theodp writes: Back in May 2021, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org touted the signing of a licensing agreement with WhiteHat Jr., allowing the edtech company with a controversial past (Whitehat Jr. was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, an edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm) to integrate Code.org's free-to-educators-and-organizations content and tools into their online tutoring service. Code.org did not reveal what it was charging Byju's to use its "free curriculum and open source technology" for commercial purposes, but Code.org's 2021 IRS 990 filing reported $1M in royalties from an unspecified source after earlier years reported $0. Coincidentally, Whitehat Jr. is represented by Aaron Kornblum, who once worked at Microsoft for now-President Brad Smith, who left Code.org's Board just before the lawsuit was filed.

Fast forward to 2023 and the bloom is off the rose, as Court records show that Code.org earlier this month sued Whitehat Education Technology, LLC (Exhibits A and B) in what is called "a civil action for breach of contract arising from Whitehat's failure to pay Code.org the agreed-upon charges for its use of Code.org's platform and licensed content and its ongoing, unauthorized use of that platform and content." According to the filing, "Whitehat agreed [in April 2022] to pay to Code.org licensing fees totaling $4,000,000 pursuant to a four-year schedule" and "made its first four scheduled payments, totaling $1,000,000," but "about a year after the Agreement was signed, Whitehat informed Code.org that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled license payments." While the original agreement was amended to backload Whitehat's license fee payment obligations, "Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended" and "has continued to access Code.org's platform and content."

That Byju's Whitehat Jr. stiffed Code.org is hardly shocking. In June 2023, Reuters reported that Byju's auditor Deloitte cut ties with the troubled Indian Edtech startup that was once an investor darling and valued at $22 billion, adding that a Byju's Board member representing the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had resigned with two other Board members. The BBC reported in July that Byju's was guilty of overexpanding during the pandemic (not unlike Zuck's Facebook). Ironically, the lawsuit Exhibits include screenshots showing Mark Zuckerberg teaching Code.org lessons. Zuckerberg and Facebook were once among the biggest backers of Code.org, although it's unclear whether that relationship soured after court documents were released that revealed Code.org's co-founders talking smack about Zuck and Facebook's business practices to lawyers for Six4Three, which was suing Facebook.

Code.org's curriculum is also used by the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) initiative, but it is unclear what royalties -- if any -- Amazon pays to Code.org for the use of Code.org curriculum. While the AFE site boldly says, "we provide free computer science curriculum," the AFE fine print further explains that "our partners at Code.org and ProjectSTEM offer a wide array of introductory and advance curriculum options and teacher training." It's unclear what kind of organization Amazon's AFE ("Computer Science Learning Childhood to Career") exactly is -- an IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search failed to find any hits for "Amazon Future Engineer" -- making it hard to guess whether Code.org might consider AFE's use of Code.org software 'commercial use.' Would providing a California school district with free K-12 CS curriculum that Amazon boasts of cultivating into its "vocal champion" count as "commercial use"? How about providing free K-12 CS curriculum to children who live where Amazon is seeking incentives? Or if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies Amazon "funds computer science coursework" for schools as he attempts to counter a Congressional antitrust inquiry? These seem to be some of the kinds of distinctions Richard Stallman anticipated more than a decade ago as he argued against a restriction against commercial use of otherwise free software.

The New York Times reports: Last month, I received an alarming email from someone I did not know: Rui Zhu, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University Bloomington. Mr. Zhu had my email address, he explained, because GPT-3.5 Turbo, one of the latest and most robust large language models (L.L.M.) from OpenAI, had delivered it to him. My contact information was included in a list of business and personal email addresses for more than 30 New York Times employees that a research team, including Mr. Zhu, had managed to extract from GPT-3.5 Turbo in the fall of this year. With some work, the team had been able to "bypass the model's restrictions on responding to privacy-related queries," Mr. Zhu wrote.

My email address is not a secret. But the success of the researchers' experiment should ring alarm bells because it reveals the potential for ChatGPT, and generative A.I. tools like it, to reveal much more sensitive personal information with just a bit of tweaking. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it does not simply search the web to find the answer. Instead, it draws on what it has "learned" from reams of information — training data that was used to feed and develop the model — to generate one. L.L.M.s train on vast amounts of text, which may include personal information pulled from the Internet and other sources. That training data informs how the A.I. tool works, but it is not supposed to be recalled verbatim... In the example output they provided for Times employees, many of the personal email addresses were either off by a few characters or entirely wrong. But 80 percent of the work addresses the model returned were correct.
The researchers used the API for accessing ChatGPT, the article notes, where "requests that would typically be denied in the ChatGPT interface were accepted..."

"The vulnerability is particularly concerning because no one — apart from a limited number of OpenAI employees — really knows what lurks in ChatGPT's training-data memory."

And there was a broader related warning in another article published the same day. Microsoft may be building an AI silo in a walled garden, argues a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's school of information, calling the development "detrimental for technology development, as well as costly and potentially dangerous for society and the economy." [In January] Microsoft sealed its OpenAI relationship with another major investment — this time around $10 billion, much of which was, once again, in the form of cloud credits instead of conventional finance. In return, OpenAI agreed to run and power its AI exclusively through Microsoft's Azure cloud and granted Microsoft certain rights to its intellectual property...

Recent reports that U.K. competition authorities and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission are scrutinizing Microsoft's investment in OpenAI are encouraging. But Microsoft's failure to report these investments for what they are — a de facto acquisition — demonstrates that the company is keenly aware of the stakes and has taken advantage of OpenAI's somewhat peculiar legal status as a non-profit entity to work around the rules...

The U.S. government needs to quickly step in and reverse the negative momentum that is pushing AI into walled gardens. The longer it waits, the harder it will be, both politically and technically, to re-introduce robust competition and the open ecosystem that society needs to maximize the benefits and manage the risks of AI technology.

A Canadian cybersecurity firm has warned that as soon as 2025, quantum computers could make current encryption methods useless.

But now Slashdot reader christoban shares a "reality check" — an IEEE Spectrum takedown with the tagline "Hype is everywhere, skeptics say, and practical applications are still far away." The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That's the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry... [T]here's growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology. Meta's head of AI research Yann LeCun recently made headlines after pouring cold water on the prospect of quantum computers making a meaningful contribution in the near future.

Speaking at a media event celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Meta's Fundamental AI Research team he said the technology is "a fascinating scientific topic," but that he was less convinced of "the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful." While LeCun is not an expert in quantum computing, leading figures in the field are also sounding a note of caution. Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services, says there is a "tremendous amount of hype" in the industry at the minute and "it can be difficult to filter the optimistic from the completely unrealistic."

A fundamental challenge for today's quantum computers is that they are very prone to errors. Some have suggested that these so-called "noisy intermediate-scale quantum" (NISQ) processors could still be put to useful work. But Painter says there's growing recognition that this is unlikely and quantum error-correction schemes will be key to achieving practical quantum computers. The leading proposal involves spreading information over many physical qubits to create "logical qubits" that are more robust, but this could require as many as 1,000 physical qubits for each logical one. Some have suggested that quantum error correction could even be fundamentally impossible, though that is not a mainstream view. Either way, realizing these schemes at the scale and speeds required remains a distant goal, Painter says... "I would estimate at least a decade out," he says.
A Microsoft technical fellow believes there's fewer applications where quantum computers can really provide a meaningful advantage, since operating a qubit its magnitudes slower than simply flipping a transistor, which also makes the throughput rate for data thousands or even millions of times slowers.

"We found out over the last 10 years that many things that people have proposed don't work," he says. "And then we found some very simple reasons for that."

"10 years later, the demise of Google Reader still stings," writes PC Magazine. But "Time marches on and corporate priorities shift. Here are the products and services that took a final bow in 2023..."

Some of the highlights? 'Clubhouse' Clones
In the early days of the pandemic, when Zoom happy hours and sourdough starters proliferated, Clubhouse burst onto the scene with an app that facilitated audio-only chats between groups large and small. Tech giants quickly churned out their own Clubhouse clones, but these party-line throwbacks were not long for this world. Facebook was the first to go, ditching its Live Audio Rooms in December 2022, but 2023 also saw the end of Reddit Talk, Spotify Live, and Amazon's live radio DJ Amp app. [X Spaces is still around]

Amazon Smile
Launched in 2013, AmazonSmile saw Amazon donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases made through smile.amazon.com to charity, with consumers able to choose from over a million charitable organizations to support. On Feb. 20, however, the program shut down because it "has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped," Amazon said at the time.

NFTs on Facebook and Instagram
Remember non-fungible tokens (NFTs)? Somehow, crypto bros convinced people to spend big bucks on what are essentially JPEGs. (Don't try to convince me otherwise.) Meta got in on the action in 2022, allowing Instagram users to create NFTs and Facebook users to share them. It didn't exactly set either social network on fire and Meta said in March it would be "winding down digital collectibles."

Cortana on Windows
In June, AI claimed its latest victim by coming after Microsoft's Cortana. The voice assistant never really made a splash compared to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, and with the launch of Bing Chat (now Copilot), Microsoft removed Cortana as a built-in app on Windows.
Also on the list are Blizzard's Overwatch League, third-party Reddit clients, and Venmo as a payment option on Amazon (effective this January 10).

Looking further into the future, Gmail's Basic HTML View disappears in 2024, while Wordpad will eventually be removed in an unspecified future release of Windows.

"I'm optimistic about the world's climate progress," Bill Gates wrote this week — but he also explained why.

"In 2024 and beyond, I predict we will see lots of new innovations coming into the marketplace — even in very complicated areas like nuclear. The climate crisis can feel overwhelming, but I find it easier to stay optimistic when you focus on all the progress we're making. If the world continues to prioritize funding innovation, I'm hopeful we can make good progress on our climate goals."

And elsewhere Gates writes that "AI is about to supercharge the innovation pipeline." My work has always been rooted in a core idea: Innovation is the key to progress. It's why I started Microsoft, and it's why Melinda and I started the Gates Foundation more than two decades ago. Innovation is the reason our lives have improved so much over the last century. From electricity and cars to medicine and planes, innovation has made the world better. Today, we are far more productive because of the IT revolution. The most successful economies are driven by innovative industries that evolve to meet the needs of a changing world.

My favorite innovation story, though, starts with one of my favorite statistics: Since 2000, the world has cut in half the number of children who die before the age of five. How did we do it? One key reason was innovation. Scientists came up with new ways to make vaccines that were faster and cheaper but just as safe. They developed new delivery mechanisms that worked in the world's most remote places, which made it possible to reach more kids. And they created new vaccines that protect children from deadly diseases like rotavirus.

In a world with limited resources, you have to find ways to maximize impact. Innovation is the key to getting the most out of every dollar spent. And artificial intelligence is about to accelerate the rate of new discoveries at a pace we've never seen before.

One of the biggest impacts so far is on creating new medicines. Drug discovery requires combing through massive amounts of data, and AI tools can speed up that process significantly. Some companies are already working on cancer drugs developed this way. But a key priority of the Gates Foundation in AI is ensuring these tools also address health issues that disproportionately affect the world's poorest, like AIDS, TB, and malaria. We're taking a hard look at the wide array of AI innovation in the pipeline right now and working with our partners to use these technologies to improve lives in low- and middle-income countries...

I feel like a kid on Christmas morning when I think about how AI can be used to get game-changing technologies out to the people who need them faster than ever before. This is something I am going to spend a lot of time thinking about next year.
Gates notes that researchers are already exploring questions like "Can AI combat antibiotic resistance?"

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), OpenAI is in early talks to raise a fresh round of funding at a valuation at or above $100 billion. Reuters reports: The terms, valuation and timing of the funding round have not yet been finalized and could still change, the report added. OpenAI has also held discussions to raise funding for a new chip venture with Abu Dhabi-based G42, according to the report. If the valuation holds, the report notes that it would make OpenAI the second-most valuable U.S. startup behind Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Way back in September 2012, Microsoft President Brad Smith discussed the idea of "producing a crisis" to advance Microsoft's "two-pronged" National Talent Strategy to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas. Not long thereafter, the tech-backed nonprofit Code.org (which promotes and provides K-12 CS education and is led by Smith's next-door neighbor) and Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC (which lobbied for H-1B reform) were born, with Smith on board both. Over the past 10+ years, Smith has played a key role in establishing Code.org's influence in the new K-12 CS education "grassroots" movement, including getting buy-in from three Presidential administrations -- Obama, Trump, and Biden -- as well as the U.S. Dept. of Education and the nation's Governors.

But after recent updates, Code.org's Leadership page now indicates that Smith has quietly left Code.org's Board of Directors and thanks him for his past help and advice. Since November (when archive.org indicates Smith's photo was yanked from Code.org's Leadership page), Smith has been in the news in conjunction with Microsoft's relationship with another Microsoft-bankrolled nonprofit, OpenAI, which has come under scrutiny by the Feds and in the UK. Smith, who noted he and Microsoft helped OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman craft messaging ahead of a White House meeting, announced in a Dec. 8th tweet that Microsoft will be getting a non-voting OpenAI Board seat in connection with Altman's return to power (who that non-voting Microsoft OpenAI board member will be has not been announced).

OpenAI, Microsoft, and Code.org teamed up in December to provide K-12 CS+AI tutorials for this December's AI-themed Hour of Code (the trio has also partnered with Amazon and Google on the Code.org-led TeachAI initiative). And while Smith has left Code.org's Board, Microsoft's influence there will live on as Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott -- credited for forging Microsoft's OpenAI partnership -- remains a Code.org Board member together with execs from other Code.org Platinum Supporters ($3+ million in past 2 years) Google and Amazon.

According to Canalys Research, Microsoft's plan to end support for Windows 10 could result in about 240 million computers being sent to landfills. "The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars," adds Reuters. From the report: While many PCs could remain functional for years post the end of OS support, Canalys warned demand for devices without security updates could be low. Microsoft announced a plan to provide security updates for Windows 10 devices until October 2028 for an undisclosed annual price. If the pricing structure for extended Windows 10 support mirrors past trends, migrating to newer PCs could be more cost-effective, increasing the number of older PCs heading to scrap, Canalys said.

For years, Amazon Web Services' annual Las Vegas trade show functioned as an infomercial for its cloud computing platform, rarely mentioning the competition. The pitch was so successful that AWS pulls in $90 billion per year. Then generative AI emerged, with Microsoft and Google baking it into products their cloud units sell. Suddenly, AWS faced startups building businesses on rivals' AI-powered platforms. So at AWS's 2023 event, AI was ubiquitous -- in presentations, launches, partnerships. AWS announced more models powering AI services and its largest-ever tech investment, $4 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic. AWS aims to show that, despite stiffening competition, it remains the leader in cloud computing. From a report: If Amazon had been caught off guard by the dawn of the generative AI age, here was evidence of a massive, companywide effort to catch up. "This is what last place looks like," analysts with Sanford C. Bernstein quipped in a research note. In the short term, AWS is going to be fine. Slowing sales growth aside, Amazon's servers remain the default starting point for companies looking to modernize old infrastructure or do much of anything online. And though generative AI makes for an impressive demo, the technology is error-prone and expensive. For most companies, it's an experiment, not a necessity.

Still, "to remain relevant," AWS needs to have a handle on generative AI, according to JB McGinnis, a principal at Deloitte who helps companies use AWS. "If they're not competing, they might lose the cloud game, too." Late in the week of the conference, Amazon invited thousands of attendees with ties to startups to the Las Vegas Raiders' stadium, which it had rented out for the occasion, plying them with drinks and AWS swag and giant versions of bar games. Before a panel discussion on artificial intelligence, Swami Sivasubramanian, the Amazon executive in charge of the company's AI services, declared 2023 the year of generative AI. Nearby, an AWS product leader walked up to the founder of a tiny startup, introduced himself, and asked what Amazon could do better. This was a humbled AWS, one that has to fight for business.

Microsoft has announced that it is deprecating Windows Mixed Reality, with plans to remove the feature in an upcoming release of the OS. From a report: Windows Mixed Reality was Microsoft's attempt at building out a VR ecosystem for Windows PCs, but unfortunately this effort has been mostly inactive for a number of years. While there have been several VR headsets built for Windows Mixed Reality, most of them launched between 2017 and 2021. It's been a long while since OEMs released new VR headsets for Windows Mixed Reality, likely because SteamVR is a much more successful platform with a much wider selection of games. Unfortunately, Microsoft says the deprecation of Windows Mixed Reality also includes support for using a Windows Mixed Reality headset with SteamVR, along with the dedicated Mixed Reality Portal app which acted as a launch environment for VR apps and games built for Windows Mixed Reality.

Tom Warren and Ash Parrish report via The Verge: Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is stepping down officially December 29th. Microsoft has not appointed a direct replacement and instead has rolled the suite of Activision Blizzard executives -- including Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, Activision publishing president Rob Kostich, and Activision Blizzard vice chair Thomas Tippl -- under Microsoft's game content and studios president Matt Booty. Kotick's departure comes just two months after some big Xbox leadership changes that saw Sarah Bond promoted to Xbox president, leading all Xbox platform and hardware work, and Matt Booty promoted to president of game content and studios, including overseeing Bethesda and ZeniMax studios. Now Booty is getting even more responsibilities with Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and Xbox Game Studios all under his watch.

Microsoft is largely keeping the leadership team of Activision Blizzard in place, with some executive-level exceptions. Activision Blizzard chief communications officer Lulu Meservey will leave the company at the end of January. Humam Sakhnini (vice chairman, Blizzard and King) will also depart at the end of December. A number of Activision Blizzard executives will depart in March, too. Brian Bulatao (chief administrative officer), Julie Hodges (chief people officer), Armin Zerza (chief financial officer), and Grant Dixton (chief legal officer) are all reporting to their Microsoft Gaming equivalents. While Thomas Tippl (vice chairman, Activision Blizzard) is reporting to Matt Booty for now, he will depart Microsoft in March alongside other Activision Blizzard executives. "Thomas, Brian, Julie, Grant and Armin will continue to help us with the transition through March 2024," says Xbox chief Phil Spencer, in an internal memo obtained by The Verge.

Additionally, a memo from Matt Booty announced some of the changes taking place at ZeniMax and Bethesda, including that Jill Braff has been named the new head of those studios. Braff worked on the integration team when ZeniMax and Bethesda joined Xbox back in 2021 and will lead the studios' development teams. [Both memos can be read below The Verge's reporting.]

Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with GenAI music app Suno. From a report: Users can enter prompts into Copilot like "Create a pop song about adventures with your family" and have Suno, via a plug-in, bring their musical ideas to life. From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs -- including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices.

Copilot users can access the Suno integration by launching Microsoft Edge, visiting Copilot.Microsoft.com, logging in with their Microsoft account and enabling the Suno plug-in or clicking on the Suno logo that says "Make music with Suno." [...] AI algorithms "learn" from existing music to produce similar effects, a fact with which not all artists -- or GenAI users -- are comfortable, especially in cases where artists don't consent to having an AI algorithm train on their music and didn't receive compensation for it.

The European Union on Wednesday added three adult content companies - Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos - to its list of firms subject to stringent regulations under new online content rules. From a report: The new rules, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), require companies to conduct risk management, undergo external and independent auditing, and share data with authorities and researchers. In April, the EU designated five Alphabet subsidiaries, two Meta Platforms units, two Microsoft businesses, X and Alibaba's AliExpress among 19 companies under the rules. Such designated companies will have to do more to tackle disinformation, give more protection and choice to users and ensure stronger protection for children or risk fines of as much as 6% of their global turnover. "Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos meet the user thresholds to fall under stricter #DSA obligations," the bloc's industry chief Thierry Breton said. "Creating a safer online environment for our children is an enforcement priority under the DSA."

An anonymous reader writes: Digital mapping specialist TomTom said on Tuesday it has partnered with tech giant Microsoft to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational assistant for vehicles. The assistant will allow users to "converse naturally with their vehicles" and enable voice interaction with infotainment, location search, and vehicle command systems, the company said.

TomTom, which competes with Google Maps and the world's biggest mapping platform HERE, used various Microsoft services like its Azure OpenAI Service to create the voice assistant. The Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service allows enterprises to leverage ChatGPT maker OpenAI's large language models (LLM). The voice assistant can be integrated into other automotive infotainment systems and is also built into TomTom's Digital Cockpit, an open, modular in-vehicle infotainment platform, the Dutch map maker said. The company began working with Microsoft in 2016, when it first started powering Azure Maps location services.

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Microsoft has released a new software tool to remove printer software from HP that was installed without user permission or system need. A few weeks ago, users noticed that Windows Update installed HP printer software even if they did not have HP printers or printers at all. Affecting Windows 10 and 11, consumers reported that this update sometimes caused problems as it could rename their non-HP printers as HP printers causing some printing features to be inaccessible. Microsoft has not disclosed the root cause of the issue. The fix released by Microsoft requires users to download and run a dedicated troubleshooting tool available from Microsoft's support site. "There are four different versions of the troubleshooter, depending on whether you have the 32- or 64-bit version of an Arm or x86 version of Windows," notes Ars Technica. "Microsoft will also release an additional recommended troubleshooting tool 'in the coming weeks' that will fix the problem in Windows 11 upon a user's request without requiring the download of a separate tool."

Speaking of the 1.3 million stolen files of Sony division Insomniac Games that hackers have leaked, the data dump includes game roadmaps, budgets, and detailed information about Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game, which a document says is slated for 2026. Bloomberg reports: According to the files, Sony plans to release several Marvel-inspired titles in the next decade, including Spider-Man 3, based on Venom and X-Men games. The files also reference a new Ratchet & Clank game apparently slated for 2029. Insomniac and Marvel's licensing commitment is as high as $621 million to develop and market the X-Men games by 2035, according to one document, which was one of many circulating on the internet. The documents also give us a peak into how Sony internally felt about Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard. Eurogamer adds: Sony has privately described Microsoft's $68.7bn takeover of Activision Blizzard as a potential "leapfrog" moment for its long-term console rival to take the lead. Threats identified by Sony include Microsoft using Call of Duty to "disrupt and threaten console gaming and game subscription markets", with a potential "massive threat to PlayStation Plus." [...] "Activision provides incredible strategic value across live service games, scale in mobile and PC storefront (Battle.net)," Sony wrote, describing the various advantages Microsoft has now added to its portfolio with the deal freshly completed.

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.

Using a "recently refurbished" telescope array, SETI scientists performed 541 hours of additional observations — and found 35 new "Fast Radio Bursts" (or FRBs). SciTechDaily reports: All 35 FRBs were found in the lower part of the frequency spectrum, each with its unique energy signature. "This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB properties and the discovery of some new ones," said the SETI Institute's Dr. Sofia Sheikh, NSF MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Fellow and lead author. "We're narrowing down the source of FRBs, for example, to extreme objects such as magnetars, but no existing model can explain all of the properties that have been observed so far. It has been wonderful to be part of the first FRB study done with the Allen Telescope Array — this work proves that new telescopes with unique capabilities, like the Allen Telescope Array, can provide a new angle on outstanding mysteries in FRB science."

The detailed findings, recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), showcase the intriguing behaviors of FRBs. These mysterious signals exhibit downward frequency drifting, a connection between their bandwidth and center frequency, and changes in burst duration over time. The team also observed something that had never been reported before: there was a noticeable drop in the center frequency of bursts over the two months of observation, revealing an unexpected cosmic slide-whistle...

No clear pattern was found, highlighting the unpredictability of these celestial phenomena.
SETI says its Allen Telescope Array (or ATA) was custom-built for SETI searches, "thanks to the interest and benevolence of many donors, including technologists Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and Nathan Myhrvold (former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft)." The Allen Telescope Array offers SETI scientists access to an instrument seven days a week, and permits the search of several different targets (usually nearby star systems) simultaneously. This can result in a speed-up of SETI searches by a factor of at least 100.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Earlier this month, Amazon came under fire as the Los Angeles Times reported on a leaked confidential document that "reveals an extensive public relations strategy by Amazon to donate to community groups, school districts, institutions and charities" to advance the company's business objectives. "We will not fund organizations that have positioned themselves antagonistically toward our interests," explained Amazon officials of the decision to cut off donations to the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture after it ran an exhibit ("Burn Them All Down") that the artist called a commentary on how public officials were not listening to community concerns about the growing number of Amazon warehouses in Southern California's Inland Empire neighborhoods...

Interestingly on the same day the Los Angeles Times was sounding the alarm on Amazon philanthropy, the White House and National Science Foundation (NSF) held a White House-hosted event on K-12 AI education. There it was announced that the Amazon-backed nonprofit Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) will develop new K-12 computer science standards that incorporate AI into foundational computer science education with support from the NSF, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. CSTA separately announced it had received a $1.5 million donation from Amazon to "support efforts to update the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards to reflect the rapid advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)," adding that the CSTA standards — which CSTA credited Microsoft Philanthropies for helping to advance — "serve as a model for CS teaching and learning across grades K-12" in 42 states.

The announcements, the White House noted, came during Computer Science Education Week, the signature event of which is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-backed Code.org's Hour of Code (which was AI-themed this year), for which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — not teachers — provided the event's signature tutorials used by the nation's K-12 students. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also advisors to Code.org's TeachAI initiative, which was launched in May "to provide thought leadership to guide governments and educational leaders in aligning education with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world and connecting the discussion of teaching with AI to teaching about AI and computer science."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from : Microsoft Research, the blue sky division of the software giant, [...] announced the release of its Phi-2 small language model (SML), a text-to-text AI program that is "small enough to run on a laptop or mobile device," according to a post on X. At the same time, Phi-2 with its 2.7 billion parameters (connections between artificial neurons) boasts performance that is comparable to other, much larger models including Meta's Llama 2-7B with its 7 billion parameters and even Mistral-7B, another 7 billion parameter model.

Microsoft researchers also noted in their blog post on the Phi-2 release that it outperforms Google's brand new Gemini Nano 2 model despite it having half a billion more parameters, and delivers less "toxicity" and bias in its responses than Llama 2. Microsoft also couldn't resist taking a little dig at Google's now much-criticized, staged demo video for Gemini in which it showed off how its forthcoming largest and most powerful new AI model, Gemini Ultra, was able to solve fairly complex physics problems and even correct students' mistakes on them. As it turned out, even though it is likely a fraction of the size of Gemini Ultra, Phi-2 also was able to correctly answer the question and correct the student using the same prompts.

However, despite these encouraging findings, there is a big limitation with Phi-2, at least for the time being: it is licensed only for "research purposes only," not commercial usage, under a custom Microsoft Research License, which further states Phi-2 may only be used for "non-commercial, non-revenue generating, research purposes." So, businesses looking to build products atop it are out of luck.