A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that "hear" you without speaking. Engadget reports: The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard. Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud -- and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. "Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible," said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. "We're moving sonar onto the body."

The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user's speech patterns. Then, once it's ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time "with about 95 percent accuracy." The system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. "We're very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy," said Cheng Zhang. "It's small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world." "The team at Cornell's Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program," adds Engadget. "They're also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements."

A video of the eyeglasses can be viewed here.

Walmart plans to have its own network of electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 to tap into the growing adoption of EVs in the United States. Reuters reports: The new fast-charging stations will be placed at thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores, alongside nearly 1,300 it already offers as part of a deal with Volkswagen unit Electrify America, one of the country's largest open public EV networks. Walmart's more than 5,000 stores and Sam's Club warehouses are located within 10 miles of about 90% of Americans.

"We have the ability to address range and charging anxiety in a way that no one else can in this country," Vishal Kapadia, Walmart's recently appointed senior vice president of Energy Transformation, said in an interview. Owning its chargers, instead of partnering with a network operator, will help Walmart address reliability and cost issues, Kapadia said. Kapadia said he expects the new charge points to be direct-current fast chargers, with about four chargers on average installed per store.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Russian government has banned more than 10,000 websites for content about the war in Ukraine since Moscow launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The blacklist includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and independent news outlets. Over the past year, Russians living inside the country have turned to censorship circumvention tools such as VPNs to pierce through the information blockade. But as dozens of virtual private networks get blocked, leaving users scrambling to maintain their access to free information, local activists and developers are coming up with new solutions. One of them is Amnezia VPN, a free, open source VPN client.

"We even do not advertise and promote it, and new users are still coming by the hundreds every day," says Mazay Banzaev, Amnezia VPN's founder. Unlike commercial VPNs that route users through company servers, which can be blocked, Amnezia VPN makes it simple for users to buy and set up their own servers. This allows them to choose their own IP address and use protocols that are harder to block. "More than half of the commercial VPNs in Russia have been blocked because it's easy enough to block them: They do not block them by protocols, but by IP addresses," says Banzaev. "[Amnezia] is an order of magnitude more resilient than a typical commercial VPN." Amnezia VPN is similar to Outline, a free and open source tool developed by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google. Amnezia was created in 2020 during a hackathon supported by Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda. Even then, "it was clear that things were moving toward stricter censorship," says Banzaev. [...]

It is unclear how many users the service has, since the organization doesn't have a way to monitor user numbers, Banzaev says. However, Amnezia offers a Telegram bot called AmneziaFree, which shares VPN configurations that help users access blocked platforms and news; it has almost 100,000 users. The bot is currently struggling with overload, and users are complaining about spotty service. Banzaev says the Amnezia team is working to add new servers on a limited budget, and that they are also working on a new version of the service. "Amnezia is not only used in Russia," notes Wired. "The service has spread to Turkmenistan, Iran, China, and other countries where users have been struggling with free access to the web."

With no discussion, the Arkansas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would require social media users in The Natural State to verify they're 18 years old or older to use the platforms. Arkansas Times reports: The proposal, backed by Gov. Sarah Sanders, is aimed at shielding minors from the harmful effects of social media. Young folks could use the platforms, but only if parents provide consent. Senate Bill 396, sponsored by Sen. Tyler Dees (R-Springdale) and Rep. Jon Eubanks (R-Paris), would require social media companies including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to contract with third-party companies to perform age verification. Users would have to provide the third-party company with a digital driver's license. Dees also sponsored a bill, now law, that requires anyone who wants to watch online pornography to verify they're an adult.

The social media bill squeaked through the Senate with 18 yes votes, the bare minimum, but passed the House 82-10 with four voting present (same as no). No one asked any questions of Eubanks -- who assured his colleagues that Facebook had "the AI and algorithms" to keep track of what users had parental consent without holding on to sensitive data -- but because it was amended (to among other things exempt LinkedIn, the most boring social media platform), the bill has to go back to the Senate, where perhaps it will meet some resistance. Utah's governor signed two bills into law last month requiring companies like Meta, Snap and TikTok to get parents permission before teens could create accounts on their platforms. "The laws also require curfew, parental controls and age verification features," adds Engadget.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2020, we reported that emulator developers were using a hole in the Xbox Store's app distribution system to get around Microsoft's longstanding ban on emulators running on Xbox consoles. This week, though, many of the emulators that were distributed through that workaround have stopped working, the apparent victims of a new crackdown by Microsoft. Xbox emulator makers and users can't say they weren't warned. In the "Gaming and Xbox" section of Microsoft's official Store Policies, section 10.13.10 clearly states that "products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family."

Microsoft's enforcement of this clause has historically focused on removing emulators published as "private" UWP apps to the Xbox Store. Those apps could be distributed to whitelisted users via direct links accessed on the system's Edge browser, getting around the usual approval process for a public store listing. Previously, users who downloaded one of these "hidden" emulator listings before Microsoft's inevitable takedown could run that emulator on an unmodified retail system indefinitely. That is no longer the case; trying to launch downloaded versions of emulators like Xenia or Retrospection on an Xbox console now generates an error saying, "Unable to launch this game or app. The game or app you're trying to launch violates Microsoft Store policy and is not supported."

Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. From a report: They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven't been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely. Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not 'til September 29th. Existing Dropcam cameras will keep working until April 8th, 2024, after which you won't be able to access them from the Nest app. To soften the blow, Google's offering a free indoor wired Nest Cam to Dropcam owners who subscribe to Nest Aware. Nonsubscribers will get a 50 percent-off coupon. The promotion runs until May 7, 2024, so you can keep using your Dropcam until it stops working.

Samsung Electronics will cut back on chip production, as it faces a sharp decline in global demand for semiconductors that has sent prices plunging. From a report: The world's biggest memory chip maker said it would make a "meaningful" cut to chip output after sales dropped sharply and it flagged a 96% drop in first-quarter profits, worse than expected. The fellow South Korean firm SK Hynix and Micron Technology of the US have also reduced production. "Samsung talking about production cuts is evidence of how bad the current slump really is," said Greg Roh, the head of research at Hyundai Motor Securities.

Smartphone and personal computer makers ramped up purchases of chips during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for consumer electronics soared as people were stuck at home during lockdowns. This led to a global chip shortage. However, demand has waned as consumers cut back on bigger purchases amid the cost of living crisis, with food and energy bills soaring. Samsung said demand had dropped because of a weaker world economy and companies buying fewer chips as they run down their inventories. "We are lowering the production of memory chips by a meaningful level, especially that of products with supply secured," the company said, referring to customers with sufficient inventories.

Startups and other companies trying to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom sparked by OpenAI are running into a problem: They can't find enough specialized computers to make their own AI software. The Information: A spike in demand for server chips that can train and run machine-learning software has caused a shortage, prompting major cloud-server providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle to limit their availability for customers, according to interviews with the cloud companies and their customers. Some customers have reported monthslong wait times to rent the hardware. "All the startups who are trying to get into this space...maybe they can get one [server] but there's no way they're going to get five," said Johnny Dallas, founder and CEO of Zeet, which sells software that makes it easier for engineers to run apps across multiple clouds.

The server chip shortage is a frustrating hangup for software developers trying to build AI tools hinging on recent advancements in machine-learning models. These programmers, at small and big companies alike, are developing large-language models to make personalized writing coaches or search engines that respond to questions with written answers rather than links, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Many others are licensing and augmenting software from OpenAI and its rivals to create specialized customer service chatbots and research tools for corporate employees. For instance, OpenAI software is helping Morgan Stanley bankers find the best locations to auction a work of art, based on the bank's myriad internal reports on art markets.

Multi-brand consumer megacorp Unilever says it has become a "cloud-only enterprise" with the help of Accenture and Microsoft. From a report: One of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the retail goods industry, according to the company, will give Unilever "resilient, secure and optimised operations" as well as "a platform to drive innovation and growth." The Anglo-Dutch biz owns more than 400 brands, which include everything from ice cream to shampoo to toilet cleaner, and is set to use Microsoft's Azure as its "primary cloud platform."

According to the corporate blurb, the move will see Unilever employ "industrial metaverse technologies" that use real-time data from factory digital twins. It musn't have got the memo from Microsoft, which recently put a bullet in its own industrial metaverse masterplan. The cloud contract is also expected to help "achieve perpetual breakthroughs in research and development," says Unilver. Lastly, through Microsoft's partnership with the controversial GPT maker, it will use "Azure OpenAI Service across Unilever's business to drive increased automation, enabling better customer and employee experiences."

Putting a temporary pause on artificial intelligence development would only hand an advantage to competitors in China, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, after more than 1,000 researchers signed a letter warning of the consequences of moving too quickly on AI research. From a report: Speaking to the Australian Financial Review in an interview published Friday, Schmidt said there were legitimate concerns about the speed of research into AI but they should be mitigated by tech companies working together to set standards. In the past week, more than 1,000 researchers and executives, including Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, signed an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, which called for an AI research pause of "at least six months," warning of "potentially catastrophic effects" on society if appropriate governance wasn't put in place. But Schmidt said he wasn't in favor of the six-month pause as it would "simply benefit China. What I am in favor of is getting everyone together ASAP to discuss what are the appropriate guardrails."

AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. From the report: A pitch deck for Anthropic's Series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers. In the deck, Anthropic says that it plans to build a "frontier model" -- tentatively called "Claude-Next" -- 10 times more capable than today's most powerful AI, but that this will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.

Anthropic describes the frontier model as a "next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching," making reference to an AI training technique it developed called "constitutional AI." At a high level, constitutional AI seeks to provide a way to align AI with human intentions -- letting systems respond to questions and perform tasks using a simple set of guiding principles. Anthropic estimates its frontier model will require on the order of 10^25 FLOPs, or floating point operations -- several orders of magnitude larger than even the biggest models today. Of course, how this translates to computation time depends on the speed and scale of the system doing the computation; Anthropic implies (in the deck) it relies on clusters with "tens of thousands of GPUs."

Full-size, self-driving bus services will begin in Scotland next month in what is believed to be a world first. The BBC reports: Stagecoach said the route over the Forth Road Bridge would launch on May 15. The 14-mile route will run between Ferrytoll park and ride in Fife and Edinburgh Park train and tram interchange. Five single-decker autonomous buses will have the capacity for about 10,000 passenger journeys per week.

The vehicles have sensors enabling them to travel on pre-selected roads at up to 50mph. They will have two members of staff on board. A safety driver will sit in the driver's seat to monitor the technology, and a so-called bus captain will help passengers with boarding, buying tickets and queries. The UK government said Project CAVForth would be the world's first full-size, self-driving public bus service.

For $30, you can ship Best Buy a prepaid box filled with up to 15 pounds of unwanted electronics. CNET reports: Starting this month, two sizes of prepaid boxes are available on the Best Buy website: a 9-by-5-by-3-inch container that can carry up to 6 pounds for $23, and a larger, 18-by-14-by-4-inch box that can carry up to 15 pounds for $30. Once you've filled it up with approved electronics, you can take the box to a UPS location or arrange for a pickup.

The recycling-by-mail program is the latest salvo in Best Buy's campaign to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. In April 2022, the company began offering a haul-away service that picks TVs, appliances and other products for recycling from customers' homes. You can also drop off unwanted electronics at Best Buy locations and trade in select merchandise for gift cards.

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

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

While Chrome 112 just shipped this week and Chrome 113 only in beta, there is already a big reason to look forward to that next Chrome web browser release: Google is finally ready to ship WebGPU support. From a report: WebGPU provides the next-generation high performance 3D graphics API for the web. With next month's Chrome 113 stable release, the plan is to have WebGPU available out-of-the-box for this new web graphics API. Though in that version Google is limiting it to ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows... Yes, Google says other platforms like Linux will see their roll-out later in the year. The WebGPU API is more akin to Direct3D 12, Vulkan, and Metal compared with the existing WebGL being derived from OpenGL (ES). From Google's blog post: WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU. The API is designed with the web platform in mind, featuring an idiomatic JavaScript API, integration with promises, support for importing videos, and a polished developer experience with great error messages.

This initial release of WebGPU serves as a building block for future updates and enhancements. The API will offer more advanced graphics features, and developers are encouraged to send requests for additional features. The Chrome team also plans to provide deeper access to shader cores for even more machine learning optimizations and additional ergonomics in WGSL, the WebGPU Shading Language.

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

Chinese state-owned telecom firms are developing a $500 million undersea fiber-optic internet cable network that would link Asia, the Middle East and Europe to rival a similar U.S.-backed project, four people involved in the deal told Reuters. From the report: The plan is a sign that an intensifying tech war between Beijing and Washington risks tearing the fabric of the internet. China's three main carriers -- China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Mobile Limited and China United Network Communications Group (China Unicom) -- are mapping out one of the world's most advanced and far-reaching subsea cable networks, according to the four people, who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Known as EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia), the proposed cable would link Hong Kong to China's island province of Hainan, before snaking its way to Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France, the four people said. They asked not to be named because they were not allowed to discuss potential trade secrets. The cable, which would cost approximately $500 million to complete, would be manufactured and laid by China's HMN Technologies, a fast-growing cable firm whose predecessor company was majority-owned by Chinese telecom giant Huawei, the people said.

Google plans to add conversational artificial-intelligence features to its flagship search engine, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said, as it deals with pressure from chatbots such as ChatGPT and wider business issues. From a report: Advances in AI would supercharge Google's ability to answer an array of search queries, Mr. Pichai said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He dismissed the notion that chatbots posed a threat to Google's search business, which accounts for more than half of revenue at parent Alphabet. "The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before," Mr. Pichai, who also heads Alphabet, said in the interview Tuesday.

Google has long been a leader in developing computer programs called large language models, or LLMs, which can process and respond to natural-language prompts with humanlike prose. But it hasn't yet used the technology to influence the way people use search -- something Mr. Pichai said would change. "Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely," Mr. Pichai said. With Microsoft already deploying the technology behind the ChatGPT system in its Bing search engine, Mr. Pichai is dealing with one of the biggest threats to Google's core business in years as he also faces investor pressure to cut costs. In January, Alphabet said it would eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of staff, its largest layoffs to date. Inflation and recession concerns have spurred other tech companies to cut back.

Mr. Pichai said Google hasn't yet achieved a goal of becoming 20% more productive, a target he set in September. He said the company was comfortable with its pace of change, though he wouldn't directly address the prospects of another round of layoffs. [...] When asked why the company didn't release a chatbot earlier, Mr. Pichai said Google was still trying to find the right market. "We were iterating to ship something, and maybe timelines changed, given the moment in the industry," he said. Google will continue to improve Bard with new AI models, Mr. Pichai said, while declining to comment on when the product would become freely available without a wait list.

Google is cracking down on predatory loan apps by cutting off their access to "sensitive" data including debtors' contacts, photos and location, after growing criticism that unscrupulous lenders are tapping the contents of borrowers' smartphones for harassment and blackmail. From a report: The tech company said on Wednesday it would update policies for financial services apps listed on the Google Play store at the end of May, so that "apps aiming to provide or facilitate personal loans may not access user contacts or photos." Details provided to app developers for Google's Android mobile system also show that lending apps will, for the first time, be restricted from requesting access to users' precise location, phone numbers and videos. The new policy covers apps offering personal, payday and peer-to-peer loans, but not mortgages, car loans or credit cards. Studies have found hundreds of apps available through Google Play that have required prospective customers to grant them access to the most intimate information on their devices in order to proceed with an application. Consent is often obtained on the grounds that these details are needed to conduct a credit check or risk assessment.

New submitter aphexx writes: A computer museum has revived and rebuilt a Cobalt RaQ 3 server appliance from the Y2K days of the internet. It's now online and accessible -- complete with an ancient CGI guestbook at http://raq.serialport.org/. There were thousands upon thousands of Cobalt RaQs and Qubes scattered across the globe in the 2000s, and I remember they were especially popular with ISPs. Judging from the guestbook comments, it looks like I'm not the only one that remembers their impact. Cobalt was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002 for a cool $2 billion, but discontinued the product line the following year.