Space

Virgin Galactic Delays Development of Ship Capable of Higher Flight Rate 26

An anonymous reader shares a report: Space tourism company Virgin Galactic released its third-quarter financial results on Thursday. As one might imagine of a spaceflight company that has not flown since June 2021, the financials are pretty disastrous. The company reported revenue of less than $1 million against losses of more than $146 million. After a long period of downtime, Virgin Galactic officials said the company is close to completing "modifications" of its VMS Eve carrier aircraft and VSS Unity spacecraft.

The company expects to complete a glide flight of Unity, which is released from Eve at altitude, in early 2023. After that point, the company will conduct a powered test flight, likely with its own employees on board, before a research flight for the Italian Air Force. And after that, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said, the company remains on track to begin flying commercial passengers -- people who bought their seats, some more than a decade ago -- in the second quarter of 2023. As with most schedules in spaceflight, that timeline seems pretty optimistic.

This is all well and good, but the return of VSS Unity will not bring Virgin Galactic close to profitability. At an optimal cadence, the company believes it can fly Eve and Unity once a month. This would still leave the company hundreds of millions of dollars in the red on an annual basis. For this reason, the company has always been betting its future on iterations of its spaceship capable of higher flight rates. The ultimate goal is a "Delta" class of spaceship with a turnaround time of one week. With a fleet of Delta ships, Colglazier has told investors, the company can meet a profitable flight rate of 400 missions a year. But the Delta ships are unlikely to be ready for test flights before at least 2025, and commercial service would not begin until a year after that.
United Kingdom

UK Parliament Group Starts NFT Inquiry as Crypto Scrutiny Grows (bloomberg.com) 13

The UK parliament started an inquiry into nonfungible tokens, the digital collectibles for which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been a champion. From a report: The Digital, Culture, Media & Sport committee in the House of Commons announced the initiative in a statement on Friday, adding that it will also study the wider blockchain technology that underpins NFTs. "MPs are expected to consider whether NFT investors, especially vulnerable speculators, are put at risk by the market," the DCMS committee said in the statement. "The inquiry may also look into the wider benefits that NFTs and the blockchain could provide the UK economy." NFTs rose into public consciousness in 2021, driven by the success of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection that became a hit with celebrities. But interest in NFTs has dried up this year as crypto assets crashed, with trading tumbling more than 95% between January and September by one estimate.
Piracy

US Authorities Seize Z-Library Domain Names 83

TorrentFreak reports: Several domains related to popular ebook repository Z-Library became inaccessible a few hours ago. DNS records and other information suggest that the shadow library was targeted by the Postal Inspection Service, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice. Confusingly, Z-Library says that the downtime is linked to a hosting issue.
Graphics

AMD Unveils RDNA 3-Based Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT Graphics Cards (hothardware.com) 50

Slashdot readers MojoKid and williamyf share the news of AMD's two new high-end graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. "Priced at $999 and $899 respectively and available in December this year, the new Radeon cards are expected to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090," writes MojoKid. HotHardware reports: AMD states that its goals for RDNA 3 are to accelerate performance-per-watt leadership and to raise the bar for high resolution and high framerate gaming. AMD has turned to a chiplet architecture to accomplish these goals, a first for gaming GPUs. The chiplet complexes consist of a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD), which is flanked top and bottom by up to six 6nm memory and cache dice (MCD). The RX 7900 XTX uses the full complement of 6 MCDs which aggregates as a 384-bit memory bus (64-bit per die) with GDDR6 memory offering 20Gbps of throughput. The RX 7900 XT uses 5 MCDs with a corresponding 320-bit bus.

All of this increased bandwidth and resources translates to what AMD claims is up to a 1.7X uplift in performance for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX versus its previous gen Radeon RX 6950 XT card in high resolution gaming. This could put the card within striking distance of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 possibly, but it's hard to say until cards ship to independent reviewers for testing. Regardless, gamers will appreciate the RX 7900 XTX's price point versus NVIDIA's $1600 top-end beast.

Social Networks

Instagram Jumps Into NFTs With Minting and Selling Feature (axios.com) 19

Meta's Instagram will soon allow artists to create and sell their own NFTs both right on the social media platform and off it. Axios reports: IG's feature will roll out to a small group of select creators in the U.S. to start, according to Meta. The first creators tapped to test the feature include photographer Isaac âoeDriftâ Wright, known as DrifterShoots, and artist Amber Vittoria. Meta won't charge fees for posting or sharing an NFT on IG, though, app store fees still apply. Separately, there will be a "professional mode" for Facebook profiles for creators to build a social media presence separate from their personal one. Artist royalties appear to be a part of the plan.

Minting or the creating of NFTs on IG will start on Polygon, a boon for the layer-2 blockchain (a separate blockchain built on top of Ethereum) given the potential onboarding of IG's billion active users. The price of Polygon's token MATIC jumped 17% from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning, boosted by IG news but also, because JPMorgan conducted its first live DeFi trade using that blockchain. The platform is adding support for Solana blockchain and Phantom wallet with the latest feature update, adding them to the list of already-supported wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Dapper Wallet, Rainbow and Trust Wallet. Ethereum and Flow blockchains are already supported. Info for selected collections with OpenSea metadata, like collection name and description, will show up on IG.

The Courts

'The Babylon Bee' Joins 'The Onion' In Decrying Law That Makes Parody a Felony (reason.com) 198

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reason Magazine: The Babylon Bee this week joined The Onion in urging the Supreme Court to defend the First Amendment against an Ohio law that makes parody a felony. The case, which the Institute for Justice is asking the Court to take up, involves Parma resident Anthony Novak, who in 2016 was prosecuted for violating a state law against using a computer to "disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of any police, fire, educational, commercial, or governmental operations." Novak supposedly did that by creating a parody of the Parma Police Department's Facebook page. [...]

For obvious reasons, the right-leaning Bee, like the left-leaning Onion, is alarmed by the implication that people have no recourse against cops who arrest them for making fun of government agencies. "The Bee is serving a brutal life sentence in Twitter jail as we speak," says its amicus brief (PDF) in Novak v. City of Parma. "Its writers would very much like to avoid a consecutive sentence in a government-run facility." The premise of Novak's prosecution was that he had disrupted police operations by prompting calls about his parody to the department's nonemergency line. "Left in the hands of the Sixth Circuit and the Parma PD (and other like-minded law enforcement), the speech-stifling Ohio statute used to go after Mr. Novak empowers state officials to search, arrest, jail, and prosecute parodists without fear of ever being held accountable," the Bee says. "The upshot for The Bee is that, in Ohio at least, its writers could be jailed for many, if not most, of the articles The Bee publishes, provided that someone contacted law enforcement -- or another entity 'protected' by [Ohio's law] -- to tell them that the articles exist."

Consider the March 3 Bee story headlined "Donut Sales Surge as Police Departments Re-Funded." If someone "had called the Parma Police Department to let them know that The Bee had published the article," the brief suggests, the publication "could have been charged with a felony, its offices searched, and its writers arrested and jailed for days, all without consequence for the parties doing the charging, arresting, jailing, and searching." Likewise if an officer's "passive-aggressive brother-in-law had forwarded the article" to the cop's official email address, thereby "interrupt[ing]" his work. Given the broad wording of Ohio's law, which refers to "governmental operations" generally, Bee articles about federal agencies, such as its August 12 report on the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago, also could be treated as grounds for arrest. "Had a caller contacted the FBI field office in Cleveland or Cincinnati" to "express outrage over the suspicious timing of the FBI's raid on Melania Trump's Mar-a-Lago closet and Attorney General Garland's acquisition of a haute couture wardrobe," the Bee notes, that could be the basis for a felony charge in Ohio.
On the First Amendment issues raised by this case, both The Onion and The Babylon Bee see eye to eye.

"The Onion may be staffed by socialist wackos, but in their brief defending parody to this Court, they hit it out of the park," the Bee says. "Parody has a unique capacity to speak truth to power and to cut its subjects down to size. Its continued protection under the First Amendment is crucial to preserving the right of citizens to effectively criticize the government."
Transportation

Apple Supplier Foxconn Partners With Saudi Wealth Fund To Build EVs (reuters.com) 16

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth said on Thursday it will make electric cars in the kingdom under a joint venture with Apple supplier Foxconn as part of a push to build new industries and lessen dependence on oil. Reuters reports: Ceer "is the first Saudi automotive brand to produce electric vehicles in Saudi Arabia, and will design, manufacture and sell a range of vehicles for consumers in Saudi Arabia and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, including sedans and sports utility vehicles," PIF said in a statement. PIF said its cars would be available in 2025, adding Ceer would draw more than $150 million in foreign direct investment, create up to 30,000 direct and indirect jobs and is projected to contribute $8 billion to the kingdom's GDP by 2034.

The joint venture "will license component technology from BMW for use in the vehicle development process," PIF said in a statement. "Foxconn will develop the electrical architecture of the vehicles, resulting in a portfolio of products that will lead in the areas of infotainment, connectivity and autonomous driving technologies," it added.

Businesses

A Host of Tech Companies, Including Coinbase, Robinhood, Lyft, and Stripe, Announce Hiring Freezes and Job Cuts (nytimes.com) 61

The macro story unfolding today is all the layoffs taking place in the tech industry. "Tech giants including Meta and Amazon have been slowing down their hiring for months, while smaller tech companies such as Robinhood and Coinbase have announced layoffs," reports the New York Times. "But rarely have so many job cuts and hiring freezes in the industry been disclosed on the same day." From the report: The technology industry's slowdown came into even sharper relief on Thursday as Amazon publicly said it had paused hiring for its corporate work force and several other technology companies announced job cuts. [...] At the same time, Lyft said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. [...] Tech companies have led the way for the U.S. economy over the past decade, lifting the stock market during the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic. But in recent weeks, many of the largest firms reported financial results that suggested they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters, soaring inflation and rising interest rates.

Social media companies in particular have been grappling with a pullback in digital advertising over the last few months. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last week that its head count would remain "roughly flat" through the end of next year. The company plans to shrink some teams and hire only for high-priority areas. Snap, Snapchat's parent company, laid off 20 percent of its employees in August, blaming challenging macroeconomic conditions. Last week, Microsoft told investors that new hires in this quarter "should be minimal." Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also said that in this quarter it would hire fewer than half the number of people it added in the third quarter.

More layoffs at tech companies are in the works. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, has ordered cuts across the company, which employs about 7,500 people. Workers at Twitter have started circulating a "Layoff Guide" with tips on how to handle being laid off. On Thursday, Lyft said it had decided on layoffs in the face of "a probable recession sometime in the next year." All teams will be affected, said Logan Green and John Zimmer, the company's founders, in an email to employees. Over the summer, Lyft cut 2 percent of its employees, mostly as a result of shutting down its car rental business, and froze hiring. But the company still has "to become leaner," its founders said. It is "not immune to the realities of inflation and a slowing economy," which have led to increasing ride-share insurance costs. Lyft also said it planned to sell its first-party vehicle service business and expected employees on that team to be offered jobs at the acquiring company.

Microsoft

Microsoft Mulls Cheap PCs Supported by Ads, Subs (theregister.com) 109

The Register: A number of job postings -- including this now-closed ad from late September for a principal software engineering manager -- are looking for engineers and others to become part of the "newly formed Windows Incubation team" whose mission is to "build a new direction for Windows in a cloud first world."

The lofty goal is to "move Windows to a place that combines the benefits of the cloud and Microsoft 365 to offer more compute resources on demand and creates a hybrid app model that spans from on-premises to the cloud." According to the ad, it also includes "building a Web-based shell with direct integration with Windows 365." Included in the possible models are low-cost PCs available via subscriptions, with advertising helping to offset some of the costs. (Also mentioned in the job are direct-to-cloud devices.)

Communications

Vonage Will Pay $100 Million to Settle FTC Allegations of Trapping Consumers in Subscriptions (wsj.com) 23

Ericsson subsidiary Vonage will pay $100 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it created a web of obstacles for its customers to cancel the internet-based telephone service and charged unexpected termination fees. From a report: The agreement, filed in a federal court Thursday, represents the largest settlement of its kind in the FTC's enforcement push against companies that allegedly throw up high hurdles to customers seeking to cancel subscriptions or services. New Jersey-based Vonage will be required to obtain consumers' express consent for services and simplify its cancelation process. The cost of a subscription ranged from $5 to $50 a month for consumers, and potentially thousands a month for businesses, the FTC said. The commission said it received hundreds of complaints from consumers about Vonage's tactics.
Australia

Remote Indigenous Community Pioneers 3D-printed Homes Set To Change Rural Lives (theguardian.com) 74

maxcelcat writes: Indigenous Australians living in remote areas have had a housing crisis for decades now. One community is addressing this by having houses created by Luyten, printed with concrete, built in their settlement. Traditional housing construction a long way from major urban centres is extraordinarily expensive and complicated. Maintenance is also a huge issue, many plumbers, electricians etc. in northern Australia find having their own aircraft is the only way to get around. Which of course adds to the costs. Hopefully this turns out to be a workable solution.
The Internet

Why Egypt Became One of the Biggest Chokepoints for Internet Cables 25

When underwater cables congregate in one place, things get tricky. From a report: Look at Egypt on a map of the world's subsea Internet cables and it immediately becomes clear why Internet experts have been concerned about the area for years. The 16 cables in the area are concentrated through the Red Sea and touch land in Egypt, where they make a 100-mile journey across the country to reach the Mediterranean Sea. (Cable maps don't show the exact locations of cables.) It has been estimated that around 17 percent of the world's Internet traffic travels along these cables and passes through Egypt. Alan Mauldin, the research director of telecoms market research firm TeleGeography, says last year the region had 178 terabits of capacity, or 178,000,000Mbps -- the US has median home Internet speeds of 167Mbps.

Egypt has become one of the Internet's most prominent chokepoints for a few reasons, says Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik. Primarily, its geography contributes to the concentration of cables in the area. Passing through the Red Sea and across Egypt is the shortest (mostly) underwater route between Asia and Europe. While some intercontinental Internet cables travel across land, it is generally safer for them to be placed at the bottom of the sea where it is harder for them to be disrupted or snooped upon. Going through Egypt is one of the only practical routes available. To the south, cables that pass around Africa are longer; while to the north, only one cable (the Polar Express) travels above Russia. "Every time someone tries to draw up an alternative route, you end up going through Syria or Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan -- all these places have a lot of issues," Madory says. The JADI cable system that bypassed Egypt was shut down due to Syria's civil war, Madory says, and it has not been reactivated. In March this year, another cable avoiding Egypt was severed as a consequence of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Google

Google's Building Package Tracking Right Into Your Gmail Inbox (theverge.com) 36

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google is adding package tracking features to Gmail, which should make it easier to see where your orders are at a glance while you scroll through your emails. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company says you'll start seeing "a simple, helpful view of your package tracking and delivery information right in your inbox" in the next few weeks.

Gmail will show you the delivery date on the list item for any shipping email, making it so you don't have to actually open the email and click a tracking link to figure out when you should expect the package. If you do go into the email, though, you'll see a card with more detailed info. At the moment, it seems as if the feature will be opt-in -- when it becomes available, you'll be able to turn it on from a notification that shows up in your inbox or through settings. Google says Gmail will also be able to notify you when a package has been delayed and bring the order email to the top of your inbox. That feature seems to be coming later, though, as the post says it'll roll out "in the coming months."
Amazon products will not be compatible with the feature because their notification emails don't include tracking information. They also don't disclose what products have shipped.

A Google spokesperson told The Verge that the feature will be available "for participating merchants" and that "if a tracking number is not included in the merchant's order email, the package tracking feature won't be available."
AI

Google's Text-To-Image AI Model Imagen Is Getting Its First (Very Limited) Public Outing (theverge.com) 22

Google's text-to-image AI system, Imagen, is being added to the company's AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology. The Verge reports: AI Test Kitchen was launched earlier this year as a way for Google to beta test various AI systems. Currently, the app offers a few different ways to interact with Google's text model LaMDA (yes, the same one that the engineer thought was sentient), and the company will soon be adding similarly constrained Imagen requests as part of what it calls a "season two" update to the app. In short, there'll be two ways to interact with Imagen, which Google demoed to The Verge ahead of the announcement today: "City Dreamer" and "Wobble."

In City Dreamer, users can ask the model to generate elements from a city designed around a theme of their choice -- say, pumpkins, denim, or the color blerg. Imagen creates sample buildings and plots (a town square, an apartment block, an airport, and so on), with all the designs appearing as isometric models similar to what you'd see in SimCity. In Wobble, you create a little monster. You can choose what it's made out of (clay, felt, marzipan, rubber) and then dress it in the clothing of your choice. The model generates your monster, gives it a name, and then you can sort of poke and prod the thing to make it "dance." Again, the model's output is constrained to a very specific aesthetic, which, to my mind, looks like a cross between Pixar's designs for Monsters, Inc. and the character creator feature in Spore. (Someone on the AI team must be a Will Wright fan.) These interactions are extremely constrained compared to other text-to-image models, and users can't just request anything they'd like. That's intentional on Google's part, though. As Josh Woodward, senior director of product management at Google, explained to The Verge, the whole point of AI Test Kitchen is to a) get feedback from the public on these AI systems and b) find out more about how people will break them.

Google wouldn't share any data on how many people are actually using AI Test Kitchen ("We didn't set out to make this a billion user Google app," says Woodward) but says the feedback it's getting is invaluable. "Engagement is way above our expectations," says Woodward. "It's a very active, opinionated group of users." He notes the app has been useful in reaching "certain types of folks -- researchers, policymakers" who can use it to better understand the limitations and capabilities of state-of-the-art AI models. Still, the big question is whether Google will want to push these models to a wider public and, if so, what form will that take? Already, the company's rivals, OpenAI and Stability AI, are rushing to commercialize text-to-image models. Will Google ever feel its systems are safe enough to take out of the AI Test Kitchen and serve up to its users?

Social Networks

Mastodon Gained 70,000 Users After Musk's Twitter Takeover (theguardian.com) 154

"More than 70,000 users joined Mastodon on the day after Musk's Twitter takeover announcement," writes Slashdot reader votsalo. "Mastodon is a six-year-old decentralized social media platform that uses 'federated' servers." The Guardian's Wilfred Chan writes: I joined Mastodon this week, and it took a few hours just to master its new vocabulary. Some of it is a little silly-sounding: instead of tweets, you have "toots". Things get trickier after that. Mastodon is not a single website but a network of thousands of websites called "instances", also called servers. These servers are "federated", which means they are run by different entities but can still communicate with each other without needing to go through a central system. And the space they all exist in is called the "fediverse," which some savvy tooters call "the Fedi."

When you sign up for Mastodon, the first thing you do is choose a server. There are general-purpose ones, such as mastodon.social, as well as ones aimed at interest groups, such as kpop.social or linuxrocks.online. There are also joke servers like dolphin.town, where the only thing users are allowed to post is the letter "e". The server becomes part of your username (for example, wilfred@kpop.social), and the toots you see on your feed are toots from your server-mates, rather than from the entire fediverse. But you're also free to toot at people from other servers and even "boost" their public toots on to your feed.

That's how Mastodon creates a unified global experience without being controlled by one entity, said Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's Germany-based founder and lead developer. "The servers are service providers, like Hotmail and Gmail are for email. It doesn't mean that the different servers are isolated from each other, like old school forums," he said. "Having just one account allows you to follow and interact with anyone in this global decentralized social network." But Mastodon's model comes with its own risks. If the server you join disappears, you could lose everything, just like if your email provider shut down. A Mastodon server admin also has ultimate control over everything you do: if for some reason the owner of kpop.social doesn't like that I boosted a toot from dolphin.town, they could remove it or even "defederate" the server, which would block all dolphin toots from the k-pop server completely. A server admin could also snoop on my private toots if they wanted to -- or delete my account for any reason.
While Mastadon's 70,000 jump in users sounds impressive, it's "still a drop in a bucket compared with Twitter's reported 450 million daily active users," says Chan. The decentralized software also remains difficult for many people to use.

According to TechCrunch, Mastadon says it has "gained 123,562 new users as of October 27, 2022 and now has 528,607 active users on the network as of October 31, 2022."
Security

Google Ad For GIMP.org Served Info-Stealing Malware Via Lookalike (bleepingcomputer.com) 19

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer, written by Ax Sharma: Searching for 'GIMP' on Google as recently as last week would show visitors an ad for 'GIMP.org,' the official website of the well known graphics editor, GNU Image Manipulation Program. This ad would appear to be legitimate as it'd state 'GIMP.org' as the destination domain. But clicking on it drove visitors to a lookalike phishing website that provided them with a 700 MB executable disguised as GIMP which, in reality, was malware.

Reddit user ZachIngram04 earlier shared the development stating that the ad previously took users to a Dropbox URL to serve malware, but was soon "replaced with an even more malicious one" which employed a fake replica website 'gilimp.org' to serve malware. BleepingCompuer observed another domain 'gimp.monster' related to this campaign. To pass off the trojanized executable as GIMP in a believable manner to the user, the threat actor artificially inflated the malware, that is otherwise under 5 MB in size, to 700 MB by a simple technique known as binary padding.
It still isn't clear if this instance was a slip up caused by a potential bug in Google Ad Manager that allowed malvertising.
IT

Hawaii is About To Launch One of the Nation's Most Ambitious Tech Waste Recycling Programs (hawaiinewsnow.com) 40

Hawaii is implementing one of the most ambitious electronic waste recycling plans in the country, but some Hawaii retailers are afraid it will mean higher prices and less selection. From a report: Ironically, Hawaii has no ability to recycle electronic devices. Instead, the material has to be collected and shipped to processing centers elsewhere. The goal of the new law is to have manufacturers collect and ship out more and more of the used-up products. But industry lobbyist Walter Alcorn, with the Consumer Technology Association, said the law sets goals that cannot be met. "On the industry side, it's been a scramble." Alcorn said. "Particularly for the computer and printer manufacturers that previously did not have to have this type of a program."

State Rep. Nicole Lowen, chair of the Energy and Environmental Protection Committee, was among the lead advocates for the law. She said putting the full responsibility on the manufacturers will incentivize them to pay more attention to the waste their industry is generating. "We are pushing them to rethink the design packaging, distribution systems of their products and create more efficiency, for the reuse and recycling of those products or the materials that they contain," Lowen said. The law required 49 manufacturers, from Apple to Samsung, to report how much product has been shipped in by weight and how they would set up systems to collect discarded devices and ship them to recycling locations. There are none in Hawaii so all the products would have to be shipped out.

AI

Google's New Prototype AI Tool Does the Writing For You (theverge.com) 22

An anonymous reader shares a report: Remember that time Google showed off its artificial intelligence prowess by demoing conversations with Pluto and a paper airplane? That was powered by LaMDA, one of Google's latest-generation conversational AI models. Now, Google's using LaMDA to build Wordcraft, a prototype writing tool that can help creative writers craft new stories. AI-powered writing tools aren't new. Chances are you've heard of Grammarly or copywriting tools like Jasper. What makes Wordcraft a bit different is that it's framed as a means to help create fictional work. Google describes it as a sort of "text editor with purpose" built into a web-based word processor. Users can prompt Wordcraft to rewrite phrases or direct it to make a sentence funnier. It can also describe objects if asked or generate prompts. In a nutshell, it's sort of like wrapping an editor and writing partner into a single AI tool.

To test Wordcraft, Google created a workshop with 13 professional writers to see how well the prototype worked. While the writers seemed to appreciate Wordcraft as a way to spark new ideas, they unanimously agreed the tool wasn't going to replace authors anytime soon. For starters, the tool wasn't great at sticking to a narrative style and produced average or cliched writing. It also stuck to tried-and-true tropes while also steering clear of "mean" characters. "One clear finding was that using LaMDA to write full stories is a dead end. It's a much more effective tool when it's used to add spice," Douglas Eck, senior research director at Google Research, said at the AI@ event. Obviously, any prototype has kinks to work out. It's also hard to fully grasp what using an AI-powered creative writing tool is like. So I was curious to see a demo of it firsthand at Google's AI@ event.

Communications

T-Mobile Will Start Charging a $35 Fee on All New Activations and Upgrades (engadget.com) 59

T-Mobile may be joining rivals Verizon and AT&T by introducing an $35 charge for all new postpaid activations and upgrades, according to The T-Mo Report and some Redditors. Engadget: According to T-Mobile internal documents, it's introducing a "Device Connection Charge" for "all activations and upgrades for mobile, Beyond the Smartphone and broadband devices." Before, the Uncarrier charged activation fees only if you received in-store customer support for new activations, with online orders exempt. Now, all new postpaid activations are charged, whether or not you were assisted. This includes updating to a new device, adding a Bring-Your-Own-Device line, or ordering a Home Internet line, according to The T-Mo Report. T-Mobile has always tried to separate itself from regular telecoms, but charging customers for essentially nothing doesn't sound very Uncarrier-like, if the reports are accurate. And you can't take your business to Sprint, as it no longer exists thanks to its merger with T-Mobile. When that deal was finalized, T-Mobile said things would be "better for customers," but constant activation charges would definitely not be better.
Windows

Windows 11 Runs on Fewer Than 1 in 6 PCs (theregister.com) 265

Much of the Windows world has yet to adopt Microsoft's latest desktop operating system more than a year after it launched, according to figures for October collated by Statcounter. From a report: Just 15.44 percent of PCs across the globe have installed Windows 11, meaning it gained 1.83 percentage points in a month. This compares to the 71.29 percent running Windows 10, which fell marginally from 71.88 percent in September. Windows 7 is still hanging on with a tenuous grip, in third place with 9.61 percent, Windows 8.1 in fourth with 2.45 percent, plain old Windows 8 with 0.69 percent, and bless its heart, Windows XP with 0.39 percent because of your extended family. In total, Windows has almost 76 percent of the global desktop OS market followed by OS X with 15.7 percent and Linux with 2.6 percent. Android comprised 42.37 percent of total operating system market share, with Windows trailing on 30.11 percent, iOS on 17.6 percent, OS X on 6.24 percent, and Linux on 1.04 percent.

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