It's not your imagination: Airlines are piling on more fees and extra charges, driving up the cost of air travel. From a report: Across the industry, revenue from what's known as ancillary sales -- fees for selecting seats, checking bags, and buying food, to name a few -- will reach a record $117.9 billion in 2023. That's a 7.7% increase from pre-pandemic records, according to a recent study from airline consultancy firm IdeaWorks and B2B car rental company CarTrawler.

As plane ticket prices have become more competitive, airlines have turned to ancillary sales to boost profits. And where these fees were once largely confined to low-cost carriers, practices like charging customers for seats and checked luggage are now widespread across all airlines. As the IdeaWorks study points out, carriers like British Airways, Air France, and KLM are now even charging fliers to secure 'better' business class seats.

It's not simply the fees that are raising hackles. It's also how they're sold online. Due to the time sensitive nature of airfares, as well as the dozens of upgrades and extras offered as you click through the sales process, airline websites can be ripe environments for what's known as dark patterns. Coined in 2010 by Harry Brignull, a UX designer with a doctorate in cognitive science, dark patterns are design strategies used to trick consumers during their purchasing experience and guide them to decisions they would not make otherwise. Airlines employ a range of tactics on their websites, ranging from manipulation to deception, Bringull says. "People need to be aware of their tactics if we want to see changes in the way they operate."

Microsoft's Windows Hello fingerprint authentication has been bypassed on laptops from Dell, Lenovo, and even Microsoft. From a report: Security researchers at Blackwing Intelligence have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the top three fingerprint sensors that are embedded into laptops and used widely by businesses to secure laptops with Windows Hello fingerprint authentication. Microsoft's Offensive Research and Security Engineering (MORSE) asked Blackwing Intelligence to evaluate the security of fingerprint sensors, and the researchers provided their findings in a presentation at Microsoft's BlueHat conference in October.

The team identified popular fingerprint sensors from Goodix, Synaptics, and ELAN as targets for their research, with a newly-published blog post detailing the in-depth process of building a USB device that can perform a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack. Such an attack could provide access to a stolen laptop, or even an "evil maid" attack on an unattended device. A Dell Inspiron 15, Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and Microsoft Surface Pro X all fell victim to fingerprint reader attacks, allowing the researchers to bypass the Windows Hello protection as long as someone was previously using fingerprint authentication on a device. Blackwing Intelligence researchers reverse engineered both software and hardware, and discovered cryptographic implementation flaws in a custom TLS on the Synaptics sensor. The complicated process to bypass Windows Hello also involved decoding and reimplementing proprietary protocols.

Using fake names, sham LinkedIn profiles, counterfeit work papers and mock interview scripts, North Korean IT workers seeking employment in Western tech companies are deploying sophisticated subterfuge to get hired. From a report: Landing a job outside North Korea to secretly earn hard currency for the isolated country demands highly-developed strategies to convince Western hiring managers, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, an interview with a former North Korean IT worker and cybersecurity researchers. North Korea has dispatched thousands of IT workers overseas, an effort that has accelerated in the last four years, to bring in millions to finance Pyongyang's nuclear missile programme, according to the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations.

"People are free to express ideas and opinions," reads one interview script used by North Korean software developers that offers suggestions for how to describe a "good corporate culture" when asked. Expressing one's thoughts freely could be met with imprisonment in North Korea. The scripts totalling 30 pages, were unearthed by researchers at Palo Alto Networks, a U.S. cybersecurity firm which discovered a cache of internal documents online that detail the workings of North Korea's remote IT workforce. The documents contain dozens of fraudulent resumes, online profiles, interview notes, and forged identities that North Korean workers used to apply for jobs in software development.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an "artificial" five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404 Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers, and that it doesn't have anything to do with Firefox at all. [...] Mozilla, which makes Firefox, told 404 Media that it does not believe this is a Firefox-specific issue. Enough people have posted about it, however, that it is clearly happening for some users and not others.

In a statement to 404 Media, Google did not provide specifics but also did not deny implementing an artificial wait time. "To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we've launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience, the spokesperson said. "Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments, according to new testimony in the Epic v. Google trial. On the stand, Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison confirmed Spotify paid a 0 percent commission when users chose to buy subscriptions through Spotify's own system. If the users picked Google as their payment processor, Spotify handed over 4 percent -- dramatically less than Google's more common 15 percent fee. Google fought to keep the Spotify numbers private during its antitrust fight with Epic, saying they could damage negotiations with other app developers who might want more generous rates.

Google's User Choice Billing program, launched in 2022, is typically described as shaving about 4 percent off Google's Play Store commission if developers use their own payment system, bringing down Google's 15 percent subscription service fee to more like 11 percent. That often ends up saving developers little or no money since they must foot the cost of payment processing themselves. And in court, Google has focused on benefits like greater flexibility rather than cost savings. [...] Harrison says Spotify's "unprecedented" popularity was great enough to justify a "bespoke" deal. "If we don't have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones," Harrison testified. As part of the deal, both parties also agreed to commit $50 million apiece to a "success fund."

Google acknowledged Harrison's testimony in a statement to The Verge. "A small number of developers that invest more directly in Android and Play may have different service fees as part of a broader partnership that includes substantial financial investments and product integrations across different form factors," says spokesperson Dan Jackson. "These key investment partnerships allow us to bring more users to Android and Play by continuously improving the experience for all users and create new opportunities for all developers." Google would not name other developers that have gotten the company to agree to more generous rates. During the trial, we learned that Google offered Netflix a special discounted rate of just 10 percent, but Netflix refused. Netflix no longer offers an in-app purchase option on Android and no longer pays Google anything to distribute its app as a result.

Mononymous writes: FreeBSD 14 has been officially released. You can get it from FreeBSD.org, or via freebsd-update and source update methods for existing systems. Some highlights:
- OpenSSH version 9.5p1
- OpenSSL version 3.0.12, a major upgrade from OpenSSL 1.1.1t in FreeBSD 13.2
- OpenZFS release 2.2
- The bhyve hypervisor now supports TPM and GPU passthrough

This version will now create user home directories in /home by default, instead of the traditional /usr/home. More information on the release and changes can be found via the release announcement page.

Earlier this month, the entire Optus mobile network went offline nationwide following a "routine software upgrade." According to Reuters, "More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout [...], triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure." Now, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned in the wake of the outage. From the report: She said it "had been an honour to serve" but that "now was an appropriate time to step down." During Friday's Senate hearing into the outage, Ms Bayer Rosmarin rebuffed suggestions she was under pressure to step down. "On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded," she said in a statement on Monday. "I was also able to communicate Optus's commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward."

Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced in the interim by chief financial officer Michael Venter. Yuen Kuan Moon, the chief executive of Optus's Singaporean parent company Singtel Group, said the company understood her decision to resign. Mr Yuen said Singtel recognised "the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence as the team works through the impact and consequences of the recent outage and continues to improve." He said Optus's priority was about "setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers." Singtel said Optus had also created a new chief operating officer position, which would be carried out by former Optus Business Managing Director Peter Kaliaropoulos.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Commercial air crews are reporting something "unthinkable" in the skies above the Middle East: novel "spoofing" attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September. In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes' systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it's only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.

OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it's not just GPS -- fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure. According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September.

While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously "unthinkable," according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a "fundamental flaw in avionics design." The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the "brain" of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was "highly significant." "This immediately sounds unthinkable," OPSGROUP said in its public post about the incidents. "The IRS (Inertial Reference System) should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed. The idea that we could lose all on-board nav capability, and have to ask [air traffic control] for our position and request a heading, makes little sense at first glance" especially for state of the art aircraft with the latest avionics. However, multiple reports confirm that this has happened." [...] There is currently no solution to this problem, with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause. According to OPSGROUP's November update, "The industry has been slow to come to terms with the issue, leaving flight crews alone to find ways of detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing." If air crews do realize that something is amiss, Humphreys said, their only recourse is to depend on air traffic control.

theodp writes: In a panel on AI at the Paris Peace Forum just 10 days ago, Microsoft President Brad Smith gave Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun a lecture on the importance of OpenAI's nonprofit independence.

"Meta is owned by shareholders," Smith argued. "OpenAI is owned by a nonprofit . Which would you have more confidence in? Getting your technology from a nonprofit? Or a for-profit company that is entirely controlled by one human being?"

But on Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pretty much trashed Smith's argument with his announcement that Microsoft was hiring OpenAI's co-founders and some of its top talent to head up a "new advanced AI research team." Another case of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish?

OpenAI was in open revolt on Monday with 490 employees threatening to leave unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman as CEO, along with cofounder and former president Greg Brockman. Altman was controversially fired by the board on Friday. From a report: "The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company" the letter reads. "Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI." Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.

Shortly before the letter was released, Sutskever posted on X: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company." The letter's release follows an extraordinary, head-spinning weekend in Silicon Valley. OpenAI's board removed Altman from his position on Friday, claiming "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

There's been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning "significant gains in pay and benefits," reports the Associated Press: The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles...

The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers.

They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead.
In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning."

And this week the union's president said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" — and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles."

In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes.

"The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers."

Sam Altman will not be returning as CEO of OpenAI, after a furious weekend of negotiations.

The Information reports: Sam Altman won't return as CEO of OpenAI, despite efforts by the company's executives to bring him back, according to co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever. After a weekend of negotiations with the board of directors that fired him Friday, as well as with its remaining leaders and top investors, Altman will not return to the startup he co-founded in 2015, Sutskever told staff. Emmett Shear, co-founder of Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch, will take over as interim CEO, Sutskever said. The decision "which flew in the face of comments OpenAI executives shared with staff on Saturday and early Sunday "could deepen a crisis precipitated by the board's sudden ouster of Altman and its removal of President Greg Brockman from the board Friday. Brockman, a key engineer behind the company's successes, resigned later that day, followed by three senior researchers, threatening to set off a broader wave of departures to OpenAI's rivals, including Google, and to a new AI venture Altman has been plotting in the wake of his firing.
Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis predicts on X:
The employees at OpenAI just lost billions of dollars in secondary share sales that were about to happen at a $90b valuation - that's over. Done.
I think OpenAI will lose half their employees, the 12-18 month lead, and 90% of their valuation in 2024.
Just insane value destruction
What's your prediction for the future of OpenAI?

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: Kyle Vogt, the serial entrepreneur who co-founded and led Cruise from a startup in a garage through its acquisition and ownership by General Motors, has resigned, according to an email sent to employees Sunday evening...

The executive shakeup comes a less than a month after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's permits to operate self-driving vehicles on public roads after an October 2 incident that saw a pedestrian — who had been initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi — run over and dragged 20 feet by the AV. A video, which TechCrunch also viewed, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. The DMV's order of suspension stated that Cruise withheld about seven seconds of video footage, which showed the robotaxi then attempting to pull over and subsequently dragging the woman 20 feet... [M]ore layoffs are expected at the company that employs about 4,000 full-time employees.
TechCrunch notes that Vogt previously co-founded Justin.tv Socialcam, Twitch, and shares this quote from an email that Vogt sent to all employees Sunday evening. "The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future...

"The status quo on our roads sucks, but together we've proven there is something far better around the corner."

This week the Linux Foundation "announced the intention to form the High Performance Software Foundation.

"Through a series of technical projects, the High Performance Software Foundation aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts." As use of high performance computing becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated high performance computing to exploit the performance of this diversifying set of architectures. As an umbrella project under the Linux Foundation, HPSF intends to provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance software ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate together on the scientific software stack.

The High Performance Software Foundation already benefits from strong support across the high performance computing landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon.
Its first open source technical projects include:

• Spack: the high performance computing package manager
• Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.
• AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes.
• WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize
• Trilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification.
• Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing.
• VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.
• HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world's largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers.
• E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack
• Charliecloud: high performance computing-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.

Recently the Register pointed out that the new (Debian-based) Raspberry Pi OS 5.0 has "a completely new Wayland desktop environment replacing PIXEL, the older desktop based on LXDE and X.org, augmented with Mutter in its previous release."

And when elementary OS 8 finally arrives, "the development team plans to finally shift to the Wayland display server by default," reports Linux magazine (adding "If you'd like to get early access to daily builds, you can do so by becoming an elementary OS sponsor on GitHub.")

"This is a transition that we have been planning and working towards for several years," writes CEO/co-founder Danielle Foré, "and we're finally in the home stretch... Wayland will bring us improved performance, better app security, and opens the doors to support more complex display setups like mixed DPI multi-monitor setups." There are other things that we're experimenting with, like the possibility of an immutable OS, and there are more mundane things that will certainly happen like shipping Pipewire. You'll also see on the project board that we're looking to replace the onscreen keyboard and it's time to re-evaluate some things like SystemD Boot. You can expect lots more little features to be detailed over the coming months.
Meanwhile, Linux Mint is getting "experimental" Wayland support next month. And also in December, Firefox will let Wayland support be enabled by default.

And last month the Register noted a merge request for GNOME to remove the gnome-xorg.desktop file. "To put this in context, the Fedora project is considering a comparable change: removing or hiding the GNOME on X.org session from the login menu, which is already the plan for the Fedora KDE spin when it moves to KDE version 6, which is still in development."

"The Chinese government has built up the world's largest known online disinformation operation," reports CNN, "and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses."

CNN reports that disinformation operation is even "at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found." The onslaught of attacks — often of a vile and deeply personal nature — is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show. The U.S. State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world's information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping... Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs.

They say it's all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia. Often, these victims don't know where to turn. Some have spoken to law enforcement, including the FBI — but little has been done. While tech and social media companies have shut down thousands of accounts targeting these victims, they're outpaced by a slew of new accounts emerging virtually every day. Known as "Spamouflage" or "Dragonbridge," the network's hundreds of thousands of accounts spread across every major social media platform have not only harassed Americans who have criticized the Chinese Communist Party, but have also sought to discredit U.S. politicians, disparage American companies at odds with China's interests and hijack online conversations around the globe that could portray the CCP in a negative light.
Some numbers from the article:

• Meta "announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone."

• YouTube owner Google "told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years."

• X "has blocked hundreds of thousands of China 'state-backed' or "state-linked" accounts, according to company blogs."

"At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth," reports the New York Times magazine, "including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris."

The article notes a threat assessment from U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch: What's most concerning isn't the swarm of satellites but the types. "We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles," Lerch said — for example, a Russian "nesting doll" satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia's, is launching unmanned "space planes" into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites.

An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and "ASAT" antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch's assessment, space looked less like a grand "new ocean" for exploration — phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration — and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.
One interesting detail from the article. "[I]f a requirement to 'blind and deafen' an enemy's satellites were to arise from U.S. Space Command, the Space Force could help fulfill the order. The means would most likely not be "kinetic" — some form of physical or explosive contact — but electronic, a weapon of code-related stealth, or perhaps a kind of debilitating high-energy burst."

And Space Force's highest-ranking officer, General Chance Saltzman, describes the kind of new military calculations made, for example, when Ukraine moved its communications to Starlink satellites: "The Russians are trying to interrupt it," he said, "and they're not having very good success." And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits... [W]hile small satellites in a large configuration could potentially be a more expensive investment than two or three megasatellites, the shift could be worthwhile. If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman remarked, it will hesitate to cross "a threshold of violence." No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.

New submitter doc1623 shares a report from Wired: Swedish workers are uniting against Tesla. [Starting Friday], cleaners will stop cleaning Tesla showrooms, electricians won't fix the company's charging points, and dockworkers will refuse to unload Tesla cargo at all Swedish ports. What started as a strike by Tesla mechanics is spreading, in something Swedish unions describe as an existential battle between Elon Musk's carmaker and the conventions they say make the country's labor market fair and efficient. The standoff in Sweden is the biggest union action the company has faced anywhere in the world. Sweden doesn't have laws that set working conditions, such as a minimum wage. Instead these rules are dictated by collective agreements, a type of contract that defines the benefits employees are entitled to, such as wages and working hours. For five years, industrial workers' union IF Metall, which represents Tesla mechanics, has been trying to persuade the company to sign a collective agreement. When Tesla refused, the mechanics decided to strike at the end of October. Then they asked fellow Swedish unions to join them.

Some unions that joined the blockade are expanding their actions in an effort to be more effective. Since November 7, union members working at four Swedish ports have been refusing to unload Tesla cargo. Tomorrow, the blockade will be extended to all ports in Sweden. "We don't want to unload any Tesla cars," says Jimmy Asberg, who is president of the dockworkers' branch of Sweden's transport union and works at Gavle port. "We are going to allow every other car [to dock], but the Tesla cars, they will stay on the ship." He hopes Tesla will understand how important this issue is for workers in the country. "Not just dockworkers but for all workers in Sweden."

The Swedish Building Maintenance Workers' Union will also join the Tesla blockade on Friday at 12 pm local time, "simply because the [IF] Metall Workers Trade Union asked us to," says ombudsman Torbjorn Jonsson, adding that the union has around 50 members who clean Tesla locations. Four showrooms and service centers will be affected -- three around Stockholm and one in the city of Umea. "Their workshops and showrooms will not be cleaned." Three days later, on November 20, the Seko union, which represents postal workers, will stop delivering letters, spare parts, and pallets to all of Tesla's addresses in Sweden. "Tesla is trying to gain competitive advantages by giving the workers worse wages and conditions than they would have with a collective agreement," said Seko's union president, Gabriella Lavecchia, in a statement. "It is of course completely unacceptable."

According to Reuters, Meta's head of augmented reality software is stepping down from his role. From the report: VP of Engineering Don Box announced the end of his tenure at Meta internally this week, without elaborating on what he would do next, according to a source familiar with the matter. A Meta spokesperson confirmed Box would be leaving the company at the end of this week and said he was doing so for personal reasons. There would be no change in product roadmap as a result of his decision, she added.

The departure of Box, a veteran engineer with experience building major technology systems from their infancy, could be a setback to progress on the operating system, a key component of Meta's AR glasses project, the source told Reuters. Meta has been planning to deliver a first generation of its AR glasses by next year, although those are meant to be used only internally and by a select group of developers, the source said. It aims to ship its first AR glasses to consumers in 2027. The Meta spokesperson declined to address the roadmap or whether the OS that Box's team was building would be in the first generation AR glasses. [...]

Meta initially hired Box in 2021 to chart a path forward after the failure of its XROS project, which aimed to create a unified custom operating system for its virtual reality headsets, Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and planned augmented reality glasses, the source said. Box broke up the 300-person XROS unit into dedicated teams for each device line early last year and personally took over the team focused on AR software, according to both the source and Box's LinkedIn profile. Prior to joining Meta, Box had worked at Microsoft since 2002. In his final role at Microsoft, he ran engineering for mixed reality, which involved developing software for the HoloLens2 headset and related AR/VR services. Box is known for having led the creation of the Xbox One operating system and later heading Microsoft's core operating system group, which works across all Windows products.

Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday. Slashdot reader tagous submitted this statement from OpenAI's board: Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. The Verge reports: Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO, effective immediately. The company will be conducting a search for the permanent CEO successor. Employees at OpenAI found out about the news when it was announced publicly, according to multiple sources. This is an extremely sudden turn of events as Altman has largely been the face of OpenAI, which arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year's hugely popular ChatGPT. Just last week, Altman keynoted at the company's DevDay conference, where it announced a suite of major new updates to compete with other big tech companies like Microsoft and Google. Altman also spoke at Thursday's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference. "I loved my time at OpenAI," Altman said in a post on X. "It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. Most of all I loved working with such talented people. Will have more to say about what's next later."

UPDATE: OpenAI President Greg Brockman and three senior researchers at OpenAI resigned. According to The Information, Brockman "helped launch the artificial intelligence developer and has been key to developing ChatGPT and other core products." He was also a "member of the six-member board that fired Altman."

Tech reporter Kara Swisher writes that there was a conflict between "the profit direction of the company under Altman and the speed of development, which could be seen as too risky, and the nonprofit side dedicated to more safety and caution.... One person on the Sam side called it a 'coup,' while another said it was the the right move."