Today, Rivian announced that it is switching from the Combined Charging System (CCS) standard to the North American Charging Standard (NACS), tesla's competing standard, in 2024. The automaker joins Ford and General Motors in adopting Tesla's charging plugs for its future electric vehicles. Ars Technica reports: "We're excited to work with Tesla and to see collaborations like this help advance the world toward carbon neutrality. The adoption of the North American Charging Standard will enable our existing and future customers to leverage Tesla's expansive Supercharger network while we continue to build out our Rivian Adventure Network. We look forward to continuing to find new ways to accelerate EV adoption," said Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe in a statement.

In an email to customers, Rivian said that it would make adapters available, so people should not wait for the factory to switch over to the NACS port from CCS1. It also says that it will add Tesla charging sites to its mobile and vehicle navigation apps. From 2025, it will start building NACS ports into its vehicles. Like GM, Rivian is in the midst of deploying thousands of DC fast chargers with CCS1 plugs, and like GM, Rivian says that the switch to NACS does not affect those plans. As with Ford and GM, there are no details as to the terms of the deal between Rivian and Tesla.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A handful of subreddits have classified themselves as not safe for work (NSFW) to protest Reddit's recent treatment of the platform's volunteer moderators, and as a result, some non-porn communities are starting to get a lot of porn. More than 8,000 subreddits went dark last week in protest of the company's API pricing changes that are set to shut down popular third-party apps. But as the protests went on, Reddit started to push back. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Steve Huffman said that, while the platform allows the protests, "the users are not in support of it now. It's like a protest in a city that goes on too long, and the rest of the citizens of the city would like to go about their lives."

In an interview with NBC News, Huffman characterized moderators as "landed gentry." And some mods have felt threatened by messages sent to them by the company. Thousands of subreddits have reopened; one tracker indicates only about 3,300 remain private or restricted. But switching to NSFW creates a new level of friction in reopened communities.

Suzuki said Tuesday it has agreed to jointly start producing "flying cars" with Japanese start-up SkyDrive around the spring of 2024 as it aims to take the lead in the growing industry. From a report: Flying cars are a type of aircraft with the ability to vertically take off and land using multiple rotors. The vehicles are typically meant for carrying a small number of people, with some models also equipped for use on land. SkyDrive will set up a fully-owned production subsidiary that will assemble vehicles utilizing the Suzuki group's plant in Shizuoka Prefecture.

The announcement comes a day after SkyDrive, a leading flying car start-up in Japan, unveiled at the Paris Airshow a plan to change the design of its vehicle under development so it can carry three people instead of two. The new design, which has an overall length of about 13 meters and a height of 3 meters, will extend the maximum flight range to about 15 kilometers from the current 10 km. SkyDrive and Suzuki announced a tie-up in the area of flying vehicles in March 2022, but the details of the collaboration have been under discussion.

You can now forgo entering your password on icloud.com and apple.com domains thanks to newly added passkey support. From a report: When running iOS 17 on an iPhone, any Apple site on the web can rely instead on Face ID or Touch ID to authenticate your login. As part of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, your Apple ID is automatically assigned a passkey that can be used for iCloud and Apple sites. If you're running iOS 17 on your iPhone, you can try it out now. Just go to any sign-in page with an apple.com or icloud.com domain, like appleid.apple.com or www.apple.com/shop/bag, and look for the Sign in with iPhone button after your enter your Apple ID email address. We've tried this from Safari on the Mac, although you can use passkeys on non-Apple devices as well. Once you select Sign in with iPhone, a QR code is presented that you scan with your iPhone. If you scan the QR code from the Camera app, you can tap the yellow link box to invoke Face ID or Touch ID to authenticate your identity on the web without ever entering your password.

OpenAI -- an early mover in releasing chatbots powered by large-language models -- is contemplating another initiative to extend its influence in the world of artificial intelligence. From a report: The company is considering launching a marketplace in which customers could sell AI models they customize for their own needs to other businesses, according to two people with knowledge of discussions at the company.

The marketplace could be OpenAI's version of an app store, offering businesses a way to access bleeding-edge large-language models that can, for instance, sniff out financial fraud in online retail transactions or answer questions about specific markets with up-to-date information, these people said. Creating such an app store also could be a hedge against a future where no AI model dominates. It's not clear whether OpenAI would charge commissions on those sales or otherwise look to generate revenue from the marketplace.

Billy Perrigo, reporting for Time: The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has spent the last month touring world capitals where, at talks to sold-out crowds and in meetings with heads of governments, he has repeatedly spoken of the need for global AI regulation. But behind the scenes, OpenAI has lobbied for significant elements of the most comprehensive AI legislation in the world -- the E.U.'s AI Act -- to be watered down in ways that would reduce the regulatory burden on the company, according to documents about OpenAI's engagement with E.U. officials obtained by TIME from the European Commission via freedom of information requests.

In several cases, OpenAI proposed amendments that were later made to the final text of the E.U. law -- which was approved by the European Parliament on June 14, and will now proceed to a final round of negotiations before being finalized as soon as January. In 2022, OpenAI repeatedly argued to European officials that the forthcoming AI Act should not consider its general purpose AI systems -- including GPT-3, the precursor to ChatGPT, and the image generator Dall-E 2 -- to be "high risk," a designation that would subject them to stringent legal requirements including transparency, traceability, and human oversight.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham believes that Plasma 6 is now "fairly livable" and recommends KDE developers and power users / enthusiasts start giving it a try. Phoronix reports: He characterized Plasma 6 as: "Basically everything in Plasma compiles with Qt 6, and at this point Plasma 6 is fairly livable. To give you a sense of how livable, it's good enough that over the past 2 months, I've gone on three KDE-related trips from the USA to Europe, with my only computer running Plasma 6 in "current git master" state, with work-in-progress merge requests applied! Its stability has been good enough that this has caused me no apprehension, and indeed, it's been totally fine on each trip. So seriously, if you're a KDE developer or an adventurous user, start living on Plasma 6! Jump right in, the water's fine. :)"

He went on to write more about the current development activities around Plasma 6. He also shared his personal beliefs around Plasma 6.0 release timing although no official release schedule is yet to be determined. Nate's belief is that Plasma 6.0 will likely be ready for release sometime between December and March.

According to an industry insider, LCD TVs won't see any further development because all new R&D money is being spent on self-emissive displays like MicroLED and OLED, as well as on backlight technology like Mini-LED. Tom's Guide reports: According to Bob Raikes from Display Daily, it's all about OLED development. "I asked EMD (which is the US name of Merck KGaA and is by far the dominant supplier of LC materials), what they were doing to push LC materials for displays onto the next stage ... They are developing LCs for privacy windows and antennas, but they told us that 'there is no pull from clients' for significant development in LC materials," Raikes wrote in a recent article. "That shouldn't have been a surprise to me -- I have been talking about the switch to OLED and other emissive displays for the premium end (and later the mainstream) of the display market for a lot of years. Still, after decades of reporting on LC developments, it took a moment to sink in!"

As for what, specifically, manufacturers are working on, it's the production of QD-OLED panels for use in the high-end Samsung and Sony TVs like the Samsung S95C OLED and Sony A95K OLED as well as the development of PHOLED panels that use a blue phosphorescent material that has a longer shelf life and can go brighter than the traditional organic material in OLED panels. [...] Sadly, LCD TVs' days are coming to a close, but OLED TVs are still going strong.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Meta says its new speech-generating AI model is too dangerous for public release. Meta announced a new AI model called Voicebox yesterday, one it says is the most versatile yet for speech generation, but it's not releasing it yet: "There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time."

The model is still only a research project, but Meta says can generate speech in six languages from samples as short as two seconds and could be used for "natural, authentic" translation in the future, among other things.

A government panel in Japan drew up a set of regulations aimed at opening up the smartphone app stores of U.S. technology giants Apple and Google to competition. From a report: The two companies dominating the smartphone operating system market will be obliged to allow their users to download apps by using services other than their own app stores. The government hopes that the move will spur competition and lead to app price drops. The smartphone OS market is occupied almost entirely by Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The companies control how apps are installed and paid for on their iPhones and Android devices.

The government will create a list of what OS providers must not do in order to stop them favoring their own services and payment platforms. The regulations were drawn up at the government's headquarters for digital market competition, headed by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno. The government aims to submit relevant legislation to the next year's ordinary session of parliament. Apple makes it impossible for iPhone users to download apps without using its App Store. Of Android users, 97% download apps through the Google Play store, although Google does not require them to do so.

An anonymous reader shares a report: GPS is now a mainstay of daily life, helping us with navigation, tracking, mapping, and timing across a broad spectrum of applications. But it does have a few shortcomings, most notably not being able to pass through buildings, rocks, or water. That's why Japanese researchers have developed an alternative wireless navigation system that relies on cosmic rays, or muons, instead of radio waves, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. The team has conducted its first successful test, and the system could one day be used by search and rescue teams, for example, to guide robots underwater or to help autonomous vehicles navigate underground.

"Cosmic-ray muons fall equally across the Earth and always travel at the same speed regardless of what matter they traverse, penetrating even kilometers of rock," said co-author Hiroyuki Tanaka of Muographix at the University of Tokyo in Japan. "Now, by using muons, we have developed a new kind of GPS, which we have called the muometric positioning system (muPS), which works underground, indoors and underwater."

Jonathan Corbet, writing at LWN: In the fast-moving open-source world, programs can come and go quickly; a tool that has many users today can easily be eclipsed by something better next week. Even in this environment, though, some programs endure for a long time. As an example, consider the PostgreSQL database system, which traces its history back to 1986. Making fundamental changes to a large code base with that much history is never an easy task. As fundamental changes go, moving PostgreSQL away from its process-oriented model is not a small one, but it is one that the project is considering seriously.

A PostgreSQL instance runs as a large set of cooperating processes, including one for each connected client. These processes communicate through a number of shared-memory regions using an elaborate library that enables the creation of complex data structures in a setting where not all processes have the same memory mapped at the same address. This model has served the project well for many years, but the world has changed a lot over the history of this project. As a result, PostgreSQL developers are increasingly thinking that it may be time to make a change.

Indonesia and Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX on Monday launched the country's largest telecommunication satellite from the United States, in a $540 million project intended to link up remote corners of the archipelago to the internet. From a report: Roughly two-thirds of Indonesia's 280 million population already use the internet, but connectivity is limited in far-flung, underdeveloped eastern islands of the Southeast Asian country. "Satellite technology will accelerate internet access to villages in areas that cannot be reached by fiber optics in the next 10 years," Mahfud MD, senior Indonesian minister, said in a statement ahead of the launch. The 4.5-tonne Satellite of the Republic of Indonesia (SATRIA-1) was built by Thales Alenia Space and deployed into orbit from Florida by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which then returned to an offshore site in a precision landing.

Hackers are threatening to release confidential data stolen from Reddit unless the company pays a ransom demand -- and reverses its controversial API price hikes. From a report: In a post on its dark web leak site, the BlackCat ransomware gang, also known as ALPHV, claims to have stolen 80 gigabytes of compressed data from Reddit during a February breach of the company's systems. Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini declined to answer TechCrunch's questions but confirmed that BlackCat's claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9.

At the time, Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, said that hackers had accessed employee information and internal documents during a "highly-targeted" phishing attack. Slowe added that the company had "no evidence" that personal user data, such as passwords and accounts, had been stolen. Reddit didn't share any further details about the attack or who was behind it. However, BlackCat over the weekend claimed responsibility for the February intrusion and threatened to leak "confidential" data stolen during the breach. It's unclear exactly what types of data the hackers have stolen, and BlackCat hasn't shared any evidence of data theft.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, the city of Mountain View, California "just approved its biggest development ever," reports SFGate, "and it's for exactly the company you'd expect." Google got the go-ahead to build a 153-acre mixed-use neighborhood just south of its headquarters in north Mountain View on June 13, with unanimous city council approval.

Plans for the 30-year project, which will supplant the Google offices and parking lots currently in the area, include over 3 million square feet of office space and 7,000 residential units... Originally, the developers planned to dedicate 20% of the new housing to affordable units, but the approved plan sets aside only 15% for lower- and middle-income housing. Google lowered the target to make the project viable in an uncertain economic climate, a spokesperson told SFGATE. This past January, the firm laid off 12,000 workers.

The new development sounds an awful lot like the "company towns" of 1900-era American settlement — firms ran all the stores and housing for their workers — but a Google spokesperson said the new project's restaurants, housing and services would serve the broader Mountain View community. Along with the housing and Google office space, the plans include 26 acres of public parks and open space, up to 288,990 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, land for a school, new streets and a private utility system. The developers have 30 years to complete the project, as long as Google and Lendlease hit permit benchmarks and complete other terms within the first 15.

A new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company found that most Americans would prefer to live "in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media," reports Fast Company, adding "this sentiment is especially strong among older millennials and Gen Xers."

The Wrap summarizes the poll results: 77% of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was "plugged in," meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage...

63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy. In total, 67% of respondents said they'd prefer things as they used to be versus as they are now.
"Interestingly, baby boomers were slightly less eager to time hop, with only 60% of people over 55 saying they'd prefer to return to yesteryear," notes Fast Company: While Americans may want to unshackle themselves from the burden of constant connectivity, an overwhelming 90% also said that being open-minded about new technologies is important, a finding that mostly held up across demographics. About half of respondents even said they tend to adopt new technologies before most people they know...

Just over half said they found keeping up with new technologies overwhelming, and about that same percentage said they believe technology is more likely to divide people than unite them. Here, it was younger respondents who took the most pessimistic view, with 57% of people under 35 agreeing that technology divides, versus 43% who disagreed.

"Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb). [A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).

"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."

More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."

Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."

Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.

CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."

Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:

r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...

On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

Wednesday BleepingComputer reported: Malwarebytes confirmed today that the Windows 11 22H2 KB5027231 cumulative update released this Patch Tuesday breaks Google Chrome on its customers' systems... While uninstalling the KB5027231 update fixes the issue, admins report that it's not possible to do so via Windows Server Update Services because of a "catastrophic error..." The Google Chrome process is actually running but is prevented from fully launching the application and loading the user interface due to the conflict.
Then Friday BleepingComputer reported that the same update "also breaks Google Chrome on systems protected by Cisco and WatchGuard EDR and antivirus solutions." "We deploy Secure Endpoint 8.1.7 to our few thousand devices, and we started getting a mountain of reports this morning that Google Chrome would not appear on the screen after attempting to open it," one admin said. "With a little trial & error, I found that killing the Secure Endpoint service or uninstalling Secure Endpoint will allow Chrome to open again..."

WatchGuard staff also confirmed on Friday that Google Chrome wouldn't open on Windows 11 after installing KB5027231 if anti-exploit protection is enabled in the company's Endpoint Security software.
Thanks to Slashdot reader boley1 for sharing the news.

"If everyone has an electric car, will the electric grid be able to support all those cars being recharged?"

That's the question being answered this week in the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" newsletter: We can already see a preview of our electric future in Norway, one of the countries with the highest share of EVs. More than 90 percent of new cars sold in the country were plug-in electric, according to the latest data, from May. More than 20 percent of the country's overall vehicle fleet is electric, a share expected to rise to one-third by 2025. So far, the grid has essentially shrugged it off. "We haven't seen any issue of the grid collapsing," says Anne Nysæther, a managing director at Elvia, a utility serving Oslo and the surrounding areas with the nation's largest concentration of EVs. The country, now almost entirely powered by renewables, has easily met the extra demand from EVs while slashing greenhouse gas emissions. That's good, because Norway will ban all new petrol and diesel cars by 2025...

To electrify everything — all these expected EVs, heat pumps and other big power draws — [the U.S.] will need to start building up our grid, according to Jesse Jenkins, an energy modeling and engineering expert at Princeton University. The United States must at least double its electricity supply by 2050, while stringing up 75,000 miles of new high-voltage lines by 2035, the equivalent of 15 round trips from Los Angeles to New York City, and connect new wind and solar generation to the grid. That sounds like a lot. But something like this has already been done. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the U.S. built new transmission capacity at a speed close to what is required today, writes Jenkins in Mother Jones, even as electricity demand grew.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Penny Hoarder: If you Googled anything between 2006 and 2013, then Google owes you money for violating your privacy. Those are the terms of a class-action lawsuit that Google has settled for $23 million.

How much money does Google owe you? Well, it depends on how many people come forward to claim their share of the settlement. The current estimated payout is about $7.70 per person.

Of course, that number could go up or down before it's all over. If fewer people than expected file claims, the payout amount will go up. But if more people than expected file claims, the payout amount will go down because more people are sharing the settlement money... The deadline to file a claim is July 31...

Basically, the class-action lawsuit alleges that Google Search "improperly shared your search queries with third-party websites and companies" during the time period in question. This has to do with how Google allegedly included your search query in the link that's created whenever you click on a website in a Google search. This involves something called a "referrer header."

Even though Google settled the case, it still denies any wrongdoing or liability. As part of the lawsuit settlement, Google is updating its FAQ page.
Some interesting history from SFGate: The lawsuit was filed in 2010 over allegations that Google shared its users' search terms with third-party websites based on its use of referrer headers, which essentially shows websites how a user found them. In 2015, the case reached an $8.5 million settlement in the Northern District of California, with a vast majority of the settlement going to a collection of internet privacy groups, because the amount allocated for each individual would have been mere pennies. But the case was brought all the way up to the Supreme Court after Ted Frank, a conservative activist and vocal class action suit critic, disputed the settlement being sent to those nonprofit groups instead of the users affected by the suit. In 2019, the case made its way back down to the district court, where the preliminary settlement was approved in 2022...

The final approval hearing for the settlement, which includes whether the class action representatives will receive $5,000 and the representing attorneys will receive 25% of the $23 million sum, is scheduled for Oct. 12.
From the Settlement agreement: If the Settlement becomes final, Settlement Class Members will be releasing Google (and certain others related to Google, such as Google directors, officers and employees) from all of the settled claims. This means that you will no longer be able to sue Google (or the other released parties) regarding any of the settled claims if you are a Settlement Class Member and do not timely and properly exclude yourself from the Settlement Class...


YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS AND OPTIONS IN THIS SETTLEMENT:

FILE A CLAIM BY JULY 31, 2023
This is the only way to get a payment under the Settlement.

DO NOTHING
Get no payment under the Settlement and give up your right to compensation for the claims and allegations in this case.

EXCLUDE YOURSELF BY JULY 31, 2023
Get no payment under the Settlement. This is the only option that allows you to be a part of any other lawsuit against Google about the claims and allegations in this case.

OBJECT BY JULY 31, 2023
Write to the Court about why you think the Settlement should not be approved. You may also ask to speak in Court about the fairness of the Settlement.