An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act." Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.

Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
- Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
- Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently; - Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
- Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.

Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."

The U.S. Supreme Court, exploring free speech rights in the social media era, on Monday agreed to consider whether the Constitution's First Amendment bars government officials from blocking their critics on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. From a report: The justices took up an appeal by two members of a public school board from the city of Poway in Southern California of a lower court's ruling in favor of school parents who sued after being blocked from Facebook pages and a Twitter account maintained by the officials. The justices also took up an appeal by a Michigan man of a lower court's ruling against him after he sued a city official in Port Huron who blocked him on Facebook following critical posts made by the plaintiff about the local government's COVID-19 response. At issue is whether a public official's social media activity can amount to governmental action bound by First Amendment limits on government regulation of speech.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: According to Google Trends, peak "Lean to Code" occurred in early 2019 when laid-off Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists were taunted with the phrase on Twitter... As Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently put it, "We're in a different world." Indeed. Encouraging kids to pursue CS careers in Code.org's viral 2013 launch video, Zuckerberg explained, "Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find."

In Learning to Code Isn't Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system."
But is that really true? Vox does note that the latest round of layoffs at Meta "is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach." Yet while that's also true at other companies, those laid-off tech workers also seem to be finding similar positions by working in other industries: Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies. "Early layoffs were dominated by recruiters, which is forgoing future hiring," Revelio senior economist Reyhan Ayas told Vox. "Whereas in 2023 we see a shift toward more core engineering and software engineering, which signals a change in focus of current business priorities."

In other words, tech companies aren't just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They're also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they're known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to...

The latest monthly jobs report by tech industry association CompTIA found that even though employment at tech companies (which includes all roles at those companies) declined slightly in March, employment in technical occupations across industry sectors increased by nearly 200,000 positions. So even if tech companies are laying off tech workers, other industries are snatching them up. Unfortunately for software engineers and the like, that means they might also have to follow those industries' pay schemes. The average software engineer base pay in the US is $90,000, according to PayScale, but can be substantially higher at tech firms like Facebook, where such workers also get bonuses and stock options.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said the embattled company may not be done with layoffs even as it goes through its latest round of 4,000 this week and braces for another batch in May. MarketWatch reports: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which announced its intention to slash 21,000 jobs late last year, is also likely to dramatically slow down hiring, Zuckerberg told employees in a town hall on Thursday, according to a Wall Street Journal report. "I just kind of think that for where we are in the efficiency that we're able to get from new technologies, that's probably the right model to expect going forward and that will be a different operating model and I think we can do it well," Zuckerberg said in a virtual Q&A session, the report said.

Meta, which announces quarterly results on Wednesday, faces an uncertain future over the next few years, Zuckerberg said, and there are no guarantees the workforce reductions are over. "I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don't want to kind of promise that there won't be future things in the future," he said. "What I can say is that there's nothing that we're planning now, and if we do something, it'll be sort of on that time frame."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Facebook users have until August to claim their share of a $725 million class-action settlement of a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by the social media company, a new website reveals. The lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

People who had an active U.S. Facebook account between May 2007 and December 2022 have until Aug. 25 to enter a claim. Individual settlement payments haven't yet been established because payouts depend on how many users submit claims and how long each user maintained a Facebook account. Facebook users can make a claim by visiting Facebookuserprivacysettlement.com and entering their name, address, email address, and confirming they lived in the U.S. and were active on Facebook between the aforementioned dates.

The FBI, Interpol and the UK's National Crime Agency have accused Meta of making a "purposeful" decision to increase end-to-end encryption in a way that in effect "blindfolds" them to child sex abuse. From a report: The Virtual Global Taskforce, made up of 15 law enforcement agencies, issued a joint statement saying that plans by Facebook and Instagram-parent Meta to expand the use of end-to-end encryption on its platforms were "a purposeful design choice that degrades safety systems," including with regards to protecting children. The law enforcement agencies also warned technology companies more broadly about the need to balance safeguarding children online with protecting users' privacy. "The VGT calls for all industry partners to fully appreciate the impact of implementing system design decisions that result in blindfolding themselves to CSA [child sexual abuse] occurring on their platforms or reduces their capacity to identify CSA and keep children safe," the statement said.

As the European Union gears up to enforce a major reboot of its digital rulebook in a matter of months, a new dedicated research unit is being spun up to support oversight of large platforms under the bloc's flagship Digital Services Act (DSA). From a report: The European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT), which was officially inaugurated in Seville, Spain, today, is expected to play a major role in interrogating the algorithms of mainstream digital services -- such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

ECAT is embedded within the EU's existing Joint Research Centre (JRC), a long-established science facility that conducts research in support of a broad range of EU policymaking, from climate change and crisis management to taxation and health sciences. But while the ECAT is embedded within the JRC -- and temporarily housed in the same austere-looking building (Seville's World Trade Centre), ahead of getting more open-plan bespoke digs in the coming years -- it has a dedicated focus on the DSA, supporting lawmakers to gather evidence to build cases so they can act on any platforms that don't take their obligations seriously. Commission officials describe the function of ECAT being to identify "smoking guns" to drive enforcement of the DSA -- say, for example, an AI-based recommender system that can be shown is serving discriminatory content despite the platform in question claiming to have taken steps to "de-bias" output -- with the unit's researchers being tasked with coming up with hard evidence to help the Commission build cases for breaches of the new digital rulebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Meta will conduct another mass round of layoffs on Wednesday, several sources working at the company told Vox. In an internal memo posted to a Meta employee message board on Tuesday evening and viewed by Vox, the company told employees that the layoffs will start on Wednesday and will impact a wide range of technical teams including those working on Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the memo was sent to employees but declined to comment further. The cuts could be in the range of 4,000 jobs, one source said.

"This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta," Lori Goler, Meta's head of people, said in the memo. Meta employees in North America will be notified by email between 4 am to 5 am PT Wednesday morning, according to Goler's note. Outside of North America, the timelines will vary country to country, and some countries will not be impacted. Meta is also asking employees in North America, whose job allow it, to work from home on Wednesday to give people "space to process the news." "The layoffs come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that the company would cut 10,000 more jobs in the coming months, after already cutting 11,000 in November," notes Vox.

After placing an early bet on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft has another secret weapon in its arsenal: its own artificial intelligence chip for powering the large-language models responsible for understanding and generating humanlike language. The Information: The software giant has been developing the chip, internally code-named Athena, since as early as 2019, according to two people with direct knowledge of the project. The chips are already available to a small group of Microsoft and OpenAI employees, who are testing the technology, one of them said. Microsoft is hoping the chip will perform better than what it currently buys from other vendors, saving it time and money on its costly AI efforts. Other prominent tech companies, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, also make their own in-house chips for AI. The chips -- which are designed for training software such as large-language models, along with supporting inference, when the models use the intelligence they acquire in training to respond to new data -- could also relieve a shortage of the specialized computers that can handle the processing needed for AI software. That shortage, reflecting the fact that primarily just one company, Nvidia, makes such chips, is felt across tech. It has forced Microsoft to ration its computers for some internal teams, The Information has reported.

The Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry organization representing technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, has voiced concerns over a recent amendment to India's IT rules, saying the changes grant the local government expansive content removal authority without implementing adequate procedural safeguards. From a report: India recently updated its IT rules, barring social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter from disseminating false or misleading information about the government's business affairs. Under the new regulations, these firms must rely on New Delhi's own fact-checking unit to verify claims. The amendments lack the "sufficient procedural safeguards" to protect people's fundamental rights to access information, said Jeff Paine, Managing Director of AIC in a statement Monday.

A New York Times opinion piece argues people in the AI industry "are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down." But how? What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That's where the government comes in — or so they hope... [A]fter talking to a lot of people working on these problems and reading through a lot of policy papers imagining solutions, there are a few categories I'd prioritize.

The first is the question — and it is a question — of interpretability. As I said above, it's not clear that interpretability is achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand... The second is security. For all the talk of an A.I. race with China, the easiest way for China — or any country for that matter, or even any hacker collective — to catch up on A.I. is to simply steal the work being done here. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity. It's ridiculous to block the export of advanced semiconductors to China but to simply hope that every 26-year-old engineer at OpenAI is following appropriate security measures.

The third is evaluations and audits. This is how models will be evaluated for everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet. Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast.
The piece also recommends that AI-design companies "bear at least some liability for what their models." But what legislation should we see — and what legislation will we see? "One thing regulators shouldn't fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry," the piece argues.

"For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down."

Online tax-filing services from TurboTax and H&R Block "want to blab your tax return secrets," warns the Washington Post. "Why? To help them make more money." If you prepare your taxes online with TurboTax or H&R Block software, at some point you'll see a message that I found confusing. "We can help you do more," TurboTax says. In this case, that "help" is funneling the private information from your tax return to Intuit — the company that owns TurboTax, Credit Karma and accounting software QuickBooks. H&R Block offers to "personalize your H&R Block experience."

If you say yes, you're going to see email and other marketing from Intuit and H&R Block or its business partners that are tailored to what's in your tax return.

That might include how much money you make, how much you owe in student loans, the size of your tax return and your charitable contributions. For example, a credit card company might pay Intuit's Credit Karma to show offers to high-income people. Intuit knows that information from your tax return. The Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote last year about how these two companies grab for your secret tax return information. He dubbed it "the Facebook-ization of personal finance."

In a way, the tax prep companies are more aggressive than Facebook. What they're doing is mission creep. You might already be paying TurboTax and H&R Block to prepare or file your tax return. Now they also want your permission to pass along your secrets to make even more money off you.

A proposed Indian government unit to fact-check news on social media is not about censoring journalism nor will it have any impact on media reportage, a federal minister said on Friday. Reuters reports: Recently amended IT regulation requires online platforms like Meta's Facebook and Twitter to "make reasonable efforts" to not "publish, share or host" any information relating to the government that is "fake, false or misleading." Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India minister of state for IT, said in an online discussion it was "not true" that the government-appointed unit, which press freedom advocates strongly oppose, was aimed at "censoring journalism." The Editors Guild of India last week described the move as draconian and akin to censorship.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the "year of efficiency" at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company's work force. At the same time, some of Meta's top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv. The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a bad bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees at Meta, which not long ago was one of the most desirable workplaces in Silicon Valley, face an increasingly precarious future. The company's stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg has said on his Facebook page, are coming this month. Some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said. "So many of the employees feel like they're in limbo right now," said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. "They're saying it's 'Hunger Games' meets 'Lord of the Flies,' where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management."

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is not the only big tech company that has hit the brakes on spending. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, shed office space, dropped perks and pulled back from experimental initiatives. But Meta appears to face the most challenges. Last year, the company reported consecutive quarters of declining revenue -- a first since it became a public company in 2012.

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."

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.

Meta has announced an AI model called the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that can identify individual objects in images and videos, even those not encountered during training. From a report: According to a blog post from Meta, SAM is an image segmentation model that can respond to text prompts or user clicks to isolate specific objects within an image. Image segmentation is a process in computer vision that involves dividing an image into multiple segments or regions, each representing a specific object or area of interest. The purpose of image segmentation is to make an image easier to analyze or process. Meta also sees the technology as being useful for understanding webpage content, augmented reality applications, image editing, and aiding scientific study by automatically localizing animals or objects to track on video.

Typically, Meta says, creating an accurate segmentation model "requires highly specialized work by technical experts with access to AI training infrastructure and large volumes of carefully annotated in-domain data." By creating SAM, Meta hopes to "democratize" this process by reducing the need for specialized training and expertise, which it hopes will foster further research into computer vision. In addition to SAM, Meta has assembled a dataset it calls "SA-1B" that includes 11 million images licensed from "a large photo company" and 1.1 billion segmentation masks produced by its segmentation model. Meta will make SAM and its dataset available for research purposes under an Apache 2.0 license. Currently, the code (without the weights) is available on GitHub, and Meta has created a free interactive demo of its segmentation technology.

India amended its IT law on Thursday to prohibit Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms from publishing, hosting or sharing false or misleading information about "any business" of the government and said the firms will be required to rely on New Delhi's own fact-check unit to determine the authenticity of any claim in a blow to many American giants that identify the South Asian market as their largest by users. From a report: Failure to comply with the rule, which also impacts internet service providers such as Jio and Airtel, risks the firms losing their safe harbour protections. The rule, first proposed in January this year, gives a unit of the government arbitrary and overbroad powers to determine the authenticity of online content and bypasses the principles of natural justice, said New Delhi-headquartered digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation.

The recently introduced RESTRICT Act, otherwise known as the "TikTok ban," is a dangerous substitute for comprehensive data privacy legislation, writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a blog post. From the post: As we wrote in our initial review of the bill, the RESTRICT Act would authorize the executive branch to block 'transactions' and 'holdings' of 'foreign adversaries' that involve 'information and communication technology' and create 'undue or unacceptable risk' to national security and more. We've explained our opposition to the RESTRICT Act and urged everyone who agrees to take action against it. But we've also been asked to address some of the concerns raised by others. We do that here in this post. At its core, RESTRICT would exempt certain information services from the federal statute, known as the Berman Amendments, which protects the free flow of information in and out of the United States and supports the fundamental freedom of expression and human rights concerns. RESTRICT would give more power to the executive branch and remove many of the commonsense restrictions that exist under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) and the aforementioned Berman Amendments. But S. 686 also would do a lot more.

EFF opposes the bill, and encourages you to reach out to your representatives to ask them not to pass it. Our reasons for opposition are primarily that this bill is being used as a cudgel to protect data from foreign adversaries, but under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well. Separately, handing relatively unchecked power over to the executive branch to make determinations about what sort of information technologies and technology services are allowed to enter the U.S. is dangerous. If Congress is concerned about foreign powers collecting our data, it should focus on comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation that will have a real impact, and protect our data no matter what platform it's on -- TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else that profits from our private information. That's why EFF supports such consumer data privacy legislation. Foreign adversaries won't be able to get our data from social media companies if the social media companies aren't allowed to collect, retain, and sell it in the first place. EFF says it's not clear if the RESTRICT Act will even result in a "ban" on TikTok. It does, however, have potential to punish people for using a VPN to access TikTok if it is restricted. In conclusion, the group says the bill is similar to a surveillance bill and is "far too broad in the power it gives to investigate potential user data."

Facebook owner Meta intends to commercialize its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December, joining Google in finding practical applications for the tech. From a report: The company, which began full-scale AI research in 2013, stands out along with Google in the number of studies published. "We've been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, told Nikkei in an exclusive interview on Wednesday in Tokyo. "We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people." Meta announced in February that it would establish a new organization to develop generative AI, but this is the first time it has indicated a timeline for commercialization. The technology, which can instantly create sentences and graphics, has already been commercialized by ChatGPT creator OpenAI of the U.S. But Bosworth insists Meta remains on the technology's cutting edge.

"We feel very confident that ... we are at the very forefront," he said. "Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams. "[I] expect we'll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It's probably the area that I'm spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox." Bosworth believes Meta's artificial intelligence can improve an ad's effectiveness partly by telling the advertiser what tools to use in making it. He said that instead of a company using a single image in an advertising campaign, it can "ask the AI, 'Make images for my company that work for different audiences.' And it can save a lot of time and money."