Private equity firms have been increasingly adding another layer of debt to their complex borrowing arrangements, raising concern among some investors about potential risks to the wider industry and the financial system. Bloomberg: Hit by a drought of deals and dwindling cash, some buyout firms are starting to resort to backroom financing to help meet fund commitments or enable succession planning. The loans — backed by assets including the promise of future income — carry interest of as much as 19%, a rate that’s more akin to the charges faced by consumers rather than corporate borrowing. Even a junk-rated company in the US paid 10% on a bond recently.

Those high costs aren’t deterring private equity firms and experts say demand is at an all-time high. While some of the biggest lenders — such as Carlyle Group — say these debts are relatively safe, others are already starting to take precautions by adding covenants that enable seizure of other underlying fund assets, highlighting worries about possible losses. Some are warning of perils when a firm faces claims from more than one type of loan simultaneously. “If the value of the fund drops, for example, you’re looking at a margin call situation,” said Jason Meklinsky, chief revenue and strategy officer at Socium Fund Services, a New Jersey-based firm that helps administer PE portfolios. “It would be like a volcano meets a tornado.” For an industry long used to easy money, the rush for such loans marks a reversal in fortune. Buyout firms have been battling rising interest rates and economic uncertainty, forcing takeover volumes to almost halve this year. Cash on hand at PEs is near the lowest since at least 2008, according to data from PitchBook.

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Source: Slashdot – Private Equity Is Piling Debt on Itself Like Never Before

An anonymous reader shares a report: Eddy Cue, in a dark suit, peered down at the monitor in front of him. The screens in the Washington, DC, courtroom had briefly malfunctioned and left witnesses with only binders, but now the tech was up and running — showing an image of three iPhones, each demonstrating a part of the phone’s setup process. Cue squinted down at the screen. “The resolution on this is terrible,” he said. “You should get a Mac.” That got some laughs in an otherwise staid and quiet courtroom. Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the case, leaned into his microphone and responded, “If Apple would like to make a donation…” That got even bigger laughs. Then everybody got back down to business.

Cue was on the stand as a witness in US v. Google, the landmark antitrust trial over Google’s search business. Cue is one of the highest-profile witnesses in the case so far, in part because the deal between Google and Apple — which makes Google the default search engine on all Apple devices and pays Apple billions of dollars a year — is central to the US Department of Justice’s case against Google. Cue had two messages: Apple believes in protecting its users’ privacy, and it also believes in Google. Whether those two statements can be simultaneously true became the question of the day.

Apple is in court because of something called the Information Services Agreement, or ISA: a deal that makes Googleâ(TM)s search engine the default on Apple’s products. The ISA has been in place since 2002, but Cue was responsible for negotiating its current iteration with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2016. In testimony today, the Justice Department grilled Cue about the specifics of the deal. When the two sides renegotiated, Cue said on the stand, Apple wanted a higher percentage of the revenue Google made from Apple users it directed toward the search engine. […] Meagan Bellshaw, a Justice Department lawyer, asked Cue if he would have walked away from the deal if the two sides couldn’t agree on a revenue-share figure. Cue said he’d never really considered that an option: “I always felt like it was in Google’s best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done.” Cue also argued that the deal was about more than economics and that Apple never seriously considered switching to another provider or building its own search product. “Certainly there wasn’t a valid alternative to Google at the time,” Cue said. He said there still isn’t one.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Defends Google Search Deal in Court: ‘There Wasn’t a Valid Alternative’

New submitter AsylumWraith shares a report: The US government aims to restore sweeping regulations for high-speed internet providers, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, reviving “net neutrality” rules for the broadband industry — and an ongoing debate about the internet’s future. The proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission will designate internet service — both the wired kind found in homes and businesses as well as mobile data on cellphones — as “essential telecommunications” akin to traditional telephone services, according to multiple people familiar with the plan. The rules would ban internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing down access to websites and online content, the people told CNN.

Agency chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel plans to unveil the proposal in a speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday, the people added, saying the FCC plans to vote Oct. 19 on whether to advance the draft rules by soliciting public feedback on them — a step that would precede the creation of any final rules. In addition to the prohibitions on blocking and throttling internet traffic, the draft rules also seek to prevent ISPs from selectively speeding up service to favored websites or to those that agree to pay extra fees, the people added, a move designed to prevent the emergence of “fast lanes” on the web that could give some websites a paid advantage over others.

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Source: Slashdot – FCC To Reintroduce Rules Protecting Net Neutrality

US intelligence agencies are getting their own ChatGPT-style tool to sift through an avalanche of public information for clues. From a report: The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to roll out a feature akin to OpenAI’s now-famous program that will use artificial intelligence to give analysts better access to open-source intelligence, according to agency officials. The CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division plans to provide intelligence agencies with its AI tool soon. “We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Randy Nixon, director of the division, said in an interview. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

It’s part of a broader government campaign to harness the power of AI and compete with China, which is seeking to become the global leader in the field by 2030. That US push dovetails with the intelligence community’s struggle to process the vast amounts of data that’s now publicly available, amid criticism that it’s been slow to exploit that source. The CIA’s AI tool will allow users to see the original source of the information that they’re viewing, Nixon said. He said that a chat feature is a logical part of getting intelligence distributed quicker.

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Source: Slashdot – CIA Builds Its Own AI Chatbot in Rivalry With China

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states on Tuesday sued Amazon, alleging the online retailer illegally wields monopoly power that keeps prices artificially high, locks sellers into its platform and harms its rivals. WSJ: The FTC’s lawsuit, filed in Seattle federal court, marks a milestone in the Biden administration’s aggressive approach to enforcing antitrust laws and has been anticipated for months. The agency’s chair, Lina Khan, is a longtime critic of Amazon who wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 2017 that earlier generations of competition cops and courts abandoned the law’s concerns over conglomerates such as Amazon. The FTC and states alleged that Amazon violated antitrust laws by using anti-discounting measures that punished merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere. The government also said sellers on Amazon were compelled to use its logistics service if they want their goods to appear in Amazon Prime, the subscription program whose perks include faster shipping times, the FTC said.

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Source: Slashdot – FTC and 17 States Sue Amazon, Alleging Illegal Online-Marketplace Monopoly

An anonymous reader shares a report: Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker (and I did), she’ll tell you it’s simply because “AI is a surveillance technology.” Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained her perspective that AI is largely inseparable from the big data and targeting industry perpetuated by the likes of Google and Meta, as well as less consumer-focused but equally prominent enterprise and defense companies. “It requires the surveillance business model; it’s an exacerbation of what we’ve seen since the late ’90s and the development of surveillance advertising. AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she said.

“The Venn diagram is a circle.” “And the use of AI is also surveillant, right?” she continued. “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control, etc., to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities.”

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Source: Slashdot – Signal President Says AI is Fundamentally ‘a Surveillance Technology’

Delta Air Lines earlier this month revamped its SkyMiles program to prioritize dollars spent over miles flown for status. This shift positions SkyMiles more as a program for high spenders than frequent flyers, causing dissatisfaction among many, including industry insiders.

Historically, airline regulations, controlled by the government, ensured fair pricing until deregulation in 1978. This deregulation spurred airlines to introduce competitive strategies, transforming frequent-flyer programs into intricate points systems. These programs now, a piece in The Atlantic argues, closely resemble financial systems, with airlines minting and selling points for profit. From the report: Here’s how the system works now: Airlines create points out of nothing and sell them for real money to banks with co-branded credit cards. The banks award points to cardholders for spending, and both the banks and credit-card companies make money off the swipe fees from the use of the card. Cardholders can redeem points for flights, as well as other goods and services sold through the airlines’ proprietary e-commerce portals.

For the airlines, this is a great deal. They incur no costs from points until they are redeemed — or ever, if the points are forgotten. This setup has made loyalty programs highly lucrative. Consumers now charge nearly 1 percent of U.S. GDP to Delta’s American Express credit cards alone. A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines’ mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.

Is this a good deal for the American consumer? That’s a trickier question. Paying for a flight or a hotel room with points may feel like a free bonus, but because credit-card-swipe fees increase prices across the economy — Visa or Mastercard takes a cut of every sale — redeeming points is more like getting a little kickback. Certainly the system is bad for Americans who don’t have points-earning cards. They pay higher prices on ordinary goods and services but don’t get the points, effectively subsidizing the perks of card users, who tend to be wealthier already.

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Source: Slashdot – Airlines Are Just Banks Now

Slash_Account_Dot writes: A federal counterintelligence agency tracking hackers has bought data harvested from the backbone of the internet by a private company because it was easier and took less time than getting similar data from the NSA, according to internal U.S. government documents. According to the documents, going through an agency like the NSA could take “days,” whereas a private contractor could provide the same data instantly. The news is yet another example of a government agency turning to the private sector for novel datasets that the public is likely unaware are being collected and then sold.

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Source: Slashdot – Getting Data From NSA Takes ‘Days’ So Federal Counterintelligence Agency Turned To Private Company, Documents Show

EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Tuesday called on Apple CEO Tim Cook to open up the iPhone maker’s fiercely guarded ecosystem of hardware and software to rivals. From a report: Breton’s comments came after meeting Cook in Brussels. “The next job for Apple and other Big Tech, under the DMA (Digital Markets Act) is to open up its gates to competitors,” Breton told Reuters. “Be it the electronic wallet, browsers or app stores, consumers using an Apple iPhone should be able to benefit from competitive services by a range of providers,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – EU’s Breton Tells Apple CEO To Open Its Ecosystem To Rivals

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ford Motor Company on Monday halted construction of a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant project in the Marshall area amid months of battles with local residents, Republicans in Congress over its use of Chinese technology and an auto industry strike in its second week. “We’re pausing work, and we’re going to limit spending on construction at Marshall until we’re confident about our ability to competitively run the plant,” Ford spokesman T.R. Reid told The Detroit News on Monday. Reid said a “number of considerations” were at play in the company’s business decision, but wouldn’t say whether the United Auto Workers’ ongoing strike of Ford and its crosstown rivals was a factor. “We haven’t made a final decision about the investment there,” Reid said of the Marshall site. The pause in construction is effective Monday, Reid said.

The Dearborn-based automaker announced on Feb. 13 that it planned to invest about $3.5 billion in an electric vehicle battery plant park in Marshall. As part of the deal, Ford secured about $210 million in direct tax incentives plus a 15-year property tax abatement worth about $775 million over the life of the tax break. There was also roughly $750 million set aside for site prep at the location, with a $299 million earmark allocated for the Marshall Area Economic Development Alliance and a $330 million earmark pushed toward the Michigan Department of Transportation budget for expanding roadways and freeway connections for the presumed Ford plant’s truck traffic. Another $120 million was routed to MAEDA earlier this month through the SOAR fund. […] The 2.5-million-square-foot battery park was to be run by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ford called “Blue Oval Battery Park Michigan.” The plant would employ 2,500 people with pay ranging from $20 to $50 an hour.

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Source: Slashdot – Ford Pauses Construction On .5 Billion EV Battery Plant In Michigan

Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their “Fanimatrix” release is the oldest active torrent that’s still widely shared today. Ernesto Van der Sar writes via TorreantFreak: The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film “The Fanimatrix.” The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement. The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days. While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major hurdle. Free video-sharing services didn’t exist yet and server bandwidth was still very costly. Technically the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn’t an option. Luckily, however, the group’s IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives.

Frost had a bit part in the film and did some other work as well, but the true breakthrough came when he stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. This appeared to be exactly what they were looking for. “It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost told us earlier. After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly. Today, more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still up and running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it’s the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books.
“I never expected to become the world’s oldest torrent but now it’s definitely become a thing I’d love to keep carrying on. So I’ll be keeping this active as long as I physically can,” Frost tells TorrentFreak. “It’s really heartening seeing the community pull together around this torrent, despite its usually low transfer count, and work together to keep it alive and kicking. It warms my heart on the daily.”

“We’re super pumped that it’s still going and that people still take an interest in it. Looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world,” Frost concludes.

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Source: Slashdot – The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old

The United States Space Force reportedly discussed setting up a hotline with China to prevent crises in space, according to Reuters, citing U.S. commander General Chance Saltzman. From the report: The chief of space operations said a direct line of communication between the Space Force and its Chinese counterpart would be valuable in de-escalating tensions but that the U.S. had not yet engaged with China to establish one. “What we have talked about on the U.S. side at least is opening up a line of communication to make sure that if there is a crisis, we know who we can contact,” Saltzman said, adding that it would be up to President Joe Biden and the State Department to take the lead on such discussions. The U.S. Space Force, founded in 2019, also does not have a direct line of communication with its Russian counterpart.

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Source: Slashdot – US Exploring Potential Space Force Hotline With China

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done tens of thousands of face recognition searches using software from outside providers in recent years. Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau’s three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this month reveals. The bureau has no policy for face recognition use in place to protect privacy, civil rights, or civil liberties. Lawmakers and others concerned about face recognition have said that adequate training on the technology and how to interpret its output is needed to reduce improper use or errors, although some experts say training can lull law enforcement and the public into thinking face recognition is low risk.

Since the false arrest of Robert Williams near Detroit in 2020, multiple instances have surfaced in the US of arrests after a face recognition model wrongly identified a person. Alonzo Sawyer, whose ordeal became known this spring, spent nine days in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The lack of face recognition training at the FBI came to light in a GAO report examining the protections in place when federal law enforcement uses the technology. The report was compiled at the request of seven Democratic members of Congress. Report author and GAO Homeland Security and Justice director Gretta Goodwin says, via email, that she found no evidence of false arrests due to use of face recognition by a federal law enforcement agency.

The GAO report focuses on face recognition tools made by commercial and nonprofit entities. That means it does not cover the FBI’s in-house face recognition platform, which the GAO previously criticized for poor privacy protections. The US Department of Justice was ordered by the White House last year to develop best practices for using face recognition and report any policy changes that result. The outside face recognition tools used by the FBI and other federal law enforcement covered by the report comes from companies including Clearview AI, which scraped billions of photos of faces from the internet to train its face recognition system, andThorn, a nonprofit that combats sex trafficking by applying face recognition to identify victims and sex traffickers from online commercial sex market imagery.The FBI ranks first among federal law enforcement agencies examined by the GAO for the scale of its use of face recognition. More than 60,000 searches were carried out by seven agencies between October 2019 and March 2022. Over half were made by FBI agents, about 15,000 using Clearview AI and 20,000 using Thorn. “No existing law requires federal law enforcement personnel to take training before using face recognition or to follow particular standards when using face recognition in a criminal investigation,” notes Wired.

“The DOJ plans to issue a department-wide civil rights and civil liberties policy for face recognition but has yet to set a date for planned implementation, according to the report. It says that DOJ officials, at one point in 2022, considered updating its policy to allow a face recognition match alone to justify applying for a search warrant.”

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Source: Slashdot – FBI Agents Are Using Face Recognition Without Proper Training

Mark Tyson writes via Tom’s Hardware: A future version of [Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology] is likely to include full neural rendering, hinted Bryan Catanzaro, a Nvidia VP of Applied Deep Learning Research. In a round table discussion organized by Digital Foundry (video), various video game industry experts talked about the future of AI in the business. During the discussion, Nvidia’s Catanzaro raised a few eyebrows with his openness to predict some key features of a hypothetical “DLSS 10.” […]

We’ve seen significant developments in Nvidia’s DLSS technology over the years. First launched with the RTX 20-series GPUs, many wondered about the true value of technologies like the Tensor cores being included in gaming GPUs. The first ray tracing games, and the first version of DLSS, were of questionable merit. However, DLSS 2.X improved the tech and made it more useful, leading to it being more widely utilized — and copied, first via FSR2 and later with XeSS. DLSS 3 debuted with the RTX 40-series graphics cards, adding Frame Generation technology. With 4x upscaling and frame generation, neural rendering potentially allows a game to only fully render 1/8 (12.5%) of the pixels. Most recently, DLSS 3.5 offered improved denoising algorithms for ray tracing games with the introduction of Ray Reconstruction technology.

The above timeline raises questions about where Nvidia might go next with future versions of DLSS. And of course, “Deep Learning Super Sampling” no longer really applies, as the last two additions have targeted other aspects of rendering. Digital Foundry asked that question to the group: “Where do you see DLSS in the future? What other problem areas could machine learning tackle in a good way?” Bryan Catanzaro immediately brought up the topic of full neural rendering. This idea isn’t quite as far out as it may seem. Catanzaro reminded the panel that, at the NeurIPS conference in 2018, Nvidia researchers showed an open-world demo of a world being rendered in real-time using a neural network. During that demo the UE4 game engine provided data about what objects were in a scene, where they were, and so on, and the neural rendering provided all the on-screen graphics. “DLSS 10 (in the far far future) is going to be a completely neural rendering system,” Catanzaro added. The result will be “more immersive and more beautiful” games than most can imagine today.

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Source: Slashdot – Nvidia Hints At Replacing Rasterization and Ray Tracing With Full Neural Rendering

Emma Roth reporting via The Verge: Facebook can be sued over allegations that its advertising algorithm is discriminatory, a California state court of appeals ruled last week. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2020, which accused the company of not showing insurance ads to women and older people in violation of civil rights laws. The case centers around Samantha Liapes, a 48-year-old woman who turned to Facebook to find an insurance provider. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook’s ad delivery system didn’t show Liapes ads for insurance due to her age and gender.

In a September 21st ruling, the appeals court reversed a previous decision that said Section 230 (which protects online platforms from legal liability if users post illegal content) shields Facebook from accountability. The appeals court concluded that the case “adequately” alleges that Facebook “knew insurance advertisers intentionally targeted its ads based on users’ age and gender” in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act. It also found significant similarities between Facebook’s ad platform and Roommates.com, a service that exceeded the protections of Section 230 by including dropdown menus with options that allowed for discrimination. “There is little difference with Facebook’s ad tools” and their targeting capabilities, the court concluded. “Facebook does not merely proliferate and disseminate content as a publisher … it creates, shapes, or develops content” with the tools.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook Can Be Sued Over Biased Ad Algorithm, Says Court

Some early adopters of Apple’s iPhone 15 have taken to social media to complain about overheating issues. Digital Trends’ Bryan Wolfe writes: Over the past few days, various user complaints have popped up online by iPhone 15 owners saying their new devices are overheating. Some, for example, have taken to the Apple discussion groups to express their dismay, while others have left messages on Reddit and elsewhere. New smartphones commonly heat up more than usual during setup and in the first 24 hours of use, even those not manufactured by Apple. The issues being reported may have occurred during these instances. Speaking from personal experience, Android Authority’s Aamir Siddiqui said he, too, has noticed his iPhone 15 Pro Max running very hot, even after the initial 24 hours of setup and settling in.

Korean YouTuber BullsLab also captured high temperatures using a thermal camera.

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Source: Slashdot – Does the iPhone 15 Have an Overheating Problem?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will replace CEO Bob Smith with outgoing Amazon executive Dave Limp, CNBC has learned. Smith is retiring effective Dec. 4 and will remain with the company until Jan. 2 for the CEO transition, according to notes to Blue Origin staff written by Smith and Bezos that were obtained by CNBC.

Limp joins Blue Origin at a key phase of the company’s multiple space projects. Blue needs to ramp production of its BE-4 rocket engines, return its space tourism rocket New Shepard to flight, and launch its next-generation New Glenn rocket for the first time — as well as deliver on a recently-won NASA contract for a crewed lunar lander.

In a statement to CNBC, a Blue Origin spokesperson praised Limp as “a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset” who has “extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations.” Amazon announced last month that Limp would be stepping down later this year. As Amazon’s devices and services chief, Limp oversaw Amazon’s Alexa, Echo and Ring units, as well as some of its more experimental divisions like Zoox autonomous vehicles, and the Project Kuiper internet satellite business.

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Source: Slashdot – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin To Replace CEO Bob Smith With Amazon Exec Dave Limp

Bill Toulas writes via Bleeping Computer reports: Google is notifying Gmail users that the webmail’s Basic HTML view will be deprecated in January 2024, and users will require modern browsers to continue using the service. After that date, all users of the popular webmail service will automatically be redirected to the more modern Standard view, which supports all the latest usability and security features.

The basic HTML view is a stripped-down version of Gmail that does not offer users chat, spell checking, keyboard shortcuts, adding or importing contacts, setting custom “from” addresses, or using rich text formatting. This feature is designed for people living in areas with internet access, using older hardware with limited memory, or using legacy web browsers that do not support current HTML features.

However, one of the biggest reasons users use HTML view is that text-to-speech tools used by users with visual impairment are more reliable, as the Standard view introduces technical complexities that are harder for these tools to manage. Nonetheless, Google has decided to retire Gmail’s HTML view without providing specific reasons.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Is Retiring Its Gmail Basic HTML View In January 2024

The official Tesla Optimus account shared an update video showing the progress its humanoid robot has made since it was announced in August 2021. In a video that looks like CGI, you can see Optimus sorting blocks and performing some yoga poses, among other things. Interesting Engineering reports: The video begins with the Tesla Bot aka the Optimus robot performing a self-calibration routine, which is essential for adapting to new environments. It then shows how TeslaBot can use its vision and joint position sensors to accurately locate its limbs in space, without relying on any external feedback. This enables TeslaBot to interact with objects and perform tasks with precision and dexterity.

One of the tasks that Optimus demonstrates is sorting blue and green blocks into matching trays. Tesla Optimus can grasp each block with ease and sort them at a human-like speed. It can also handle dynamic changes in the environment, such as when a human intervenes and moves the blocks around. TeslaBot can quickly adjust to the new situation and resume its task. It can also correct its own errors, such as when a block lands on its side and needs to be rotated.

The video also showcases Tesla Bot’s balance and flexibility, as it performs some yoga poses that require standing on one leg and extending its limbs. These poses are not related to any practical workloads, but they show how TeslaBot can control its body and maintain its stability. The video ends with a call for more engineers to join the Tesla Optimus team, as the project is still in development and needs more talent. There is no information on when TeslaBot will be ready for production or commercial use, but the video suggests that it is making rapid progress and using the same software as the Tesla cars.

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Source: Slashdot – Tesla Bot Can Now Sort Objects Autonomously

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Denmark’s Lego said on Monday that it remains committed to its quest to find sustainable materials to reduce carbon emissions, even after an experiment by the world’s largest toymaker to use recycled bottles did not work. Lego said it has “decided not to progress” with making its trademark colorful bricks from recycled plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, and after more than two years of testing “found the material didn’t reduce carbon emissions.” Lego enthusiastically announced in 2021 that the prototype PET blocks had become the first recycled alternative to pass its “strict” quality, safety and play requirements, following experimentation with several other iterations that proved not durable enough.

The company said scientists and engineers tested more than 250 variations of PET materials, as well as hundreds of other plastic formulations, before nailing down the prototype, which was made with plastic sourced from suppliers in the U.S. that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority. On average, a one-liter plastic PET bottle made enough raw material for ten 2 x 4 Lego bricks. Despite the determination that the PET prototype failed to save on carbon emissions, Lego said it remained “fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032.” […] Lego said it will continue to use bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene — a plastic used in everything from consumer and food packaging to tires — for parts in Lego sets such as leaves, trees and other accessories.

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Source: Slashdot – Lego Drops Plans To Make Bricks From Recycled Plastic Bottles