An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is pouncing on Microsoft's weathered enterprise security reputation by pitching its services to government institutions. Pointing to a recent report from the US Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) that found that Microsoft's security woes are the result of the company "deprioritizing" enterprise security, Google says it can help. The company's pitch isn't quite as direct as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying he made Google dance, but it's spicy all the same. Repeatedly referring to Microsoft as "the vendor" throughout its blog post on Monday, Google says the CSRB "showed that lack of a strong commitment to security creates preventable errors and serious breaches." Platforms, it added, "have a responsibility" to hold to strong security practices. And of course, who is more responsible than Google?

Microsoft today unveiled Recall, a new AI-powered feature for Windows 11 PCs, at its Build 2024 conference. Recall aims to improve local searches by making them as efficient as web searches, allowing users to quickly retrieve anything they've seen on their PC. Using voice commands and contextual clues, Recall can find specific emails, documents, chat threads, and even PowerPoint slides.

The feature uses semantic associations to make connections, as demonstrated by Microsoft Product Manager Caroline Hernandez, who searched for a blue dress and refined the query with specific details. Microsoft said that Recall's processing is done locally, ensuring data privacy and security. The feature utilizes over 40 local multi-modal small language models to recognize text, images, and video.

OpenAI is pausing the use of the popular Sky voice in ChatGPT over concerns it sounds too much like the "Her" actress Scarlett Johansson. From a report: The company says the voices in ChatGPT were from paid voice actors. A final five were selected from an initial pool of 400 and it's purely a coincidence the unnamed actress behind the Sky voice has a similar tone to Johansson. Voice is about to become more prominent for OpenAI as it begins to roll out a new GPT-4o model into ChatGPT. With it will come an entirely new conversational interface where users can talk in real-time to a natural-sounding and emotion-mimicking AI.

While the Sky voice and a version of ChatGPT Voice have been around for some time, the comparison to Johansson became more obvious due to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and many others, drawing the similarity between the new AI model and the movie "Her". In "Her," Scarlett Johansson voices an advanced AI operating system named Samantha, who develops a romantic relationship with a lonely writer played by Joaquin Phoenix. With its ability to mimic emotional responses, the parallels from GPT-4o were obvious.

A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is: 1. A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
2. For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This "digital decay" occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the "References" section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:
1. 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
2. 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their "References" section that points to a page that no longer exists.[...]

"Last week, we reported on a customer who was charged $277 for gasoline his rented Tesla couldn't have possibly used," writes the automotive blog The Drive.

"And now, we've heard from other Hertz customers who say they've been charged even more." Hertz caught attention last week for how it handled a customer whom it had charged a "Skip the Pump" fee, which allows renters to pay a premium for Hertz to refill the tank for them. But of course, this customer's rented Tesla Model 3 didn't use gas — it draws power from a battery — and Hertz has a separate, flat fee for EV recharges. Nevertheless, the customer was charged $277.39 despite returning the car with the exact same charge they left with, and Hertz refused to refund it until after our story ran. It's no isolated incident either, as other customers have written in to inform us that it happened to them, too....

Evan Froehlich returned the rental at 21 percent charge, expecting to pay a flat $25 recharge fee. (It's ordinarily $35, but Hertz's loyalty program discounts it.) To Froehlich's surprise, he was hit with a $340.97 "Skip the Pump" fee, which can be applied after returning a car if it's not requested beforehand. He says Hertz's customer service was difficult to reach, and that it took making a ruckus on social media to get Hertz's attention. In the end, a Hertz representative was able to review the charge and have it reversed....

A March 2023 Facebook post documenting a similar case indicates this has been happening for more than a year.
After renting a Tesla Model 3, another customer even got a $475.19 "fuel charge," according to the article — in addition to a $25 charging fee: They also faced a $125.01 "rebill" for using the Supercharger network during their rental, which other Hertz customers have expressed surprise and frustration with. Charging costs can vary, but a 75-percent charge from a Supercharger will often cost in the region of just $15.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog OMG Ubuntu: Ubuntu first switched to using Wayland as its default display server in 2017 before reverting the following year. It tried again in 2021 and has stuck with it since. But while Wayland is what most of us now log into after installing Ubuntu, anyone doing so on a PC or laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card present instead logs into an Xorg/X11 session.

This is because NVIDIA's proprietary graphics drivers (which many, especially gamers, opt for to get the best performance, access to full hardware capabilities, etc) have not supported Wayland as well as as they could've. Past tense as, thankfully, things have changed in the past few years. NVIDIA's warmed up to Wayland (partly as it has no choice given that Wayland is now standard and a 'maybe one day' solution, and partly because it wants to: opportunities/benefits/security).

With the NVIDIA + Wayland sitch' now in a better state than before — but not perfect — Canonical's engineers say they feel confident enough in the experience to make the Ubuntu Wayland session default for NVIDIA graphics card users in Ubuntu 24.10.

This week the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the launch of the High Performance Software Foundation, which "aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for high performance computing" (or HPC) by "increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts."

It promises initiatives focused on "continuously built, turnkey software stacks," as well as other initiatives including architecture support and performance regression testing. Its first open source technical projects are:

- Spack: the HPC package manager.

- Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.

- Viskores (formerly VTK-m): a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.

- HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers.

- Apptainer: Formerly known as Singularity, Apptainer is a Linux Foundation project providing a high performance, full featured HPC and computing optimized container subsystem.

- E4S: a curated, hardened distribution of scientific software packages.

As use of HPC becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation will provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance computing ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate on the scientific software.

The High Performance Software Foundation benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including Premier Members Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories; General Members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Intel, Kitware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Associate Members University of Maryland, University of Oregon, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
In a statement, an AMD vice president said that by joining "we are using our collective hardware and software expertise to help develop a portable, open-source software stack for high-performance computing across industry, academia, and government." And an AWS executive said the high-performance computing community "has a long history of innovation being driven by open source projects. AWS is thrilled to join the High Performance Software Foundation to build on this work. In particular, AWS has been deeply involved in contributing upstream to Spack, and we're looking forward to working with the HPSF to sustain and accelerate the growth of key HPC projects so everyone can benefit."

The new foundation will "set up a technical advisory committee to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics," according to the announcement, following a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

"China's navy has apparently tested out a hypersonic rail gun," reports Futurism, describing it as "basically a device that uses a series of electromagnets to accelerate a projectile to incredible speeds."

But "during a demonstration of its power, things didn't go quite as planned." As the South China Morning Post reports, the rail gun test lobbed a precision-guided projectile — or smart bomb — nine miles into the stratosphere. But because it apparently didn't go up as high as it was supposed to, the test was ultimately declared unsuccessful. This conclusion came after an analysis led by Naval Engineering University professor Lu Junyong, whose team found with the help of AI that even though the winged smart bomb exceeded Mach 5 speeds, it didn't perform as well as it could have. This occurred, as Lu's team found, because the projectile was spinning too fast during its ascent, resulting in an "undesirable tilt."
But what's more interesting is the project itself. "Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China's other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space.... which for the record did not make it all the way to space..." Chinese officials, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the hypersonic rail gun technology's potential to revolutionize civilian travel by creating even faster railways and consumer space launches, too.
Japan and France also have railgun projects, according to a recent article from Defense One. "Yet the nation that has demonstrated the most continuing interest is China," with records of railgun work dating back as far as 2011: The Chinese team claimed that their railgun can fire a projectile 100 to 200 kilometers at Mach 6. Perhaps most importantly, it uses up to 100,000 AI-enabled sensors to identify and fix any problems before critical failure, and can slowly improve itself over time. This, they said, had enabled them to test-fire 120 rounds in a row without failure, which, if true, suggests that they solved a longstanding problem that reportedly bedeviled U.S. researchers. However, the team still has a ways to go before mounting an operational railgun on a ship; according to one Chinese article, the projectiles fired were only 25mm caliber, well below the size of even lightweight naval artillery.

As with many other Chinese defense technology programs, much remains opaque about the program...

While railguns tend to get the headlines, this lab has made advances in a wide range of electric and electromagnetic applications for the PLA Navy's warships. For example, the lab's research on electromagnetic launch technology has also been applied to the development of electromagnetic catapults for the PLAN's growing aircraft carrier fleet...

While it remains to be seen whether the Chinese navy can develop a full-scale railgun, produce it at scale, and integrate it onto its warships, it is obvious that it has made steady advances in recent years on a technology of immense military significance that the US has abandoned.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tangential for sharing the news.

Earlier this week the Washington Post reported that America's Defense department "is growing concerned that the United Launch Alliance, one of its key partners in launching national security satellites to space, will not be able to meet its needs to counter China and build its arsenal in orbit with a new rocket that ULA has been developing for years." In a letter sent Friday to the heads of Boeing's and Lockheed Martin's space divisions, Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli used unusually blunt terms to say he was growing "concerned" with the development of the Vulcan rocket, which the Pentagon intends to use to launch critical national security payloads but which has been delayed for years. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was formed nearly 20 years ago to provide the Defense Department with "assured access" to space. "I am growing concerned with ULA's ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs," he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. "Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays...."

ULA originally won 60 percent of the Pentagon's national security payloads under the current contract, known as Phase 2. SpaceX won an award for the remaining 40 percent, but it has been flying its reusable Falcon 9 rocket at a much higher rate. ULA launched only three rockets last year, as it transitions to Vulcan; SpaceX launched nearly 100, mostly to put up its Starlink internet satellite constellation. Both are now competing for the next round of Pentagon contracts, a highly competitive procurement worth billions of dollars over several years. ULA is reportedly up for sale; Blue Origin is said to be one of the suitors...

In a statement to The Post, ULA said that its "factory and launch site expansions have been completed or are on track to support our customers' needs with nearly 30 launch vehicles in flow at the rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama." Last year, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in an interview that the deal with Amazon would allow the company to increase its flight rate to 20 to 25 a year and that to meet that cadence it was hiring "several hundred" more employees. The more often Vulcan flies, he said, the more efficient the company would become. "Vulcan is much less expensive" than the Atlas V rocket that the ULA currently flies, Bruno said, adding that ULA intends to eventually reuse the engines. "As the flight rate goes up, there's economies of scale, so it gets cheaper over time. And of course, you're introducing reusability, so it's cheaper. It's just getting more and more competitive."
The article also notes that years ago ULA "decided to eventually retire its workhorse Atlas V rocket after concerns within the Pentagon and Congress that it relied on a Russian-made engine, the RD-180. In 2014, the company entered into a partnership with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to provide its BE-4 engines for use on Vulcan. However, the delivery of those engines was delayed for years — one of the reasons Vulcan's first flight didn't take place until earlier this year."

The article says Cavelli's letter cited the Pentagon's need to move quickly as adversaries build capabilities in space, noting "counterspace threats" and adding that "our adversaries would seek to deny us the advantage we get from space during a potential conflict."

"The United States continues to face an unprecedented strategic competitor in China, and our space environment continues to become more contested, congested and competitive."

America's Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed an antitrust suit against Amazon in September. This week Amazon responded in court about its usage of Signal's "disappearing messages" feature.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares GeekWire's report: At a company known for putting its most important ideas and strategies into comprehensive six-page memos, quick messages between executives aren't the place for meaningful business discussions. That's one of the points made by Amazon in its response Monday to the Federal Trade Commission's allegations about executives' use of the Signal encrypted communications app, known for its "disappearing messages" feature. "For these individuals, just like other short-form messaging, Signal was not a means to send 'structured, narrative text'; it was a way to get someone's attention or have quick exchanges on sensitive topics like public relations or human resources," the company says as part of its response, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Of course, for regulators investigating the company's business practices, these offhanded private comments between Amazon executives could be more revealing than carefully crafted memos meant for wider internal distribution. But in its filing this week, Amazon says there is no evidence that relevant messages have been lost, or that Signal was used to conceal communications that would have been responsive to the FTC's discovery requests. The company says "the equally logical explanation — made more compelling by the available evidence — is that such messages never existed."

In an April 25 motion, the FTC argued that the absence of Signal messages from Amazon discussing substantive business issues relevant to the case was a strong indication that such messages had disappeared. "Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during Plaintiffs' pre-Complaint investigation, and Amazon did not instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages until over fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs' investigation was underway," the FTC wrote in its motion. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon's actions and inactions...."

Amazon's filing quotes the company's founder, Jeff Bezos, saying in a deposition in the case that "[t]o discuss anything in text messaging or Signal messaging or anything like that of any substance would be akin to business malpractice. It's just too short of a messaging format...." The company's filing traces the initial use of Signal by executives back to the suspected hacking of Bezos' phone in 2018, which prompted the Amazon founder to seek ways to send messages more securely.

The thinktank InfluenceMap produces "data-driven analysis on how business and finance are impacting the climate crisis." Their web site says their newest report documents "How automaker lobbying threatens the global transition to electric vehicles." This report analyses the climate policy engagement strategies of fifteen of the largest global automakers in seven key regions (Australia, EU, Japan, India, South Korea, UK, US). It shows how even in countries where major climate legislation has recently passed, such as the US and Australia, the ambition of these policies has been weakened due to industry pressure. All fifteen automakers, except Tesla, have actively advocated against at least one policy promoting electric vehicles. Ten of the fifteen showed a particularly high intensity of negative engagement and scored a final grade of D or D+ by InfluenceMap's methodology. Toyota is the lowest-scoring company in this analysis, driving opposition to climate regulations promoting battery electric vehicles in multiple regions, including the US, Australia and UK. Of all automakers analyzed, only Tesla (scoring B) is found to have positive climate advocacy aligned with science-based policy.
CleanTechnica writes that Toyota "led on hybrid vehicles (and still does), so it's actually not surprising that it has been opposed to the next stage of climate-cutting auto evolution — it's clinging on to its lead rather than continuing to innovate for a new era."

More from InfluenceMap: Only three of fifteen companies — Tesla, Mercedes Benz and BMW — are forecast to produce enough electric vehicles by 2030 to meet the International Energy Agency's updated 1.5 degreesC pathway of 66% electric vehicle (battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrids) sales according to InfluenceMap's independent analysis of industry-standard data from February 2024. Current industry forecasts analyzed for this report show automaker production will reach only 53% electric vehicles in 2030. Transport is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and road transport is failing to decarbonize at anywhere near the rate of many other industries. InfluenceMap's report also finds that Japanese automakers are the least prepared for an electric vehicle transition and are engaging the hardest against it.
"InfluenceMap highlights that these anti-EV efforts in the industry are often coming from industry associations rather than coming directly from automakers, shielding them a bit from inevitable public backlash," writes CleanTechnica.

"Every automaker included in the study except Tesla remains a member of at least two of these groups," InfluenceMap reports, "with most automakers a member of at least five."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from Ars Technica: The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone.

While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics' quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called "Q-UGVs" for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it's the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it's not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past.

MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously. On LinkedIn, Onyx Industries shared a video of a similar system in action.

In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC states that weaponized payloads are just one of many use cases being evaluated. MARSOC also clarifies that comments made by Onyx Industries to The War Zone regarding the capabilities and deployment of these armed robot dogs "should not be construed as a capability or a singular interest in one of many use cases during an evaluation."

Starting this week millions will see AI-generated answers in Google's search results by default. But the announcement Tuesday at Google's annual developer conference suggests a future that's "not without its risks, both to users and to Google itself," argues the Washington Post: For years, Google has been shielded for liability for linking users to bad, harmful or illegal information by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But legal experts say that shield probably won't apply when its AI answers search questions directly. "As we all know, generative AIs hallucinate," said James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. "So when Google uses a generative AI to summarize what webpages say, and the AI gets it wrong, Google is now the source of the harmful information," rather than just the distributor of it...

Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the nonprofit free-market think tank R Street, worries that innovation could be throttled if Congress doesn't extend Section 230 to cover AI tools. "As AI is integrated into more consumer-facing products, the ambiguity about liability will haunt developers and investors," he predicted. "It is particularly problematic for small AI firms and open-source AI developers, who could be decimated as frivolous legal claims accumulate." But John Bergmayer, legal director for the digital rights nonprofit Public Knowledge, said there are real concerns that AI answers could spell doom for many of the publishers and creators that rely on search traffic to survive — and which AI, in turn, relies on for credible information. From that standpoint, he said, a liability regime that incentivizes search engines to continue sending users to third-party websites might be "a really good outcome."

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are looking to ditch Section 230 altogether. [Last] Sunday, the top Democrat and Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of a bill that would sunset the statute within 18 months, giving Congress time to craft a new liability framework in its place. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) argued that the law, which helped pave the way for social media and the modern internet, has "outlived its usefulness."

The tech industry trade group NetChoice [which includes Google, Meta, X, and Amazon] fired back on Monday that scrapping Section 230 would "decimate small tech" and "discourage free speech online."
The digital law professor points out Google has traditionally escaped legal liability by attributing its answers to specific sources — but it's not just Google that has to worry about the issue. The article notes that Microsoft's Bing search engine also supplies AI-generated answers (from Microsoft's Copilot). "And Meta recently replaced the search bar in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with its own AI chatbot."

The article also note sthat several U.S. Congressional committees are considering "a bevy" of AI bills...

Ars Technica looks at what happened after Google's answer to Amazon's cloud service "accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason..."

"[A]ccording to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15." UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service... UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian...." Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution)... The many stakeholders in the service meant service restoration wasn't just about restoring backups but also processing all the requests and payments that still needed to happen during the two weeks of downtime.

The second must-read document in this whole saga is the outage update page, which contains 12 statements as the cloud devs worked through this catastrophe. The first update is May 2 with the ominous statement, "You may be aware of a service disruption affecting UniSuper's systems...." Seven days after the outage, on May 9, we saw the first signs of life again for UniSuper. Logins started working for "online UniSuper accounts" (I think that only means the website), but the outage page noted that "account balances shown may not reflect transactions which have not yet been processed due to the outage...." May 13 is the first mention of the mobile app beginning to work again. This update noted that balances still weren't up to date and that "We are processing transactions as quickly as we can." The last update, on May 15, states, "UniSuper can confirm that all member-facing services have been fully restored, with our retirement calculators now available again."

The joint statement and the outage updates are still not a technical post-mortem of what happened, and it's unclear if we'll get one. Google PR confirmed in multiple places it signed off on the statement, but a great breakdown from software developer Daniel Compton points out that the statement is not just vague, it's also full of terminology that doesn't align with Google Cloud products. The imprecise language makes it seem like the statement was written entirely by UniSuper.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader swm for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Automotive News: Automotive News recently reported that eight automakers sent vehicle location data to police without a court order or warrant. The eight companies told senators that they provide police with data when subpoenaed, getting a rise from several officials.

BMW, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen presented their responses to lawmakers. Senators Ron Wyden from Oregon and Ed Markey from Massachusetts penned a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, urging investigative action. "Automakers have not only kept consumers in the dark regarding their actual practices, but multiple companies misled consumers for over a decade by failing to honor the industry's own voluntary privacy principles," they wrote.

Ten years ago, all of those companies agreed to the Consumer Privacy Protection Principles, a voluntary code that said automakers would only provide data with a warrant or order issued by a court. Subpoenas, on the other hand, only require approval from law enforcement. Though it wasn't part of the eight automakers' response, General Motors has a class-action suit on its hands, claiming that it shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a company that provides insurers with information to set rates.
The article notes that the lawmakers praised Honda, Ford, GM, Tesla, and Stellantis for requiring warrants, "except in the case of emergencies or with customer consent."

"We're migrating domains in batches..." announced web-hosting company Squarespace earlier this month.

"Squarespace has entered into an agreement to become the new home for Google Domains customers. When your domain transitions from Google to Squarespace, you'll become a Squarespace customer and manage your domain through an account with us."

Slashdot reader shortyadamk shares an email sent today to a Google Domains customer: "Today your domain, xyz.com, migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace Domains.

"Your WHOIS contact details and billing information (if applicable) were migrated to Squarespace. Your DNS configuration remains unchanged.

"Your migrated domain will continue to work with Google Services such as Google Search Console. To support this, your account now has a domain verification record — one corresponding to each Google account that currently has access to the domain."

America's Defense Department "is rushing to expand its capacity to wage war in space," reports the New York Times, "convinced that rapid advances by China and Russia in space-based operations pose a growing threat to U.S. troops and other military assets on the ground and U.S. satellites in orbit." [T]he Defense Department is looking to acquire a new generation of ground- and space-based tools that will allow it to defend its satellite network from attack and, if necessary, to disrupt or disable enemy spacecraft in orbit, Pentagon officials have said in a series of interviews, speeches and recent statements... [T]he move to enhance warfighting capacity in space is driven mostly by China's expanding fleet of military tools in space... [U.S. officials are] moving ahead with an effort they are calling "responsible counterspace campaigning," an intentionally ambiguous term that avoids directly confirming that the United States intends to put its own weapons in space. But it also is meant to reflect this commitment by the United States to pursue its interest in space without creating massive debris fields that would result if an explosive device or missile were used to blow up an enemy satellite. That is what happened in 2007, when China used a missile to blow up a satellite in orbit. The United States, China, India and Russia all have tested such missiles. But the United States vowed in 2022 not to do any such antisatellite tests again.

The United States has also long had ground-based systems that allow it to jam radio signals, disrupting the ability of an enemy to communicate with its satellites, and is taking steps to modernize these systems. But under its new approach, the Pentagon is moving to take on an even more ambitious task: broadly suppress enemy threats in orbit in a fashion similar to what the Navy does in the oceans and the Air Force in the skies.
The article notes a recent report drafted by a former Space Force colonel cited three ways to disable enemy satellite networks: cyberattacks, ground or space-based lasers, and high-powered microwaves. "John Shaw, a recently retired Space Force lieutenant general who helped run the Space Command, agreed that directed-energy devices based on the ground or in space would probably be a part of any future system. 'It does minimize debris; it works at the speed of light,' he said. 'Those are probably going to be the tools of choice to achieve our objective." The Pentagon is separately working to launch a new generation of military satellites that can maneuver, be refueled while in space or have robotic arms that could reach out and grab — and potentially disrupt — an enemy satellite. Another early focus is on protecting missile defense satellites. The Defense Department recently started to require that a new generation of these space-based monitoring systems have built-in tools to evade or respond to possible attack. "Resiliency feature to protect against directed energy attack mechanisms" is how one recent missile defense contract described it. Last month the Pentagon also awarded contracts to two companies — Rocket Lab and True Anomaly — to launch two spacecraft by late next year, one acting as a mock enemy and the other equipped with cameras, to pull up close and observe the threat. The intercept satellite will not have any weapons, but it has a cargo hold that could carry them.
The article notes that Space Force's chief of space operations has told Senate appropriators that about $2.4 billion of the $29.4 billion in Space Force's proposed 2025 budget was set aside for "space domain awareness." And it adds that the Pentagon "is working to coordinate its so-called counterspace efforts with major allies, including Britain, Canada and Australia, through a multinational operation called Operation Olympic Defender. France has been particularly aggressive, announcing its intent to build and launch by 2030 a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser." [W]hat is clear is that a certain threshold has now been passed: Space has effectively become part of the military fighting domain, current and former Pentagon officials said. "By no means do we want to see war extend into space," Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations, said at a Mitchell Institute event this year. "But if it does, we have to be prepared to fight and win."

Bloomberg reports that self-driving car company Cruise "reached an $8 million to $12 million settlement with a pedestrian who was dragged by one of its self-driving vehicles in San Francisco, according to a person familiar with the situation." The settlement was struck earlier this year and the woman is out of the hospital, said the person, who declined to be identified discussing a private matter. In the October incident, the pedestrian crossing the road was struck by another vehicle before landing in front of one of GM's Cruise vehicles. The robotaxi braked hard but ran over the person. It then pulled over for safety, driving 20 feet at a speed of up to seven miles per hour with the pedestrian still under the car.
The incident "contributed to the company being blocked from operating in San Francisco and halting its operations around the country for months," reports the Washington Post: The company initially told reporters that the car had stopped just after rolling over the pedestrian, but the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates permits for self-driving cars, later said Cruise had covered up the truth that its car actually kept going and dragged the woman. The crash and the questions about what Cruise knew and disclosed to investigators led to a firestorm of scrutiny on the company. Cruise pulled its vehicles off roads countrywide, laid off a quarter of its staff and in November its CEO Kyle Vogt stepped down. The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating the company, adding to a probe from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In Cruise's absence, Google's Waymo self-driving cars have become the only robotaxis operating in San Francisco.

in June, the company's president and chief technology officer Mohamed Elshenawy is slated to speak at a conference on artificial-intelligence quality in San Francisco.
Dow Jones news services published this quote from a Cruise spokesperson. "The hearts of all Cruise employees continue to be with the pedestrian, and we hope for her continued recovery."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: There's a big debate in the tech world over whether artificial intelligence models should be "open source." Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, sued the startup and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on claims that the company had diverged from its mission of openness. The Biden administration is investigating the risks and benefits of open source models. Proponents of open source A.I. models say they're more equitable and safer for society, while detractors say they are more likely to be abused for malicious intent. One big hiccup in the debate? There's no agreed-upon definition of what open source A.I. actually means. And some are accusing A.I. companies of "openwashing" -- using the "open source" term disingenuously to make themselves look good. (Accusations of openwashing have previously been aimed at coding projects that used the open source label too loosely.)

In a blog post on Open Future, a European think tank supporting open sourcing, Alek Tarkowski wrote, "As the rules get written, one challenge is building sufficient guardrails against corporations' attempts at 'openwashing.'" Last month the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit that supports open-source software projects, cautioned that "this 'openwashing' trend threatens to undermine the very premise of openness -- the free sharing of knowledge to enable inspection, replication and collective advancement." Organizations that apply the label to their models may be taking very different approaches to openness. [...]

The main reason is that while open source software allows anyone to replicate or modify it, building an A.I. model requires much more than code. Only a handful of companies can fund the computing power and data curation required. That's why some experts say labeling any A.I. as "open source" is at best misleading and at worst a marketing tool. "Even maximally open A.I. systems do not allow open access to the resources necessary to 'democratize' access to A.I., or enable full scrutiny," said David Gray Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech who has studied use of the "open source" label by A.I. companies.

Karl Bode writes via Techdirt: Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA -- (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an "open access" fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared network. Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: "Sumo Fiber, a veteran member of the UTOPIA Open Access Marketplace, is now offering 10 Gbps symmetrical for $119, plus a $30 UTOPIA Fiber infrastructure fee, bringing the total cost to $149 per month."

It's a collaborative hybrid that blurs the line between private companies and government, and it works. And the prices being offered here are significantly less than locals often pay in highly developed tech-centric urban hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Seattle. Yet giant local ISPs like Comcast and Qwest spent decades trying to either sue this network into oblivion, or using their proxy policy orgs (like the "Utah Taxpayer Association") to falsely claim this effort would end in chaos and inevitable taxpayer tears. Yet miraculously UTOPIA is profitable, and for the last 15 years, every UTOPIA project has been paid for completely through subscriber revenues. [...] For years, real world experience and several different studies and reports (including our Copia study on this concept) have made it clear that open access networks and policies result in faster, better, more affordable broadband access. UTOPIA is proving it at scale, but numerous other municipalities have been following suit with the help of COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding.