “This is about the entire industry, sending a signal that you should not be cutting corners — because if you fail your passengers, we will hold you accountable.”

A major winter storm last December caused travel disruptions across the country as airlines canceled thousands of flights. But while other airlines recovered relatively quickly, Southwest fell apart. The airline ultimately canceled 16,900 flights, stranding more than 2 million passengers. In a statement, Southwest described the agreement as “a consumer-friendly settlement.” The airline says it has taken steps since last year’s disruption to improve its operational resiliency and customer care.

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Source: Slashdot – Southwest Will Pay a 0 Million Fine For Its Meltdown During the 2022 Holidays