Microsoft announced an extended support program for Windows 10 last year that would allow users to pay for continued security updates beyond the October 2025 end of support date. Today, the company has unveiled the pricing structure for that program, which starts at $61 per device, and doubles every year for three years. Windows Central: Security updates on Windows are important, as they keep you protected from any vulnerabilities that are discovered in the OS. Microsoft releases a security update for Windows 10 once a month, but that will stop when October 2025 rolls around. Users still on Windows 10 after that date will officially be out of support, unless you pay.

The extended support program for Windows 10 will let users pay for three years of additional security updates. This is handy for businesses and enterprise customers who aren't yet ready to upgrade their fleet of employee laptops and computers to Windows 11. For the first time, Microsoft is also allowing individual users at home to join the extended support program, which will let anyone running Windows 10 pay for extended updates beyond October 2025 for three years. The price is $61 per device, but that price doubles every year for three years. That means the second year will cost you $122 per device, and the third year will cost $244 per device.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November.

A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back. Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.

Microsoft and Quantinuum today announced a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Using Quantinuum's ion-trap hardware and Microsoft's new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. From a report: This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying the logical qubits. This, the two companies say, has now moved the state-of-the-art of quantum computing out of what has typically been dubbed the era of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers.

"Noisy" because even the smallest changes in the environment can lead a quantum system to essentially become random (or "decohere"), and "intermediate scale" because the current generation of quantum computers is still limited to just over a thousand qubits at best. A qubit is the fundamental unit of computing in quantum systems, analogous to a bit in a classic computer, but each qubit can be in multiple states at the same time and doesn't fall into a specific position until measured, which underlies the potential of quantum to deliver a huge leap in computing power.

It doesn't matter how many qubits you have, though, if you barely have time to run a basic algorithm before the system becomes too noisy to get a useful result -- or any result at all. Combining several different techniques, the team was able to run thousands of experiments with virtually no errors. That involved quite a bit of preparation and pre-selecting systems that already looked to be in good shape for a successful run, but still, that's a massive improvement from where the industry was just a short while ago. Further reading: Microsoft blog.

Intel on Tuesday disclosed $7 billion in operating losses for its foundry business in 2023, "a steeper loss than the $5.2 billion in operating losses the year before," reports Reuters. "The unit had revenue of $18.9 billion for 2023, down 31% from $27.49 billion the year before." From the report: Intel shares were down 4.3% after the documents were filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). During a presentation for investors, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said that 2024 would be the year of worst operating losses for the company's chipmaking business and that it expects to break even on an operating basis by about 2027. Gelsinger said the foundry business was weighed down by bad decisions, including one years ago against using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines from Dutch firm ASML. While those machines can cost more than $150 million, they are more cost-effective than earlier chip making tools.

Partially as a result of the missteps, Intel has outsourced about 30% of the total number of wafers to external contract manufacturers such as TSMC, Gelsinger said. It aims to bring that number down to roughly 20%. Intel has now switched over to using EUV tools, which will cover more and more production needs as older machines are phased out. "In the post EUV era, we see that we're very competitive now on price, performance (and) back to leadership," Gelsinger said. "And in the pre-EUV era we carried a lot of costs and (were) uncompetitive." Editor's note: This story has been corrected to change the 2022 revenue figure for Intel Foundry to $27.49 billion, as reflected in the source article. We apologize for the math error.

President Joe Biden has become the first sitting U.S. president to post on a decentralized networking protocol. As reported by The Verge, President Biden's Threads account "has begun using Meta's ActivityPub integration," which allows for content, data, and followers to be ported between networks -- the basis that makes up the "fediverse." From the report: The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan. Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse -- and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts -- as those features weren't part of Threads' integration when it opened up beta testing last month. But his posts are available, and he'll see likes coming in from there. Or whoever is running the Presidential Threads account will, anyway.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump, the agency's chair said. The FCC told advocates on Tuesday of the plan to vote on the final rule at its April 25 meeting. The commission voted 3-2 in October on the proposal to reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 and re-establish the commission's authority over broadband internet.

Net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed the planned commission vote in an interview with Reuters. "The pandemic made clear that broadband is an essential service, that every one of us -- no matter who we are or where we live -- needs it to have a fair shot at success in the digital age," she said. "An essential service requires oversight and in this case we are just putting back in place the rules that have already been court-approved that ensures that broadband access is fast, open and fair."

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI news app from Instagram's co-founders that failed to make it big on its own. The Verge reports: The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact's tech rather than its team. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact's co-founders, will be "special advisors" for Yahoo but won't be joining the company. Artifact's remaining five employees have either gotten other jobs or are planning to take some time off. The acquisition comes a bit more than a year after Artifact's launch and about three months after Systrom and Krieger announced its death. [...]

Artifact, the app, will go away once the acquisition is complete. But Artifact's underlying tech for categorizing, curating, and personalizing content will soon start to show up on Yahoo News -- and eventually on other Yahoo platforms, too. "You'll see that stuff flowing into our products in the coming months," says Downs Mulder. It sounds like there's also a good chance that Yahoo's apps might get a bit of Artifact's speed and polish over time, too. Both Systrom and Downs Mulder say the integration will take time, that you can't just drop an Artifact algorithm into Yahoo News and call it a day. But they see a possibility to get everybody into the future a little faster. Yahoo can develop a personalized content ecosystem, the "TikTok for text" that was so alluring to Artifact users. And Artifact can power a news service of the future.

The White House plans to renew a push in April to convince Congress to extend an internet subsidy program used by 23 million American households just weeks before it runs out of money, officials said. From a report: In October, the White House asked for $6 billion to extend the program through December 2024, but Congress has not funded it, potentially putting millions of households at risk of losing their internet service. Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel told lawmakers in a letter that April is the last month participants will get the full subsidy, with partial subsidies in May.

Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher to use toward internet service. "We have come too far to allow this successful effort to promote internet access for all to end," Rosenworcel said on Tuesday. "Despite the breadth of this support and the urgent need to continue this program to ensure millions of households nationwide do not lose essential internet access, no additional funding has yet been appropriated."

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with "Just Walk Out" technology. The company's senior vice president of grocery stores says they're moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with. From a report: Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Instead, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen are embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out, whose impressive technology was truly ahead of its time. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren't Amazon members.

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.

"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.

AWS has expanded its free credits program for startups to cover the costs of using major AI models. From a report: In a move to attract startup customers, Amazon now allows its cloud credits to cover the use of models from other providers including Anthropic, Meta, Mistral AI, and Cohere. "This is another gift that we're making back to the startup ecosystem, in exchange for what we hope is startups continue to choose AWS as their first stop," said Howard Wright, vice president and global head of startups at AWS.

[...] As part of the deal, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Trainium and Inferentia chips to build and train its models. Wright said Amazon's free credit will contribute to revenue of Anthropic, one of the most popular models on Bedrock.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: In the average American house, any download rate above roughly 242 Mbs is considered a solidly speedy broadband internet connection. That's pretty decent, but across the Atlantic, researchers at UK's Aston University recently managed to coax about 1.2 million times that rate using a single fiber optic cable -- a new record for specific wavelength bands. As spotted earlier today by Gizmodo, the international team achieved a data transfer rate of 301 terabits, or 301,000,000 megabits per second by accessing new wavelength bands normally unreachable in existing optical fibers -- the tiny, hollow glass strands that carry data through beams of light. According to Aston University's recent profile, you can think of these different wavelength bands as different colors of light shooting through a (largely) standard cable.

Commercially available fiber cabling utilizes what are known as C- and L-bands to transmit data. By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands. "Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider," Ian Phillips, the optical processor's creator, said in a statement. "Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way." But in terms of new tech, the processor was basically it for the team's experiment. "Broadly speaking, data was sent via an optical fiber like a home or office internet connection," Phillips added. What's particularly impressive and promising about the team's achievement is that they didn't need new, high-tech fiber optic lines to reach such blindingly fast speeds. Most existing optical cables have always technically been capable of reaching E- and S-bands, but lacked the equipment infrastructure to do so. With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.

As political pressure mounts, TikTok says it's committed to fostering educational content on its app. "The company announced on Tuesday that it's expanding its dedicated STEM feed across Europe, starting in the U.K. and Ireland, after first launching it in the U.S. last year," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The STEM feed will begin to automatically appear alongside the "For You" and "Following" feeds for users under the age of 18. Users above the age of 18 can enable the STEM feed via the app's "content preferences" settings. The feed includes English-speaking content with auto-translate subtitles. TikTok says that since launching the feed in the U.S. last year, 33% of users have the STEM feed enabled and a third of teens go to the STEM feed every week. The app has seen a 24% growth in STEM-related content in the U.S. since the feed launched. Over the past three years, almost 15 million STEM-related videos have been published on the app globally.

The company is expanding its partnerships with Common Sense Networks and Poynter to assess all of the content appearing on the STEM feed. Common Sense Networks will examine the content to ensure it's appropriate for the STEM feed, while Poynter will assess the reliability of the information. Content that doesn't pass both of these checkpoints will not be eligible for the STEM feed.

Google plans to destroy a trove of data that reflects millions of users' web-browsing histories, part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked millions of users without their knowledge. WSJ: The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private "Incognito" browsing option. The lawsuit alleged that Google's marketing and privacy disclosures didn't properly inform users of the kinds of data being collected, including details about which websites they viewed. The settlement details, filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, set out the actions the company will take to change its practices around private browsing. According to the court filing, Google has agreed to destroy billions of data points that the lawsuit alleges it improperly collected, to update disclosures about what it collects in private browsing and give users the option to disable third-party cookies in that setting.

The agreement doesn't include damages for individual users. But the settlement will allow individuals to file claims. Already the plaintiff attorneys have filed 50 in California state court. Attorney David Boies, who represents the consumers in the lawsuit, said the settlement requires Google to delete and remediate "in unprecedented scope and scale" the data it improperly collected. "This settlement is an historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies," Boies said.

Companies racing to develop more powerful artificial intelligence are rapidly nearing a new problem: The internet might be too small for their plans (non-paywalled link). From a report: Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies. Some executives and researchers say the industry's need for high-quality text data could outstrip supply within two years, potentially slowing AI's development.

AI companies are hunting for untapped information sources, and rethinking how they train these systems. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has discussed training its next model, GPT-5, on transcriptions of public YouTube videos, people familiar with the matter said. Companies also are experimenting with using AI-generated, or synthetic, data as training material -- an approach many researchers say could actually cause crippling malfunctions. These efforts are often secret, because executives think solutions could be a competitive advantage.

Data is among several essential AI resources in short supply. The chips needed to run what are called large-language models behind ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and other AI bots also are scarce. And industry leaders worry about a dearth of data centers and the electricity needed to power them. AI language models are built using text vacuumed up from the internet, including scientific research, news articles and Wikipedia entries. That material is broken into tokens -- words and parts of words that the models use to learn how to formulate humanlike expressions.

New documents from a class action against Meta "reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years," reports the Observer.

"One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too." Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data.

In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs' attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo's software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat. According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed "Ghostbusters" — in reference to the Snapchat logo — where they developed "kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains," allowing them "to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage."

The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track "detailed in-app activity" by "parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo's program...." The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. "The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook's then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat," the document alleged.

A CNN opinion piece looks at "the moaning about manual transmission's demise," noting that "it's not just Europeans (literally) clinging on. In the U.S., there's apparently a young (also predominantly male) demographic that is embracing manual driving — championing it as retro, much like Gen Z's affinity to typewriters and vintage cameras.

"They feel there's something authentic about it: a connection between driver and vehicle that automatization cuts out." But CNN's writer argues the case against stick shifts... [Automatic vehicles] chalk up better mileage and drive faster than their stick-shift counterparts. The explanation: automatics select the right gear for the vehicle, usually the highest gear possible. The average manual driver is not always so proficient. In getting the gear right, automatics consume less fuel, save money and emit fewer emissions.

These are among the reasons why it's ever harder to buy a new manual-transmission model of any kind in many countries. In the US, less than 1% of new models have stick shifts (compared to 35% in 1980), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It's really only sports cars, off-road truck SUVs and a handful of small pickups that still have clutches.... While all gasoline-run cars and trucks are climate killers with stick shifts being the slightly worse of two evils, combustion-engine automatics themselves are on their way out. They are tooling along the highway side-by-side with their stick-and-clutch counterparts toward the junkyard of history. Electric vehicles have gear systems, too: a single speed transmission that transmits energy from the motor to the wheels. But because only one gear exists, there is no switching of gears, neither automatically nor manually...

Road transportation accounts for 15% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World Data, as well as being a huge contributor to the air pollution that claims around nine million deaths a year from respiratory and lung diseases. Transportation noise, though less deadly, also contributes to stress and sleep disorders. Thankfully, there's a convenient way to circumvent these blights: electric vehicles...

But for those aficionados who really can't go without a clutch and gear shifter, Toyota is planning a realistic-feeling fake manual transmission for some EV models. It serves no purpose whatsoever — save to comfort bruised egos.

"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix: NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years.

Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9.
"A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did."

Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."

This week every U.S. agency was ordered to appoint a "chief AI officer".

But that wasn't the only AI policy announced. According to CNN, "By the end of the year, travelers should be able to refuse facial recognition scans at airport security screenings without fear it could delay or jeopardize their travel plans." That's just one of the concrete safeguards governing artificial intelligence that the Biden administration says it's rolling out across the U.S. government, in a key first step toward preventing government abuse of AI. The move could also indirectly regulate the AI industry using the government's own substantial purchasing power... The mandates aim to cover situations ranging from screenings by the Transportation Security Administration to decisions by other agencies affecting Americans' health care, employment and housing. Under the requirements taking effect on December 1, agencies using AI tools will have to verify they do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people. In addition, each agency will have to publish online a complete list of the AI systems it uses and their reasons for using them, along with a risk assessment of those systems...

[B]ecause the government is such a large purchaser of commercial technology, its policies around procurement and use of AI are expected to have a powerful influence on the private sector.
CNN notes that Vice President Harris told reporters that the administration intends for the policies to serve as a global model. "Meanwhile, the European Union this month gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law, once again leapfrogging the United States on regulating a critical and disruptive technology."

CNN adds that last year, "the White House announced voluntary commitments by leading AI companies to subject their models to outside safety testing."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."