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.

Truecaller will soon start making its caller identification service available over WhatsApp and other messaging apps to help users spot potential spam calls over the internet, the company told Reuters on Monday. From a report: The feature, currently in beta phase, will be rolled out globally later in May, Truecaller Chief Executive Alan Mamedi said. Telemarketing and scamming calls have been on the rise in countries like India, where users gets about 17 spam calls per month on average, according to a 2021 report by Truecaller. "Over the last two weeks, we have seen a spike in user reports from India about spam calls over WhatsApp," Mamedi said, noting that telemarketers switching to internet calling was fairly new to the market.

Amid broader venture-capital doldrums, it is boom times for startups touting generative artificial intelligence tech. From a report: Before their startup had customers, a business plan or even a formal name, former Google AI researchers Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani were fielding interest from investors eager to back the next big thing in artificial intelligence. At Google, Ms. Parmar and Mr. Vaswani were among the co-authors of a seminal 2017 paper that helped pave the way for the boom in so-called generative AI. Earlier this year, only weeks after striking out on their own, they raised funds that valued their fledgling company -- now called Essential AI -- at around $50 million, people familiar with the company said. While most of Silicon Valley's venture-capital ecosystem remains in the doldrums, investors this year have been pouring funds into companies like Essential specializing in generative AI systems that can create humanlike conversation, imagery and computer code. Many of the companies getting backing are new and unproven.

Analysts at research firm PitchBook predict that venture investment in generative AI companies will easily be several times last year's level of $4.5 billion. That is driven in part by Microsoft's $10 billion investment in January into OpenAI, the startup behind the wildly popular ChatGPT bot. In comparison, such investment totaled $408 million in 2018, the year OpenAI released the initial version of the language model powering ChatGPT. Entrepreneurs and their backers are hoping generative AI will change business activities from movie production to customer service to grocery delivery. PitchBook estimates the market for such AI applications in enterprise technology alone will rise to $98 billion in 2026 from nearly $43 billion this year. As with the recently ended bull run of broader startup investing, though, investors often are jumping into AI startups even when it isn't clear how they will make a profit -- especially since the computational power required to train AI services can sometimes amount to tens of millions of dollars a year or more. The sudden influx of capital is also encouraging many AI researchers, some without management or operations experience, to start their own companies, adding to competition.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder -- turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine. As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI -- the company behind ChatGPT -- thinks blockchains can help. Altman's crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.

Worldcoin is back again this week with a new launch -- this one poised to be its biggest yet. World App, Worldcoin's crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download. The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era. It's Worldcoin's biggest swing yet to redefine itself in the eyes of consumers.

Slack sees the future: Imagine if every time you hop into a channel, you'll be able to get up to speed on unread Slack messages in one click — whether you're jumping in midway through a project or catching up from being out of the office. In the future, with generative AI built seamlessly into the user experience, conversation summaries will be there when you need them, the moment you start scrolling through a channel.

With AI assistance built natively into Slack's message composer and canvas, a new surface for curating information, Slack GPT could also help you tweak your drafts until the words are just right. In a few clicks, you'll be able to distill content, adjust the tone, and more, right from where you're already writing.
In fact, Slack "previewed generative AI tools on Thursday," reports the Register, "currently under development and bundled under the banner Slack GPT." Customers will be able to use large language models like Anthropic's Claude as well as OpenAI's GPT to instruct the chatbots to perform other tasks, like search or answering questions.

Slack is also working on Workflow Builder — a no-code automation tool that will enable users to add generative prompts to automatically perform tasks for them, like setting up alerts or writing and sharing documents... Other tools, like its forthcoming Einstein GPT app, are aimed at supporting existing Salesforce services in its CRM software. Users of Salesforce Customer 360 data and Data Cloud — like customer service agents, sales reps, or marketers — can access language models to generate leads, write emails, schedule meetings, or draft plans. Einstein GPT will also be able to handle code, so developers can ask chatbots to write short programs or fix bugs.

It's not clear when Slack GPT or Einstein GPT will be generally available. Integration with Anthropic's Claude, however, is available now, whilst integration with ChatGPT is currently in beta. Workflow Builder is scheduled to be released in summer this year.
From Slack's announcement: Say you have a workflow that alerts you when a new lead comes in from Sales Cloud, ensuring sales reps can quickly respond. Imagine if ChatGPT could take your workflow a few steps further, using CRM data from a sales lead to draft a personalized prospecting email for you? Put it in a document, share it in a channel, and every sales rep now has a head start when they follow up on the lead.

A Norwegian company named ENRX "wants to inductively charge electric vehicles with 200 kW while driving on a section of highway in Florida," according to the "electric mobility industry" news site electrive.com.

"A one-mile section of a four-lane highway near Orlando is to be electrified." ENRX has teamed up with the Central Florida Expressway Authority and the Aspire Engineering Research Center for an initiative to build a one-mile (1.6-kilometre) section on a four-lane highway near Orlando that will inductively charge the batteries of moving electric vehicles at 200 kW.

The principle is clear: the electric vehicle batteries are fitted with a special receiver pad and charged as they drive over the coils embedded in the road. In the process, the energy is transferred from these coils to the receiver pad mounted on the vehicle floor, which according to ENRX should provide "a safe, wireless power supply" even at motorway speeds. Advantages of the 'Next Generation Electric Roadway system' mentioned include interoperability, different output power levels for different vehicle and battery types, or user-defined distance between the ground and the vehicle. In addition, the system (on the infrastructure side) is supposed to be maintenance-free after installation...

"When you can charge while driving, range anxiety and frequent charging stops will be a thing of the past," says ENRX CEO Bjørn Eldar Petersen... "Dynamic charging can reduce the need for large battery capacities, allowing cars to be equipped with lighter and more affordable battery packs."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader aduxorth for sharing the news.

Slashdot reader indominabledemon shared this article from TechSpot: Games today use highly-detailed textures that can quickly fill the frame buffer on many graphics cards, leading to stuttering and game crashes in recent AAA titles for many gamers... [T]he most promising development in this direction so far comes from Nvidia — neural texture compression could reduce system requirements for future AAA titles, at least when it comes to VRAM and storage.... In a research paper published this week, the company details a new algorithm for texture compression that is supposedly better than both traditional block compression (BC) methods as well as other advanced compression techniques such as AVIF and JPEG-XL.

The new algorithm is simply called neural texture compression (NTC), and as the name suggests it uses a neural network designed specifically for material textures. To make this fast enough for practical use, Nvidia researchers built several small neural networks optimized for each material... [T]extures compressed with NTC preserve a lot more detail while also being significantly smaller than even these same textures compressed with BC techniques to a quarter of the original resolution... Researchers explain the idea behind their approach is to compress all these maps along with their mipmap chain into a single file, and then have them be decompressed in real time with the same random access as traditional block texture compression...

However, NTC does have some limitations that may limit its appeal. First, as with any lossy compression, it can introduce visual degradation at low bitrates. Researchers observed mild blurring, the removal of fine details, color banding, color shifts, and features leaking between texture channels. Furthermore, game artists won't be able to optimize textures in all the same ways they do today, for instance, by lowering the resolution of certain texture maps for less important objects or NPCs. Nvidia says all maps need to be the same size before compression, which is bound to complicate workflows. This sounds even worse when you consider that the benefits of NTC don't apply at larger camera distances.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantages of NTC have to do with texture filtering. As we've seen with technologies like DLSS, there is potential for image flickering and other visual artifacts when using textures compressed through NTC. And while games can utilize anisotropic filtering to improve the appearance of textures in the distance at a minimal performance cost, the same isn't possible with Nvidia's NTC at this point.

Supported by conversations with nearly a dozen former employees, 9to5Mac details the downfall of Brydge -- "a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions. As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company's most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well. Those former Brydge employees largely attribute the company's failure to mismanagement during growth, misleading statements from its two co-CEOs, and an overall hostile working environment that led to a high turnover rate.

Last year, BMW announced plans to charge a $18 per month subscription for heated seats. Now, Mercedes is considering making better EV engine performance an added subscription surcharge. "Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle owners in North America who want a little more power and speed can now buy 60 horsepower for just $60 a month or, on other models, 80 horsepower for $90 a month," reports CNN. "They won't have to visit a Mercedes dealer to get the upgrade either, or even leave their own driveway. The added power, which will provide a nearly one second decrease in zero-to-60 acceleration, will be available through an over-the-air software patch." Techdirt reports: If you don't want to pay monthly, Mercedes will also let you pay a one time flat fee (usually several thousand dollars) to remove the artificial restrictions they've imposed on your engine. That's, of course, creating additional upward pricing funnel efforts on top of the industry's existing efforts to upsell you on a rotating crop of trims, tiers, and options you probably didn't want.

It's not really clear that regulators have any interest in cracking down on charging dumb people extra for something they already owned and paid for. After all, ripping off gullible consumers is effectively now considered little more than creative marketing by a notable segment of government "leaders" (see: regulatory apathy over misleading hidden fees in everything from hotels to cable TV).

Gmail is starting to show more ads on mobile devices and the web. "Starting on mobile, we've observed that Google is now showing ads within your inbox's 'Updates' filter," reports 9to5Google. "That automatic filter is designed to capture emails regarding orders, select promotions, billing statements, and more. Now, Gmail is starting to show two ads at the top of the 'Updates' tab, just like it does on the other tabs." From the report: Beyond that, it also appears that Gmail is starting to mix its ads on desktop throughout the list of emails under Gmail tabs -- they're at least not showing in the main inbox. Dozens of reports on Twitter show the change just in the past two days, though we haven't been able to replicate it in our own inbox. Some users also report seeing more ads in general, instead of the two that Google would typically show.

There doesn't appear to be any new setting to change the placement of ads in the inbox lists, and it's not even clear if this is a change that Google is rolling out to all users. In any case, though, the overwhelming opinion seems to be negative regarding the change -- which is fully understandable.

AI startup Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research, ServiceNow's R&D division, have released StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems along the lines of GitHub's Copilot. From a report: Code-generating systems like DeepMind's AlphaCode; Amazon's CodeWhisperer; and OpenAI's Codex, which powers Copilot, provide a tantalizing glimpse at what's possible with AI within the realm of computer programming. Assuming the ethical, technical and legal issues are someday ironed out (and AI-powered coding tools don't cause more bugs and security exploits than they solve), they could cut development costs substantially while allowing coders to focus on more creative tasks.

According to a study from the University of Cambridge, at least half of developers' efforts are spent debugging and not actively programming, which costs the software industry an estimated $312 billion per year. But so far, only a handful of code-generating AI systems have been made freely available to the public -- reflecting the commercial incentives of the organizations building them (see: Replit). StarCoder, which by contrast is licensed to allow for royalty-free use by anyone, including corporations, was trained on over 80 programming languages as well as text from GitHub repositories, including documentation and programming notebooks. StarCoder integrates with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code code editor and, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, can follow basic instructions (e.g., "create an app UI") and answer questions about code.

Forget your hook, line and sinker. An Israeli foodtech company says it has 3D printed the first ever ready-to-cook fish fillet using animal cells cultivated and grown in a laboratory. From a report: Lab-grown beef and chicken have drawn attention as a way to sidestep the environmental toll of farming and tackle concerns over animal welfare, but few companies have forayed into seafood. Israel's Steakholder Foods has now partnered with Singapore-based Umami Meats to make fish fillets without the need to stalk dwindling fish populations. Umami Meats extracts cells - for now from grouper - and grows them into muscle and fat. Steakholder Foods then adds them to a 'bio-ink' suited for special 3D printers. The outcome: a narrow fillet that mimics the properties of sea-caught fish.

Umami hopes to bring its first products to market next year, starting in Singapore and then, pending regulation, countries like the United States and Japan. Cell cultivation alone is still too expensive to match the cost of traditional seafood, so for now the fish cells are diluted with plant-based ingredients in the bio-ink. "As time goes by, the complexity and level of these products will be higher, and the prices linked to producing them will decrease," said Arik Kaufman, the chief executive of Steakholder Foods.

Sonos and Alphabet's Google will face off in a San Francisco federal trial on Monday over claims that Google copied Sonos' patented smart-speaker technology in wireless audio devices like Google Home and Chromecast Audio. From a report: The case is part of a sprawling intellectual property dispute between the former business partners that includes other lawsuits in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Sonos has asked the court for $90 million in damages from Google in the San Francisco case, down from $3 billion after U.S. District Judge William Alsup narrowed the case, according to a Google court filing. Sonos alleges Google infringed two of its patents related to multi-room wireless audio. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the case relates to "some very specific features that are not commonly used," and that Sonos "mischaracterized our partnership and technology."

Eric Berger writes via Ars Technica: A consortium of nearly every major European satellite company announced Tuesday that it plans to bid for a proposed satellite constellation to provide global communications. Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from low-Earth orbit similar to what SpaceX's Starlink offers. The bid, which includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, SES, and Thales Alenia Space, comes in response to a request by the European Union for help in constructing a sovereign constellation to provide secure communications for government services, including military applications.

European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton announced the continent's plans for this constellation -- known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, or IRIS^2 -- last November. The European Union will provide 2.4 billion euro, with additional contributions expected from the European Space Agency and private investments. "IRIS^2 establishes space as a vector of our European autonomy, a vector of connectivity and a vector of resilience," Breton said at the time. "It heightens Europe's role as a true space power. With a clear ambition and sense of direction."

The partnership announced Tuesday, which also includes Deutsche Telekom, Hispasat, OHB, Orange, Hisdesat, and Telespazio, will aim to create a state-of-the-art satellite constellation based on a multi-orbit architecture. Although it is top-heavy with established industry players, the partnership said it will encourage startups in the European space sector to join the coalition. This is in response to a desire by Breton to broaden the European commercial space sector. At present, Europe estimates the cost of this constellation at about 6 billion euro and desires it to be ready to provide global coverage by the year 2027.

Internet users are turning to VPN services as a means to circumvent Utah's new law requiring porn sites to verify users' ages. The spike in VPN searches appears to be directly related to Pornhub's decision on Tuesday to completely disable its websites for people living in the state. TechRadar reports: Google searches for virtual private networks (VPNs) have been skyrocketing since, with a peak registered on May 3, the day the new law came into force. By downloading a VPN service, pornography fans will be able to keep accessing Pornhub and similar sites with ease. That's because a virtual private network is security software able to spoof users' IP address (digital location and device identifier). Hence a surge of interest in VPNs across Utah as people will simply need to connect to a server located in a US state or foreign country where the restriction isn't yet enforced.

"Utah's age-verification law shows a worrying trend to further restrict digital freedoms and disregard data privacy across the US," said a spokesperson of secure VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA). "Private Internet Access is a long-time advocate of greater digital privacy, and we urge lawmakers to consider other ways of protecting children online, including education, guidance from parents, and open conversations about safe internet usage, rather than relying on increasingly intrusive digital regulations which disregard people's privacy and online freedom." You can see the spike in "virtual private network" searches via Google Trends.

"Search queries for VPN were at peak popularity in Utah just before 4 a.m. EST Tuesday, according to the trends data," notes Newsweek. "Other related queries in the past week include searches for VPN extensions like Hola and Fox Speed."

Following the announcement of the bill in March, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele signed a law today eliminating income, property, capital gains, and other tariffs on technology innovations. Watcher Guru reports: The announcement reinforces El Salvador's perspective as a haven for technology development. Additionally, Bukele stated that the new act protects "technology innovations, software and app programming, AI, computer, and communications hardware manufacturing."

The Innovations and Technology Manufacturing Incentives Act will likely attract tech developments to the country. Moreover, the elimination of taxes presents an economic benefit to a host of companies. Conversely, El Salvador continues to maintain its commitment to a variety of tech innovations that are being developed.

Waymo is doubling its commercial robotaxi service area in the Phoenix metro area to include Scottsdale, nearly all of Tempe and larger sections of Chandler and Mesa. The updated service area is 180 square miles, or about one-third of the 517-square-mile Phoenix metro area. "Importantly, it connects downtown to Arizona State University in Tempe and other East Valley suburbs," adds TechCrunch. From the report: The former Google self-driving project under Alphabet is also adding a second location that accesses the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Riders can already get to the airport by taking a Waymo robotaxi to the 44th Street Phoenix SkyTrain Station, which has frequent round-the-clock trains to the main terminals. Waymo robotaxis will now pick up and drop off passengers at the new 24th Street PHX SkyTrain Station.

A larger service area, particularly one that allows for riders to take driverless Waymo vehicles from one suburb to downtown or to the airport, is critical for the company to grow its business and generate more revenue. The expansion will also help the company scale beyond the 10,000 autonomous trips that public riders take each week in Phoenix and San Francisco combined, Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a media briefing. Panigrahi did not disclose what percentage of those rides were in Phoenix, where it can charge. "We're clearly excited about the trajectory we're going to be on and we believe we can hit 10x of that scale by next summer, roughly," Panigrahi said.

While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not. The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media -- and has since removed them. From a report: The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021. But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off. The faces of the protesters and police are smoothed-off and warped, giving the image a dystopian aura. The tricolour carried by the protester has the right colours -- red, yellow and blue -- but in the wrong order, and the police uniform is outdated.

Amnesty and other observers have documented hundreds of cases of human rights abuses committed by Colombian police during the wave of unrest in 2021, among them violence, sexual harassment and torture. Their research has raised awareness of the heavy-handedness of Colombian police and contributed to the growing acceptance of the need for reform. But photojournalists and media scholars warned that the use of AI-generated images could undermine Amnesty's own work and feed conspiracy theories.