Meta announced that it would remove news content from its platform in California if the state government passes legislation requiring tech companies to pay publishers. Reuters reports: The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act would require "online platforms" to pay a "journalism usage fee" to news providers whose work appears on their services, aimed at reversing a decline in the local news sector. In a tweeted statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the payment structure a "slush fund" and said the bill would primarily benefit "big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers."

The statement was Meta's first on the California bill specifically, although the company has been waging similar battles over compensation for news publishers at the federal level and in countries outside the United States.

Brave has launched its Brave Search API, allowing third parties to integrate its privacy-preserving and ad-free search results into their applications through a simple API call. Thurrott reports: Brave notes that its Search API is inexpensive and that it's a great fit for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models developers in particular because it provides access to a collection of high-quality, Web-scale data including recent events. Brave claims that its standalone Brave Search offering now delivers over 8 billion annualized queries, which makes it the fastest-growing search engine since Microsoft Bing. And in sharp contrast to the market leaders, Brave Search is private and transparent. Plus, it's fueled by opt-in users of the Brave browser's Web Discovery Project, which adds millions of new web pages to the index every single day and keeps it current and fresh. The Brave web browser has over 60 million active users now, the company adds.

A free version of the Brave Search API provides one search query per second and up to 2,000 queries per month. Paid tiers start at $3 CPM (cost per one thousand) for 20 queries per second and up to 20 million queries per month, with access to web search, Goggles, news cluster, and videos cluster, plus added cost access to autosuggest and spellcheck at $5 per 10,000 requests. Higher-price tiers add more queries per second and per month, plus additional capabilities like schema-enriched web results, infobox, FAQ, discussions, locations, and more.

Mozilla: Firefox version 115 will be the last supported Firefox version for users of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. If you are using these versions of Windows you will be moved to the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) channel by an application update. Mozilla will provide security updates for these users until September 2024. No security updates will be provided after that date.

Rest now, little Chromecast. Google has announced the decade-old Chromecast 1 is finally hitting end of life. From a report: A message on Google's Chromecast firmware support page announced the wind-down of support, saying, "Support for Chromecast (1st gen) has ended, which means these devices no longer receive software or security updates, and Google does not provide technical support for them. Users may notice a degradation in performance." The 1st-gen Chromecast launched in 2013 for $35.

The original Chromecast was wildly successful and sold 10 million units in 2014 alone. For years, the device was mentioned in Google earnings calls as the highlight of the company's hardware efforts, and it was essentially the company's first successful piece of hardware. The Chromecast made it easy to beam Internet videos to your TV at a time when that was otherwise pretty complicated.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by child pornography victims to overcome a legal shield for internet companies in a case involving a lawsuit accusing Reddit Inc of violating federal law by failing to rid the discussion website of this illegal content. The justices turned away the appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss the proposed class action lawsuit on the grounds that Reddit was shielded by a U.S. statute called Section 230, which safeguards internet companies from lawsuits for content posted by users but has an exception for claims involving child sex trafficking. The Supreme Court on May 19 sidestepped an opportunity to narrow the scope of Section 230 immunity in a separate case.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects "interactive computer services" by ensuring they cannot be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of information provided by users. The Reddit case explored the scope of a 2018 amendment to Section 230 called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which allows lawsuits against internet companies if the underlying claim involves child sex trafficking. Reddit allows users to post content that is moderated by other users in forums called subreddits. The case centers on sexually explicit images and videos of children posted to such forums by users. The plaintiffs -- the parents of minors and a former minor who were the subjects of the images -- sued Reddit in 2021 in federal court in California, seeking monetary damages. The plaintiffs accused Reddit of doing too little to remove or prevent child pornography and of financially benefiting from the illegal posts through advertising in violation of a federal child sex trafficking law.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 concluded that in order for the exception under FOSTA to apply, plaintiffs must show that an internet company "knowingly benefited" from the sex trafficking through its own conduct. Instead, the 9th Circuit concluded, the allegations "suggest only that Reddit 'turned a blind eye' to the unlawful content posted on its platform, not that it actively participated in sex trafficking." Reddit said in court papers that it works hard to find and prevent the sharing of child sexual exploitation materials on its platform, giving all users the ability to flag posts and using dedicated teams to remove illegal content.

Arm unveiled its upcoming flagship CPUs for 2024, including the Arm Cortex X4, Cortex A720, and Cortex A520. These chips, built on the Armv9.2 architecture, promise higher performance and improved power efficiency. Arm also introduced a new 'QARMA3 algorithm' for memory security and showcased a potential 14-core mega-chip design for high-performance laptops. Ars Technica reports: Arm claims the big Cortex X3 chip will have 15 percent higher performance than this year's X3 chip, and "40 percent better power efficiency." The company also promises a 20 percent efficiency boost for the A700 series and a 22 percent efficiency boost for the A500. The new chips are all built on the new 'Armv9.2' architecture, which adds a "new QARMA3 algorithm" for Arm's Pointer Authentication memory security feature. Pointer authentication assigns a cryptographic signature to memory pointers and is meant to shut down memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows by making it harder for unauthenticated programs to create valid memory pointers. This feature has been around for a while, but Arm's new algorithm reduces the CPU overhead of all this extra memory work to just 1 percent of the chip's power, which hopefully will get more manufacturers to enable it.

Arm's SoC recommendations are usually a "1+3+4" design. That's one big X chip, three medium A700 chips, and four A500 chips. This year the company is floating a new layout, though, swapping out two small chips for two medium chips, which would put you at a "1+5+2" configuration. Arm's benchmarks -- which were run on Android 13 -- claim this will get you 27 percent more performance. That's assuming anything can cool and power that for a reasonable amount of time. Arm's blog post also mentions a 1+4+4 chip -- nine cores -- for a flagship smartphone. [...]

Every year with these Arm flagship chip announcements, the company also includes a wild design for a giant mega-chip that usually never gets built. Last year the company's blueprint monster was a design with eight Cortex X3 chips and four A715 cores, which the company claimed would rival an Intel Core i7. The biggest X3-based chip on the market is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which landed in a few Windows laptops. That was only a four X3/four A715 chip, though. This year's mega chip is a 14-core monster with 10 Cortex X4 chips and four A720 chips, which Arm says is meant for "high-performance laptops." Arm calls the design the company's "most powerful cluster ever built," but will it ever actually be built? Will it ever be more than words on a page?

In 2021, YouTube made the controversial decision to hide dislike counts on its platform, citing the aim of protecting creators from harassment. While this removed a valuable metric for viewers, alternatives have emerged, such as the browser extension Return YouTube Dislike and the new site Favoree. The latter is being hailed as "the Rotten Tomatoes of YouTube," where users can rate and review YouTube channels. BGR reports: Earlier this week, one user disappointed with the removal of YouTube's dislike counts took to Reddit to promote their new site Favoree. Rather than simply giving a channel a thumbs up or thumbs down, you can give it a rating out of five stars and even write a review. That way, you can actually see why people like or dislike a given channel.

This is a new site, so only a small handful of YouTube channels are currently represented (much less have many ratings or reviews) [...]. For example, Summoning Salt is a stellar channel a friend turned me on to a few years ago, which features long-form documentary-style videos about the history of speedrunning video games. The channel page on Favoree features a short description, a list of relevant keywords, embedded videos, and several written reviews.

Obviously, this is only going to work if Favoree really picks up steam and thousands of users start writing reviews and submitting new channels. That said, it's an interesting project, and the creator is accepting feedback on Reddit and acting on many of those suggestions rather quickly. It will be interesting to track Favoree to see how it develops.

New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority is asking that its national airline weigh passengers departing on international flights from Auckland International Airport through July 2, 2023. From a report: The program, which Air New Zealand calls a passenger weight survey, is a way to gather data on the weight load and distribution for planes, the airline said. "We weigh everything that goes on the aircraft -- from the cargo to the meals onboard, to the luggage in the hold," Alastair James, the airline's load control improvement specialist said in a statement. "For customers, crew and cabin bags, we use average weights, which we get from doing this survey." Still, weight is a personal thing that not everyone wishes to disclose. In order to protect individuals' privacy, the airline says it has made the data anonymous.

Generative artificial intelligence is all the rage in startup-land, and corporate venture capital investors don't want to be left out. From a report: A small but growing number of companies' venture arms are rolling out efforts, in various forms, that are focused on investing in the current AI startup boom. Generative AI and large language models are getting a lot of attention for their potential to automate many business tasks, big and small. "From an enterprise perspective, more than two-thirds of leaders are trying to prioritize generative AI," Paul Drews, managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, tells Axios. Of the 44 startups Workday Ventures has backed, about 25% are already using tech developed by OpenAI, according to managing director Barbry McGann. She adds it's because the AI company's tools are so "enterprise-ready," making it easy for business software makers to quickly integrate the tech.

A group of industry leaders is planning to warn on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars. From a report: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war," reads a one-sentence statement expected to be released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I. The signatories included top executives from three of the leading A.I. companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered "godfathers" of the modern A.I. movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field (The third Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, who leads Meta's A.I. research efforts, had not signed as of Tuesday.) The statement comes at a time of growing concern about the potential harms of artificial intelligence. Recent advancements in so-called large language models -- the type of A.I. system used by ChatGPT and other chatbots -- have raised fears that A.I. could soon be used at scale to spread misinformation and propaganda, or that it could eliminate millions of white-collar jobs.

Canon has developed a material for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels that does not use rare metals, Nikkei reported. From the report: This move comes as the Japanese company aims to reduce its dependence on major rare metal producers such as those in China. Canon plans to commercialize the technology within a few years, paving the way for securing stable production without being affected by geopolitical risks. The new material is quantum dots (QD), tiny semiconductor particles with a diameter of 1 nanometer. When irradiated with light or injected with an electric current, the particles emit vivid colors.

Other quantum dots are already used for high-end OLED televisions. Samsung Electronics mass-produces quantum dots, but it uses the compound indium phosphide. Indium is a rare metal produced in extremely small quantities, with China being the major source. Canon's new material uses lead, which is easily procured from recycled raw materials in "urban mines." Canon aims to commercialize the material in the mid-2020s by establishing technology for mass production. Canon uses lead in some of its compounds as a substitute for indium. Lead usually leads to results that are less durable than with indium, but by leveraging its expertise in compounding materials such as toner and ink for office equipment, the company has devised a compound that is as durable as indium.

Nvidia and MediaTek on Monday said they will collaborate on technology to power advanced vehicle infotainment systems that can stream video or games or interact with drivers using artificial intelligence. From a report: Under the agreement, announced at the Computex technology trade show in Taipei, MediaTek will integrate an Nvidia graphic processing unit chiplet and Nvidia software into the system-on-chips it supplies to automakers for infotainment displays. MediaTek systems using Nvidia software would be compatible with automated driving systems based on Nvidia technology, the companies said. Dashboard displays could show the environment around the vehicle, while cameras would monitor the driver.

"The automotive industry needs strong companies that can work with the industry for decades at a time," Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang told a news conference in Taipei, pointing to a long product cycle for car makers. "The quality, strength and positions of our two companies could give the automotive industry partners that they can build their companies on," he said, adding the partnership would provide chips that can power "every single segment of a car".

"Over the past 13 years, Tim Taylor and Christine Dennison have scoured the ocean floor using autonomous underwater robots," according to a history writer's commentary on CNN, "to discover and document the wrecks of seven US submarines lost in World War II." Taylor and Dennison are ensuring that more families of those lost know where their loved ones' deep-water graves reside. They are racing against time as underwater development threatens many of these wrecks... Budget constraints hinder the Navy from devoting resources to undertaking these kinds of searches, according to Taylor, and his team is showing how private groups can fill the gap.
A philanthropic private investment group funds the expeditions, the article points out, adding that Taylor and Dennison "hope to employ the special autonomous underwater technology they created to help others map the ocean floor for environmental and other purposes."

Their latest find was part of the 82-day battle of Okinawa in 1945: The USS Mannert L. Abele, which the explorers found 4,500 feet under the Pacific Ocean and 81 miles from the nearest landmass, was the first American ship sunk by an unusual type of rocket-powered Japanese kamikaze plane... Though the Abele managed to shoot down two aircraft and damage or fend off others, at six minutes in, a Japanese fighter plunged into the destroyer's engine room and exploded, cutting off all electrical power. Just a minute later, another, much more unusual, plane slammed into the destroyer's hull. The Abele had been struck by a unique rocket-propelled kamikaze plane called the MXY7 Ohka ("Cherry Blossom"), which due to its very short range had to be carried under the belly of a larger bomber until close to US ships, whereupon it was released to soar toward its target at immense speed.

The detonation of this manned missile's 1.3 tons of explosives caused the ship to seemingly break into two and begin sinking. In a matter of minutes, 84 sailors and officers had been killed. Japanese aircraft strafed the surviving crew as they jumped into the oil-slick water, but two smaller landing craft escorting the Abele shot down two more planes and beat off the rest, managing to rescue 255 crew members.

Nearly eight decades later, modern robotics technologies allowed Taylor and Dennison to find the destroyer's submerged hull. In the past, Taylor noted, it would have been practically inconceivable for a small, private team to have undertaken the cumbersome search process that, Taylor estimated, would have taken four to five times as long and cost significantly more money...

It was on their last remaining day of a more-than-month-long search, just before bad weather would force them to conclude the expedition, that they spotted the Abele's wreck.

"Beginning next Thursday, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell plans to start enforcing the state's automotive right-to-repair law," reports the Boston Globe. "But this week, the world's top automakers asked a federal judge to stop her." The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a car industry trade group, sued to block enforcement of the law almost from the moment it was passed by voter referendum in 2020. Ever since, the law has been tied up in the courtroom of US District Judge Douglas Woodlock. Now the alliance has asked Woodlock to grant a temporary injunction that would stop Campbell from enforcing the law until he issues a final ruling in the case.

Campbell's predecessor, now-Governor Maura Healey, repeatedly refrained from enforcing the law, pending Woodlock's decision. But Healey always reserved the right to reverse this policy if a ruling took too long. In March, Campbell said she would start enforcing the law effective June 1. "The people of Massachusetts deserve the benefit of the law they approved more than two years ago," she said in a document filed with the court.

But the carmakers say that only the federal government has the authority to enact such a law. They claim the law is so poorly drafted that they can't comply with it, and even if they could, compliance would weaken vehicle security, making it easier for cyber criminals to steal digital data about vehicles and their owners. Two carmakers, Kia and Subaru, have tried to comply with the law by switching off the telematic services in their cars. But the carmakers argue that this deprives consumers of the right to use these features, which include emergency roadside assistance that could potentially save lives.

Reuters reports: China's cyberspace regulator said 1.4 million social media posts have been deleted following a two-month probe into alleged misinformation, illegal profiteering, and impersonation of state officials, among other "pronounced problems"...

Beijing frequently arrests citizens and censors accounts for publishing or sharing factual information considered sensitive or critical of the Communist Party, the government or the military, especially when such information goes viral. Of the 67,000 accounts that were permanently closed, almost 8,000 were taken down for "spreading fake news, rumours, and harmful information," according to The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Around 930,000 other accounts received less severe punishments, from being removed of all followers to the suspension or cancellation of profit-making privileges.

In a separate campaign, the regulator recently closed over 100,000 accounts that allegedly misrepresented news anchors and media agencies to counter the rise of online fake news coverage aided by AI technologies.

A CBS News video reports the U.S. military "is now testing an autonomous F-16 fighter jet, and in simulated dogfighting, the AI already crushes trained human pilots." And that's just one of several automated systems being developed — raising questions as to just how far this technology should go: "The people we met developing these systems say they aren't trying to replace humans, just make their jobs safer. But a shift to robot soldiers could change war in profound ways, as we found on a visit to Sikorsky Aircraft, the military contractor that makes the Blackhawk helicopter... Flying the experimental Blackhawk is as easy as moving a map." [The experimental helicopter is literally controlled by taps on a tablet computer, says a representative from Sikorsky. "We call it operating, because you're making suggestions. The machine really decides how to do it."]
The Sikorsky representative suggests it could avoid a "Blackhawk down" scenario where more human soldiers have to be sent into harm's way to try rescuing their comrades. But CBS also calls it "part of a larger effort to change how wars are fought, being led by DARPA, the Defense Department's innovative lab. They've also developed autonomous offroad buggies, unmanned undersea vehicles, and swarms and swarms of drones."

The CBS reporter then asks DARPA program manager Stuart Young if we're head for the future with Terminator-like fighting machines. His answer? "There's always those dilemmas that we have, but clearly our adversaries are thinking about that thing. And part of what DARPA does is to try to prevent technologial surprise." CBS also spoke to former Army Ranger Paul Scharre, who later worked for the Defense Department on autonomous weapons, who says already-available comercial technologies could create autonomous weapons today. "All it takes is a few lines of code to simply take the human out of the loop." "Scharre is not all doom and gloom. He points out in combat between nations, robot soldiers will legally need to follow the law of war, and might do so better than emotional or fatigued humans... But yes, Scharre does worry about the eventual marriage of advanced robots and military AI that becomes smarter and faster than we are."

Q: So at that point humans just would be out of the decision-making. You'd just have to trust the machines and that you'd programmed them well.

A: Yes...

Q: Do you think militaries should commit to keeping humans in the loop?

A: I don't think that's viable. If you could wave a magic wand and say, 'We're going to stop the growth of the technology', there's probably benefits in that. But I don't think it's viable today... A human looking at a target, saying 'Yep, that's a viable target,' pressing a button every single time? That would be ideal. I'm not sure that's going to be the case.

Microsoft's annual developer event Build 2023 unveiled ChatGPT's integration into Bing and an AI 'personal assistant' for Windows 11.

But Windows Central also notes two more big (non-AI) announcements: Windows 11 is getting cloud-powered OS backup and restore Smartphone owners have long enjoyed a similar functionality, where you could buy a new device and upon the first start, simply log in to your platform account and select "Restore my apps" from the cloud backup. And now Windows will be able to do the same. ["If the user chooses yes, Windows will automatically apply the old wallpaper and settings and even begin preloading apps you had installed on your old PC. Once the user hits the desktop, they'll see all their previously pinned apps already in the Taskbar, and clicking on them will initiate an automatic download from the Microsoft Store."]

Windows 11 on ARM devices gets a big boost [B]ecause Microsoft has no intention of dropping x86 support, they have been slow in adopting ARM architecture to make it a viable alternative for Windows users. With Build 2023, this is moving ahead...
Elsewhere Windows Central argues that "should result in a better experience on devices like the Surface Pro 9 (ARM), Surface Pro X, and the new Dell Inspiron 14 with a Snapdragon 8cx 2 processor.

On the gaming side of things, Unity with native Windows on ARM support will become available in early June. Once launched, the tool will let developers target Windows on ARM devices for current and future games, resulting in better performance. Unity is a very popular development platform for games, and native support for Windows on ARM is a welcome addition...

Visual Studio having Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) support for Arm will give developers another way to target Windows on ARM PCs.
Even Node.js v20.0.0 now officially supports ARM64 Windows, "allowing for native execution on the platform. The MSI, zip/7z packages, and executable are available from the Node.js download site along with all other platforms."

And in addition, Visual Studio 17.71 Preview 1 now ships with support for Linux development with C++.

Slashdot reader Zapotek brings an update from the Ecsypno skunkworks, where they've been busy with R&D for distributed computing systems: Armed with Cuboid, Qmap was built, which tackled the handling of nmap in a distributed environment, with great results. Afterwards, an iterative clean-up process led to a template of sorts, for scheduling most applications in such environments.

With that, Peplum was born, which allows for OS applications, Ruby code and C/C++/Rust code (via Ruby extensions) to be distributed across machines and tackle the processing of neatly grouped objects.

In essence, Peplum:

- Is a distributed computing solution backed by Cuboid.
- Its basic function is to distribute workloads and deliver payloads across multiple machines and thus parallelize otherwise time consuming tasks.
- Allows you to combine several machines and built a cluster/supercomputer of sorts with great ease.

After that was dealt with, it was time to port Qmap over to Peplum for easier long-term maintenance, thus renamed Peplum::Nmap.

We have high hopes for Peplum as it basically means easy, simple and joyful cloud/clustering/super-computing at home, on-premise, anywhere really. Along with the capability to turn a lot of security oriented apps into super versions of themselves, it is quite the infrastructure.
Yes, this means there's a new solution if you're using multiple machines for "running simulations, to network mapping/security scans, to password cracking/recovery or just encoding your collection of music and video" -- or anything else: Peplum is a F/OSS (MIT licensed) project aimed at making clustering/super-computing affordable and accessible, by making it simple to setup a distributed parallel computing environment for abstract applications... TLDR: You no longer have to only imagine a Beowulf cluster of those, you can now easily build one yourself with Peplum.
Some technical specs: It is written in the Ruby programming language, thus coming with an entire ecosystem of libraries and the capability to run abstract Ruby code, execute external utilities, run OS commands, call C/C++/Rust routines and more...

Peplum is powered by Cuboid, a F/OSS (MIT licensed) abstract framework for distributed computing — both of them are funded by Ecsypno Single Member P.C., a new R&D and Consulting company.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from CBS News: Amid growing concerns of security risks to members of Congress, over 50 senators have been issued satellite phones for emergency communication, people familiar with the measures told CBS News... [Senate Sergeant at Arms] Gibson said satellite communication is being deployed "to ensure a redundant and secure means of communication during a disruptive event." Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that "takes out communications" in part of America.

Google has been ordered to pay Sonos $32.5 million after a jury verdict found that Google's smart speakers and media players infringed on one of Sonos' patents. The Verge reports: The legal battle started in 2020 when Sonos accused Google of copying its patented multiroom audio technology after the companies partnered in 2013. Sonos went on to win its case at the US International Trade Commission, resulting in a limited import ban on some of the Google devices in question. Google has also had to pull some features from its lineup of smart speakers and smart displays.

Last August, Google sued Sonos over allegations that the audio company infringed on Google's smart speakers and voice control technology. This most recent trial started earlier this month, with Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda telling Reuters at the time that the case pertains to "some very specific features that are not commonly used" and that Sonos "mischaracterized our partnership and technology." Neither Google nor Sonos immediately responded to The Verge's request for comment.

Sonos didn't come out of the case completely victorious, however, as the jury decided that Google's Home app didn't infringe on a separate patent filed by Sonos. The judge also told jurors to "disregard a $90 million damages estimate from a Sonos expert witness, saying he had decided that some of the evidence provided was inadmissible," Law360 reports.