Alphabet's Google is set to go before a federal jury in Boston on Tuesday in a trial over accusations that processors it uses to power AI technology in key products infringe a computer scientist's patents. From a report: Singular Computing, founded by Massachusetts-based computer scientist Joseph Bates, claims Google copied his technology and used it to support AI features in Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate and other Google services. A Google court filing said that Singular has requested up to $7 billion in monetary damages, which would be more than double the largest-ever patent infringement award in U.S. history.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda called Singular's patents "dubious" and said that Google developed its processors "independently over many years." "We look forward to setting the record straight in court," Castaneda said.

Emilia David reports via The Verge: OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case "without merit" and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet. In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times "is not telling the full story." It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. "Even when using such prompts, our models don't typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts," OpenAI said.

OpenAI claims it's attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples "appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites." The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content. However, the company maintained its long-standing position that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems, they need access to "the enormous aggregate of human knowledge." It reiterated that while it respects the legal right to own copyrighted works -- and has offered opt-outs to training data inclusion -- it believes training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow for repurposing copyrighted works. The company announced website owners could start blocking its web crawlers from accessing their data on August 2023, nearly a year after it launched ChatGPT. OpenAI stills hopes to form a "constructive partnership with The New York Times and respect its long history," the company said.

Last month, OpenAI struck an unprecedented deal with Politico parent company Axel Springer, allowing ChatGPT to summarize news stories from Politico and Business Insider.

In just a few weeks, Waymo will begin testing its driverless passenger vehicles on the highways in Phoenix, Arizona. The company will start by shuttling employees, and if all goes well, it will expand its operations to include regular customers. TechCrunch reports: Bringing its autonomous cars to the highway is just the latest in a series of big steps for Waymo, especially in the Phoenix area. In December, the company started offering curbside drop-off and pickup at the Phoenix airport. Just a few months before that, Waymo made its autonomous vehicles available in the Uber app.

In an SEC filing on Monday, Unity Software said it will lay off approximately 25% of its workforce, or 1,800 jobs, by the end of March. It marks the San Francisco-based company's largest layoff ever. Reuters reports: While Unity is not widely recognized outside the gaming industry, over 1.1 million game creators rely on its software toolkit each month, including the maker of the popular "Pokemon Go," "Beat Saber" and "Hearthstone" games. Monday's deep job cut will affect all teams, regions and areas of the business, the company told Reuters.

The layoffs come shortly after interim CEO Jim Whitehurst announced a "company reset" in November. "We are ... reducing the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability," Whitehurst wrote in the memo to all Unity employees on Monday. While Whitehurst provided no specifics on structural changes to come, a company spokesperson confirmed there will be additional changes coming. This is the fourth round of layoffs the company has conducted within the last year.

Starting in the second quarter of 2024, Volkswagen drivers will be able to install OpenAI's ChatGPT in their vehicles. The Verge reports: The chatbot will be available across VW's lineup, including in Tiguan, Passat, and Golf as well as the automaker's ID family of electric vehicles. The feature will come to Europe first and is being considered for customers in the US, though plans have yet to be finalized. VW is using ChatGPT to augment its IDA in-car voice assistant to enable more naturalistic communication between car and driver. Vehicle owners can use the new super-powered voice assistant to control basic functions, like heating and air conditioning, or to answer "general knowledge questions."

If you're scratching your head, wondering why you would possibly need ChatGPT in your car, VW says future functions may help prove its worth. "Enriching conversations, clearing up questions, interacting in intuitive language, receiving vehicle-specific information, and much more -- purely hands-free," the company says. VW promises it won't force you to create a new account or install any apps. The chatbot can be activated by using the wake words "Hello IDA" or pressing a button on the steering wheel. And OpenAI isn't getting access to your driving stats, either. VW says questions and answers are "deleted immediately to ensure the highest possible level of data protection."

VW says it is able to integrate OpenAI's chatbot into its cars thanks to Cerence, a third-party software company that makes "automative grade" ChatGPT integrations. The company's Cerence Chat Pro software will enhance VW's voice assistant so it can "provide relevant responses to nearly every query imaginable."

Apple has announced it will start shipping its Vision Pro headset on February 2nd in the United States. Pre-orders begin January 19th at 8AM ET. From a report: In addition to announcing the availability of its $3,499 headset, Apple also revealed the pricing for the Zeiss prescription lenses that users can get with it. Readers will be available for an extra $99, while prescription lenses will cost $149.

As General Motors prepares to roll out electric versions of its Buicks, "hundreds of Buick dealerships nationwide" are "turning their backs on the storied brand," reports the Boston Globe.

"The move to electric Buicks is one reason so many dealers are giving up their Buick franchises, according to auto industry watchers." They say that smaller, low-volume Buick dealers either can't or won't make the big investments needed to begin selling EVs, especially as sales growth in the sector has cooled and unsold electrics are piling up on dealer lots. "I think there are dealers who are just not confident in the electric vehicle transition and they don't want to have to commit to the investment," said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at online car retailer iSeeCars.com...

Buick has announced its intention to migrate to an all-electric line of cars by the end of the decade. The brand's first EV is set to go on sale this year. But getting ready to sell EVs is a costly proposition. Dealers must purchase new equipment to service the cars and must pay for worker retraining. GM estimates that the upfront cost to dealers will range between $200,000 and $400,000. "If you're in a market where you're not selling a lot of Buicks, investing a lot to sell electric Buicks may not make a good business case," said Mark Schirmer, spokesperson for Cox Automotive, an Atlanta-based automotive marketing company.
While 854,000 Buicks were sold in 1980, just 103,000 were sold in 2022 — down from 207,000 in 2019, according to the article. So in 2022 GM bought out 44 percent of its dealerships (which they say accounted for just 20% of all U.S. Buick sales), with the majority of them still selling other GM brands like Chevrolet and GMC.

But the article also includes some perspective from Robert O'Koniewski, executive vice president of the Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association. "The only reason GM has kept the Buick alive is that it's popular in China." That's Buick's biggest market by far, thanks to a 50-50 joint venture it launched in 1997 with government-owned SAIC Motor, China's biggest carmaker. The partnership sold 653,000 Chinese Buicks in 2022.

But that's a big decline from the 926,000 sold in 2020. Brauer said that Chinese consumers are pulling away from the US brand in favor of Chinese companies like BYD, which passed Tesla in the fourth quarter of 2023 to become the world's largest maker of electric vehicles.

The chief content officer for New York's public radio station WNYC predicts an "AI-fueled shift to niche community and authored excellence."

And ironically, it will be fueled by "Greedy publishers and malicious propagandists... flooding the web with fake or just mediocre AI-generated 'content'" which will "spotlight and boost the value of authored creativity." And it may help give birth to a new generation of independent media. Robots will make the internet more human.

First, it will speed up our migration off of big social platforms to niche communities where we can be better versions of ourselves. We're already exhausted by feeds that amplify our anxiety and algorithms that incentivize cruelty. AI will take the arms race of digital publishing shaped by algorithmic curation to its natural conclusion: big feed-based social platforms will become unending streams of noise. When we've left those sites for good, we'll miss the (mostly inaccurate) sense that we were seeing or participating in a grand, democratic town hall. But as we find places to convene where good faith participation is expected, abuse and harassment aren't, and quality is valued over quantity, we'll be happy to have traded a perception of scale influence for the experience of real connection.

Second, this flood of authorless "content" will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast... "Could a robot have done this?" will be a question we ask to push ourselves to be funnier, weirder, more vulnerable, and more creative. And for the funniest, the weirdest, the most vulnerable, and most creative: the gap between what they do and everything else will be huge. Finally, these AI-accelerated shifts will combine with the current moment in media economics to fuel a new era of independent media.
For a few years he's seen the rise of independent community-funded journalists, and "the list of thriving small enterprises is getting longer." He sees more growth in community-funding platforms (with subscription/membership features like on Substack and Patreon) which "continue to tilt the risk/reward math for audience-facing talent....

"And the amount of audience-facing, world-class talent that left institutional media in 2023 (by choice or otherwise) is unlike anything I've seen in more than 15 years in journalism... [I]f we're lucky, we'll see the creation of a new generation of independent media businesses whose work is as funny, weird, vulnerable and creative as its creators want it to be. And those businesses will be built on truly stable ground: a direct financial relationship with people who care.

"Thank the robots."

"For the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox," writes TechCrunch, citing startup investments like Mastodon's client Mammoth and the Fakespot browser extension that helps identify fake reviews. But Mozilla has also launched Mozilla.ai (added a bunch of new AI-focused members to its board).

In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them." "Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers — and even more so for most consumers — to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant."
While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months." Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source — at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...."

With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source — and especially the Linux movement — which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft...

Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope."
And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you.

"I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In the January 2024 Communications of the ACM, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi minces no words in Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!. He argues that the unintended consequences of the rise of social media and mobile computing include hate mongering on a global scale and a worldwide youth mental health crisis.

"How did the technology that we considered 'cool' just a decade ago become an assault weapon used to hurt, traumatize, and even kill vulnerable people?" Vardi asks. "Looking back at my past columns, one can see the forewarnings. Our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. In the name of efficiency, we aimed at eliminating all friction. In the name of efficiency, it became desirable to move fast and break things, and we allowed the technology industry to become dominated by a very small number of mega corporations. It is time for all computing professionals to accept responsibility for computing's current state. To use Star Wars metaphors, we once considered computing as the 'Rebels,' but it turns out that computing is the 'Empire.' Admitting we have a problem is a necessary first step toward addressing the problems computing has created."
Examples cited in the piece include:

• Amnesty International's 2022 accusation that Meta "substantially contributed" to human rights violations of Myanmar's Rohingya people
• Internal Meta documents saying "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly" in policing harmful content.

So far the ACM's piece has attracted one comment. "Deep thanks for your long-term commitment to ethics and how you articulate clearly its challenges."

Today America's Federal Aviation Administration "ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft," reports CNN, identifying the aircraft as "the model involved in an Alaska Airlines emergency landing in Oregon on Friday after a section of the plane apparently blew out in midflight." A passenger's video posted to social media shows a side section of the fuselage, where a window would have been, missing — exposing passengers to the outside air. The video, which appears to have been taken from several rows behind the incident, shows oxygen masks deployed throughout the airplane, and least two people sitting near and just behind the missing section...

The plane "landed safely back at Portland International Airport with 171 guests and six crew members," the airline said... According to FlightAware, the flight was airborne for about 20 minutes.
"There was a really loud bang toward the rear of the plane and a whoosh noise," one passenger told a local news station — and then "all of the masks dropped."

Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares more details from the BBC: Diego Murillo said the gap was "as wide as a refrigerator".

Fellow passenger Elizabeth Lee added: "Part of the plane was missing and the wind was just extremely loud. but everyone was in their seats and had their belt on."

Jessica Montoia described the flight as a "trip from hell" adding a phone was taken out of a man's hand by the wind.
CNN covers the federal response: The FAA said the planes must be parked until emergency inspections are performed, which will "take around four to eight hours per aircraft."

"The FAA is requiring immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes before they can return to flight," FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said Saturday in a statement. "Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the (National Transportation Safety Board's) investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282." The order impacts 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets, the agency approximates....

Boeing said the company supported the FAA's grounding decision. "Safety is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers and their passengers," Boeing said in a statement
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader lsllll for sharing the news.

Tuesday's launch was different. "SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites designed to connect directly to unmodified smartphones..." reports SpaceNews, "after getting a temporary experimental license to start testing the capability in the United States." Six of the 21 Starlink satellites that launched on a Falcon 9 rocket at 10:44 p.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carry a payload that the company said could provide connectivity for most 4G LTE devices when in range. SpaceX plans to start enabling texting from space this year in partnership with cellular operators, with voice and data connectivity coming in 2025, although the company still needs regulatory permission to provide the services commercially. Initial direct-to-smartphone tests would use cellular spectrum from SpaceX's U.S. mobile partner T-Mobile. SpaceX has also partnered with mobile operators in Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland....

Meanwhile, early-stage ventures AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are closing in on fundraising deals to expand their dedicated direct-to-device constellations. AST SpaceMobile said January 2 it is seeking to secure funds this month from "multiple parties" ahead of launching its first five commercial satellites early this year on a Falcon 9. Lynk Global, which is currently providing intermittent texting and other low-bandwidth services to phones outside cellular networks in parts of the Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, and Palau, plans to raise funds by merging with a shell company run by former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

More than 4 million electric vehicles are now on America's roads. And Friday the U.S. Energy announced that more than a third of them (1.4 million) were sold within the last year.

That's 50% more than were sold in the previous year — and about the same number sold in the entire five years between 2016 and 2021. But the energy secretary's statement also touts the current administrations efforts at "building out a reliable and interoperable nationwide EV charging network — an undertaking never before seen in the United States." Today, the U.S. has close to 170,000 public EV chargers — a 75% increase since the president took office with nearly 900 new chargers coming online per week.

These developments are part of an inevitable shift toward a thriving electric transportation sector — a shift that American automakers and battery manufacturers are already carrying forward.

"If you have been affected, you will will receive a notification when you open Chrome on either desktop or Android devices," reports Search Engine Land. But they add that "discussions among digital marketers on X indicate that advertisers are still not ready..."

An anonymous reader writes: Google started its campaign to phase out of third-party cookies as announced earlier. At the beginning cookies are turned off for 1% of users, and those lucky ones unlock a "tracking protection" in Chrome settings. In agreement with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority, third-party cookies will be completely removed at the end of this year, a move under tight anti-competition scrutiny also in Brussels. Meanwhile, a technology researcher released their privacy audit of Google's third-party cookie replacement, Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API, validating its standing against EU data protection, which may even close the ever-present cookie consent popups disliked universally in Europe.

Business Insider's Kelli Maria Korducki reports on a growing trend happening on LinkedIn: some people are using the professional network for personal connections, fielding romantic offers amid job postings. But that leaves the question: Is it a good idea to mix work and love? From the report: Dustin Kidd, a professor of sociology at Temple University who researches social media and pop culture, said that dating via LinkedIn belonged to a long tradition of "dating hacks" -- using online tools designed for other purposes to snag a date. "In the aughts, this happened with Friendster and then Myspace," Kidd said, but has since spread to myriad platforms that are ostensibly romance-free. Even fitness-tracking sites such as Strava are fair game. The common thread for love-hijacked social-media sites is a single feature, Kidd said: DMs. "The design of LinkedIn helps to maintain its focus on the professional, but any platform with a direct-messaging option is likely to also be used to pursue sex and dating," he told me. The ease and relative privacy of direct messaging help explain how some people are using LinkedIn for romance, but it doesn't explain why. In an age with so many dedicated dating platforms -- from giants such as Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge to niche apps including Feeld (for the unconventional), Pure (for the noncommittal), and NUiT (for the astrologically inclined) -- why mix Cupid's arrow with corporate updates?

Any type of social media where you can see people's pictures can turn into a dating app. And LinkedIn is even better because it's not just showing people's fake lives. One answer may be the growing number of Americans who have gotten tired of the roulette-like experience that comes with modern dating apps. In a 2023 Pew survey of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they'd felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches. [...]

LinkedIn's appeal as a dating site, according to people who use it that way, is the platform's ability to give back some of that control and boost the caliber of their prospects. Because the professional-networking site asks users to link to their current and former employers' profile pages, it offers an additional layer of credibility that other social-media platforms lack. Many profiles also include first-person references from former colleagues and managers -- real people with real profile pages. [...] Even for those who shy away from using LinkedIn to angle for dates, the site has become a go-to tool for vetting romantic candidates found through conventional dating apps or in-person encounters. "Social media is just one big dating app," [said Samuela John, a 24-year-old personal organizer in New York City who developed chemistry with an oil-industry man on the platform]. "Any type of social media where you can see people's pictures can turn into a dating app. And LinkedIn is even better because it's not just showing people's fake lives." [...] "I don't think you should go into it like, 'All right, I'm going to find my husband on LinkedIn,'" John said. "I think you should go about it as if you were just networking, like in a casual sense. And then if you end up meeting the person, see the vibes and then go from there."

Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: Software maker Ivanti is urging users of its end-point security product to patch a critical vulnerability that makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code inside affected networks. The vulnerability, in a class known as a SQL injection, resides in all supported versions of the Ivanti Endpoint Manager. Also known as the Ivanti EPM, the software runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and Internet of Things devices such as routers. SQL injection vulnerabilities stem from faulty code that interprets user input as database commands or, in more technical terms, from concatenating data with SQL code without quoting the data in accordance with the SQL syntax. CVE-2023-39336, as the Ivanti vulnerability is tracked, carries a severity rating of 9.6 out of a possible 10.

"If exploited, an attacker with access to the internal network can leverage an unspecified SQL injection to execute arbitrary SQL queries and retrieve output without the need for authentication," Ivanti officials wrote Friday in a post announcing the patch availability. "This can then allow the attacker control over machines running the EPM agent. When the core server is configured to use SQL express, this might lead to RCE on the core server." RCE is short for remote code execution, or the ability for off-premises attackers to run code of their choice. Currently, there's no known evidence the vulnerability is under active exploitation. Ivanti has also published a disclosure that is restricted only to registered users. A copy obtained by Ars said Ivanti learned of the vulnerability in October. [...]

Putting devices running Ivanti EDM behind a firewall is a best practice and will go a long way to mitigating the severity of CVE-2023-39336, but it would likely do nothing to prevent an attacker who has gained limited access to an employee workstation from exploiting the critical vulnerability. It's unclear if the vulnerability will come under active exploitation, but the best course of action is for all Ivanti EDM users to install the patch as soon as possible.

Code within the latest version of the ChatGPT Android app suggests that you'll soon be able to set it as the default assistant app, replacing the Google Assistant. Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports: ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, released last month, added a new activity named com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity. The activity is disabled by default, but after manually enabling and launching it, an overlay appears on the screen with the same swirling animation as the one shown when using the in-app voice chat mode. This overlay appears over other apps and doesn't take up the entire screen like the in-app voice chat mode. So, presumably, you could talk to ChatGPT from any screen by invoking this assistant. However, in my testing, the animation never finished and the activity promptly closed itself before I could speak with the chatbot. This could either be because the feature isn't finished yet or is being controlled by some internal flag. [...]

However, the fact that the aforementioned XML file even exists hints that this is what OpenAI intends to do with the app. Making the ChatGPT app Android's default digital assistant app would enable users to launch it by long-pressing the home button (if using three-button navigation) or swiping up from a bottom corner (if using gesture navigation). Unfortunately, the ChatGPT app still wouldn't be able to create custom hotwords or respond to existing ones, since that functionality requires access to privileged APIs only available to trusted, preinstalled apps. Still, given that Google will launch Assistant with Bard any day now, it makes sense that OpenAI wants to make it easier for Android users to access ChatGPT so that users don't flock to Bard just because it's easier to use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Last week border officials in the Punjab region of India revealed they intercepted 107 drug-carrying drones sent by smuggling gangs last year over the border from Pakistan, the highest number on record. Most were carrying heroin or opium from Pakistan to be dropped and received by collaborators in the Punjab, notorious for having India's worst levels of opiate addiction. Last year the head of a police narcotics unit in Lahore, a city in Pakistan which borders the Punjab, was dismissed after he was suspected of running a drug trafficking gang sending drones over to India. But the use of cheap flying robots instead of humans to smuggle drugs across borders is a worldwide phenomenon. [...]

[D]rones will likely become an everyday part of drug dealing too, according to Peter Warren Singer, author of multiple books on national security and a Fellow at think tank New America, with legit medicines due to be delivered by drone in the U.S. later this year and maybe in the U.K. too. "We are just scraping the surface of what is possible, as drone deliveries become more and more common in the commercial world, it will be the same with delivery of illicit goods. In our book, Burn-In, we explain how a future city will see drones zipping about delivering everything from groceries and burritos to drugs, both prescribed by a doctor or bought off a dealer. Drones have traditionally been used by governments and corporations for what are known as the "3 D's" jobs that are too dull, dirty, or dangerous for humans. For criminals, it is the same, except add in another D: Dependable. A drone doesn't steal the product and can't be arrested or snitch if caught."

Liam O'Shea, senior research fellow for organized crime and policing at defense and security thinktank RUSI, said drones were at the moment of limited value to wholesale traffickers and organized criminal gangs because of their range and the weight they can carry. "It makes sense that smugglers would seek to use drones. They are cheap and easy to acquire. They also lower the risks involved in some transactions, as smugglers do not have to be physically present during transactions. They offer opportunities for smuggling in areas where previous routes were too risky, such as prisons and over securitized borders. "I expect them to be of greater value to smaller players and distributors dealing with smaller quantities. Wholesale drug traffickers will still need to use routes that facilitate smuggling at higher volume or using drones to make multiple trips, which entails risks of detection. That may well change as improvements in technology improve drones' carrying capacity and crime groups are better able to access drones with greater capacity."

Tesla and Samsung are joining forces to allow users of Samsung's SmartThings platform to connect to Tesla products so they can keep track of energy production and usage. The Verge reports: When connected to the Powerwall, SmartThings Energy can sync with the "Storm Watch" feature so that you're notified of heavy weather on a Samsung phone or TV, for example. In addition to the Powerwall, SmartThings Energy will be able to connect to other Tesla products, including its electric vehicles, Solar Inverter, and Wall Connector charging solutions. The collaboration is possible thanks to Tesla's API, which Samsung claims SmartThings Energy is the first to take advantage of.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The DeepMind robotics team has revealed three new advances that it says will help robots make faster, better, and safer decisions in the wild. One includes a system for gathering training data with a "Robot Constitution" to make sure your robot office assistant can fetch you more printer paper -- but without mowing down a human co-worker who happens to be in the way.

Google's data gathering system, AutoRT, can use a visual language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) working hand in hand to understand its environment, adapt to unfamiliar settings, and decide on appropriate tasks. The Robot Constitution, which is inspired by Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics," is described as a set of "safety-focused prompts" instructing the LLM to avoid choosing tasks that involve humans, animals, sharp objects, and even electrical appliances.

For additional safety, DeepMind programmed the robots to stop automatically if the force on its joints goes past a certain threshold and included a physical kill switch human operators can use to deactivate them. Over a period of seven months, Google deployed a fleet of 53 AutoRT robots into four different office buildings and conducted over 77,000 trials. Some robots were controlled remotely by human operators, while others operated either based on a script or completely autonomously using Google's Robotic Transformer (RT-2) AI learning model.