A first-of-its-kind geothermal project is now up and running in Nevada, where it will help power Google's data centers with clean energy. From a report: Google is partnering with startup Fervo, which has developed new technology for harnessing geothermal power. Since they're using different tactics than traditional geothermal plants, it is a relatively small project with the capacity to generate 3.5 MW. For context, one megawatt is enough to meet the demand of roughly 750 homes. The project will feed electricity into the local grid that serves two of Google's data centers outside of Las Vegas and Reno.

It's part of Google's plan to run on carbon pollution-free electricity around the clock by 2030. To reach that goal, it'll have to get more sources of clean energy online. And it sees geothermal as a key part of the future electricity mix that can fill in whenever wind and solar energy wane. "If you think about how much we advanced wind and solar and lithium ion storage, here we are -- this is kind of the next set of stuff and we feel like companies have a huge role to play in advancing these technologies," says Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google.

The first transatlantic flight by a commercial airliner fully powered by "sustainable" jet fuel has taken off from London Heathrow. From a report: Tuesday's Virgin Atlantic flight, partly funded by the UK government, has been hailed by the aviation industry and ministers as a demonstration of the potential to significantly cut net carbon emissions from flying, although scientists and environmental groups are extremely sceptical. Airlines have previously flown on a blend of up to 50% of alternative fuels, called sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and flight VS100 is operating under special dispensation with no paying passengers, using fuel made mostly from tallow and other waste products.

One of those onboard, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, said: "Today's 100% SAF-powered flight shows how we can decarbonise transport both now and in the future, cutting lifecycle emissions by 70% and inspiring the next generation of solutions." Rishi Sunak said the flight was "a major milestone towards making air travel more environmentally friendly and decarbonising our skies." Virgin Atlantic said the flight to New York would show that SAF was a safe replacement for normal kerosene jet fuel. The Virgin Atlantic founder and president, Sir Richard Branson, also onboard, said: "The world will always assume something can't be done, until you do it."

A study of more than 2 million people's internet use found no "smoking gun" for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety. From a report: Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support "popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk" from the technology. However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute -- part of the University of Oxford -- said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was "absent" without more co-operation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.

"The best data we have available suggests that there is not a global link between these factors," said Przybylski, who carried out the study with Matti Vuorre, a professor at Tilburg University. Because the "stakes are so high" if online activity really did lead to mental health problems, any regulation aimed at addressing it should be based on much more "conclusive" evidence, he added. "Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age" was published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science on Tuesday. In their paper, Przybylski and Vuorre studied data on psychological wellbeing from 2.4 million people aged 15 to 89 in 168 countries between 2005 and 2022, which they contrasted with industry data about growth in internet subscriptions over that time, as well as tracking associations between mental health and internet adoption in 202 countries from 2000-19.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta purposefully engineered its platforms to addict children and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint. The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew -- but never disclosed -- it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents.

In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage." The complaint said that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but that 164,000 -- far fewer than half of the reported accounts -- were "disabled for potentially being under the age of 13" that year. The complaint noted that at times Meta has a backlog of up to 2.5m accounts of younger children awaiting action. The complaint alleges this and other incidents violate the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires that social media companies provide notice and get parental consent before collecting data from children. The lawsuit also focuses on longstanding assertions that Meta knowingly created products that were addictive and harmful to children, brought into sharp focus by whistleblower Frances Haugen, who revealed that internal studies showed platforms like Instagram led children to anorexia-related content. Haugen also stated the company intentionally targets children under the age of 18.

Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called "teen fundamentals" which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development. The presentation discussed teen brains' relative immaturity, and teenagers' tendency to be driven by "emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward" and asked how these asked how these characteristics could "manifest ... in product usage." [...] One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users might hurt the company's business in a 2019 email. But a year later, the same executive expressed frustration that while Facebook readily studied the usage of underage users for business reasons, it didn't show the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger kids and remove them from its platforms.

After acquiring VMware for $69 billion, Broadcom is eliminating several positions at the virtualization technology company. Business Insider reports: Employees whose positions were eliminated received an email on Monday, viewed by Business Insider, that read: "Broadcom recently completed its acquisition of VMware. As part of integration planning, and following an organizational needs assessment, we identified go-forward roles that will be required within the combined company. We regret to inform you that your position is being eliminated and your employment will be terminated."

"We would like to thank you for your dedication and service. We want to make this transition as smooth as possible, including offering you a generous severance package and providing you a non-working paid notice period," the email continued. Currently, it's unclear exactly how many employees will be affected by the cuts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [L]ast week, researchers at Blackwing Intelligence published an extensive document showing how they had managed to work around some of the most popular fingerprint sensors used in Windows PCs. Security researchers Jesse D'Aguanno and Timo Teras write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft's own Surface Pro Type Covers. These are just three laptop models from the wide universe of PCs, but one of these three companies usually does make the fingerprint sensor in every laptop we've reviewed in the last few years. It's likely that most Windows PCs with fingerprint readers will be vulnerable to similar exploits.

Blackwing's post on the vulnerability is also a good overview of exactly how fingerprint sensors in a modern PC work. Most Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint readers use "match on chip" sensors, meaning that the sensor has its own processors and storage that perform all fingerprint scanning and matching independently without relying on the host PC's hardware. This ensures that fingerprint data can't be accessed or extracted if the host PC is compromised. If you're familiar with Apple's terminology, this is basically the way its Secure Enclave is set up. Communication between the fingerprint sensor and the rest of the system is supposed to be handled by the Secure Device Connection Protocol (SCDP). This is a Microsoft-developed protocol that is meant to verify that fingerprint sensors are trustworthy and uncompromised, and to encrypt traffic between the fingerprint sensor and the rest of the PC.

Each fingerprint sensor was ultimately defeated by a different weakness. The Dell laptop's Goodix fingerprint sensor implemented SCDP properly in Windows but used no such protections in Linux. Connecting the fingerprint sensor to a Raspberry Pi 4, the team was able to exploit the Linux support plus "poor code quality" to enroll a new fingerprint that would allow entry into a Windows account. As for the Synaptic and ELAN fingerprint readers used by Lenovo and Microsoft (respectively), the main issue is that both sensors supported SCDP but that it wasn't actually enabled. Synaptic's touchpad used a custom TLS implementation for communication that the Blackwing team was able to exploit, while the Surface fingerprint reader used cleartext communication over USB for communication. "In fact, any USB device can claim to be the ELAN sensor (by spoofing its VID/PID) and simply claim that an authorized user is logging in," wrote D'Aguanno and Teras."Though all of these exploits ultimately require physical access to a device and an attacker who is determined to break into your specific laptop, the wide variety of possible exploits means that there's no single fix that can address all of these issues, even if laptop manufacturers are motivated to implement them," concludes Ars.

Blackwing recommends all Windows Hello fingerprint sensors enable SCDP, the protocol Microsoft developed to try to prevent this exploit. PC makers should also "have a qualified expert third party audit [their] implementation" to improve code quality and security.

Charter Communications confirmed to Light Reading it will lower the default video streaming resolution for its Unlimited Plus mobile customers to 480p from 720p starting in December. From a report: Charter's default setting for customers on its other By The Gig and Unlimited mobile plans is already set at 480p. The company said its Unlimited Plus mobile customers can change their default streaming setting back from 480p to 720p using the company's My Spectrum App for no extra charge. Further, the change will not affect customers who are connected to Wi-Fi. When customers are on Wi-Fi, the video streaming resolution among Charter's Spectrum Mobile customers is determined by the format of the video content the customer is streaming and the capabilities and settings of their device, according to the company.

Russia has added the spokesman of U.S. technology company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to a wanted list, according to an online database maintained by the country's interior ministry. From a report: Russian state agency Tass and independent news outlet Mediazona first reported that Meta communications director Andy Stone was included on the list Sunday, weeks after Russian authorities in October classified Meta as a "terrorist and extremist" organization, opening the way for possible criminal proceedings against Russian residents using its platforms.

The interior ministry's database doesn't give details of the case against Stone, stating only that he is wanted on criminal charges. According to Mediazona, an independent news website that covers Russia's opposition and prison system, Stone was put on the wanted list in February 2022, but authorities made no related statements at the time and no news media reported on the matter until this week. In March this year, Russia's federal Investigative Committee opened a criminal investigation into Meta.

"On a typical day 1,300 planes take off and land at Heathrow Airport, and keeping that going requires around 20 million litres of jet fuel every day," reports the BBC. "That's the equivalent of filling up your car around 400,000 times.

"But, when it comes to fuel, airports around the world are having to have a major rethink..." To be of any use to the aviation industry, hydrogen needs to be in its liquid form, which involves chilling it to minus 253C. Handling a liquid at that kind of temperature is immensely challenging. Given the chance, liquid hydrogen will "boil-off" and escape as a gas — potentially becoming a hazard. So tanks, pipes and hoses all have to be extra-insulated to keep the liquid cold.

France's Air Liquide has a lot of experience in this area. For around 50 years it has been supplying cryogenic hydrogen to the Ariane rockets of the European Space Agency (ESA)... Over the past three years, in partnership with Airbus and France's biggest airport operator, Group ADP, Air Liquide has been investigating the potential of hydrogen in the aviation business. It is also part of the H2Fly consortium which this summer successfully flew an aircraft using liquid hydrogen. For Air Liquide, it was an opportunity to test systems for fuelling a hydrogen aircraft...

However, installing the equipment needed to store and distribute hydrogen at airports will not be cheap. The consultancy Bain & Company estimates it could cost as much as a billion dollars per airport. One start-up, Universal Hydrogen, says it has a solution... The company has developed special tanks to hold liquid hydrogen (UH calls them modules), which can then be trucked to the airport. The modules are designed to slot straight into the aircraft, where they can be plugged into the propulsion system. No need for pipes, hoses and pumps.

The modules are extremely well insulated and can keep the hydrogen in its liquid form for four days. Two modules would hold 360kg of hydrogen and would be able to fly an aircraft 500 miles, plus an extra 45 minutes of flight time in reserve.

AI employed by the U.S. military "has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces' missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia," reports the Associated Press.

But that's the beginning. AI also "tracks soldiers' fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space." Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to "galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August. While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy — including on weaponized systems.'

There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles. That's especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.

Google Maps has added "a fresh color scheme, including a different look for parks and city blocks," writes SFGate. "But it's the changes to the app's all-important road maps that are rankling online commentators..." Previously, highways and freeways were depicted in bright yellow, which stood out against a stark white grid. Now, the app shows every road in various shades of gray, with major thoroughfares like Interstate 80 and Highway 1 showing up darker and thicker than other roadways. Raynell Cooper, an employee at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, called the new look "cartographically disappointing" in a Monday post to X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, "major local roads and limited-access highways (freeways) are basically indistinguishable."
TechRadar has a side-by-side comparison of the old and new color schemes, quoting one Reddit who says the new one is a bit harder to read quickly. "The toned down look is cute but not practical." And the Evening Standard shares more negative reactions, including one user who complained the new color scheme is "shockingly bad." "Hate it hate it hate it hate it. Yellow roads were so good, and everything was bright and cheery," states another person on Reddit. "Now it's depressing and the roads are hard to see when not fairly zoomed in, they just don't pop like the yellow did.
One Reddit user offered another complaint. "I think the water is a fairly significant change, it's a much closer shade to the green of the land which makes it a little harder to differentiate at a quick glance."

And another criticism came from a post on X. "15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps..." wrote designer Elizabeth Laraki. "Last week, the team dramatically changed the map's visual design. I don't love it." It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale... Google Maps should have cleaned up the crud overlaying the map. So much stuff has accumulated on top of the map. Currently there are ~11 different elements obscuring it.
Tech blogger John Gruber writes, "This is a very long way of saying that Google Maps's app design should be like Apple Maps."

The New York Times reports: Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it "disabled only a fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states.

Instead, the social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations. "Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed," the complaint said, "and zealously protected from disclosure to the public...."

It also accused Meta executives of publicly stating in congressional testimony that the company's age-checking process was effective and that the company removed underage accounts when it learned of them — even as the executives knew there were millions of underage users on Instagram... The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic — the next generation of users — that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth.
More from the Wall Street Journal: An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens "predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior," the filings show... "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects," the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company's existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. "And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit...."

"In December 2017, an Instagram employee indicated that Meta had a method to ascertain young users' ages but advised that 'you probably don't want to open this pandora's box' regarding age verification improvements," the states say in the suit. Some senior executives raised the possibility that cracking down on underage usage could hurt Meta's business... The states say Meta made little progress on automated detection systems or adequately staffing the team that reviewed user reports of underage activity. "Meta at times has a backlog of 2-2.5 million under-13 accounts awaiting action," according to the complaint...

The unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms' usage above the well being of users... Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts earlier this month...

The complaint cites numerous other executives making public claims that were allegedly contradicted by internal documents. While Meta's head of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Congress that the company didn't consider profitability when designing products for teens, a 2018 internal email stated that product teams should keep in mind that "The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270" when making product decisions.

"The abolition of third-party cookies will make it possible to protect privacy-related data such as what sites users visit and what pages they view from advertising companies," notes the Japan-based site Gigazine.

And this month "Google has confirmed that it is on track to start disabling third-party cookies across its Chrome browser in a matter of weeks," writes TechRadar: An internal email published online sees Google software engineer Johann Hofmann share with colleagues the company's plan to switch off third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users from Q1 2024 — a plan that was shared months ago and that, surprisingly, remains on track, given the considerable pushbacks so far... Hofmann explains that Google is still awaiting a UK Competition and Markets Authority consultation in order to address any final concerns before "Privacy Sandbox" gets the go-ahead.
The Register explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" idea: Since 2019 — after it became clear that European data protection rules would require rethinking how online ads work — Google has been building a set of ostensibly privacy-preserving ad tech APIs known as the Privacy Sandbox... One element of the sandbox is the Topics API: that allows websites to ask Chrome directly what the user is interested in, based on their browser history, so that targeted ads can be shown. Thus, no need for any tracking cookies set by marketers following you around, though it means Chrome squealing on you unless you tell it not to...

Peter Snyder, VP of privacy engineering at Brave Software, which makes the Brave browser, told The Register in an email that the cookie cutoff and Privacy Sandbox remains problematic as far as Brave is concerned. "Replacing third-party cookies with Privacy Sandbox won't change the fact that Google Chrome has the worst privacy protections of any major browser, and we're very concerned about their upcoming plans," he said. "Google's turtle-paced removal of third-party cookies comes along with a large number of other changes, which when taken together, seriously harm the progress other browsers are making towards a user-first, privacy-protecting Web.

"Recent Google Chrome changes restrict the ability for users to modify, make private, and harden their Web experience (Manifest v3), broadcasting users' interests to websites they visit (Topics), dissolving privacy boundaries on the Web (Related Sites), offloading the battery-draining costs of ad auctions on users (FLEDGE/Protected Audience API), and reducing user control and Web transparency (Signed Exchange/WebBundles)," Snyder explained. "And this is only a small list of examples from a much longer list of harmful changes being shipped in Chrome."

Snyder said Google has characterized the removal of third-party cookies as getting serious about privacy, but he argued the truth is the opposite. "Other browsers have shown that a more private, more user-serving Web is possible," he said. "Google removing third-party cookies should be more accurately understood as the smallest possible change it can make without harming Google's true priority: its own advertising business."
The Register notes that other browser makers such as Apple, Brave, and Mozilla have already begun blocking third-party cookies by default, while Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge "provide that option, just not out of the box."

EFF senior staff technologist Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told The Register that "When Google Chrome finishes the project on some unspecified date in the future, it will be a great day for privacy on the web. According to the announcement, the actual phased rollout is slated to begin in Q3 2024, with no stated deadline to reach 100 percent. Let's hope Google's advertising wing does not excessively delay these critical privacy improvements."

TechRadar points out that after the initial testing period in 2024, Google will begin its phased rollout of the cookie replacement program — starting in June.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Last January the Register reported that the Budgie desktop environment was planning to switch from using GNOME to Enlightenment. But this week Budgie's project lead David Mohammed and packaging guru Sam Lane "passed on news of a rift — and indeed possible divorce — between Budgie and Enlightenment," the Register reported. "And it's caused by Wayland." The development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie's Wayland future...

While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project's own words this is "still considered experimental and not for regular end users." Mohammed told us... "Progress though towards a full implementation currently doesn't fit into the deemed urgent nature to move to Wayland (Red Hat dropping further X11 development, and questions as to any organisation stepping up, etc.)"

So, instead, Budgie is exploring different ways to build a Wayland-only environment. For now, as we mentioned when looking at Ubuntu's 23.10 release, there's a new windowing library, Magpie. Magpie 0.9 is what the project describes as "a soft-fork of GNOME's mutter at version 43" — the term soft fork meaning it's a temporary means to an end, rather than intended to form an on-going independent continuation.

For the future, though, Mohammed told us... "[T]he Budgie team has been evaluating options to move forward. XFCE are doing some really great work in this area with libxfce4windowing — a compatibility layer bridging Wayland and X11, allowing the move in a logical direction without needing a big-bang approach. To date, most of the current codebase has already been reworked and is ready for a Wayland-only approach without impacting further development and enhancements."
Mohammed later told the Register, "It makes sense for the more dynamic smaller projects to work together where there are shared aims."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The popular party game "Cards Against Humanity" continued their tradition of practical jokes on Black Friday. They created a new social network where users can perform only one action: posting the word "yowza."

Then announced it on their official social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and X...

Regardless of what words you type into the window, they're replaced with the word yowza. "For just $0.99, you'll get an exclusive black check by your name," reads an announcement on the site, "and the ability to post a new word: awooga."

It's a magical land where "yowfluencers" keep "reyowzaing" the "yowzas" of other users. And there's also a tab for trending hashtags. (Although, yes, they all seem to be "yowza".) But they've already gotten a write up in the trade industry publication Advertising Age.

"With every bad thing happening in the world, social media is always right there, making it worse," a spokesperson said.... "[W]e asked ourselves: Is there a way we could make a social network that doesn't suck? At first, the answer was 'no.' The content moderation problem is just too hard. And then we thought, why not solve the content moderation problem by having no content? That's Yowza...."

When creating your profile on the network there's a dropdown menu for specifying your age and location — although all of the choices are yowza. More details from Advertising Age:

The company said the word "yowza" was the first that came to mind when its creative teams were brainstorming—and it just stuck. "It's dumb, it's ridiculous, it means nothing. It's perfect," the rep said.

And the service is still evolving, with fresh user upgrades. The official Yowza store will now also sell you the ability to also post the word Shazam — for $29.99. (Also on sale are 100,000 followers — for 99 cents.) But there's also an official FAQ which articulates the service's deep commitment to protecting their users' privacy.

Do you promise you won't share my private information with the Chinese Communist Party, like TikTok?

Yowza.

"Every car we were driving with was heading that direction..." Shelby Easler says in a TikTok video, "so we assumed this was going somewhere..."

But SFGate reports that instead of a handy "alternate route," Google Maps was leading her and her two passengers "far off the major highway and into Nevada's fierce deserts on an off-roading trail." Easler's car were not the only bushwackers. In Shelby's viral TikTok, a trail of cars closely follows behind them. "The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere. He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around," Easler said.
1.5 million people have viewed Easler's earlier footage of their road to nowhere. The off-roading trail was apparently only wide enough for traffic in one direction, and attempting to return in that other direction, "We were driving over bushes and rocks and alot of the cars couldn't even make it," Easler says in the second video. "Which is kind of why our car broke down."

They told SFGate that ultimately "We had to leave the car in Vegas, and it got towed to the service center of a dealership. They said the rear, right tire was coming off, and the alignment was messed up too. Low-key a pretty expensive fix."

They eventually called the highway patrol to shut down the road that Google Maps was sending people to, because "With every car coming in, every single car was getting trapped."

AI models can find patterns and make predictions, but their reasoning is often inscrutable. This "black box" issue makes AI less reliable and less scientifically useful. However, a team led by Dion Hafner (a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen) devised a clever neural network to predict rogue waves. By restricting inputs to meaningful wave measurements and tracing how they flowed through the network, the team extracted a simple five-part equation encapsulating the AI's logic. Economist adds: To generate a human-comprehensible equation, the researchers used a method inspired by natural selection in biology. They told a separate algorithm to come up with a slew of different equations using those five variables, with the aim of matching the neural network's output as closely as possible. The best equations were mixed and combined, and the process was repeated. The result, eventually, was an equation that was simple and almost as accurate as the neural network. Both predicted rogue waves better than existing models.

The first part of the equation rediscovered a bit of existing theory: it is an approximation of a well-known equation in wave dynamics. Other parts included some terms that the researchers suspected might be involved in rogue-wave formation but are not in standard models. There were some puzzlers, too: the final bit of the equation includes a term that is inversely proportional to how spread out the energy of the waves is. Current human theories include a second variable that the machine did not replicate. One explanation is that the network was not trained on a wide enough selection of examples. Another is that the machine is right, and the second variable is not actually necessary.

Some Pixel 8 Pro owners have noticed circular bumps in several places on the screen that look to be the result of something pressing up against the underside, which is soft and fragile, of the 6.7-inch OLED panel. From a report: A statement from the company today acknowledges how "some users may see impressions from components in the device that look like small bumps" in specific conditions. Google says there is "no functional impact to Pixel 8 performance or durability," which does line up with all current reports.

Researchers have used the technology behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT to create a fake clinical-trial data set to support an unverified scientific claim. From a report: In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November, the authors used GPT-4 -- the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs -- paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated -- wrongly -- that one treatment is better than the other.

"Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available," says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy. The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity. "It was one thing that generative AI could be used to generate texts that would not be detectable using plagiarism software, but the capacity to create fake but realistic data sets is a next level of worry," says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent research-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments."

Ian Hickson, a software engineer at Google who left the company after 18 years, reflects on his time at the firm in a blog post and why he thinks the firm lost its way. He joined in 2005 when its culture genuinely prioritized doing good, but over time he saw that culture erode into one focused on profits over users, he writes. The recent layoffs have damaged trust and morale across the company, he writes. An excerpt from the post: Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.

There are still great people at Google. [...] In recent years I started offering career advice to anyone at Google and through that met many great folks from around the company. It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO's office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google's extensive resources to deliver value to users. I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful). Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements.

I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google's culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass.