The U.S. Navy has ramped up efforts to recruit young gamers and esports fans to meet recruitment goals, allocating up to $4.3 million this year for esports marketing. This includes hosting video game tournaments and having sailors compete as the esports team "Goats & Glory." Critics argue targeting minors for military marketing normalizes war and raises ethical concerns, The Guardian reports. While the military cannot formally recruit those under 17, advertising and direct interaction with minors for recruitment purposes is permitted. Veterans groups oppose this, noting the military relies on gaming's appeal to young teens, whose brains are still developing, to influence future decisions about military service, the report adds.

DuckDuckGo keeps adding new features to its browser; and while these features are common in other browsers, DuckDuckGo is giving them a privacy-minded twist. The latest is a private, end-to-end encrypted syncing service. There's no account needed, no sign-in, and the company says it never sees what you're syncing. From a report: Using QR codes and shortcodes, and a lengthy backup code you store somewhere safe, DuckDuckGo's browser can keep your bookmarks, passwords, "favorites" (i.e., new tab page shortcuts), and settings for its email protection service synced between devices and browsers. DuckDuckGo points to Google's privacy policy for using its signed-in sync service on Chrome, which uses "aggregated and anonymized synchronized browsing data to improve other Google products and services." DuckDuckGo states that the encryption key for browser sync is stored only locally on your devices and that it lacks any access to your passwords or other data.

Apple researchers have unveiled a new AI tool called "Keyframer," (PDF) which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to animate static images through natural language prompts. From a report: This novel application, detailed in a new research paper published on arxiv.org, represents a giant leap in the integration of artificial intelligence into the creative process -- and it may also hint at what's to come in newer generations of Apple products such as the iPad Pro and Vision Pro. The research paper, titled "Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models," explores uncharted territory in the application of LLMs to the animation industry, presenting unique challenges such as how to effectively describe motion in natural language.

Imagine this: You're an animator with an idea that you want to explore. You've got static images and a story to tell, but the thought of countless hours bending over an iPad to breathe life into your creations is, well, exhausting. Enter Keyframer. With just a few sentences, those images can begin to dance across the screen, as if they've read your mind. Or rather, as if Apple's large language models (LLMs) have. Keyframer is powered by a large language model (in the study, they use GPT-4) that can generate CSS animation code from a static SVG image and prompt. "Large language models have the potential to impact a wide range of creative domains, but the application of LLMs to animation is under-explored and presents novel challenges such as how users might effectively describe motion in natural language," the researchers explain.

A new satellite mission to track planet-warming emissions of methane gas is finally set to launch, now aided with AI technology to help build a global map of oil and gas infrastructure and surveil it for leaks [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: The MethaneSAT satellite was announced by the Environmental Defense Fund six years ago as a way to monitor releases of methane, an invisible gas that researchers estimate is responsible for almost a third of the emissions-induced increase in global temperatures since the start of the industrial era. The satellite is now scheduled to blast into space in March aboard a rocket operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX. On Wednesday, Google said it would provide the AI computing capabilities required to crunch vast amounts of data produced by the orbiting methane monitor.

MethaneSAT is the latest example of how satellites are used to detect methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, which is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year timescale. Experts say reducing methane emissions is one of the most powerful short-term actions needed to address global warming. The International Energy Agency this year found the global energy industry was responsible for 135mn tonnes of methane emissions in 2022, only slightly below record high levels of 2019. Existing satellites have detected more than 500 "super-emitting" events in 2022 from oil and gas operations, the IEA said, with a further 100 such events at coal mines, which can release methane during or after operations.

Silicon Valley institution Y Combinator has released a new list of 20 types of startups it wants to join its accelerator program -- calling for applications in sectors like AI-powered robotics, space and defense technology. From a report: Y Combinator, YC for short, updates the list periodically, depending on what kinds of startups it sees gaining traction and where it thinks there's opportunity. This update, released in a blog post Wednesday, represents the biggest overhaul to its "requests for startups" since 2018. In a blog post Wednesday, YC Managing Director Dalton Caldwell described the requests as "ideas we'd want to see made real, in spaces that we believe will be important in the coming decades." The result is a window into the larger trends in the world of venture capital.

The first idea on YC's list is applying machine learning to robotics. "For decades, everyone has known that robots are the future, as any science fiction novel will show," YC partners wrote in the blog post. Now, advances around artificial intelligence are making the technology more useful, particularly in industrial settings. It listed autonomous tractors and infrastructure inspection robots as examples.

Now that it can be strapped to our faces and worn to strange places, opinions about Apple's Vision Pro are flying left and right. Entering the chat is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has more at stake than perhaps anyone on earth if Apple does to headsets what the iPhone did to smartphones. From a report: In a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday, Zuckerberg gives his official verdict on the Vision Pro versus his company's latest Quest 3 headset: "I don't just think that Quest is the better value, I think Quest is the better product, period." While being filmed by the Quest 3's video passthrough system in his living room, Zuckerberg highlights the tradeoffs Apple made to get the fanciest display possible into something that can be worn on your head in an acceptable form factor. He says the Quest 3 weighs 120 grams less, making it more comfortable to wear for longer. He also says it allows for greater motion due to its lack of a wired battery pack and wider field of view than the Vision Pro.

He thinks the Quest's option of physical hand controllers and hand tracking for input is better, though he says he's a fan of eye tracking for some use cases and teases that it will return to future Meta headsets after debuting in the Quest Pro. He says the Quest has a better "immersive" content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there's the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, "like seven times less expensive."

Mark Tyson reports via Tom's Hardware: A serial burglar in Edina, Minnesota is suspected of using a Wi-Fi jammer to knock out connected security cameras before stealing and making off with the victim's prized possessions. [...] Edina police suspect that nine burglaries in the last six months have been undertaken with Wi-Fi jammer(s) deployed to ensure incriminating video evidence wasnâ(TM)t available to investigators. The modus operandi of the thief or thieves is thought to be something like this:

- Homes in affluent areas are found - Burglars carefully watch the homes - The burglars avoid confrontation, so appear to wait until homes are empty - Seizing the opportunity of an empty home, the burglars will deploy Wi-Fi jammer(s) - "Safes, jewelry, and other high-end designer items," are usually taken

A security expert interviewed by the source publication, KARE11, explained that the jammers simply confused wireless devices rather than blocking signals. They usually work by overloading wireless traffic âoeso that real traffic cannot get through,â the news site was told. [...] Worryingly, Wi-Fi jamming is almost a trivial activity for potential thieves in 2024. KARE11 notes that it could buy jammers online very easily and cheaply, with prices ranging from $40 to $1,000. Jammers are not legal to use in the U.S. but they are very easy to buy online.

The Chromium team is prototyping Web Monetization to allow websites to automatically receive micro payments from visitors for their content, bypassing traditional ad or subscription models. The Register reports: Earlier this month, Alexander Surkov, a software engineer at open source consultancy Igalia, announced the Chromium team's intent to prototype Web Monetization, an incubating community specification that would let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors, as opposed to advertisers, via a web browser and a designated payment service.

"Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content," Surkov wrote in an explanatory document published last summer. "It provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features -- small payments and no user interaction -- that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web."

"Open Payments API is an open HTTP-based standard created to facilitate micro transactions on the web," wrote Surkov. "It is implemented by a wallet and enables the transfer of funds between two wallets. It leverages fine-grained access grants, based on GNAP (Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol), which gives wallet owners precise control over the permissions granted to applications connected to their wallet." The basic idea is web users will get a digital wallet, provided by Gatehub and Fynbos presently, and web publishers will add a link tag to their site's block formatted like so: . Thereafter, site visitors who have linked their digital wallet to their browser will pay out funds to the requesting publisher, subject to the browser's permissions policy.

Less than a week after naming Laura Chambers as interim CEO, Firefox's maker Mozilla said it is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. The cuts are primarily in the product development organization. Bloomberg reports: "We're scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success," Mozilla said in a statement. "We intend to re-prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there's a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry."

Mozilla last cut a significant number of jobs four years ago at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The not-for-profit company, which competes with Alphabet Inc.'s Google Chrome, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Microsoft Corp.'s Edge, has been grappling with sliding market share of its Firefox web browser in recent years. So far in 2024, the tech sector has cut 32,000 jobs.

Sean O'Kane reports via TechCrunch: Waymo is voluntarily recalling the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It's the company's first recall. Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Pena described the crashes as "minor" in a blog post, and said neither vehicle was carrying passengers at the time. There were no injuries. He also said Waymo's ride-hailing service -- which is live in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin -- "is not and has not been interrupted by this update." The company declined to share video of the crashes with TechCrunch.

Waymo said it developed, tested, and validated a fix to the software that it started deploying to its fleet on December 20. All of its robotaxis received that software update by January 12. "This voluntary recall reflects how seriously we take our responsibility to safely deploy our technology and to transparently communicate with the public," Pena wrote.

The crashes that prompted the recall both happened on December 11. Pena wrote that one of Waymo's vehicles came upon a backward-facing pickup truck being "improperly towed." The truck was "persistently angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane." Pena said the robotaxi "incorrectly predicted the future motion of the towed vehicle" because of this mismatch between the orientation of the tow truck and the pickup, and made contact. The company told TechCrunch this caused minor damage to the front left bumper. The tow truck did not stop, though, according to Pena, and just a few minutes later another Waymo robotaxi made contact with the same pickup truck being towed. The company told TechCrunch this caused minor damage to the front left bumper and a sensor. (The tow truck stopped after the second crash.) Last week, a Waymo autonomous vehicle was vandalized and burned by a crowd of people in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Rival operator Cruise suspended its operations while it investigates an incident where one of its robotaxis ran over a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle driven by a human.

Estate agents are increasingly using AI tools to digitally furnish empty rental flats, a practice known as "virtual staging," to make them look occupied in listings. While virtual staging has existed for years, AI advancements have made the process faster and cheaper. One major UK estate agency already offers AI staging services to customers, Vice reported this week. Industry insiders cited by Vice said AI virtual staging is likely to become more widespread as costs fall. The unrealistic furniture from AI staging can be noticeable, such as bunk beds with overlapping ladders. But the technology continues advancing in quality. The story adds: Although some agents have experimented with using popular AI image generators like Dall-e and Midjourney to "fix" property pictures, the results are usually pretty bizarre, like in this example, where the AI has envisioned bookcases in every corner of the living room and put a hob at perfect height for a toddler. Companies like Virtual Staging AI, ModelProp and Gepetto, which describes itself as like "Pinterest on steroids," are now taking this technology and tailoring it specifically to virtual furnishing.

Wunderlist, a beloved to-do app known for its delightful design, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and discontinued years later. Now Wunderlist co-founder Christian Reber -- who apparently attempted to buy back Wunderlist to no luck -- has launched Superlist to revive its spirit. The new app focuses on centralized project management by compiling tasks, notes, files and more into shareable lists. It then automatically organizes tasks into a daily agenda.

Superlist starts at $8 a month, but offers "uinlimited tasks, notes, and reminders, and unlimited private lists" for individuals at no cost.

A company called Hands-Free Automation (HFA) has been accused of improperly relisting properties on Airbnb at higher prices after taking listings from hotel and short-term rental sites, according to a lawsuit filed in February. HFA founder Anthony Agyeman allegedly promised investors returns in 3-6 months for $20,000-30,000 investments in owning stakes in Airbnb listings. However, Airbnb prohibits the practice, and HFA has not been authorized by property owners, CNBC reported this week. The Federal Trade Commission has accused similar companies previously of making false promises of profits. Airbnb said it was unaware of contact from regulators regarding HFA.

Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. From a report: You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and all you need is an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM. I've been briefly testing out Chat with RTX over the past day, and although the app is a little rough around the edges, I can already see this being a valuable part of data research for journalists or anyone who needs to analyze a collection of documents. Chat with RTX can handle YouTube videos, so you simply input a URL, and it lets you search transcripts for specific mentions or summarize an entire video.

Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Apple's response to Beeper Mini -- the app that briefly brought iMessage to Android. From a report: During the State of the Net Conference on Monday, Carr said the FCC should look into whether Apple's move "complies with the FCC's Part 14 rules" about accommodating users with disabilities.

Beeper Mini launched last year, allowing Android users to gain access to iMessage features, including blue message bubbles and the ability to send high-quality photos and videos. However, Apple quickly blocked Beeper Mini users and continued to shut down attempts to make the app work, leading its developers to eventually just give up. The FCC's Part 14 rules lay out requirements that "advanced communications service," such as iMessage, must follow to ensure they're accessible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Russia hasbeen at the forefront ofinternet disinformationtechniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea. According to French authorities, the Kremlin is at it again. On February 12th Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries, tied in part to the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the elections to the European Parliament in June. Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames "Portal Kombat." Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. Over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022. Current traffic to these sites, which exist in various languages including French, German, Polish and English, is low. But French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a "massive" wave of Russian disinformation.

Viginum says it watched the sites between September and December 2023. It concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread "deceptive or false" content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media. The underlying objective is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe. According to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organization. [...] As the campaign for the European Parliament elections draws near, France is thought to be a particular target for Moscow. According to an article in theWashington Postin December, Kremlin documents show that Russia has been intensifying its effort to undermine French backing for Ukraine. It also has a clear interest in promoting division in France, at a time when Marine Le Pen is riding high in the polls for the next presidential election in 2027. The hard-right leader, who financed previous campaigns with a Russian bank loan, stands to benefit the most from France's polarized politics

In a post on Threads today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a new test in the U.S. that shows a list of popular topics that other people are discussing. It's a core feature of Twitter (now "X") that should help make it easier to find new posts and users on Threads. The Verge reports: The list will appear on the search page and in the For You feed, allowing you to browse through posts about a particular topic. In addition to testing a way to save posts, Meta recently said it will add controls to limit political content recommendations on Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says Threads uses machine learning AI systems to determine what goes on the list. It takes into account how many people are talking about a certain topic, as well as how many people have interacted with posts about it.

A registered sex offender has become the first person in England and Wales to be convicted of cyber-flashing. The BBC reports: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, of Basildon, Essex, sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on Friday. The woman took screenshots of the image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to Essex Police the same day. Hawkes admitted two charges when he appeared before magistrates in Southend earlier. He is the first person to be convicted of the new offense of cyber-flashing, which was brought in under the Online Safety Act and came into effect on January 31.

After pleading guilty to two counts of sending a photograph or film of genitals to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation, he was remanded in custody until March 11, when he will be sentenced at Basildon Crown Court. Hawkes is a registered sex offender until November 2033 after he was convicted and given a community order for sexual activity with a child under 16 and exposure last year at Basildon Crown Court, the CPS said. He will also be sentenced for breaching the order when he is sentenced in March.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The US government has committed $42 million to further the development of the 5G Open RAN (O-RAN) standard that would allow wireless providers to mix and match cellular hardware and software, opening up a bigger market for third-party equipment that's cheaper and interoperable. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) grant would establish a Dallas O-RAN testing center to prove the standard's viability as a way to head off Huawei's steady cruise toward a global cellular network hardware monopoly.

Verizon global network and technology president Joe Russo promoted the funding as a way to achieve "faster innovation in an open environment." To achieve the standard's goals, AT&T vice president of RAN technology Robert Soni says that AT&T and Verizon have formed the Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments Consortium (ACCoRD), which includes a grab bag of wireless technology companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, and Rakuten. Japanese wireless carrier Rakuten formed as the first O-RAN network in 2020. The company's then CEO, Tareq Amin, told The Verge's Nilay Patel in 2022 that Open RAN would enable low-cost network build-outs using smaller equipment rather than massive towers -- which has long been part of the promise of 5G.

But O-RAN is about more than that; establishing interoperability means companies like Verizon and AT&T wouldn't be forced to buy all of their hardware from a single company to create a functional network. For the rest of us, that means faster build-outs and "more agile networks," according to Rakuten. In the US, Dish has been working on its own O-RAN network, under the name Project Genesis. The 5G network was creaky and unreliable when former Verge staffer Mitchell Clarke tried it out in Las Vegas in 2022, but the company said in June last year that it had made its goal of covering 70 percent of the US population. Dish has struggled to become the next big cell provider in the US, though -- leading satellite communications company EchoStar, which spun off from Dish in 2008, to purchase the company in January. The Washington Post writes that O-RAN "is Washington's anointed champion to try to unseat the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies" as the world's biggest supplier of cellular infrastructure gear.

According to the Post, Biden has emphasized the importance of O-RAN in conversations with international leaders over the past few years. Additionally, it notes that Congress along with the NTIA have dedicated approximately $2 billion to support the development of this standard.

Abstract of a paper [PDF] the on pre-print server Arxiv: Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of about 1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. We survey faculty at highly-ranked universities, and confirm that Google Scholar is widely used when evaluating scientists. Intrigued by a citationboosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations. These findings provide conclusive evidence that citations can be bought in bulk, and highlight the need to look beyond citation counts.