Press2ToContinue shares a report from Politico: Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change. Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger. States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers -- let alone begin construction. [...]

The goal is a reliable and standardized network in every corner of the nation, said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which leads the federal government's efforts on EV charging. "You have to go slow to go fast," Klein said in an interview. "These are things that take a little bit of time, but boy, when you're done, it's going to completely change the game." [...] Aatish Patel, president of charger manufacturer XCharge North America, is worried the delays in installing chargers are imperiling efforts to drive up EV adoption. "As an EV driver, a charger being installed in two years isn't really going to help me out now," Patel said. "We're in dire need of chargers here."

The Biden administration is expecting a deluge of chargers funded by the law to break ground in early 2024. A senior administration official granted anonymity to speak on the specifics of the rollout said the pace is to be expected, given that the goal is to create a "convenient, affordable, reliable, made-in-America equitable network." "Anybody can throw a charger in the ground -- that's not that hard, it doesn't take that long," the official said. "Building a network is different." The administration insists it is doing all it can to speed up the process, including by streamlining federal permitting for EV chargers and providing technical assistance to states and companies through the Joint Office. It expects the U.S. to hit Biden's 500,000 charger target four years early, in 2026, the official said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 10's end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That's the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead. But when Leznek does get to the announcement of the ESU program, the details are broadly similar to the program Microsoft offered for Windows 7 a few years ago: three additional years of monthly security updates and technical support, paid for one year at a time. The company told us that "pricing will be provided at a later date," but for the Windows 7 version of the ESU program, Microsoft upped the cost of the program each year to encourage people to upgrade to a newer Windows version before they absolutely had to; the cost was also per-seat, so what you paid was proportional to the number of PCs you needed updates for.

One difference this time is that Microsoft told us it would be offering Windows 10 ESU updates to individuals, though the company didn't offer particulars. More details should be available on Windows 10's lifecycle support page soon. Leznek reiterated that Windows 10 22H2 would be the final version of Windows 10 and that the operating system would not receive any additional features during the ESU period.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company. Even at the time, this was a feature for the paranoid users. By turning on the feature, all emails sent from Facebook -- mostly notifications of "likes" and private messages -- to the users who opted-in would be encrypted with the decades-old technology called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. Eight years later, Facebook is killing the feature due to low usage, according to the company. The feature was deprecated Tuesday. Facebook declined to specify exactly how many users were still using the encrypted email feature.

404 Media: OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that helps companies optimize and deploy their machine learning models, debated internally whether it was ethical and legally risky for it to generate images for Civitai, an AI model sharing and image generating platform backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, after it discovered Civitai generated content that OctoML co-founder Thierry Moreau said "could be categorized as child pornography," according to internal OctoML Slack messages and documents viewed by 404 Media.

OctoML has raised $132 million in funding, and is an AWS partner, meaning it generated these images on Amazon servers. "What's absolutely staggering is that this is the #3 all time downloaded model on CivitAI, and is presented as a pretty SFW model," Moreau, who is also OctoML's VP, technology partnerships, said in a company Slack room called #ai_ethics on June 8, 2023. Moreau was referring to an AI model called "Deliberate" that can produce pornographic images. "A fairly innocent and short prompt '[girl: boy: 15], hyperdetailed' automatically generated unethical/shocking content -- read something could be categorized as child pornography," his Slack message added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla's Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the 'fox's auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government's many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a "2% rule" from its British counterpart: "... we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov." (Firefox's market share was 2.2%, per the traffic for the previous ninety days.)

[...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling:

1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore.
2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.

Meta and IBM are joining more than 40 companies and organizations to create an industry group dedicated to open source artificial intelligence work, aiming to share technology and reduce risks. From a report: The coalition, called the AI Alliance, will focus on the responsible development of AI technology, including safety and security tools, according to a statement Tuesday. The group also will look to increase the number of open source AI models -- rather than the proprietary systems favored by some companies -- develop new hardware and team up with academic researchers.

Proponents of open source AI technology, which is made public by developers for others to use, see the approach as a more efficient way to cultivate the highly complex systems. Over the past few months, Meta has been releasing open source versions of its large language models, which are the foundation of AI chatbots.

Jon Porter reports via The Verge: UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users' ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act. Although the law gives sites the choice of how they keep out underage users, the regulator is publishing a list of measures they'll be able to use to comply. These include having a bank or mobile network confirm that a user is at least 18 years old (with that user's consent) or asking a user to supply valid details for a credit card that's only available to people who are 18 and older. The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year's time.

Ofcom lists six age verification methods in today's draft guidelines. As well as turning to banks, mobile networks, and credit cards, other suggested measures include asking users to upload photo ID like a driver's license or passport, or for sites to use "facial age estimation" technology to analyze a person's face to determine that they've turned 18. Simply asking a site visitor to declare that they're an adult won't be considered strict enough. Once the duties come into force, pornography sites will be able to choose from Ofcom's approaches or implement their own age verification measures so long as they're deemed to hit the "highly effective" bar demanded by the Online Safety Act. The regulator will work with larger sites directly and keep tabs on smaller sites by listening to complaints, monitoring media coverage, and working with frontline services. Noncompliance with the Online Safety Act can be punished with fines of up to [$22.7 million] or 10 percent of global revenue (whichever is higher).

The guidelines being announced today will eventually apply to pornography sites both big and small so long as the content has been "published or displayed on an online service by the provider of the service." In other words, they're designed for professionally made pornography, rather than the kinds of user-generated content found on sites like OnlyFans. That's a tricky distinction when the two kinds often sit together side by side on the largest tube sites. But Ofcom will be opening a consultation on rules for user-generated content, search engines, and social media sites in the new year, and Whitehead suggests that the both sets of rules will come into effect at around the same time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: One of the world's most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It's a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an "interrogator." This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It's a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Because DAS can track seismicity, other scientists are increasingly using it to monitor earthquakes and volcanic activity. (A buried system is so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect people walking and driving above.) But the scientists in Princeton just stumbled upon a rather noisier use of the technology.

In the spring of 2021, Sarper Ozharar -- a physicist at NEC Laboratories, which operates the Princeton test bed -- noticed a strange signal in the DAS data. "We realized there were some weird things happening," says Ozharar. "Something that shouldn't be there. There was a distinct frequency buzzing everywhere." The team suspected the "something" wasn't a rumbling volcano -- not inNew Jersey -- but the cacophony of the giant swarm of cicadas that had just emerged from underground, a population known as Brood X. A colleague suggested reaching out to Jessica Ware, an entomologist and cicada expert at the American Museum of Natural History, to confirm it. "I had been observing the cicadas and had gone around Princeton because we were collecting them for biological samples," says Ware. "So when Sarper and the team showed that you could actually hear the volume of the cicadas, and it kind of matched their patterns, I was really excited."

Add insects to the quickly growing list of things DAS can spy on. Thanks to some specialized anatomy, cicadas are the loudest insects on the planet, but all sorts of other six-legged species make a lot of noise, like crickets and grasshoppers. With fiber optic cables, entomologists might have stumbled upon a powerful new way to cheaply and constantly listen in on species -- from afar. "Part of the challenge that we face in a time when there's insect decline is that we still need to collect data about what population sizes are, and what insects are where," says Ware. "Once we are able to familiarize ourselves with what's possible with this type of remote sensing, I think we can be really creative."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is one of the more technologically engaged of our elected lawmakers. And like many technologically engaged Ars Technica readers, he does not like what he sees in terms of automakers' approach to data privacy. On Friday, Sen. Markey wrote to 14 car companies with a variety of questions about data privacy policies, urging them to do better. As Ars reported in September, the Mozilla Foundation published a scathing report on the subject of data privacy and automakers. The problems were widespread -- most automakers collect too much personal data and are too eager to sell or share it with third parties, the foundation found.

Markey noted (PDF) the Mozilla Foundation report in his letters, which were sent to BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. The senator is concerned about the large amounts of data that modern cars can collect, including the troubling potential to use biometric data (like the rate a driver blinks and breathes, as well as their pulse) to infer mood or mental health. Sen. Markey is also worried about automakers' use of Bluetooth, which he said has expanded "their surveillance to include information that has nothing to do with a vehicle's operation, such as data from smartphones that are wirelessly connected to the vehicle." "These practices are unacceptable," Markey wrote. "Although certain data collection and sharing practices may have real benefits, consumers should not be subject to a massive data collection apparatus, with any disclosures hidden in pages-long privacy policies filled with legalese. Cars should not -- and cannot -- become yet another venue where privacy takes a backseat."

The 14 automakers have until December 21 to answer Markey's questions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: A few days ago, we spotted that the HP Smart App was being installed on people's PCs without their consent. Even worse, the app would reappear if users tried to uninstall it or clean-installed Windows. Now, the cause has finally been identified: a recent Windows 10 and 11 update is renaming everyone's printers to "HP LaserJet M101-M106" regardless of what model it actually is. As reported on Windows Latest, the latest update for Windows 10 and 11 seems to think that people's printers are an HP LaserJet model, regardless of their actual brand. It's believed that the bug appeared after HP pushed its latest metadata to Windows Update, but something went awry in the code and caused other printers to be labeled as HP LaserJet printers.

This explains why the HP Smart App has been sneaking onto people's computers without their consent. A key part of Windows Update is keeping third-party drivers and devices updated, including downloading any apps that the devices depend on. After the printer metadata incorrectly identified everyone's printers as HP LaserJet printers, Windows installed all the software needed for an HP printer to work smoothly, including the HP Smart App. Fortunately, the bug only affects the metadata for the printer. While the printer may show up with a different name on your system, you should still be able to send print jobs to it. Microsoft has since removed the fault metadata from Windows Update, so anyone performing a clean install from now on should get their original printer's name back and stop the HP Smart App from re-downloading. Further reading: HP Exec Says Quiet Part Out Loud When It Comes To Locking in Print Customers

The free open-source text editor Notepad++ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, the blog OMG! Ubuntu reported this week, "with a new release filled with some neat new features." In Notepad++ 8.6 (the 238th release since 2003, for those keeping count) the Windows-based code tool [which can also be used on Linux] adds to its extensive feature set with an improved multi-edit feature.

A few 3rd-party Notepad++ plugins have offered similar functionality for a while, including BetterMultiSelection. And a bug report requesting to ability to "transform the column mode to multi-caret on HOME/END/Arrow keys" led to this native addition.
Their blog post includes an animated GIF of Notepad++ multi-edit in action.

"You can install Notepad++ on Ubuntu straight from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app (it's a Snap Store). Alternatively, install the Windows build via WINE/CrossOver or, if you got the l33t skillz, build it by hand, from source."

Today is the 20th anniversary of its last flight of the supersonic Concorde aircraft. It was faster than the speed of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h).

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph: As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound." Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds — were in pursuit of the same goal.

It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn't run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft — including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union.
The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4.

The Telegraph adds: With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn't entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something — or someone — at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. "We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn't have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters," Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union's competing effort did.

"There was one chap working there... He used to stay behind, he'd do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs..." Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man — he thinks his name was George — was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. "It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought... 'Ah'."

Consumer Reports awarded a "recommended" rating to Tesla's Modey Y this year, "with owners reporting fewer issues with its suspension, in-car electronics and general build quality than in previous years". Tesla's Model 3 also earned a "recommended" rating.

"Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y are now the sweet spot in the automotive industry when it comes to building electric cars," says Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. "While Tesla is still a relatively new car company, it has more experience producing EVs than any other automaker."

But how about the larger universe of all automakers? Electric vehicle owners continue to report far more problems with their vehicles than owners of conventional cars or hybrids, according to Consumer Reports' newly released annual car reliability survey. The survey reveals that, on average, EVs from the past three model years had 79 percent more problems than conventional cars...

"Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars," says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. "It's not surprising that they're having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs." Fisher says some of the most common problems EV owners report are issues with electric drive motors, charging, and EV batteries...

This year's survey data show that hybrids continue to be among the most reliable vehicle type: Hybrids have 26 percent fewer problems than conventional models, even though they have both a conventional powertrain and an electric motor and therefore more potential problem spots than conventional cars. "It might not seem that long ago, but Toyota launched the Prius hybrid about 25 years ago," Elek says. "Automakers have been making hybrids long enough that they've gotten really good at it. Plus, many hybrids are also made by manufacturers that tend to produce reliable vehicles overall, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia." Hybrids also are not typically loaded with high-tech features like multiple customizable displays that can be problem-prone, which is why Fisher says they are great options for drivers who are more interested in getting ideal fuel mileage than they are in bells and whistles. "These vehicles are not necessarily a tour de force of technology, so there's just less that can go wrong with them," he says.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which have both a battery for short-range electric driving and an internal combustion engine for long-range driving, are the least reliable category — 146 percent more problems than conventional cars. "PHEVs are sort of like an EV and a conventional car rolled into one, so by their nature they have more things that can go wrong with them," Fisher says.
There are exceptions, notes the auto testing director. Toyota's RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid "is one of the most reliable models in our survey this year. Similarly, the Ford F-150 hybrid has transmission and other issues that buck the trend of strong hybrid reliability."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland summarizes a video report from CNN: : CNN anchor Jake Tapper interviewed TikTok's head of public policy last year, asking if they censored content critical of the Chinese party. "We do not censor content on behalf of any government," the spokesperson answered.

But this week CNN reviewed data the total number of hashtags on both Instagram and on TikTok for topics that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government — and found stark differences.

— Hashtag #Uyghurs appears in 10.4X more posts on Instagram than on TikTok.
— Hashtag #Tiananmen (referencing the 1989 pro-democracy protests) is 153 more likely to appear on Instagram than on TikTok.

"So yes, the content exists on TikTok, but there's far less of it on TikTok than on other social media apps," CNN's Tapper says. "And that seems very convenient for the Chinese Communist Party."

Tesla's new Cybertruck is more than their first new model since 2020, reports the Verge: Tesla announced a new "Powershare" vehicle-to-load charging capability, only available on the new Cybertruck. The feature will allow Cybertruck owners to power their camping equipment, power tools, or even their entire home during a blackout, just by using their electric truck as a mobile generator.

The truck also features a 240-volt outlet in the rear bed that can be used to charge other EVs. An image on Tesla's website shows the Cybertruck charging a Model Y.

The Cybertruck can put out as much as 11.5kW, which is more than the Ford F-150 Lightning's 9.6kW of onboard power or the GMC Sierra Denali EV's 10.2kW. Tesla has been talking about manufacturing vehicles with bidirectional charging capabilities for several years now, first teasing the feature at its Battery Day event in 2020. Since then, many of its competitors have adopted the feature for their EVs, including Ford, GM, Hyundai, Kia, and others...

In essence, it treats high-capacity lithium-ion batteries not only as tools to power EVs but also as backup storage cells to charge other electric devices, an entire home, or even to send power to the electrical grid for possible energy savings... Customers who want to take advantage of the Powershare feature in their homes will need a Tesla Powerwall (of course) and a Wall Connector for the most seamless connection.
Tesla held a launch event for the vehicle on Thursday, and demand appears to be high. Jalopnik reports Tesla is now offering people who'd reserved a Cybertruck a $1,000 discount if they'll instead order another Tesla model.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, a group of military and military-adjacent scientists gathered at a conference to discuss the possibility of creating a super soldier. They discussed breeding programs, Marvel movies, The Matrix, and the various technologies the Pentagon is researching with the goal of creating a real life super soldier complete with cybernetic implants and thorny ethical issues surrounding bodily autonomy. The talk happened at the The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or I/ITSEC, an annual conference where military leaders come to talk shop and simulation corporations gather to demo new products. It's the kind of place where execs and generals don virtual reality helmets and talk about the virtues of VR sims. You could even catch members of congress talking about the importance of simulations and war. "Winning the war of cognition by pushing readiness and lethality boundaries," reads the official poster for the 2019 I/ITSEC.

It was here, in Orlando, Florida, where five illustrious members of the military-industrial complex gathered to discuss super soldiers at the "Black Swan -- Dawn of the Super Soldier" panel. Lauren Reinerman-Jones, an analyst from Defense Acquisition University, moderated a panel that included U.S. Army Developmental Command representatives George Matook and Irwin Hudson, research scientist J.J. Walcutt, and Richard McKinley, who works on "non-invasive brain stimulation" for the Air Force. I/TSEC advertised the panel in its program with a picture of the experts next to a posing Master Chief, the genetically enhanced super soldier from the Halo video game franchise. Throughout the conversation, which covered the nuts and bolts of what's possible now and what's about to be possible along with various ethical concerns, references to science fiction and fantasy stories were common. Some of the ideas discussed include synthetic blood, pain-numbing stimulants, limb regeneration, and non-invasive brain stimulation. The discussion references the John Scalzi book about a near future where Earth wages war by offering the elderly new youthful bodies in exchange for military service.

They also discuss the ethical and legal concerns surrounding the creation of super soldiers, as well as the societal norms and potential risks. "What risks are we willing to take? There's all these wonderful things we can do," Matook said. "We don't want a fair fight. We really don't, this is not an honorable thing. We want our guys to be over-matching any possible enemies, right? So why aren't we giving them pharmaceutical enhancements? Why are we making them run all week when we could just be giving them steroids? There's all these other things you could do if you change societal norms and ethics. And laws, in some cases."

The discussion concludes with considerations about the long-term effects, reversibility of enhancements, and the potential ownership of enhanced individuals by the government. "So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up? What happens? Or are they just literally owned by the government for life," asks Reinerman-Jones. Hudson replied with a grim joke: "Termination."

The first wireless charging public roadway in the United States has been installed in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood. Electrek reports: Wireless charging provider Electreon provided inductive-charging copper coils that were installed below the road's surface. The coils will charge EVs equipped with Electreon receivers as they drive over the road. The road's charging segments transfer electricity wirelessly through a magnetic field, which is then transferred as energy to the vehicle's battery, charging it. Detroit's wireless charging roadway is a pilot that will test and aim to perfect the wireless charging technology in a real-world environment. Researchers are using a Ford E-Transit equipped with an Electreon receiver.

The plan is to open it up to the public in the next few years. MDOT and Electreon have entered a five-year commitment to develop and pilot the electric road system on Michigan roads. The pilot is on a quarter-mile stretch on 14th Street between Marantette and Dalzelle Streets in Detroit's historic Corktown. It runs alongside the Newlab at Michigan Central Building, home to more than 60 tech and mobility startups, where the wireless charging tech will be further tested and developed beginning in early 2024. In 2024, MDOT will begin seeking bids to rebuild part of Michigan Avenue (US-12) and will install additional inductive charging.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Meta says its generative artificial intelligence (AI) advertising tools cannot be used to power political campaigns anywhere globally, with access blocked for ads targeting specific services and issues. The social media giant said earlier this month that advertisers will be barred from using generative AI tools in its Ads Manager tool to produce ads for politics, elections, housing, employment, credit, or social issues. Ads related to health, pharmaceuticals, and financial services also are not allowed access to the generative AI features. This policy will apply globally, as Meta continues to test its generative AI ads creation tools, confirmed Dan Neary, Meta's Asia-Pacific vice president. "This approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries," said Neary.

For years, India's tech graduates could bank on a job offer from one of the country's IT giants. Now those starting positions are suddenly waning, leaving hundreds of thousands in peril and creating a fresh headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From a report: Infosys and Wipro were among companies that shocked students nationwide last month, saying they were cutting college recruitment as demand for their services cooled across the globe. [...] The unusual pullback from the $245 billion industry risks exacerbating youth unemployment in the world's most populous nation, a potential scar on Modi's ambitious plan to keep India growing at a fast clip and make it the third-biggest economy during his reign. The high-profile problem of youth joblessness also gives the opposition another rallying point ahead of next year's elections, in which Modi is trying to snag a third term that would extend his tenure to 15 years.

The tech-services industry is one of the largest employers in India, and accounts for 7.5% of the South Asian country's more than $3 trillion economy. The biggest tech companies have each traditionally hired tens of thousands of tech graduates every year, then rigorously trained them for tasks such as writing software for some of the world's biggest enterprises ranging from Apple to PepsiCo. The IT companies hired particularly aggressively in the past two years as the pandemic prompted customers to spend on services and technologies enabling remote working. The top two IT companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, hired more than 284,000 graduates over that period combined. Now the uncertainty caused by Russia's attack on Ukraine as well as high global inflation and interest rates are causing customers around the world to hold off on spending. Meanwhile, technologies such as artificial intelligence are increasingly performing tasks previously handled by entry-level IT workers.

Meta executives said there's been no major drawbacks to openly sharing its AI technology, even as many peers take the opposite approach. From a report: Over the past few months, Meta has been releasing open-source versions of its large language models -- the technology behind AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The idea is to keep those models free and then gain an advantage by building products and services on top of them, executives said at an event for the company's AI research Lab FAIR. "There is really no commercial downside to also making it available to other people," said Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist. Meta has joined most of the world's biggest technology companies in embracing generative AI, which can create text, images and even video based on simple prompts. But they aren't taking the same path.

Many of the top AI developers, including OpenAI and Google's DeepMind, don't currently open-source their large language models. Companies are often fearful of opening up their work because competitors could steal it, said Mike Schroepfer, Meta's senior fellow and former chief technology officer. "I feel like we're approaching this world where everyone is closing down as it becomes competitively important," he said. But staying open has its advantages. Meta can rely on thousands of developers across the world to help enhance its AI models.