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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orange Espana, Spain's second-biggest mobile operator, suffered a major outage on Wednesday after an unknown party obtained a "ridiculously weak" password and used it to access an account for managing the global routing table that controls which networks deliver the company's Internet traffic, researchers said. From a report: The hijacking began around 9:28 Coordinated Universal Time (about 2:28 Pacific time) when the party logged into Orange's RIPE NCC account using the password "ripeadmin" (minus the quotation marks). The RIPE Network Coordination Center is one of five Regional Internet Registries, which are responsible for managing and allocating IP addresses to Internet service providers, telecommunication organizations, and companies that manage their own network infrastructure. RIPE serves 75 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

The password came to light after the party, using the moniker Snow, posted an image to social media that showed the orange.es email address associated with the RIPE account. RIPE said it's working on ways to beef up account security. Security firm Hudson Rock plugged the email address into a database it maintains to track credentials for sale in online bazaars. In a post, the security firm said the username and "ridiculously weak" password were harvested by information-stealing malware that had been installed on an Orange computer since September. The password was then made available for sale on an infostealer marketplace.

Google is collecting the eyelid shape and skin tone of children via parent submitted videos, according to a project description online reviewed by 404 Media. From the report: Canadian tech conglomerate TELUS, which says it is working on Google's behalf, is offering parents $50 to film their children wearing various props such as hats or sunglasses as part of the project, the description adds. The project shows the methods some companies are using to build machine learning, artificial intelligence, or facial recognition datasets and products. Rather than scraping already existing images or analyzing previously collected material, TELUS, and by extension Google, is asking the public to contribute directly and get paid in return. Google told 404 Media the collection was part of the company's efforts to verify users' age.

A cartel in the embattled central Mexico state of Michoacan set up its own makeshift internet antennas and told locals they had to pay to use its wifi service or they would be killed, according to prosecutors. New submitter awwshit shares a story: Dubbed "narco-antennas" by local media, the cartel's system involved internet antennas set up in various towns built with stolen equipment. The group charged approximately 5,000 people elevated prices between 400 and 500 pesos ($25 and $30) a month, the Michoacan state prosecutor's office told the Associated Press. That meant the group could rake in about $150,000 a month. People were terrorized "to contract the internet services at excessive costs, under the claim that they would be killed if they did not," prosecutors said, though they did not report any such deaths. Local media identified the criminal group as a faction known as Los Viagras. Prosecutors declined to say which cartel was involved because the case was still under investigation, but they confirmed Los Viagras dominates the towns forced to make the wifi payments.

Qualcomm today unveiled a new Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, a single-chip architecture that will likely power Apple Vision Pro competitors from Meta, Samsung, Google and HTC, among others. ZDNet reports: Succeeding last year's XR2 Gen 2, the plus variant brings improved GPU and CPU frequency -- up 15% and 20% respectively, support for 4.3K per eye resolution at 90fps, and the ability for headsets to field 12 or more cameras with on-device AI capabilities. The latter allows equipped models to better track user movements and surrounding objects for more immersive (and harmonious) VR and MR experiences. As for efficiency gains, you'll still be getting the 50% improvement as the previous XR2 Gen 2 when stacked against the XR2 Gen 1 platform. Basically, there's no change on that front.

"(Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2) will take XR productivity and entertainment to the next level by bringing spectacularly clear visuals to use cases such as room-scale screens, life-size overlays and virtual desktops," said Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc, in a Thursday press release. Clearly, the new silicon is aimed at headsets that can do it all -- with feature parity to the $3,500 gorilla in the room, Apple's upcoming Vision Pro headset -- though Qualcomm says it'll be priced accessibly for manufacturers to build hardware around.

How affordable will these competing wearables be? Your guess is as good as mine. But considering we've already gotten products like the $500 Meta Quest 3 fielding the slightly less capable XR2 Gen 2 chip, the future of XR may not be as expensive as it seems. The new Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset is made in collaboration with Google and Samsung, both of which bring expertise in the Android ecosystem and developing mobile VR devices. The trio had announced plans to develop an XR platform back in February of 2023, likely in reaction to the then-rumored headset by Apple.

As spotted by X user bedros_p, Google appears to be preparing to introduce a paid upgrade for Bard Advanced, a "new, cutting-edge AI experience" announced in December that gives users access to Google's best models and capabilities. Android Police reports: According to the strings, you will be able to "Try Bard Advanced for 3 months, on us." After that test period, you will likely have to pay up for the service. A defunct link within the code suggests that it may be part of Google One, but it's not clear if Bard Advanced will be added to all tiers or only more expensive ones with more Google Drive storage. It's also possible that it will be an extra new tier in Google One.

As a refresher, Google launched its most capable AI model yet in December 2023, called Gemini. The LLM is available in three tiers, including a Nano version capable of running on devices like phones and a Pro version currently powering Bard in the US. There is also a Gemini Ultra which isn't public just yet, but supposedly outperforms other LLMs in almost all metrics. Google says that this is the one that will power Bard Advanced.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Los Angeles Times: The former Westside Pavilion, a long shuttered indoor mall, will be transformed into a UCLA biomedical research center aimed at tackling such towering challenges as curing cancer and preventing global pandemics, officials announced Wednesday. The sprawling three-story structure will be known as the UCLA Research Park and will house two multidisciplinary centers focusing on immunology and immunotherapy as well as quantum science and engineering. Establishment of the public-private research center is a coup for Southern California that "will cement California's global, economic, scientific and technical dominance into the 22nd century and beyond," said Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The former owners of the mall, Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. and Macerich, said Wednesday that they sold the property to the Regents of the University of California for $700 million. By purchasing the former shopping center, UCLA saved several years of potential toil to build such a facility on campus. UCLA is the most-applied-to university in the nation, but its Westwood home is among the smallest of the nine UC undergraduate campuses, leaving it limited room for growth. The former mall sits on prime real estate in the heart of the Westside at Pico Boulevard and Overland Avenue, about two miles from the UCLA campus. The mall was owned by commercial developers who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to dramatically remake the old shopping center into an office complex intended to appeal to technology firms, which signed some of the biggest office leases in L.A.'s Silicon Beach before the pandemic.

Google agreed to become the sole tenant and began paying rent last year yet never moved in. The interior is mostly unfinished, but is ready for UCLA to build out to its specifications in a process Newsom said would take about 40 months. The UCLA Research Park "will serve as a state of the art hub of research and innovation that will bring together academics, corporate partners, government agencies and startups to explore new areas of inquiry and achieve breakthroughs that serve the common good," UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said. In addition to flexible work areas, the former mall's 12-screen multiplex movie theater may be converted into lecture halls or performance spaces offering programming across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, the chancellor's office said. One tenant of the research park will be the new California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy.

All new cars and vans bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035, according to the latest legal mandate updated this week. From a report: The date for all new petrol and diesel cars to be banned was originally set for 2030. However, in September, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pushed this date back to 2035. The government says this is giving consumers more time to make the switch and deal with the UK's charging infrastructure.

The transition will still be challenging. Eighty percent of new cars and 70 percent of new vans sold in Great Britain must be zero emission by 2030, increasing to 100 percent by 2035. While the government points to statistics indicating a 41 percent increase in zero-emission vehicles registered for the first time -- note, the vast majority of newly registered vehicles still remain conventionally powered -- charging infrastructure is an altogether different story. The government boasts of more than 50,000 public charge points, an increase of 44 percent year on year, but not all chargers are born equal. According to research from RAC, a local roadside assistance business, the government has failed to meet its target of having six or more rapid or ultra-rapid electric vehicle chargers at every motorway service area in England.

LG says it developed a 27-inch OLED gaming monitor that can reach an incredibly high 480Hz refresh rate, promising to usher in an "era of OLEDs featuring ultra-high refresh rates," LG says. From a report: LG says it achieved the 480Hz rate on a QHD 2,560-by-1,440-resolution display. Other vendors, including Alienware and Asus, have also introduced PC monitors that can hit 500Hz. But they did so using IPS or TN panels at a lower 1920-by-1080 resolution. OLED panels, on the other hand, are known for offering stunning color contrasts, and true blacks, resulting in top-notch picture quality.

The 480Hz refresh rate will be overkill for the average gamer. But the ultra-high refresh rate could appeal to competitive players, where latency and smooth gameplay matters. LG adds that the 27-inch OLED monitor features a 0.03-millisecond response time. The OLED panel should also be easier on the eyes during long playthroughs. "The company's Gaming OLEDs emit the lowest level of blue light in the industry and approximately half the amount emitted by premium LCDs," LG says. "This reduction in blue light not only minimizes eye fatigue but also eliminates flickers, providing gamers with more comfortable and enjoyable gaming sessions."