Google's latest Photos trick is a feature it's calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. From a report: Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on a bench closer to the middle of the photo, which generates "new" parts of the bench and balloons to the left to fill in the space. In this example, Google again makes the sky more vibrant.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Mohamed Maslouh, a London-based contractor, was assigned to enter data into Google's internal gHire recruitment system last September, he noticed something surprising. The database contained the profiles of thousands of people in the EU and U.K. whose names, phone numbers, personal email addresses and resumes dated back as far as 2011. Maslouh knew something was amiss, as he had received data-protection training from Randstad, the European human-resources giant that employed him, and was aware of the EU's five-year-old General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which remained part of British law after Brexit.

Under the law, companies in the European Union and U.K. may not hang onto anyone's personal data -- that is, information relating to any identifiable living person -- for longer than is strictly necessary, which generally means a maximum retention time measured in weeks or months. Google may now face investigations over potential violations of the GDPR, after Maslouh filed protected whistleblower complaints with the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office in November and with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) -- which has jurisdiction over Google's activities in the EU -- in February.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: While General Motors has announced that it plans to phase out CarPlay in its EVs starting in 2024, Ford has just doubled down on long-term CarPlay compatibility. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ford CEO Jim Farley laid it bare: "In terms of content, we kind of lost that battle 10 years ago," Farley said. "So like get real with it, because you're not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle."

Farley's argument is extremely sound. He is contending that since most people bring their smartphones into their cars with them, that people want the infotainment to be an extension of their phones and not another thing to deal with. On another level, embracing CarPlay and Android Auto cost automakers money to license but that cost is amortized over a large production run. The possibility of having a CarPlay-only infotainment is distant and highly unlikely, as automakers do need their own interface for the high-tech gadgets of today's cars.

And let's be real: CarPlay is one of the best things to happen to modern cars. It simplifies driving, keeps people less distracted by vastly reducing the learning curve, and is just more convenient. Ford is embracing it.

For the first time, the American Psychological Association (APA) has issued guidelines for teenagers, parents, teachers and policymakers on how to use social media, with the aim of reducing the rate of depression, anxiety and loneliness in adolescents. NPR reports: The 10 recommendations in the report summarize recent scientific findings and advise actions, primarily by parents, such as monitoring teens' feeds and training them in social media literacy, even before they begin using these platforms. But some therapists and clinicians say the recommendations place too much of the burden on parents. To implement this guidance requires cooperation from the tech companies and possibly regulators.

While social media can provide opportunities for staying connected, especially during periods of social isolation, like the pandemic, the APA says adolescents should be routinely screened for signs of "problematic social media use." The APA recommends that parents should also closely monitor their children's social media feed during early adolescence, roughly ages 10-14. Parents should try to minimize or stop the dangerous content their child is exposed to, including posts related to suicide, self-harm, disordered eating, racism and bullying. Studies suggest that exposure to this type of content may promote similar behavior in some youth, the APA notes.

Another key recommendation is to limit the use of social media for comparison, particularly around beauty -- or appearance-related content. Research suggests that when kids use social media to pore over their own and others' appearance online, this is linked with poor body image and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls. As kids age and gain digital literacy skills they should have more privacy and autonomy in their social media use, but parents should always keep an open dialogue about what they are doing online. The report also cautions parents to monitor their own social media use, citing research that shows that adults' attitudes toward social media and how they use it in front of kids may affect young people.

The APA's report does contain recommendations that could be picked up by policy makers seeking to regulate the industry. For instance it recommends the creation of "reporting structures" to identify and remove or deprioritize social media content depicting "illegal or psychologically maladaptive behavior," such as self-harm, harming others, and disordered eating. It also notes that the design of social media platforms may need to be changed to take into account "youths' development capabilities," including features like endless scrolling and recommended content. It suggests that teens should be warned "explicitly and repeatedly" about how their personal data could be stored, shared and used.

A study commissioned by Meta has found that the metaverse could contribute around 2.4% to U.S. annual GDP by 2035, equating to as much as $760 billion. Reuters reports: The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or overlay information digitally on images of the real world, according to the report by consulting firm Deloitte. Economic gains may come from the use of the technologies in the defense, medical and manufacturing sectors, plus entertainment use cases such as video games and communication, the report said.

Social media giant Meta, which pivoted its focus on building metaverse technologies in 2021, has forecast the tech would eventually replace mobile as the main computing platform. In a separate report, Meta said the European Union may see an increased economic opportunity of up to 489 billion euros ($538.29 billion) in annual GDP by 2035 or about 1.3%-2.4% of its total GDP. The metaverse could contribute between C$45.3 billion ($33.88 billion) and C$85.5 billion to Canada's annual GDP by 2035, Deloitte said. Last year, a Meta-funded report estimated that metaverse adoption would contribute $3.01 trillion by 2031.

Roblox's new anti-cheat software puts a stop to in-game exploits, but at what cost? According to Liam Dawe from Gaming On Linux, it's blocking the Wine application, meaning "you won't be able to play it on Linux any more, at all, unless you find some sort of special workaround." He adds: "Previously the roll-out of this update was being tested only with some users. Now though it's here for everyone giving a 64 bit client and introducing their Hyperion anti-cheat software which they are intentionally blocking Wine with." Here's what one of their staff had to say about this: Hi - thanks for the question. I definitely get where you're coming from, and as you point out, you deserve a clear, good-faith answer. Unfortunately that answer is essentially "no."

From a personal perspective, a lot of people at Roblox would love to support Linux (including me). Practically speaking, there's just no way for us to justify it. If we release a client, we have to support it, which means QA, CS, documentation, etc., all of which is much more difficult on a fragmented platform. We release weekly on a half-dozen platforms. Adding in the time to test, debug, and release a Linux client would be expensive, which means time taken away from improving Roblox on our current platforms.

Even Wine support is difficult because of anti-cheat. As wonderful as it would be to allow Roblox under Wine, the number of users who would take advantage of that is minuscule compared with our other platforms, and it's not worthwhile if it makes it easy for exploiters to cheat.

I'm sorry to be such a downer about this, but it's the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.

Again, I'm personally sorry to have to say this. Way back in 2000 I had a few patches accepted into the kernel, and I led the port of Roblox game servers from Windows to Linux several years ago. From a technical and philosophical perspective, it would be a wonderful thing to do. But our first responsibility is to our overall community, and the opportunity cost of supporting a Linux client is far, far too high to justify.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Milan recently created a fully rechargeable battery using nontoxic edible components. This is probably the world's first battery that is safe to ingest and entirely made of food-grade materials. "Given the level of safety of these batteries, they could be used in children's toys, where there is a high risk of ingestion," said Mario Caironi, a senior researcher at IIT. However, this isn't the only solution the edible battery could provide. Apart from serving as an alternative to conventional toxic toy batteries, the edible battery from IIT could also play a key role in making health care applications safer than ever. For instance, doctors have to be cautious regarding the use of miniature electronic devices (such as drug-delivery robots, biosensors, etc.) inside the human body, as they come equipped with batteries made of toxic substances. An edible battery could solve this problem. There are also more mundane applications, like replacing batteries in pet toys.

Ivan K. Ilic, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at IIT, told Ars Technica, "Two main ways a battery damages human tissue when it's inside the body is by doing water electrolysis and by the toxicity of its materials. Water electrolysis is a phenomenon where electricity with a voltage higher than 1.2 V (virtually all commercial batteries) breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (an explosive gas), and it is very dangerous if it occurs in the stomach. Our battery is way below this voltage, around 0.65 V, so water electrolysis cannot occur. On the other hand, we used only food materials, so nothing is toxic!" Before the battery is useful, however, the researchers will need to first enhance the battery's power capacity. Currently, the edible battery can supply 48 microamperes of current for a bit over 10 minutes. So it can easily meet the power demand of a miniature medical device or a small LED. "These batteries are no competition to ordinary batteries -- they will not power electric cars -- but they are meant to power edible electronics and maybe some other niche applications, so their main advantage is non-toxicity," said Ilic. Here's a list of what makes these edible batteries work, as mentioned by Ars:

- "Quercetin, a pigment found in almonds and capers, serves as the battery cathode, whereas riboflavin (vitamin B2) makes up the battery anode.
- The researchers used nori (edible seaweed that is used in the wrapping of sushi rolls) as the separator and a water-based solution (aqueous NaHSO4) as the electrolyte.
- Activated charcoal is employed to achieve high electrical conductivity in the battery.
The battery electrodes come covered in beeswax and connect to a gold foil (used to cover pastries) that laminates a supporting structure made of ethyl cellulose."

The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs from artificial intelligence music start-up Boomy, ramping up policing of its platform amid complaints of fraud and clutter across streaming services. From a report: In recent months the music industry has been confronting the rise of AI-generated songs and, more broadly, the growing number of tracks inundating streaming platforms daily. Spotify, the largest audio streaming business, recently took down about 7 per cent of the tracks that had been uploaded by Boomy, the equivalent of "tens of thousands" of songs, according to a person familiar with the matter. Recording giant Universal Music had flagged to all the main streaming platforms that it saw suspicious streaming activity on Boomy tracks, according to another person close to the situation.

The Boomy songs were removed because of suspected "artificial streaming" -- online bots posing as human listeners to inflate the audience numbers for certain songs. AI has made this type of activity easier because it allows someone to instantly generate many music tracks, which can then be uploaded online and streamed. Boomy, which was launched two years ago, allows users to choose various styles or descriptors, such as "rap beats" or "rainy nights," to create a machine-generated track. Users can then release the music to streaming services, where they will generate royalty payments. California-based Boomy says its users have created more than 14mn songs.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, writes in a blog post: Software architectures are not like the architectures of bridges and houses. After a bridge is constructed, it is hard, if not impossible, to change the way it was built. Software is quite different, once we are running our software, we may get insights about our workloads that we did not have when it was designed. And, if we had realized this at the start, and we chose an evolvable architecture, we could change components without impacting the customer experience. My rule of thumb has been that with every order of magnitude of growth you should revisit your architecture, and determine whether it can still support the next order level of growth.

A great example can be found in two insightful blog posts written by Prime Video's engineering teams. The first describes how Thursday Night Football live streaming is built around a distributed workflow architecture. The second is a recent post that dives into the architecture of their stream monitoring tool, and how their experience and analysis drove them to implement it as a monolithic architecture. There is no one-size-fits-all. We always urge our engineers to find the best solution, and no particular architectural style is mandated. If you hire the best engineers, you should trust them to make the best decisions.

I always urge builders to consider the evolution of their systems over time and make sure the foundation is such that you can change and expand them with the minimum number of dependencies. Event-driven architectures (EDA) and microservices are a good match for that. However, if there are a set of services that always contribute to the response, have the exact same scaling and performance requirements, same security vectors, and most importantly, are managed by a single team, it is a worthwhile effort to see if combining them simplifies your architecture.

Evolvable architectures are something that we've taken to heart at Amazon from the very start. Re-evaluating and re-architecting our systems to meet the ever-increasing demands of our customers. You can go all the way back to 1998, when a group of senior engineers penned the Distributed Computing Manifesto, which put the wheels in motion to move Amazon from a monolith to a service-oriented architecture. In the decades since, things have continued to evolve, as we moved to microservices, then microservices on shared infrastructure, and as I spoke about at re:Invent, EDA.

Textbooks giant Pearson is currently taking legal action over the use of its intellectual property to train AI models, chief executive Andy Bird revealed today as the firm laid out its plans for its own artificial intelligence-powered products. From a report: The firm laid out its plans on how it would use AI a week after its share price tumbled by 15% as American rival Chegg said its own business had been hurt by the rise of ChatGPT. Those plans would include AI-powered summaries of Pearson educational videos, to be rolled out this month for Pearson+ members, as well as AI-generated multiple choice questions for areas where a student might need more help. Bird said Pearson had an advantage as its AI products would use Pearson content for training, which he said would make it more reliable. However, he also added that the business was also monitoring the situation regarding other businesses using Pearson content to train its AI. He said Pearson had already sent out a cease-and-desist letter, though did not say who it was addressed to.

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup backed by Google owner Alphabet, on Tuesday disclosed the set of written moral values that it used to train and make safe Claude, its rival to the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. From a report: The moral values guidelines, which Anthropic calls Claude's constitution, draw from several sources, including the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and even Apple's data privacy rules. Anthropic was founded by former executives from Microsoft-backed OpenAI to focus on creating safe AI systems that will not, for example, tell users how to build a weapon or use racially biased language. Co-founder Dario Amodei was one of several AI executives who met with Biden last week to discuss potential dangers of AI.

Most AI chatbot systems rely on getting feedback from real humans during their training to decide what responses might be harmful or offensive. But those systems have a hard time anticipating everything people might ask, so they tend to avoid some potentially contentious topics like politics and race altogether, making them less useful. Anthropic takes a different approach, giving its Open AI competitor Claude a set of written moral values to read and learn from as it makes decisions on how to respond to questions. Those values include "choose the response that most discourages and opposes torture, slavery, cruelty, and inhuman or degrading treatment," Anthropic said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Meta has announced a new open-source AI model that links together multiple streams of data, including text, audio, visual data, temperature, and movement readings. From a report: The model is only a research project at this point, with no immediate consumer or practical applications, but it points to a future of generative AI systems that can create immersive, multisensory experiences and shows that Meta continues to share AI research at a time when rivals like OpenAI and Google have become increasingly secretive. The core concept of the research is linking together multiple types of data into a single multidimensional index (or "embedding space," to use AI parlance). This idea may seem a little abstract, but it's this same concept that underpins the recent boom in generative AI.

Apple is bringing Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to the iPad. Both apps will be available for $4.99 per month or $49 per year on iPad starting on May 23rd. For comparison, buying Logic Pro on a Mac costs $199.99, and buying Final Cut Pro normally costs $299.99. From a report: The video and music editing apps will come with enhancements specifically for iPads. Final Cut Pro, for example, will come with a new jog wheel that's supposed to make the editing process "easier than ever," allowing you to navigate the magnetic timeline, move clips, and perform edits using just your finger and multi-touch gestures. There's also a new feature called Live Drawing that lets you use your Apple Pencil to draw and write directly on top of video content. If you have an iPad Pro with an M2 chip, you can use the Apple Pencil's hover feature to skim and preview footage without even touching the screen.

IBM on Tuesday launched watsonx, a new artificial intelligence and data platform to help companies integrate AI in their business. From a report: The new AI platform launch comes over a decade after IBM's software called Watson got attention for winning the game show Jeopardy. IBM at the time said Watson could "learn" and process human language. But Watson's high cost at the time made it a challenge for companies to use, according to Reuters reporting. Fast forward a decade, chatbot ChatGPT's overnight success is making AI adoption at companies a focus, and IBM is looking to grab new business. This time, the lower cost of implementing the large language AI models means the chances of success are high, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters ahead of the company's annual Think conference.

"When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up an attraction that's very, very different," said Krishna. "The first barrier to create the model is high, but once you've done that, to adapt that model for a hundred or a thousand different tasks is very easy and can be done by a non-expert." Krishna said AI could reduce certain back office jobs at IBM in the coming years. "That doesn't mean the total employment decreases," he said about some media reports talking about IBM pausing hiring for thousands of jobs that AI could replace. "That gives the ability to plow a lot more investment into value-creating activities...We hired more people than were let go because we're hiring into areas where there is a lot more demand from our clients."

A vulnerability in the "Advanced Custom Fields" plugin for WordPress is putting more than two million users at risk of cyberattacks, warns Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad. The Register reports: A warning from Patchstack about the flaw claimed there are more than two million active installs of the Advanced Custom Fields and Advanced Custom Fields Pro versions of the plugins, which are used to give site operators greater control of their content and data, such as edit screens and custom field data. Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad uncovered the vulnerability on February 5, and reported it to Advanced Custom Fields' vendor Delicious Brains, which took over the software last year from developer Elliot Condon. On May 5, a month after a patched version of the plugins was released by Delicious Brains, Patchstack published details of the flaw. It's recommended users update their plugin to at least version 6.1.6.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-30777 and with a CVSS score of 6.1 out of 10 in severity, leaves sites vulnerable to reflected XSS attacks, which involve miscreants injecting malicious code into webpages. The code is then "reflected" back and executed within the browser of a visitor. Essentially, it allows someone to run JavaScript within another person's view of a page, allowing the attacker to do things like steal information from the page, perform actions as the user, and so on. That's a big problem if the visitor is a logged-in administrative user, as their account could be hijacked to take over the website.

"This vulnerability allows any unauthenticated user [to steal] sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by tricking the privileged user to visit the crafted URL path," Patchstack wrote in its report. The outfit added that "this vulnerability could be triggered on a default installation or configuration of Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The XSS also could only be triggered from logged-in users that have access to the Advanced Custom Fields plugin."

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), the New York Times is getting around $100 million from Google over the next three years as part of a deal that allows Google to feature Times content on some of its platforms. Reuters reports: The deal includes the Times' participation in Google News Showcase, a product that pays publishers to feature their content on Google News and some other Google platforms, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the matter. The Times in February announced an expansion of its agreement with Google that included content distribution and subscriptions.

At its annual Google I/O developers conference on Wednesday, Google is planning to announce a number of generative AI updates, including launching a general-use large language model (LLM) called PaLM 2. CNBC reports: According to internal documents about Google I/O viewed by CNBC, the company will unveil PaLM 2, its most recent and advanced LLM. PaLM 2 includes more than 100 languages and has been operating under the internal codename "Unified Language Model." It's also performed a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis. At the event, Google will make announcements on the theme of how AI is "helping people reach their full potential," including "generative experiences" to Bard and Search, the documents show. Pichai will be speaking to a live crowd of developers as he pitches his company's AI advancements.

Google first announced the PaLM language model in April of 2022. In March of this year, the company launched an API for PaLM alongside a number of AI enterprise tools it says will help businesses "generate text, images, code, videos, audio, and more from simple natural language prompts." Last month, Google said its medical LLM called "Med-PaLM 2" can answer medical exam questions at an "expert doctor level" and is accurate 85% of the time.

Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. [...] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.

Windows 11's Settings panel has been seen with a number of adverts in test builds of the OS, in what's becoming a sadly familiar theme for preview builds of late. From a report: As spotted by German tech site Deskmodder, this was flagged up by a respected source for Microsoft leaks, Albacore, on Twitter. Albacore shared some screenshots of the new home page for the Settings app, as uncovered by digging into a Windows 11 preview from the Canary channel (the earliest test builds). The first screen grab (on the left in the above tweet) shows an ad for Microsoft 365 at the top of the panel, telling users what they get with the service and that they can try it for free (for a trial period). Under that, there's a prompt to 'finish setting up your account,' which refers to completing the setup of your Microsoft Account. The other screenshots also have prompts relating to the Microsoft Account, this time urging users to sign into the account, one of which is shown on the Settings home page and another in the Accounts section. In the latter, users are told to 'Sign in to get the most out of Windows.'

Singapore's government is taking the first steps toward codifying a new internet safety law that would grant it wide-ranging powers over content, access and communication online. From a report: The Online Criminal Harms Bill, introduced for a first reading in parliament on Monday, is aimed at cracking down on illicit activities like scams, misinformation, cybercrime drug trafficking and the spread of exploitative images. It is part of a wider "suite of legislation" to protect Singaporeans online, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement. The bill is likely to pass into law without strong opposition, as most proposed legislation does in the city-state's parliament. It would grant the government broad powers to restrict content online: from blocking the communication of certain material or web addresses to removing apps from mobile stores or restricting accounts on social networks. It further advocates a proactive approach to preventing malicious cyber activity, allowing those powers to be used on the suspicion that a given website or account may be used in such acts. The bill also includes a provision for service providers to appeal the government's directives.