Blue Origin Is Planning To Open New Launch Sites Outside the US

According to the Financial Times, Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin has announced plans to expand its operations to "Europe and beyond." Engadget reports: Part of this growth hinges on finding a site for an international launch facility -- the company has already put down roots in Texas, Washington, Florida and Alabama -- but the new location hasn't been chosen yet. It's also actively looking for fresh acquisitions and partnerships outside of the US in areas such as manufacturing and software. Though Blue Origin was the first to launch, land and reuse a rocket successfully, it has fallen behind its rival due to hold-ups with building its launchers. Blue Origin's plans for a more global footprint might help them catch up with SpaceX's progress. Amazon's Project Kuiper also plans to use Blue Origin's rocket New Glenn for at least 12 launches between 2024 and 2029 after a few years of delays. "We're looking for anything we can do to acquire, to scale up to better serve our customers," Bob Smith, Blue Origin CEO, said. "It's not a function of size -- rather how much it accelerates our road map of what we're trying to get done."

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Quasar 'Clocks' Show the Universe Was Five Times Slower Soon After the Big Bang

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough by observing the early universe in extreme slow motion, confirming Einstein's theory of an expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy. Phys.Org reports: Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant -- and hence ancient -- universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as "clocks." "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. "If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second -- but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag." Professor Lewis and his collaborator, Dr. Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars -- hyperactive supermassive black holes at the centers of early galaxies -- to analyze this time dilation. Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae -- massive exploding stars -- as "standard clocks." But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe. By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages. Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr. Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colors (or wavelengths) -- green light, red light and into the infrared -- they were able to standardize the "ticking" of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar's ticking. "With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space," Professor Lewis said. These results further confirm Einstein's picture of an expanding universe but contrast earlier studies that had failed to identify the time dilation of distant quasars.

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AMAs Are the Latest Casualty In Reddit's API War

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable. On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable. The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse. On Saturday, the r/IAmA moderators announced that they will no longer perform these duties: - Active solicitation of celebrities or high-profile figures to do AMAs. - Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high-profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary). - Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion. - Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users. - Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following. - Moderator confidential verification for AMAs. - Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts The subreddit, which has 22.5 million subscribers as of this writing, will still exist, but its moderators contend that most of what makes it special will be undermined. "Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention," the moderators said. The mods will also continue to do bare minimum tasks like keeping spam out and rule enforcement, they said. Like many other Reddit moderators Ars has spoken to, some will step away from their duties, and they'll reportedly be replaced "as needed."

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EU and Japan Look To Partner On AI and Chips

The European Union (EU) is seeking closer cooperation with Japan in areas such as artificial intelligence to reduce reliance on China. CNBC reports: EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is meeting with the Japanese government on Monday, and artificial intelligence will be "very high" on his agenda, he said in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday. "I will engage with [the] Japanese government ... on how we can organize our digital space, including AI based on our shared value," Breton said. Breton also said there will be an EU-Japan Digital Partnership council, to discuss areas including quantum and high-performance computing. The EU held a similar council with South Korea last week, in which the two sides agreed to cooperate on technologies such as AI and cybersecurity. Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China -- a different approach from that of the U.S., which has sought to decouple its economy from Beijing. Part of that EU strategy involves deepening the relationship with allied countries around technology. Breton told Reuters on Monday that the bloc and Japan will cooperate in the area of semiconductors. Japan is a key country in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tokyo has been looking to strengthen its domestic industry. Last week, a fund backed by the Japanese government proposed to buy domestic chipmaking firm JSR for around 903.9 billion yen ($6.3 billion). The EU has also been looking to strengthen its own semiconductor industry across the bloc.

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Apple To Ask US Supreme Court To Undo App Store Order In Epic Games Case

Apple said it will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review a judge's order in the antitrust case filed by Epic Games, the creator of "Fortnite." The order, issued by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, largely upheld a previous ruling that prohibits Apple from restricting developers from including links to alternative payment options in their apps, potentially reducing Apple's sales commissions. Reuters reports: Apple said in a court filing (PDF) it will ask the justices to take up its appeal of a ruling on Friday by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that kept in place most of the order issued in 2021 by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. [...] Apple's attorneys in Monday's filing said the 9th Circuit reached too far in issuing a nationwide injunction against Apple alleging that it violated a California state unfair competition law. Apple said its petition in the Supreme Court that it will raise "far-reaching and important" questions about the power of judges to issue broad injunctions.

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AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare

The June Steam Survey results show that AMD CPUs have gained significant popularity among Linux gamers, with a market share of 67% -- a remarkable 7% increase from the previous month. Phoronix reports: In part that's due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD SoC but it's been a trend building for some time of AMD's increasing Ryzen CPU popularity among Linux users to their open-source driver work and continuing to build more good will with the community. In comparison, last June the AMD CPU Linux gaming marketshare came in at 45% while Intel was at 54%. Or at the start of 2023, AMD CPUs were at a 55% marketshare among Linux gamers. Or if going back six years, AMD CPU use among Linux gamers was a mere 18% during the early Ryzen days. It's also the direct opposite on the Windows side. When looking at the Steam Survey results for June limited to Windows, there Intel has a 68% marketshare to AMD at 32%. Beyond the Steam Deck, it's looking like AMD's efforts around open-source drivers, AMD expanding their Linux client (Ryzen) development efforts over the past two years, promises around OpenSIL, and other efforts commonly covered on Phoronix are paying off for AMD in wooing over their Linux gaming customer base.

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Valve Responds To Claims It Has Banned AI-Generated Games From Steam

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Valve has issued a rare statement after claims it was rejecting games with AI-generated assets from its Steam games store. The notoriously close-lipped developer of the Half-Life series and de facto gatekeeper of PC gaming distribution said its policy was evolving and not a stand against AI. Steam has a review and approval process much like any app platform, and its rules on content aren't always clear until developers test them with edge cases. So it was with one indie dev who posted in a subreddit for like-minded game developers using AI, saying Valve "is no longer willing to publish games with AI generated content." The game they had submitted had "a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated," and Valve appeared to take issue with this. "As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game," their first warning letter stated. Then, a week later: "we reviewed [Game Name Here] and took our time to better understand the AI tech used to create it. Again, while we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights. At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data." Considering most AI tools can't really claim to have legal rights to all their training data (and even if they do, it may still not be an ethical use of that data), this policy as stated basically amounts to a blanket ban on AI-generated assets in games. [...] If the creators can't realistically claim copyright over their own work, Valve has deemed the risk of publishing that work too high. As such, Valve responded to Eurogamer to say that, basically, their policy is more "what's legally required" than any particular stance on AI. "We know it is a constantly evolving tech, and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies," Valve said. "Stated plainly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process."

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Kentucky Mandates Tesla's Charging Plug For State-Backed Charging Stations

Kentucky is requiring that electric vehicle charging companies include Tesla's plug if they want to be part of a state program to electrify highways using federal dollars, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. From the report: Kentucky's plan went into effect on Friday, making it the first state to mandate Tesla's charging technology, although Texas and Washington states previously shared such plans with Reuters. In addition to federal requirements for the rival Combined Charging System (CCS), Kentucky mandates Tesla's plug, called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), at charging stations, according to Kentucky's request for proposal (RFP) for the state's EV charging program on Friday. "Each port must be equipped with an SAE CCS 1 connector. Each port shall also be capable of connecting to and charging vehicles equipped with charging ports compliant with the North American Charging Standard (NACS)," the documents say. The U.S. Department of Transportation earlier this year said that charging companies must provide CCS plugs to be eligible for federal funding to deploy 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. It added that the rule allows charging stations to have other connectors, as long as they support CCS, a national standard.

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Apple Plans To Launch a Mac Monitor That Doubles As a Smart Home Display

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple will introduce an external Mac monitor that can act as a smart home display when a Mac goes to sleep or is shut down. Ars Technica reports: The feature would be available on at least one monitor in an upcoming lineup that will likely include successors to Apple's Pro Display XDR and Studio Display. The newsletter didn't go into much detail about the upcoming displays beyond the smart home feature. Like the Studio Display, a new monitor with smart home capabilities would run on a chip first seen in the iPhone. The Studio Display contains Apple's A13 chip -- the same seen in the iPhone 11 line of smartphones. The upcoming smart display could potentially run on the A16 seen in the iPhone 14 Pro, since that device introduced a similar always-on display feature to Apple's smartphone lineup. The iPhone 14 Pro's always-on display currently shows what you'd see if you tapped your iPhone to see the lock screen: the time, wallpaper, and app widgets -- albeit at a very dim brightness. Later this year, Apple will launch iOS 17 alongside the upcoming iPhone 15. iOS 17 will introduce a new smart display mode for the iPhone that makes that always-on display mimic the features and information you'd see on a Google or Amazon smart display, a product category that was all the rage at CES a couple of years ago but that has not exactly become ubiquitous. It's fair to expect the Mac monitor's smart display to work a bit like that iOS 17 feature. But while iOS 17 is slated to launch this fall, Gurman predicts that the new Mac display won't hit the market until next year at the earliest.

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China Restricts Export of Chipmaking Metals In Clash With US

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China imposed restrictions on exporting two metals that are crucial to parts of the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric-vehicle industries in an escalation of the country's tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the US and Europe. Gallium and germanium, along with their chemical compounds, will be subject to export controls meant to protect Chinese national security starting Aug. 1, China's Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Monday. Exporters for the two metals will need to apply for licenses from the commerce ministry if they want to start or continue to ship them out of the country, and will be required to report details of the overseas buyers and their applications, it said. Impact on the tech industry "depends on the stockpile of equipment on hand," said Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics LLC. "It's more of a muscle flexing for the next year or so. If it drags on, prices will go up." China is the dominant global producer of both metals that have applications for electric vehicle makers, the defense industry and displays. Gallium and germanium play a role in producing a number of compound semiconductors, which combine multiple elements to improve transmission speed and efficiency. China accounts for about 94% of the world's gallium production, according to the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre. Still, the metals aren't particularly rare or difficult to find, though China's kept them cheap and they can be relatively high-cost to extract. Both metals are byproducts from processing other commodities such as coal and bauxite, the base for aluminum production. With restricted supply, higher prices could draw out production from elsewhere. "When they stop suppressing the price, it suddenly becomes more viable to extract these metals in the West, then China again has an own-goal," said Christopher Ecclestone, principle at Hallgarten & Co. "For a short while they get a higher price, but then China's market dominance gets lost -- the same thing has happened before in other things like antimony, tungsten and rare earths."

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Samsung Software Engineers Busted For Pasting Proprietary Code Into ChatGPT

Multiple employees of Samsung's Korea-based semiconductor business plugged lines of confidential code into ChatGPT, effectively leaking corporate secrets that could be included in the chatbot's future responses to other people around the world. PCMag reports: One employee copied buggy source code from a semiconductor database into the chatbot and asked it to identify a fix, according to The Economist Korea. Another employee did the same for a different piece of equipment, requesting "code optimization" from ChatGPT. After a third employee asked the AI model to summarize meeting notes, Samsung executives stepped in. The company limited each employee's prompt to ChatGPT to 1,024 bytes. Just three weeks earlier, Samsung had lifted its ban on employees using ChatGPT over concerns around this issue. After the recent incidents, it's considering re-instating the ban, as well as disciplinary action for the employees, The Economist Korea says. "If a similar accident occurs even after emergency information protection measures are taken, access to ChatGPT may be blocked on the company network," reads an internal memo. "As soon as content is entered into ChatGPT, data is transmitted and stored to an external server, making it impossible for the company to retrieve it." The OpenAI user guide warns users against this behavior: "We are not able to delete specific prompts from your history. Please don't share any sensitive information in your conversations." It says the system uses all questions and text submitted to it as training data.

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SpaceX Prepares For Rehearsal, Test Flight of Starship Rocket

SpaceX plans to carry out a launch rehearsal next week of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, and its first test flight possibly the following week, the private space company said Thursday. Phys.Org reports: SpaceX published photos of the massive Starship, which is designed to eventually send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, on its launchpad at the company's base in Texas. "Starship fully stacked at Starbase," SpaceX said in a tweet. "Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week followed by Starship's first integrated flight test ~ week later pending regulatory approval." SpaceX will need a green light from the Federal Aviation Administration before being allowed to carry out the orbital test launch. SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of Starship in February. The 230-foot (69-meter) Super Heavy booster was anchored to the ground during the test-firing, called a static fire, to prevent it from lifting off.

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Cancer and Heart Disease Vaccines 'Ready By End of the Decade'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said. A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. Studies into these vaccinations are also showing "tremendous promise", with some researchers saying 15 years' worth of progress has been "unspooled" in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab. Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for "all sorts of disease areas" in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumor types. Burton said: "We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world." He also said that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection -- allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) -- while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body's immune response against disease. Burton said :"I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology." But scientists warn that the accelerated progress, which has surged "by an order of magnitude" in the past three years, will be wasted if a high level of investment is not maintained.

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Researchers Built Sonar Glasses That Track Facial Movements For Silent Communication

A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that "hear" you without speaking. Engadget reports: The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard. Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud -- and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. "Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible," said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. "We're moving sonar onto the body." The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user's speech patterns. Then, once it's ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time "with about 95 percent accuracy." The system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. "We're very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy," said Cheng Zhang. "It's small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world." "The team at Cornell's Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program," adds Engadget. "They're also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements." A video of the eyeglasses can be viewed here.

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Walmart Plans Own EV Charger Network At US Stores By 2030

Walmart plans to have its own network of electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 to tap into the growing adoption of EVs in the United States. Reuters reports: The new fast-charging stations will be placed at thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores, alongside nearly 1,300 it already offers as part of a deal with Volkswagen unit Electrify America, one of the country's largest open public EV networks. Walmart's more than 5,000 stores and Sam's Club warehouses are located within 10 miles of about 90% of Americans. "We have the ability to address range and charging anxiety in a way that no one else can in this country," Vishal Kapadia, Walmart's recently appointed senior vice president of Energy Transformation, said in an interview. Owning its chargers, instead of partnering with a network operator, will help Walmart address reliability and cost issues, Kapadia said. Kapadia said he expects the new charge points to be direct-current fast chargers, with about four chargers on average installed per store.

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Crooks Are Using CAN Injection Attacks To Steal Cars

"Thieves has discovered new ways to steal cars by pulling off smart devices (like smart headlights) to get at and attack via the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus," writes longtime Slashdot reader KindMind. The Register reports: A Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is present in nearly all modern cars, and is used by microcontrollers and other devices to talk to each other within the vehicle and carry out the work they are supposed to do. In a CAN injection attack, thieves access the network, and introduce bogus messages as if it were from the car's smart key receiver. These messages effectively cause the security system to unlock the vehicle and disable the engine immobilizer, allowing it to be stolen. To gain this network access, the crooks can, for instance, break open a headlamp and use its connection to the bus to send messages. From that point, they can simply manipulate other devices to steal the vehicle. "In most cars on the road today, these internal messages aren't protected: the receivers simply trust them," [Ken Tindell, CTO of Canis Automotive Labs] detailed in a technical write-up this week. The discovery followed an investigation by Ian Tabor, a cybersecurity researcher and automotive engineering consultant working for EDAG Engineering Group. It was driven by the theft of Tabor's RAV4. Leading up to the crime, Tabor noticed the front bumper and arch rim had been pulled off by someone, and the headlight wiring plug removed. The surrounding area was scuffed with screwdriver markings, which, together with the fact the damage was on the kerbside, seemed to rule out damage caused by a passing vehicle. More vandalism was later done to the car: gashes in the paint work, molding clips removed, and malfunctioning headlamps. A few days later, the Toyota was stolen. Refusing to take the pilfering lying down, Tabor used his experience to try to figure out how the thieves had done the job. The MyT app from Toyota -- which among other things allows you to inspect the data logs of your vehicle -- helped out. It provided evidence that Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in the RAV4 had detected malfunctions, logged as Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), before the theft. According to Tindell, "Ian's car dropped a lot of DTCs." Various systems had seemingly failed or suffered faults, including the front cameras and the hybrid engine control system. With some further analysis it became clear the ECUs probably hadn't failed, but communication between them had been lost or disrupted. The common factor was the CAN bus.

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The Open Source VPN Out-Maneuvering Russian Censorship

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Russian government has banned more than 10,000 websites for content about the war in Ukraine since Moscow launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The blacklist includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and independent news outlets. Over the past year, Russians living inside the country have turned to censorship circumvention tools such as VPNs to pierce through the information blockade. But as dozens of virtual private networks get blocked, leaving users scrambling to maintain their access to free information, local activists and developers are coming up with new solutions. One of them is Amnezia VPN, a free, open source VPN client. "We even do not advertise and promote it, and new users are still coming by the hundreds every day," says Mazay Banzaev, Amnezia VPN's founder. Unlike commercial VPNs that route users through company servers, which can be blocked, Amnezia VPN makes it simple for users to buy and set up their own servers. This allows them to choose their own IP address and use protocols that are harder to block. "More than half of the commercial VPNs in Russia have been blocked because it's easy enough to block them: They do not block them by protocols, but by IP addresses," says Banzaev. "[Amnezia] is an order of magnitude more resilient than a typical commercial VPN." Amnezia VPN is similar to Outline, a free and open source tool developed by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google. Amnezia was created in 2020 during a hackathon supported by Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda. Even then, "it was clear that things were moving toward stricter censorship," says Banzaev. [...] It is unclear how many users the service has, since the organization doesn't have a way to monitor user numbers, Banzaev says. However, Amnezia offers a Telegram bot called AmneziaFree, which shares VPN configurations that help users access blocked platforms and news; it has almost 100,000 users. The bot is currently struggling with overload, and users are complaining about spotty service. Banzaev says the Amnezia team is working to add new servers on a limited budget, and that they are also working on a new version of the service. "Amnezia is not only used in Russia," notes Wired. "The service has spread to Turkmenistan, Iran, China, and other countries where users have been struggling with free access to the web."

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OpenAI To Offer Remedies To Resolve Italy's ChatGPT Ban

The company behind ChatGPT will propose measures to resolve data privacy concerns that sparked a temporary Italian ban on the artificial intelligence chatbot, regulators said Thursday. The Associated Press reports: In a video call late Wednesday between the watchdog's commissioners and OpenAI executives including CEO Sam Altman, the company promised to set out measures to address the concerns. Those remedies have not been detailed. The Italian watchdog said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but stressed to OpenAI the importance of complying with the 27-nation EU's stringent privacy rules. The regulators imposed the ban after some users' messages and payment information were exposed to others. They also questioned whether there's a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to train ChatGPT's algorithms and raised concerns the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals. Other regulators in Europe and elsewhere have started paying more attention after Italy's action. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it's "following up with the Italian regulator to understand the basis for their action and we will coordinate with all EU Data Protection Authorities in relation to this matter." France's data privacy regulator, CNIL, said it's investigating after receiving two complaints about ChatGPT. Canada's privacy commissioner also has opened an investigation into OpenAI after receiving a complaint about the suspected "collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent." In a blog post this week, the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office warned that "organizations developing or using generative AI should be considering their data protection obligations from the outset" and design systems with data protection as a default. "This isn't optional -- if you're processing personal data, it's the law," the office said. In an apparent response to the concerns, OpenAI published a blog post Wednesday outlining its approach to AI safety. The company said it works to remove personal information from training data where feasible, fine-tune its models to reject requests for personal information of private individuals, and acts on requests to delete personal information from its systems.

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Arkansas House Wants You To Show ID To Use Social Media

With no discussion, the Arkansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would require social media users in The Natural State to verify they're 18 years old or older to use the platforms. Arkansas Times reports: The proposal, backed by Gov. Sarah Sanders, is aimed at shielding minors from the harmful effects of social media. Young folks could use the platforms, but only if parents provide consent. Senate Bill 396, sponsored by Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Springdale) and Rep. Jon Eubanks (R-Paris), would require social media companies including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to contract with third-party companies to perform age verification. Users would have to provide the third-party company with a digital driver's license. Dees also sponsored a bill, now law, that requires anyone who wants to watch online pornography to verify they're an adult. The social media bill squeaked through the Senate with 18 yes votes, the bare minimum, but passed the House 82-10 with four voting present (same as no). No one asked any questions of Eubanks -- who assured his colleagues that Facebook had "the AI and algorithms" to keep track of what users had parental consent without holding on to sensitive data -- but because it was amended (to among other things exempt LinkedIn, the most boring social media platform), the bill has to go back to the Senate, where perhaps it will meet some resistance. Utah's governor signed two bills into law last month requiring companies like Meta, Snap and TikTok to get parents permission before teens could create accounts on their platforms. "The laws also require curfew, parental controls and age verification features," adds Engadget.

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Thieves Tunnel Through Coffee Shop Wall To Steal $500,000 In iPhones From Washington Apple Store

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: An Apple Store at the Alderwood Mall was burgled last weekend, with thieves infiltrating the location through a nearby coffee shop. According to Seattle's King 5 News, thieves broke into Seattle Coffee Gear, went into the bathroom, and cut a hole in the wall to get to the Apple Store backroom. The burglars were able to bypass the Apple Store's security system by using the adjacent coffee shop, stealing a total of 436 iPhones that were worth around $500,000. According to Seattle Coffee Gear manager Eric Marks, the coffee shop is not noticeably adjacent to the Apple Store because of the way that the store is laid out. "I would have never suspected we were adjacent to the Apple Store, how it wraps around I mean," Marks told King 5 News. "So, someone really had to think it out and have access to the mall layout." Police were able to obtain surveillance footage of the theft, but as it is part of an active investigation, it has not yet been released. Nothing was stolen from the coffee shop, but it will cost $1,500 to replace locks and repair the bathroom wall.

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