An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2020, voters in Massachusetts chose to extend that state's automotive "right to repair" law to include telematics and connected car services. But this week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told automakers that some of the law's requirements create a real safety problem and that they should be ignored since federal law preempts state law when the two conflict. Almost all new cars in 2023 contain embedded modems and offer some form of telematics or connected car services. And the ballot language that passed in Massachusetts requires "manufacturers that sell vehicles with telematics systems in Massachusetts to equip them with a standardized open data platform beginning with model year 2022 that vehicle owners and independent repair facilities may access to retrieve mechanical data and run diagnostics through a mobile-based application."

There have been attempts by state lawmakers, the auto industry, and NHTSA to tweak the law to create a more reasonable timeline for implementation, but to no avail. Now, according to Reuters, NHTSA has written to automakers to advise them not to comply with the Massachusetts law. Among its problems are the fact that someone "could utilize such open access to remotely command vehicles to operate dangerously, including attacking multiple vehicles concurrently," and that "open access to vehicle manufacturers' telematics offerings with the ability to remotely send commands allows for manipulation of systems on a vehicle, including safety-critical functions such as steering, acceleration, or braking." Faced with this dilemma, it's quite possible the automakers will respond by simply disabling telematics and connected services for customers in the state. Subaru already took that step when it introduced its model year 2022 vehicles, and NHTSA says other OEMs may do the same.

Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal want to clarify that the internet's bedrock liability law does not apply to generative AI, per a new bill introduced Wednesday. From a report: Legal experts and lawmakers have questioned whether AI-created works would qualify for legal immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that largely shields platforms from lawsuits over third-party content. It's a newly urgent issue thanks to the explosive of generative AI. The new bipartisan bill bolsters the argument that Section 230 doesn't cover AI-generated work. It also gives lawmakers an opening to go after Section 230 after vowing to amend it, without much success, for years.

Section 230 is often credited as the law that allowed the internet to flourish and for social media to take off, as well as websites hosting travel listings and restaurant reviews. To its detractors, it goes too far and is not fit for today's web, allowing social media companies to leave too much harmful content up online. Hawley and Blumenthal's "No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act" would amend Section 230 "by adding a clause that strips immunity from AI companies in civil claims or criminal prosecutions involving the use or provision of generative AI," per a description of the bill from Hawley's office.

Google is bringing generative AI technology to shopping, aiming to get a jump on e-commerce sites like Amazon. From a report: The Alphabet-owned company announced features Wednesday aimed at helping people understand how apparel will fit on them, no matter their body size, and added capabilities for finding products using its search and image-recognition technology. Additionally, Google introduced new ways to research travel destinations and map routes using generative AI -- technology that can craft text, images or even video from simple prompts.

"We want to make Google the place for consumers to come shop, as well as the place for merchants to connect with consumers," Maria Renz, Google's vice president of commerce, said in an interview ahead of the announcement. "We've always been committed to an open ecosystem and a healthy web, and this is one way where we're bringing this technology to bear across merchants." Google is the world's dominant search engine, but 46% of respondents in a survey of US shoppers conducted last year said they still started their product searches and research on Amazon, according to the research firm CivicScience. TikTok, too, is making inroads, CivicScience's research found -- 18% of Gen Z online shoppers turn to the platform first. Google is taking note, with some of its new, AI-powered shopping exploration features aimed at capturing younger audiences.

A new virtual "try-on" feature, launching on Wednesday, will let people see how clothes fit across a range of body types, from XXS to 4XL sizes. Apparel will be overlaid on top of images of diverse models that the company photographed while developing the capability. Google said it was able to launch such a service because of a new image-based AI model that it developed internally, and the company is releasing a new research paper detailing its work alongside the announcement.

mschaffer shares a report: Comcast and other ISPs have annoyed customers for many years by advertising low prices and then charging much bigger monthly bills by tacking on a variety of fees. While some of these fees are related to government-issued requirements and others are not, poorly trained customer service reps have been known to falsely tell customers that fees created by Comcast are mandated by the government. The FCC rules will force ISPs to accurately describe fees in labels given to customers, but Comcast said it wants the FCC to rescind a requirement related to "fees that ISPs may, but are not obligated to, pass through to customers." These include state Universal Service fees and other local fees. As Comcast makes clear, it isn't required to pass these costs on to customers in the form of separate fees. Comcast could stop charging the fees and raise its advertised prices by the corresponding amount to more accurately convey its actual prices to customers. Instead, Comcast wants the FCC to change the rule so that it can continue charging the fees without itemizing them..

I suppose it's just easier to grab people's money than it is to make up names for the fees, Mschaffer adds.

Alphabet's Google may have to sell part of its lucrative adtech business to address concerns about anti-competitive practices, EU regulators said on Wednesday, threatening the company with its harshest regulatory penalty to date. From a report: The European Commission set out its charges in a statement of objections to Google two years after opening an investigation into behaviours such as favouring its own advertising services, which could also lead to a fine of as much as 10% of Google's annual global turnover. The stakes are higher for Google in this latest clash with regulators as it concerns the company's biggest money maker, with the adtech business accounting for 79% of total revenue last year.

Its 2022 advertising revenue, including from search services, Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube adverts, Google Ad Manager, AdMob and AdSense, amounted to $224.5 billion. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Google may have to sell part of its adtech business because a behavioural remedy is unlikely to be effective at stopping the anti-competitive practices.

The European Union took an important step on Wednesday toward passing what would be one of the first major laws to regulate artificial intelligence, a potential model for policymakers around the world as they grapple with how to put guardrails on the rapidly developing technology. From a report: The European Parliament, a main legislative branch of the E.U., passed a draft law known as the A.I. Act, which would put new restrictions on what are seen as the technology's riskiest uses. It would severely curtail uses of facial recognition software, while requiring makers of A.I. systems like the ChatGPT chatbot to disclose more about the data used to create their programs. The vote is one step in a longer process. A final version of the law is not expected to be passed until later this year.

The European Union is further along than the United States and other large Western governments in regulating A.I. The 27-nation bloc has debated the topic for more than two years, and the issue took on new urgency after last year's release of ChatGPT, which intensified concerns about the technology's potential effects on employment and society. Policymakers everywhere from Washington to Beijing are now racing to control an evolving technology that is alarming even some of its earliest creators. In the United States, the White House has released policy ideas that includes rules for testing A.I. systems before they are publicly available and protecting privacy rights. In China, draft rules unveiled in April would require makers of chatbots to adhere to the country's strict censorship rules. Beijing is also taking more control over the ways makers of A.I. systems use data.

TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers writes: Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator -- and, unlike Google, open-sourced it. Called MusicGen, Meta's music-generating tool, a demo of which can be found here, can turn a text description (e.g. "An '80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background") into about 12 seconds of audio, give or take. MusicGen can optionally be "steered" with reference audio, like an existing song, in which case it'll try to follow both the description and melody.

Meta says that MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 "high-quality" licensed music tracks and 390,000 instrument-only tracks from ShutterStock and Pond5, a large stock media library. The company hasn't provided the code it used to train the model, but it has made available pre-trained models that anyone with the right hardware -- chiefly a GPU with around 16GB of memory -- can run.

So how does MusicGen perform? Well, I'd say -- though certainly not well enough to put human musicians out of a job. Its songs are reasonably melodic, at least for basic prompts like "ambient chiptunes music," and -- to my ears -- on par (if not slightly better) with the results from Google's AI music generator, MusicLM. But they won't win any awards.

Google has launched its script editor tool, offering advanced automations for Google Home-powered smart homes. The Verge reports: Available starting Tuesday, June 13th, to those in the Google Home public preview, the script editor is part of Google's new home.google.com web interface, which also has live feeds for any Nest cams on your account. The script editor will be coming to the new Google Home app preview starting June 14th. There's no date for general availability.

Along with allowing for multiple starters and actions, the script editor adds more advanced conditions. For example, you can set an automation to run only if the TV is on and it's after 6PM but before midnight. The script editor automations are created in the new Google Home web interface, you can apply for the public preview here.

The script editor allows you to do everything you can in the Home app when setting up automations, plus "more than 100 new features and capabilities to fit your unique understanding of your home and what you want it to do," according to a blog post by Anish Kattukaran, director of product management at Google Home. This includes access to nearly 100 starters and actions, including Matter sensors -- something not currently possible in the Home app. For example, an Eve Motion sensor connected via Matter to Google Home can't currently be used as a starter for automations in the Home app but can be used as one in the script editor. Google has some example automations that you can view here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Moderators of many Reddit communities are pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted indefinitely. For the vast majority of subreddits, the blackout to protest Reddit's expensive API pricing changes was expected to last from Monday until Wednesday. But in response to a Tuesday post on the r/ModCoord subreddit, users are chiming in to say that their subreddits will remain dark past that 48-hour window. "Reddit has budged microscopically," u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, "our core concerns still aren't satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began." SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge -- "like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well" -- and said that "more is needed for Reddit to act."

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in. SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. "For example, r/stopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns," SpicyThunder335 wrote. As an alternative, SpicyThunder335 recommended implementing a "weekly gesture of support on 'Touch-Grass-Tuesdays,'" which would be left up to the discretion of individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they're on board. As of this writing, more than 8,400 subreddits have gone private or into a restricted mode. The blackouts caused Reddit to briefly crash on Monday.

Meta said on Tuesday that it would provide researchers with access to components of a new "human-like" artificial intelligence model that it said can analyze and complete unfinished images more accurately than existing models. From a report: The model, I-JEPA, uses background knowledge about the world to fill in missing pieces of images, rather than looking only at nearby pixels like other generative AI models, the company said. That approach incorporates the kind of human-like reasoning advocated by Meta's top AI scientist Yann LeCun and helps the technology to avoid errors that are common to AI-generated images, like hands with extra fingers, it said.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is a prolific publisher of open-sourced AI research via its in-house research lab. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that sharing models developed by Meta's researchers can help the company by spurring innovation, spotting safety gaps and lowering costs. "For us, it's way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we're using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make," he told investors in April.

Experts say the subsea cable market is in danger of dividing into eastern and western blocs amid fears of espionage and geopolitical tensions. From a report: Nearly 1.4mn kilometres of metal-encased fibre criss-crosses the world's oceans, speeding internet traffic seamlessly around the globe. The supply and installation of these cables has been dominated by companies from France, the US and Japan. The Chinese government started successfully penetrating the global market, but consecutive US administrations have since managed to freeze China out of large swathes of it. This was ostensibly because of concerns of espionage and worries about what Beijing might do to disrupt strategic assets operated by Chinese companies in the event of a conflict. Despite being routinely blocked from international subsea cable projects involving US investment, Chinese companies have adapted by building international cables for China and many of its allied nations. This has raised fears of a dangerous division in who owns and manages the infrastructure underpinning the global web.

In 2018, Amazon, Meta and China Mobile agreed to work together on a cable connecting California to Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. But a spate of manoeuvres in Washington to block Chinese participation in US cables led to China Mobile pulling out of the consortium. Meta and Amazon filed a new application for the system in 2021, this time with no Chinese investment, no connection to Hong Kong, and a new name: Cap-1. Then, last year, the application for Cap-1 was withdrawn altogether, even though most of the 12,000km cable had already been built. China's original involvement remained a security concern for the US government, according to two people briefed on the discussions. "There are hundreds of millions of dollars sunk in the Pacific," said a person involved in the aborted project. Over the last five years, as tensions between the two countries have mounted and fears have grown in Washington about the risks of espionage, the US government has sought to pull apart an interwoven network of internet cables that had developed through international collaboration over decades.

In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the "noise" and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass. From a report: The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company's increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they'll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes.

Huffman says the blackout hasn't had "significant revenue impact" and that the company anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online by Wednesday. "There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well," the memo reads. "We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail."

theodp writes: "My advice to all the young tech enthusiasts, future engineering managers, and CTOs is simple," writes Vadim Kravcenko in The Surprising Power of Documentation. "Cultivate a love for documentation. You may view it as a chore, an afterthought, or a nuisance. But trust me when I say this: Documentation isn't just a task on your to-do list; it's a pillar for success and a bridge that connects ideas, people, and vision. Treat it not as a burden but as an opportunity to learn, share, and create an impact."

So, what would Goldilocks make of your organization's documentation -- Too much? Too little? Just right? Got any recommended tools and management tips for creating useful and sustainable documentation?

A company called Sol Reader is working on a headset designed exclusively for reading books. "The device is simple: It slips over your eyes like a pair of glasses and blocks all distractions while reading," reports TechCrunch. From the article: The $350 device is currently on pre-order, comes in a handful of colors, and contains a pair of side-lit, e-ink displays, much like the Kindle does. The glasses come with a remote (I wish my Kindle had a remote!) and a charger. A full battery gets you around 25 hours of reading. That may not sound like a lot, but if you have an average adult reading speed of around 200 words per minute, you can finish the 577,608-word tome Infinite Jest in about 48 hours. That means you need at least one charging break, but then, if you are trying to read Infinite Jest in a single sitting, you're a bigger book nerd than most.

The product has a diopter adjustment built in, so glasses- and contacts-wearers can use the glasses without wearing additional vision correction (up to a point -- the company doesn't specify the exact adjustment range). The displays are 1.3-inch, e-ink displays with 256x256 per-eye resolution. The glasses have 64MB of storage, which should hold plenty of books for even the longest of escapist holidays.

The company's $5 million funding round was led by Garry Tan (Initialized, Y Combinator) and closed about a year ago. Today, the company is shipping the 'advanced copy' (read: private beta) of the glasses to a small number of early access testers. The company is tight-lipped on when its full production batches will start shipping, and customers are currently advised to join the waiting list if they want to get their mittens on a pair of Sols.

What Iran's military called "the first product of the quantum processing algorithm" of the Naval university appears to be a stock development board, available widely online for around $600. Motherboard reports: According to multiple state-linked news agencies in Iran, the computer will help Iran detect disturbances on the surface of water using algorithms. Iranian Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari showed off the board during the ceremony and spoke of Iran's recent breakthroughs in the world of quantum technology. The touted quantum device appears to be a development board manufactured by a company called Diligent. The brand "ZedBoard" appears clearly in pictures. According to the company's website, the ZedBoard has everything the beginning developer needs to get started working in Android, Linux, and Windows. It does not appear to come with any of the advanced qubits that make up a quantum computer, and suggested uses include "video processing, reconfigurable computing, motor control, software acceleration," among others.

"I'm sure this board can work perfectly for people with more advanced [Field Programmable Gate Arrays] experience, however, I am a beginner and I can say that this is also a good beginner-friendly board," said one review on Diligent's website. Those interested in the board can buy one on Amazon for $589. It's impossible to know if Iran has figured out how to use off-the-shelf dev boards to make quantum algorithms, but it's not likely.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: President Joe Biden's administration is set to allow New York City to move forward with a landmark program that will toll vehicles entering Lower Manhattan, after a public review period ends Monday. The toll is formally known as the Central Business District Tolling Program -- but it's commonly called "congestion pricing." In practice it works like any other toll, but because it specifically charges people to drive in the traffic-choked area below 60th street in Manhattan, it would be the first program of its kind in the United States. Proposals range from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours, and it's set to go into effect next spring.

The plan had been delayed for years, but it cleared a milestone last month when the Federal Highway Administration signed off on the release of an environmental assessment. The public has until Monday to review the report, and the federal government is widely expected to approve it shortly after. From there, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) can finalize toll rates, as well as discounts and exemptions for certain drivers.

While no other US city has yet implemented congestion pricing, Stockholm, London and Singapore have had it for years. These cities have reported benefits like decreased carbon dioxide pollution, higher average speeds, and congestion reduction. [...] The stakes of New York City's program are high, and leaders in other cities are watching the results closely. If successful, congestion pricing could be a model for other US cities, which are trying to recover from the pandemic and face similar challenges of climate change and aging public infrastructure.

Google is set to be hit with a formal antitrust complaint from the European Union that could lead to massive new fines and strike at the heart of the advertising technology that drives most of the US firm's revenue. From a report: The so-called statement of objections, to be announced as soon as Wednesday, will mark another escalation in a long-running saga that's already led to a trio of EU penalties totaling more than $8.6 billion. The new charges will target the core of the Alphabet unit's ad tech business model, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. Google's advertising business is by far its most successful, accounting for about 80% of its annual revenue. In 2022, its ad sales amounted to about $225 billion. The new complaint is the most significant in the current five-year mandate of the European Commission, the EU's antitrust watchdog, one of the people said.

Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site's new API pricing terms. From a report: According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. "A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we've been working on resolving the anticipated issue," spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. Reddit's status page reported a "major outage" affecting Reddit's desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. [...] More than 7,000 subreddits have gone private or read-only in response to the API pricing terms, which is forcing the developers of apps like Apollo for Reddit to shut down at the end of the month.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Two senators sent a letter to TikTok's chief executive on Tuesday, accusing the company of making misleading claims to Congress around how it stores and handles American user data, and demanding answers to more than a dozen questions by the end of next week.

The letter, from Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, focused on how sensitive data about American users may be stored in China and how employees there may have access to it. The lawmakers said recent reports from The New York Times and Forbes raised questions about statements made during congressional testimony in March by Shou Chew, TikTok's chief executive, and in an October 2021 hearing involving Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy for the Americas. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

"We are deeply troubled by TikTok's recurring pattern of providing misleading, inaccurate or false information to Congress and its users in the United States, including in response to us during oversight hearings and letters," the senators wrote...

Forbes reported last month that TikTok has stored the sensitive financial information of creators, including Social Security numbers and tax IDs, on servers in China, where employees there can have access to them... The Times reported earlier in the month that American user data, including driver's licenses and potentially illegal content such as child sexual abuse materials, was shared at TikTok and ByteDance through an internal messaging and collaboration tool called Lark. The information was often available in Lark "groups" — chat rooms of employees — with thousands of members, alarming some workers because ByteDance workers in China and elsewhere could easily see the material.

CNN summarizes the issue. "A recent advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy says there's not enough evidence to determine whether social media is safe enough for children and adolescents when it comes to their mental health." (Although a CNN news anchor points out that "Nearly all of the research points to negative impacts.")

CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent interviewed U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy "to examine what led him to sound the alarm, and who should be responsible for tackling the issue." And the surgeon general remembers when his five-year-old daughter asked to post a picture on social media. "I think finding the right balance is not easy, in part because, you know, the platforms weren't necessarily designed for balance. They were designed to maximize how much time we spend on them." CNN: How worried are you? When people hear something coming from the surgeon general's office, they think of, you know, smoking, opioids, things like this. Social media — is it at that level of concern for you?

Surgeon General: Yes, I would say yes, it is. And, and — but it's it's more complicated... because we know that some kids do actually get benefit from their experience of social media. Some are able to connect more easily with friends and family, to express themselves more creatively and more openly than they otherwise would, and to find community... But one of the things that has become an increasing source of worry for me is that the the association between social media use and harmful outcomes... [W]e're asking parents to somehow figure it out all on their own. And the reason I issued an advisory on this topic is I worry that we have not taken enough action to support parents and kids...

CNN: What is the level of evidence about the dangers of social media and what is the level of evidence that you want? I mean, what does it take for you as a surgeon general to act on this...?

Surgeon General: I think the first question I'm asking is where is the evidence of safety...? There's a lot of association data, right, that's showing an association between use and certain and negative outcomes, like for example, for kids who who use more than 3 hours of social media a day, they face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. But we also know that kids are telling us in their own words and their own experience how they're experiencing social media. So, for example, about nearly half of adolescents are saying that using social media makes them feel worse about their body image...

And one of the consistent messages I hear from researchers who's been studying this area for a long time is that they are having a hard time getting access to the data from social media companies. You know, as a parent, I don't ever want to feel like someone or anyone is hiding information from me about how a product affects my child. But that's how a lot of parents are feeling right now. And so that's a place where I think transparency matters. Let's get the data out there so independent researchers can assess it and can help us understand the harms and benefits and which kids are most impacted so we can design, you know, our approach, you know, in a more informed way...

One of the things we call for in my advisory is for the policymakers to step in and establish actual, transparent, enforceable safety standards like we do for other products so that parents have some reassurance around safety... This technology is already being used by 95% of kids, Right. And I don't think that's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle here or to say somehow nobody should be using social media, that that's not the goal here... We don't like leave it up to car manufacturers to determine whether or not they've hit the standards or not. We don't do that with medications either. There should be, you know, independent authority that parents can trust are looking primarily in solely out for the welfare of their kids, and they should be the ones who enforce these standards....

You know, just to put it bluntly, I do not think we have done our job as a society to have the backs of kids and parents on this because we haven't moved fast enough to get the information to ultimately guide them on safe use... [P]arents across the country, people are trying to do the best they can with limited information.
The surgeon general also says their ideal legislation would also "help to reduce kids exposure to harmful content" and include "restrictions on features that seek to manipulate kids into spending excessive amounts of time on these platforms."