In a support document today, Microsoft announced its ending support for Cortana on Windows in late 2023. "Cortana continues to live on in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Teams display, and Teams rooms," notes XDA Developers. From the report: In the support document announcing the end of the Cortana era, Microsoft notes that you'll still be able to access AI experiences in Windows 11, and calls out Windows Copilot by name. Alongside that, there's the new Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and voice access in Windows, the last of which lets you control your PC with your voice.

The writing has been on the wall for Cortana for some time now. It was first introduced as a virtual assistant for Windows Phone 8.1, back in 2014, competing with the likes of Apple's Siri. In 2015, it launched on the desktop with Windows 10, and then it started to feel like Microsoft was putting Cortana everywhere. It started showing up in apps like Office and such, similar to what we're seeing with Copilot now. There were third-party Cortana devices too, like the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker and the Johnson Controls Glas thermostat, both of which are no longer supported.

Soon after it started becoming apparent that Cortana wouldn't compete with Amazon Alexa, Microsoft started to roll back. Cortana was stripped out of Windows, becoming a standalone app rather than something you found in the taskbar. For a couple of years now, it's just kind of lived as an app on Windows 11, with no news arriving about any kinds of new features. Now is the era of Bing Chat and Copilot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Now more than a year into the tech "correction," the denial phase is over. There appears to be a broad consensus that lower valuations are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. But for well-capitalized private companies, it can take a while for the dominos to fall. We've started to see once highly valued businesses sell for disappointing outcomes or shut down altogether. There's a term for these erstwhile unicorns that have seen their valuations crash: unicorpses.

We're starting to see businesses that were valued at hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on paper, evaporate. While last year saw ill-fated failures for fintech business Fast and crypto money mis-manager FTX, the pace of unicorn deaths seems to be accelerating. Just last week we saw the fire sale of truck software business Embark, which went public in 2021 via a SPAC, valued at $4.25 billion. It sold to a private buyer for just over $70 million. Then there was the case of Plastiq, a highly valued lending and payments business that was supposed to go public via a SPAC last year, but failed to list. The company has now filed for bankruptcy. Not to mention, Elizabeth Holmes finally went to jail this week for her famously fraudulent business, Theranos.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the past 24 hours, several news outlets reported a now-retracted story claiming that the US Air Force had run a simulation in which an AI-controlled drone "went rogue" and "killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective." The US Air Force has denied that any simulation ever took place, and the original source of the story says he "misspoke." The story originated in a recap published on the website of the Royal Aeronautical Society that served as an overview of sessions at the Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit that took place last week in London.

In a section of that piece titled "AI -- is Skynet here already?" the authors of the piece recount a presentation by USAF Chief of AI Test and Operations Col. Tucker "Cinco" Hamilton, who spoke about a "simulated test" where an AI-enabled drone, tasked with identifying and destroying surface-to-air missile sites, started to perceive human "no-go" decisions as obstacles to achieving its primary mission. In the "simulation," the AI reportedly attacked its human operator, and when trained not to harm the operator, it instead destroyed the communication tower, preventing the operator from interfering with its mission.

Google Wallet on Android is finally getting ready for your digital driver's license and other US state IDs. Google says the feature is rolling out this month, and it will slowly start bringing states online this year. From a report: Of course, your state has to be one of the few that actually supports digital IDs. Google says Maryland residents can use the feature right now and that "in the coming months, residents of Arizona, Colorado and Georgia will join them." The road to digital driver's license support has been a long one, with the "Identity Credential API" landing in Android 11 back in 2020. Since then it has technically been possible for states to make their own ID app.

Now Google Wallet, Google's re-re-reboot of its payment app, is providing a first-party way to store an ID on your phone. Some parts of the Identity Credential API landed in Google Play Services (Google's version-agnostic brick of APIs), so Wallet supports digital IDs going back to Android 8.0, which covers about 90 percent of Android devices. Maryland has supported Digital IDs on iOS for a while, which gives us an idea of how this will work. An NFC transfer is enough to beam your credentials to someone, where you can just tap against a special NFC ID terminal and confirm the transfer with your fingerprint. Wallet has an NFC option, along with a "Show code" option that will show the traditional driver's license barcode.

Apple's savings account, a partnership with Goldman Sachs, launched in April to great fanfare. Some customers say it has been hard to get their money out. From a report: Nathan Thacker, who lives outside Atlanta, had been trying to transfer $1,700 from his Apple account to JPMorgan Chase since May 15. Each time he called Goldman's customer service department, he said, he was told to give it a few more days. The money arrived in his Chase account Thursday morning, he said, after The Wall Street Journal contacted Goldman about his and other customers' experiences. Others said they also had trouble transferring money from their new Apple accounts. Customer service representatives at Goldman, which holds the deposits, sometimes gave differing responses about what to do, they said. Sometimes, their money appeared to have simply vanished, not showing up in their Apple account or in the account they were trying to move it to.

[...] On brand-new accounts, like Apple's, transfers that make up a large share of the overall balance can trigger anti-money-laundering alerts or other security concerns that require additional review, according to people in the AML field. Those delays usually last five or so days, they said. It can also be a red flag when a customer tries to transfer a large amount of money from a newly opened savings account into an account that is different from the one where the money originally came from.

PC makers from Lenovo to Samsung are pinning their hopes for reviving laptop sales on upgraded displays. From a report: At the Computex show in Taiwan this week, every major local electronics brand showed off new laptop models with OLED displays, the same technology used in smartphones. Asustek Computer, Acer, Gigabyte Technology and Micro-Star International all expanded their portfolios, hoping to drive an upgrade cycle and revive flagging sales. OLED produces more vibrant colors, greater uniformity and superior contrast compared to conventional LCD technology, but it uses more energy and comes at a higher cost. It's become the universal standard on smartphones, after debuting on the highest-end devices, and Samsung's display subsidiary has been advocating its proliferation to larger form factors. "At Asus, we believe that OLED panels are truly the future of laptop displays," Asus co-chief executive officer Samson Hu told Bloomberg.

The Taipei-based company, led by Hu and fellow engineer S.Y. Hsu, has a 55% share of the OLED notebook market today, having introduced its first such models two years ago. But it's a small market: OLED represents about 3% of notebook shipments, according to Asus' data. Cost is a key issue: a 15.6-inch OLED panel commands a price 2.5 to 3 times higher than a comparable LCD screen, according to IDC analyst Annabelle Hsu. Companies pass at least some of that expense to consumers: an Asus Vivobook 15 with OLED and some other upgrades costs $699 versus $549 for the LCD model. Part of the problem is that there's a practical monopoly over the category: Samsung Display has more than 99% of the laptop OLED market. Asus' co-CEOs said they hope suppliers like BOE or LG Display enter the fray to drive down prices.

An anonymous reader shares a report: During the pandemic, when many workers saw their teams only via videoconference, Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of virtual reality seemed somewhat reasonable. The company renamed itself Meta Platforms and prioritized bringing about the "metaverse," a digital immersive world where people could meet up and do things together -- including their jobs -- while wearing VR headsets at home. Meta is still selling this vision to corporate customers, as well as consumers. The company debuted its Quest 3 headset on Thursday. Apple is expected to unveil an ambitious version that will compete with Meta on Monday.

But so far, Meta isn't practicing what it preaches. Employees across the organization generally aren't using the headsets -- especially not for work meetings, according to 11 current and former employees. Even those in the VR part of the organization don't use it regularly for work, said one former employee, who, like the others, declined to be named discussing internal culture. Meta only provides headsets to employees if they've signed up for an internal program to test new features before the public. Otherwise, they get a discount, the people said. Some teams -- including policy head Nick Clegg's -- tried experimental VR meetings, only to abandon the practice after finding it uncomfortable and glitchy, one of the people said. Some of the glitches may be attributed to the testing program.

Meta Platforms employees assigned to an office will have to start coming in three days a week starting in September, as the company shifts to a more structured hybrid schedule. From a report: The move won't affect workers who currently have remote positions, Meta said in a statement Thursday. The three-day mandate only applies to workers already in an office some days. It will take effect Sept. 5. "We're confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home," a Meta spokesperson said. The change is meant to foster "the collaboration, relationships and culture necessary for employees to do their best work," the spokesperson said.

Amazon has been talking with wireless carriers about offering low-cost or possibly free nationwide mobile phone service to Prime subscribers, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: The company is negotiating with Verizon, T-Mobile US and Dish Network to get the lowest possible wholesale prices. That would let it offer Prime members wireless plans for $10 a month or possibly for free and bolster loyalty among its biggest spending customers, the people said, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. The talks have been going on for six to eight weeks and have also included AT&T at times, but the plan may take several more months to launch and could be scrapped, one person said.

The Japanese space agency (JAXA) and NASA plan to launch a satellite made of wood in 2024. The Independent reports: The high durability of wood in space was recently tested and confirmed at the International Space Station (ISS) by an international group of scientists led by those from Kyoto University. Their experiments showed wood samples tested at the ISS for durability underwent minimal deterioration and maintained good stability. Preliminary inspection, including strength tests and crystal structural analyses, of the wood samples was also done once they were brought back to Earth from the ISS by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.

Despite extreme conditions in space, including temperature changes and exposure to intense cosmic rays and dangerous solar particles for 10 months, tests found no changes in the samples, such as cracking, warping, peeling or surface damage, according to a recent Kyoto University statement. The retrieved wood specimens were tested and showed no deformation after space exposure and also did not undergo any mass change before and after space exposure, scientists said.

The international research group has determined that the satellite LignoSat, slated to be jointly launched in 2024 by Nasa and Japan's space agency Jaxa, will likely use Magnolia wood -- "Hoonoki" in Japanese. Magnolia, researchers said, has relatively high workability, dimensional stability and overall strength, making its properties ideal for the mission. Wood also has some benefits compared to complex alloys used in space vehicles, as it is environmentally friendly, easier to produce and can be disposed off better at the end of a satellite's life. Such wooden satellites may also be designed to completely burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere and even if small fragments did survive, they may decompose easily.

North America has emerged as the fastest-growing market for new battery cell manufacturing factories, driven by incentives provided by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to a report by Clean Energy Associates. Electrek reports: CEA says that China is still the leading battery cell manufacturing hub, but its share will decline in "coming years." Europe has seen delays and cancellations of several planned battery factories, mostly due to high energy prices and other countries' pro-clean energy and EV manufacturing policies luring projects away. Global EV battery usage increased by 72% in just a year, from 2021 to 2022. And going forward, CEA forecasts an impressive two-year 186% growth rate on the 1,706 GWh of batteries produced in 2022.

The reason is obvious for the rapid increase in battery factories: The International Energy Agency's "Global EV Outlook 2023" reports that EV sales exceeded 10 million in 2022, and 14% of all new cars sold were electric in 2022 -- up from around 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020. And battery and EV manufacturing are only going to continue to experience huge growth.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed a rule that would require all new cars and trucks to have automatic braking systems capable of preventing collisions. The rule aims to address the rise in traffic fatalities and would mandate the use of advanced systems that can automatically stop and avoid hitting pedestrians and stationary or slow-moving vehicles. The New York Times reports: The agency is proposing that all light vehicles, including cars, large pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, be equipped to automatically stop and avoid hitting pedestrians at speeds of up to 37 miles per hour. Vehicles would also have to brake and stop to avoid hitting stopped or slow-moving vehicles at speeds of up to 62 m.p.h. And the systems would have to perform well at night. About 90 percent of the new vehicles on sale now have some form of automatic emergency braking, but not all meet the standards the safety agency is proposing.

Automatic emergency braking systems typically use cameras, radar or both to spot vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and other obstacles. By comparing a vehicle's speed and direction with those of other vehicles or people, these systems can determine that a collision is imminent, alert the driver through an alarm and activate the brakes if the driver fails to do so. [...] The safety agency will take comments on the rule from automakers, safety groups and the public before making it final -- a process that can take a year or more. The rule will go into effect three years after it is adopted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the U.S. Air Force in order to override a possible "no" order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference. At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final "yes/no" order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created "highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal," including attacking U.S. personnel and infrastructure.

"We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective," Hamilton said, according to the blog post. He continued to elaborate, saying, "We trained the system -- 'Hey don't kill the operator -- that's bad. You're gonna lose points if you do that'. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target."
UPDATE (6/2/2023): The Air Force has since denied that such a simulation ever took place.

The Pentagon has announced that it will purchase Starlink satellite internet terminals from SpaceX to provide communication capabilities to Ukraine as it defends itself against a full-scale Russian invasion. "We continue to work with a range of global partners to ensure Ukraine has the satellite and communication capabilities they need. Satellite communications constitute a vital layer in Ukraine's overall communications network and the department contracts with Starlink for services of this type," the Pentagon said in a statement to CNBC. "For operational security reasons and due to the critical nature of these systems -- we do not have additional information regarding specific capabilities, contracts or partners to provide at this time," the statement added. From the report: The first Starlink terminals in Ukraine arrived four days after Russian troops poured over the nation's border in what became the largest air, land and sea assault in Europe since World War II. Ukraine digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had previously asked Musk for the capability on Twitter, posted that Starlink was "here" in Ukraine -- with a photo showing more than two dozen boxes in the back of a truck. Musk said in October that SpaceX wouldn't be able to continue funding use of Starlink terminals in the country out of its own coffers "indefinitely," after a report from CNN said the company had asked the Pentagon to cover the cost.

Western officials have previously hailed Musk's decision to equip Ukraine with Starlink internet, citing the colossal and indiscriminate Russian shelling on civilian infrastructure that has left large swaths of the country without communications. Musk reportedly told the Pentagon in October he would no longer finance the Starlink terminals in Ukraine as the country prepared to fight through the harsh winter months. However, the billionaire reversed course and did continue to fund the service.

Speaking of Brave, the browser-maker is introducing vertical tabs. From a blog post: With today's 1.52 desktop release, the vertical tabs setting is available to Brave users on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Enabling the vertical tabs setting relocates your open tabs from the top of your browser window (i.e. above the address bar) to the left side of the window, where they'll appear stacked vertically rather than horizontally. To do so, right-click an existing horizontal tab and select "use vertical tabs" from the menu. With open tabs arranged vertically, you'll be able to scroll through them as needed. To open a new tab, simply click the button to create a new tab at the bottom of the vertical tabs sidebar.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We fitted trackers in old, broken FT laptops -- cleared of data -- and gave them to the UK's six most prominent retailers, who are legally obliged to take back old goods from customers buying new ones. Over the next six months, the trackers took us on a curious tour of Britain, with stops at a Norfolk beach, two residential addresses in Slough and a warehouse in rural Wales. They opened a window into an industry plagued by an Achilles heel it calls "leakage" -- where goods slip through the fingers of formal recyclers into the hands of other, potentially questionable, actors.

All the retailers promised they would "recycle" the laptops, but one of the two we gave to John Lewis was stolen twice out of the recycling supply chain. Meanwhile, Argos sold the two we handed in to an eBay seller. None of the laptops we kept sight of ended up illegally exported, but some slipped into streams that could still head that way. [...] Six months after deploying the 14 FT laptops, 10 appeared to have been recycled correctly. Three deployed with Amazon, two with Dell, one with Curry's and one with John Lewis travelled to authorised recycling plants. The recycling company that received the three laptops we gave to Apple said they were recycled. The second Curry's laptop was still sitting at the site of a recycling company to be harvested for repairs, the retailer said.

Then the tracker went dark, meaning it is unclear where the laptop went next. "The fact it happened twice might just be unfortunate," noted Sayers, "or it reiterates the fact that stuff leaks." Justin Greenaway, commercial manager at Sweeep Kuusakoski, an electronics recycling plant in Kent, said household waste recycling centres were regularly targeted by criminals and "if e-waste is stolen it is often destined to be exported." Slough Borough Council, which runs the recycling centre, said the accuracy radius of trackers meant it could not be proved the laptop entered its site, but "if someone wanted to lift somethingâ...âit could happen without being noticed." WasteCare insisted that theft from its operations was "rare," minimised by 24/7 on-site CCTV and cameras in its vehicles, and said it was working "to put in place additional measures to avoid a recurrence." John Lewis said the company was reviewing its processes to prevent this from happening again. Approximately 114,000 tonnes of electronics are lost from the UK's recycling system to theft every year, according to a report by Material Focus, a non-profit electrical recycling organisation.

Google is very publicly adding to the chorus of complaints about Microsoft's alleged restrictive cloud software licensing policies, claiming that unless the European Union formally tackles it, the industry and customers will suffer lasting damage. From a report: Amit Zavery, vice president, general manager, and head of platform at Google Cloud, says antitrust regulators are "starting to understand the situation" and are asking questions. "Any enterprise company will be impacted negatively if things are not resolved properly," he told The Register. "I think there should be appetite [from the regulators] and I think there should be movement in that area to really put some kind of checks and balances on Microsoft's policies." One bone of contention for Google, the third-largest public cloud provider globally and in Europe, is that it simply costs more to run Microsoft software on third-party providers' clouds. This is due to extra licensing costs levied by Microsoft when you run its applications on non-Microsoft clouds, we're told. "Microsoft publicly touts that if you run their software on Azure versus other vendors like AWS and GCP, it's five times cheaper or it's more expensive to run on us 5x basically because of the tax customers have to pay to Microsoft," Zavery told us.

The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, "Tessa," after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice. From a report: Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder. Members of the union, Helpline Associates United, say they were fired days after their union election was certified. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Tessa, which Neda claims was never meant to replace the helpline workers, almost immediately ran into problems. On Monday, activist Sharon Maxwell posted on Instagram that Tessa offered her "healthy eating tips" and advice on how to lose weight. The chatbot recommended a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day and weekly weighing and measuring to keep track of weight. "If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today," Maxwell wrote. "It is beyond time for Neda to step aside."

Meta has officially announced its Quest 3 VR headset in a post on Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram. The $499.99 headset is "coming this fall," and the post confirms that its design is 40 percent lighter than the Quest 2, with a new next-generation Snapdragon chip inside. From a report: This is coming just days before Apple is expected to announce its long-rumored mixed reality headset and hours ahead of a showcase for games on Meta's VR platform that begins later today at 1PM ET. We already had a pretty good idea of how the Quest 3 would shake out after Mark Gurman of Bloomberg detailed his hands-on experience with the then-unannounced device earlier this week, reporting on the lighter and more comfortable design that adds new sensors and redesigned controllers. The announced video clearly shows off the three new sensor areas across the front of the device. Gurman described that the pill-shaped zones hold four cameras split evenly between the left and right sides -- two of which are full-color cameras and two standard -- and a single depth sensor in the middle that could improve the headset's AR performance.

Venture capital funds, private equity groups and accountancy firms are using the latest artificial intelligence to pick acquisition targets and start-ups for investment, betting the technology can give them an edge over rivals. From a report: Big Four accountant KPMG, hedge fund Coatue and venture capital firm Headline are among those using the latest AI tools to advise clients and help guide their dealmaking. With investors under pressure to identify the next high-growth start-up at a time when few companies are going public, some argue that dealmakers can benefit from using generative AI for tasks such as assessing a company's growth potential based on financial analysis.

"If you can train or use a model that gets a lot of efficiency first, you will get an advantage in that particular area of the business that is harder for a second mover to do," said Par Edin, who leads innovation in KPMG's US deal advisory and strategy business. "It is about getting there first for each and every particular use case." The pace of artificial intelligence development over the past six months, triggered by the release of OpenAI's popular ChatGPT -- a chatbot that provides humanlike answers to queries -- has spurred investors to use the tools to identify fast-growing companies and acquisition targets.